The Fermenting Futures project is a body of artworks by the authors that explore the importance of yeast from cultural, scientific, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives. The project was created through an embedded artists’ residency at the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Yeast’s ability to ferment alcohol and make bread rise has played a key role in the development of human civilization; the works in the project ask us to consider how yeast biotechnology might now help confront global environmental problems.

This statement is a reflection by artist Anna Dumitriu on her residency with biochemist Robert K. Neely at the University of Birmingham, which led to the creation of The Chemistry of Biology: An Alchemy of DNA , a sculptural and bio-digital installation that premiered at Birmingham Open Media in October 2017. Their project explored the chemical nature of DNA, the enigmatic “instruction book of life” through new super-resolution laser imaging technologies using fluorescent molecules, enabling them to physically observe a region of DNA containing a scarless CRISPR edit to a bacterial genome, building on an earlier project, Make Do and Mend .

This article documents the artistic research the author undertook for FEAT (Future Emerging Art and Technology) residency. It describes her collaboration with the MRG-Grammar consortium and the creation of an artwork that involved editing the genome of a bacterium using CRISPR to reflect on issues related to antimicrobial resistance, biohacking and control. The article explores the author’s methodology and describes the benefits of long-term embedded residencies to create artworks that are deeply engaged with emerging technologies with a view to enable the public to access the concepts and implications of cutting-edge technologies and scientific research through an artistic lens.

Ethical issues frequently arise in the production and exhibition of bioart, both as subject matter and as an issue in itself. This article explores how learning from the author’s experiences as lead project artist in the Creative Europe—funded Trust Me, I’m an Artist project, along with her work as a freelance artist, which is deeply embedded in laboratory settings around the world, can help build capacity and opportunities for artists and scientists to work together in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations to address the societal and cultural implications of emerging bioscientific and biomedical research areas, attitudes to patient care, and public engagement in contemporary scientific research.

Trust Me, I’m an Artist (TMIAA) is a European-based project devoted to developing “Ethical Frameworks for Artists, Cultural Institutions and Audiences Engaged in the Challenges of Creating and Experiencing New Art Forms in Biotechnology and Biomedicine.” As such it brings together a wide variety of interested parties to debate and, hopefully to some extent, resolve ethical issues arising at the intersection of art, science and biomedicine. Leonardo hosts a selection of articles by the artists and curators reporting about the project and the experience.

The transdisciplinary art project Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0 brings together an artist, a philosopher, a microbiologist, an artificial life programmer and an interactive media specialist, to investigate the relationship of the emerging science of bacterial communication to our own digital communications networks, looking in particular at ‘packet data’ and bacterial quorum sensing. The project seeks to reflect the complexity of communication taking place at a microscopic level in comparison with human communication technologies such as the Internet.

Created as part of the experimental European/worldwide collaborative e-MobiLArt project—designed to encourage collaboration with scientists, and with artists from other cultural backgrounds and geographic locations. Enactive Dialectics converges both real and virtual emotional space into one digitally mediated experience and calls for reconsideration of the boundary between private and public self.

KryoLab is an installation and performance that brings together bioart, ice sculpture and sound, in an investigation of delicate relationships in the Arctic ecosystem. It traces our individual and collective journeys, in terms of investigative art/science research as well as in terms of being part of the experimental European/worldwide collaborative e-MobiLArt project—designed to encourage collaboration with scientists and with artists from other cultural backgrounds and geographic locations. This article briefly describes the KryoLab installation concept itself, and the collaboration process.

The Third Woman is an interactive mobile film—game, performance, and installation, which gradually reveals the layers of a contemporary film drama on mobile phones and screens.