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.

This study sets out to explore the perception of noise, as well as the relation toward meaning or information that it might contain, in arts, science and daily life. It is realized as an installation based on a suspended cloud of nitinol drums that create a sonic environment evolving in time and space. Digital random noise drives the instruments. Roaming freely and listening, visitors become part of an ecology of noise. As visitors explore differing regions in time and space, what appears to be noise can shift to a “meaningful” signal. This process of discovering a clear signal in a noisy background holds strong analogies to the scientific search for a nuclear resonance performed in the nuClock project.

Through the epistemological lenses of quantum theory and phenomenological art, the authors describe their collaborative development of several artworks exploring electrodynamic levitation. Comprising diverse ion traps that enable naked-eye observation of charged matter interactions, these artworks question the murky boundaries of perceptibility and objectification.

It is widely accepted that increased human interaction with natural systems is responsible for complex environmental issues, with most current thinking centered on the provision of advanced technological solutions. One response emerging from current bioinspired robotics research proposes artificial neural networks (ANNs) enhanced with artificial hormones for increased performance and efficiency. Here the authors discuss their artistic project concept, developed in collaboration with a bioinspired artificial life lab, considering the affordance of emotional robotics to develop despondency in the field.

This article summarizes the process and outcome of the Future Emerging Art and Technology residency during which new media artists Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič undertook the challenge of understanding and manifesting the artistic potential of high-performance computing (HPC). As a result of the collaboration with FET HPC the artists developed a concept liberated from complex computational technicity to underscore the (un)intentional construction of meaning by algorithmic agencies. The performance presents a congress of actors sensing, interrogating and interrupting each other, thereby producing an excess of relation, interpretation and translation. The heterogeneous congress performs an expulsion of imposed (anthropogenic) meaning, substituted by authentic, autogenic sense and non-sense.

The FEAT initiative organized and studied residencies of leading international artists in European Future and Emerging Technology projects. During the residencies, the artists closely collaborated with engineers and scientists on fundamental research in visionary areas of novel technologies, not solely as an artistic endeavor, but also to investigate effects of artistic engagement on technoscience. Effects of the collaboration are visible on many levels, including addressing fundamental questions about the technoscientific project objectives, ethical aspects and the aesthetics of scientific experiments. Interactions also resulted in long-term collaborations and opportunities for scientists to engage with artists in a shared effort to uncover truth.