Emergent Vessels starts from bioinks of Neurospora crassa fungi and Physarum polycephalum slime mold, printed into a temporary support bath. The printed geometry is only a set of initial conditions. The organisms colonize it, branch through it, and reorganize it without intervention, and over days and weeks capillary-like vascular networks emerge.

This is order arising from chaos, governed by the same dissipative thermodynamics that pattern rivers, lungs, and root systems. The sculptures are not representations of life but living processes, and each is different when a viewer returns.

The work proceeds as research: systematic studies of emergent vascularization across increasing orders of geometric complexity. Bioprinter designs, bioink protocols, and morphological datasets will be published open-access for other artists and researchers. Current work scales the prints toward six feet on a custom-built bioprinter, and carries Neurospora bioprinting into the culinary arts with the Hill-Maini Lab.

A cuttlefish changes color without pigment, by changing the structure of its skin. Synthetic Cesia borrows that logic. Its soft photonic skins are Fabry–Pérot optical cavities: a layer of the conducting polymer PEDOT:PSS held between thin films of gold. Electron-beam irradiation encodes different swelling behaviors across the film, so when moisture reaches it, regions swell by different amounts and the reflected color shifts in programmable ways.

In the first sculptural instantiation, shown at 120710 Gallery in March 2026, photonic films on gold foil were set into a flowering branch, with a mister that sends color cycling across the visible spectrum. Seeing becomes witnessing a physical event rather than reading a fixed surface.

The series is building toward architectural-scale installation: scaling the skins from laboratory samples to large-format sheets, and developing heat-based patterning alongside electron-beam patterning so the method is more widely accessible. An ongoing conversation with Iris van Herpen explores photonic skins in couture.

The Shen (蜃) is a creature of Chinese myth whose breath creates mirages. Here it is a mollusk deity with a cuttlefish’s photonic skin, and its memories live in a distributed slime mold intelligence. Players uncover its memoirs by feeding the organism. The game grows out of Emergent Vessels and Synthetic Cesia, and was made with Andrew Thomas Huang for Rhizome 7×7 2026 at the New Museum.

The Shen speaks from 500 million years in the future. It has outlived every civilization it ever breathed into being. It is contacting you through a Distributed Intelligence Technology—a slime mold network it spent three thousand years engineering, a syncytium of millions of nuclei whose memory is not stored but embodied. The organism is its memories. The Shen does not narrate linearly, but in spirals. Each click activates a node in the network, redirecting cytoplasmic flow, and the story that emerges is shaped by the topology of the telling.

A living cuttlefish sculpture, bioprinted with custom Physarum polycephalum bioinks, accompanies the game at Gray Area in San Francisco, opening December 2026. A custom bioprinter will keep printing the evolving sculpture live in the gallery.