The Revival Fund’s inaugural cohort
What we funded
The Revival Fund is built on the premise that the past still has something to offer in the form of ideas that were neglected or illegible. They may have been prematurely dismissed for a variety of reasons including changes in funding fashion, competition from a more dominant paradigm, or barriers of language and semantics. Today, we have new tools and a more robust methodological base from which we can re-challenge abandoned lines of research: to us, this seemed like a worthwhile experiment to run.
Clearly this frame was resonant and we received over 250 applications following our open call in February. Over the past few months we have greatly enjoyed reading and learning from these submissions. Choosing among them, we decided that we could take the idea of true Revival forward more coherently by backing fewer projects at larger sizes (our average grant size was slightly over $11k), giving each grantee the time and room to carry the work through.
In our selection process, we focused on three main principles:
The applicants’ rigor of methodology (do they know how to carry out the work to best revive the research, and do they have the relevant experience)
The research’s maturity for revival (does the idea or research speak to a particular stream of work today that could benefit from an added perspective or experimentation)
The applicants’ clarity on where the work should go to flourish beyond Revival (do they know the most effective audience, and are we able to help)
As a small, nimble entity in formation, we hope to bypass path dependencies of the larger funding bodies in recognizing and supporting ideas illegible or overlooked elsewhere.
In that spirit, we are pleased to announce our inaugural cohort of grantees and their projects.
Aiden Sagerman (History of Science, Harvard) is reviving diagrammatic reasoning:
Through the early twentieth century, topology relied on a distinctly visual language, geometric intuition captured by diagrams, but by mid-century it had shifted to algebraic logic. Sagerman is charting that transition by zooming in on Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane’s invention of category theory between 1942 and 1945 and the origin of the commutative diagram and their role in the invention of category. He believes that examining how visual reasoning was essential to twentieth-century mathematical theory-building offers a concrete way to understand the loose notion of “creativity” that LLMs struggle with.
Nora N. Khan (critic and curator) is resurfacing epistemic virtues:
Metascience discourse today is largely about how to improve science funding, research, and publication. Khan is after the variables underneath it, the environmental and organizational conditions that facilitate breakthrough inquiry. Her work will focus on recovering the epistemological models of forgotten collectives (the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute, Gene Youngblood’s Intermedia columns, the KUNCI Study Forum, the Living Midnight Narrative Outfit) as “epistemic holding environments” that held a generative space for the uncertainty and ambiguity of visionary knowledge production.
Iris Long and Yanlin Lu (curator; Princeton) are reconstructing somatic science:
In 1981, Qian Xuesen, the father of Chinese rocketry, coined “somatic science” (renti kexue), framing the body as a cybernetic “open complex giant system” with multiple “functional states” and even “extraordinary functions.” In the 80s and 90s, this became a serious national effort under the banner of an “Eastern Scientific Revolution,” one which was later dismissed by critics as the greatest pseudoscience movement in contemporary China. Long and Lu are relooking at the archive of this anomalous bodily phenomena research, and inviting five artists to reenact the experiments. They believe its vocabulary of “functional states” is significantly analogous with current work on interoception and embodied cognition.
Daniel Burger (EightSix Science) is reviving brain-in-vat research:
From the 1920s to 1971, Soviet and American physiologists pursued isolated brain perfusion – keeping a brain alive and functional outside the body. Experiments included Sergei Brukhonenko’s “autojektor” which sustained isolated dog heads and Robert White’s cooled primate brains in the 1960s and 70s. Over time, shifting funding priorities, an absence of immediate downstream applications, and a technical dead end led the program to collapse. Burger is restarting it now that organ perfusion is a mature commercial industry and post-mortem perfusion work has shown new confidence in brain tissue resilience. He is working towards a Stage 1 proof-of-concept of a controlled “brain-in-vat.”
Jenn Leung and Chloe Loewith (Lifefabs; Future Impact Group) are rebuilding synthetic intelligence:
There is still no standard for encoding information to living neurons, and no agreed way to measure what a brain-on-a-chip is “doing” or whether it learns. Leung and Loewith, early collaborators with Cortical Labs (whose CL1 runs on roughly 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, and which once taught a neuron culture to play Pong), are reviving the bottom-up tradition of artificial life (Alife) to build reproducible benchmarking standards at the API layer. They are using multiplayer games as the interface and training the neuronal culture as game agents inside them.
Abhinav Singh (Harvard) is reviving molecular inference:
In the 2000s researchers showed that statistical algorithms could be run as chemical reaction networks physically built from DNA strand displacement (chemistry as a computational substrate). However, this “molecular inference” gained only slow progress because real molecules leak, cross-react, and behave differently than simulations predict. Singh wants to make DNA computing an engineering discipline: a reproducible simulation-build-test pipeline that defines “failure predictors” for leakage and crosstalk, and widens the robust operating range with GPU-scale sequence optimization.
Seconds_0 is reintroducing Soviet research:
As English became the globalized language of twentieth-century science, Russian journal papers were marginalized and their results forgotten. Seconds, who built and runs Chinarxiv.org (22,700+ machine-translated Chinese papers with full text, search, and a free public API) is adapting that infrastructure to Soviet research: automated OCR, technical Russian, mathematical equations and diagrams, and PDF generation. The grant funds the R&D and we are internally curating the first journals to surface their “alpha” papers with help from Ulkar Aghayeva and Soviet history experts.
Outside of this inaugural cohort, the Putnam Papers is our other internally incubated project which follows the life and work of forgotten mid-century American physicist, Peter Putnam. By sourcing a set of obscure scientific papers and interviews, we aim to reconstruct and re-contextualize the ideas of an influential (to his more famous contemporaries) thinker through a set of commissioned essays – the first of which is being written by Kartik Tiwari, a PhD student at the University of Bonn working towards doctorates in both physics and philosophy. His work will look at Putnam as an intellectual link between Arthur Eddington (best known for providing the first empirical proofs for the theory of relativity) and John Archibald Wheeler (Putnam’s research advisor and a giant of 20th century physics).
Please get in touch with Hiya Jain [hiya@analoguegroup.org] if you would like to learn more about the project or pitch a research essay.
We extend our gratitude to Peter Wang, the Noticing Foundation, and the Good Science Project whose support made the fund possible; if you’d like to get involved as a patron, please get in touch with Wendi Yan [wendi@analoguegroup.org] and Aishwarya Khanduja [aish@analoguegroup.org]
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