There is a lot of work happening at the edges of biology, technology, and culture that never quite finds its audience. Projects without press releases. Tools built quietly, shared freely. Knowledge that spreads person to person rather than through institutions.
Spore is a field directory for that work.
Open-source and outward-facing, it signposts the projects, tools, and knowledge quietly growing a biopunk future — a living index of what’s being made, and by whom, at the fertile boundary between the living world and the designed one.
What it is and isn’t
Spore is not a journal, a magazine, or a portfolio. It doesn’t publish original content or curate for prestige. It points. Each entry is a signal — something worth knowing about, something worth following, something that might connect with something else you’re already thinking about.
The biopunk frame is deliberate. Not the aesthetic — the attitude: that biology is a design material, that open access matters, that the most interesting futures are being prototyped outside the mainstream, often without funding, often without permission.
Why now
The tools are ready. The community exists, even if it doesn’t always know it’s a community. What’s missing is legibility — a way to see the field whole, to find the connective tissue between a DIY bioreactor in someone’s kitchen, a mycelium composite workshop in a former factory, and a bioluminescent installation in a Bristol gallery.
Spore is an attempt at that legibility.