Niche tells the story of an artist who meets a scientist and through the encounter makes a hypothesis: If the artist became a stem cell and then divided into a neuron, would he discover the meaning of intelligence? David Edwards and Jay Cantor introduce a new fiction genre—the novel catalogue—to coincide with the opening of the new art and design innovation center in Paris, Le Laboratoire. In the novel catalogue, the process through which creators create matters as much as the works that result from the creation. The novel catalogue fictionalizes the creative process of an exhibition season which opens with the artistic outcome of an experiment between Fabrice Hyber, a French artist, and Robert Langer of MIT.

Photo by Eliza Grinnell

David Edwards is founder of Le Laboratoire, a new artscience center in Paris, and Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, Harvard University.

Jay Cantor is the author of three previous novels, the Death of Che Guevara, Krazy Kat, and Great Neck, and of two books of essays, The Space Between and On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother. He is Professor of English at Tufts University.

Read More by David Edwards:

• Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
• Whiff