James King

This September, I will be taking up the Witt Residency at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. Go Blue!

I have written a post for the Scientific American guest blog. Its about my project, Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow and the importance of being in the lab. Thank you to Bora Zivkovic for the opportunity. More to come!

I am very excited that E. chromi has been nominated for the Designs of the Year award. I am especially pleased that the hard work done by the team is being recognised as well as the speculative imaginings of their two design advisors. The work of these young and talented scientists and engineers may involve materials and process that are for the most part invisible, intangible and, lets not forget, alive but it is indeed design.

E.chromi has been nominated in the Interactive category, alongside the likes of Angry Birds and Rock Band 3 which may seem strange but we wouldn’t fit into any of the other categories either.

The video above has been made with the help of some really wonderful people. Firstly, Cath Elliot at Little Giant Pictures did the animation and editing and so much more, Matthew Irvine Brown made a fantastic soundtrack and Alice Hoult lent her hand to some lovely illustrations.

The exhibition is on until August 7th at the Design Museum.

AlterNature: We Can is an exhibition curated by Karen Verschooren at the z33 gallery in Hasselt, Belgium, 21 November 2010 – 13 March 2011.

The exhibition gathers together artworks that show how man is shaping the natural world through genetic modification and horticultural intervention. The Cellularity project is included in the exhibition.

The Scatalog from the E.chromi project was exhibited at the Nano Supermarket in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 23 – 31 October 2010.

Guerilla Science is a small group of dedicated people who take science to music festivals. They invited Daisy Ginsberg and me to present the Scatalog from the E.chromi project at the Secret Garden Party.

Cellularity was shown as part of the the EPSRC ’s presence at the Cheltenham Science Festival, 8 – 13 June, 2010.

Photo by Anab Jain

The Hastings Center is a bioethics research institute in the US. Over the course of 2009 and 2010 I have spent a few weeks as a visiting scholar, enjoying the beautiful surroundings, incredible library and conversations with the wonderfully intelligent and generous resident scholars. The Center was kind enough to host a public talk that I gave entitled Designing Synthetic Biology which can be viewed on their FORA.tv channel.

I presented the Cellularity project at the Wyss Institute at Harvard as part of their annual symposium on synthetic biology.

Photo by Jean-Baptiste Labrune

Cellularity was shown at IMPACT – a collaborative exhibition between the EPSRC and the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art, London, 15 – 21 March, 2010.