Confessions of a Cell

Projects from the Hinternet Summer School on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theories and Methods” | Katharina Sand

We are very pleased to present today the first in an ongoing series of participant projects from the Inaugural Hinternet Summer School on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theory and Methods”, which was held in August, 2025. We are starting things off with this remarkable work from Katharina Sand, an unusually polymathic writer, scholar, textilist, and giromondo, most often spotted these days in Paris and Linz. As you will see, her contribution is a literal cornucopia: keratose, bountiful, and overwhelming.—The Editors

0.

A long-forgotten episode of fashion and textile history recently came to light when the following manuscript and materials were recovered from the textiles bay of the Arcology (Wing C, Biofabrication Cache, CE 3025). It documents an unusual approach to remedying fast fashion, namely, through the production of sentient clothing: garments that are (biotechnically speaking) alive, i.e., conscious, conversational, and self-repairing. What the ill-fated enterprise had clearly not considered was the temperament or “personality” of the biological component — a fact that seems particularly relevant to some of the newest developments in the use of DNA for data storage.