FLOATING FUTURE GARDENS
Corinne Okada Takara
2024
Wood, bike wheels, custom 3D-printed LEGO bricks, LEGO boards, hardware, lights; 72 x 46 x 84 in. Special thanks to Garrett Hayes. Play Platform, 2024. Wood, LEGO boards, custom 3D-printed LEGO bricks, Kokedama moss balls; 48 x 72 x 4 in. Special thanks to Mako Watanabe. Living Sensors - Plants Speak in Fluorescent Colors, 2024. Sonotubes, incandescent and fluorescent lights, LEGO boards, 3D-printed components, LEGO assemblies, GFP soybeans from InnerPlant, soybean plants, soil; 24 x 74 in. Special thanks to Garrett Hayes, Tim Keller, Rod Kumimoto, and InnerPlant.
Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life
“Biodesign” is a much newer word than it is a practice, an anachronism that Corinne Okada Takara centers in her work. Interweaving synthetic biotechnological insights with local, lived, and Indigenous knowledge, Takara’s installations embody the rapidly shifting nature of contemporary life. Whether through her Floating Gardens—a nod to Mesoamerican chinampas—or her radish mukimono, which are cultivated in a box of soil simulating ground cover of Mars, Takara positions science as a vehicle for the expression, not erasure, of cultural heritage.
Takara is the daughter of a toymaker, and a philosophy of play and collaborative worldmaking shapes both her art practice and her role as an educator. “When people are invited to construct with a blend of LEGOs, clay, and local plant materials, the experience is so outside the box that many felt free to build without firmly knowing what they were creating,” Takara wrote in a reflection on her 2022 Creative Residency at Ginkgo Bioworks. “It was a percolating, meditative space; and many began massaging the materials and ideas simultaneously….”
Yatai Cart takes the inviting shape of a Japanese mobile food stand. Yatai carts are typically set up in pedestrian hotspots; in addition to offering ramen and other kinds of street food, they create an opportunity for strangers to share a meal together. In a similar fashion, Takara’s installation facilitates another kind of communing in which people who may never have met the opportunity to play and dream together about our collective biofuture.
Like Yatai Cart, Takara’s Play Platform features an organically shaped LEGO build table, custom 3D-printed objects, and handmade materials. The build tables evoke the interleaved spheres of land, air, and sea that make up our planet. Many of the components of both Floating Future Gardens installations were built by people from the Little Tokyo community, such as the miniature kokedama moss balls, which were crafted in a workshop at JACCC.
Kokedama originated with the Nearai bonsai method of the 1600s: moss is wrapped around the compact roots of a plant, acting as a protective living vessel. Today, synthetic genomes of spreading earthmoss (Physcomitrium patens) might act as tiny factories for life-saving medicine, protecting human beings much as the kokedama protect its plants’ roots. Whatever the future holds, it also holds our past.
— Natasha K. Boyd
Image credit: Carson Davis Brown
Floating Future Gardens) was featured in Emergence: Art from Life, an exhibition at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, as part of PST ART. Presented by Getty, PST ART returned in September 2024 with Art & Science Collide, a regional event exploring the connections between art and science, past and present.
Thank you PST ART; JACCC; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles for your support of Emergence.