May
Creating human faces from discarded DNA
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist whose work “seeks to question fundamental assumptions underpinning perceptions of human nature, technology and the environment”.
From Twisted Sifter:
In her fascinating series entitled Stranger Visions, Heather collects DNA samples from discarded objects found on the street such as hair, nails, cigarette butts and chewing gum.
She then takes the samples to a DIY biology lab where she extracts the DNA and sequences the results. The sequence is then fed into a custom-built computer program that spits out a 3D model of a face which she then prints. The process and ideas behind such a provocative exploration are fascinating.
Aug
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights encoded into DNA, and then eaten?
A collaboration between The Netherlands Proteomics Centre, The Netherlands Genomics Initiative and artist Charlotte Jarvis has resulted in Blighted By Kenning, a project that incorporates science, nature, and biblical symbolism:
The project has bio-engineered a bacteria which has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights encoded into its DNA sequence. The DNA has been extracted and apples grown near The Hague, which houses the International Court of Justice, have been ‘contaminated’ with the synthetic DNA. They are currently being sent to genomics laboratories around the world, which have been asked to sequence the declaration and also to eat the fruit.
To achieve this, each unique three-character combination (“codon”) of the fundamental units of DNA: Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G) and Cytosine (C), represents each letter of the alphabet. Using bacteria to generate the specific DNA sequence of the Declaration of Human Rights, it was inoculated into apples and allowed to express a novel protein: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights protein, to be exact.
Fruit-based human rights is definitely an innovative exploit - I’d be interested to see what comes next…
(via The Finch & Pea)
Aug
3D Body Parts
Victoria Cartright is a “designer, 3D artist, illustrator, and general creator of images” who has created these gorgeous three-dimensional pieces of various anatomical organs. Check out the full range at her website.
Aug
Artist’s interpretation of the human microbiome
Artist and illustrator Russell Cobb is responsible for these wonderfully artistic depictions of the human microbiome, beautifully detailing the emerging view of the human body as an ecosystem containing many collaborating and competing species.
Aug
The beauty of Venn
Venn diagrams were designed to illustrate all possible mathematical or logical relationships between groups of things. They can provide handy representations of a number of phenomena (including Batman), but tend to become less useful as the size of the dataset increases.
Nevertheless, researchers at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, have created the very first example of a Venn diagram using exactly 11 sets of data (above).
As reported by New Scientist:
One of the sets is outlined in white, and the colours correspond to the number of overlapping sets. The team called their creation Newroz, Kurdish for “the new day”. The name also sounds like “new rose” in English, reflecting the diagram’s flowery appearance.
The researchers correctly note that the practical applications of the diagram are limited, but its pleasing ‘flowery’ appearance does provide a rare example of the possible crossover between data presentation and art. In fact……
Boom.
Aug
The brain as art
Taken from the recent exhibition, ‘Brains - The Mind as Matter’ at the Wellcome Collection in London.
Aug
Illustrated cross section of Mycoplasma
From The Machinery of Life, by David S. Goodsell.
Jul
Urban origami
French paper artist Mademoiselle Maurice takes to the streets of Vietnam and Hong Kong to stunning effect.
See more at her website.
Jul
Own your own slice of the moon
San Francisco-based artist Craig Dorety has a series of carvings that represent segments of the moon’s surface as found in the topograhical data from JAXA’s Kayuga mission.
(via Boing Boing)
Jul
Dancing Colours: Turning sound waves into visible sculptures
Artist Fabian Oefner used only coloured salt and a speaker to visually capture ‘sound’ as shown in the stunning images above.
According to Oefner (via My Modern Met), “The idea of the series is to build a bridge between the acoustical and the visual world.”
To set up the project, Oefner wraps a very thin piece of plastic on top of a speaker and places salt, colored with pigments, on top. When the speaker begins to vibrate with music, the plastic vibrates and these odd looking sculptures form for just a fraction of a second. By connecting a microphone to the flash trigger, Oefner is able to capture these very brief moments where sound colorfully dances along the surface of the speaker.
Jun
Dendrological art
Artist Brian Nash Gill:
Dendrology, the study of trees, a science that has given us historical data about our global environment and forever-changing climate.
Jun
DNA letterpress poster (including secret message!)
From Etsy:
Never miss out on extra credit again with this 5-color letterpress poster, featuring DNA from the molecular structure of its basepairs, to a double-helix circular plasmid, all the way to its condensed state during mitosis in the form of sister chromatids. And don’t forget about the string of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs at the bottom—translate it into protein for a secret message!
About Me
Hi there, I'm Jim: PhD student in the biological sciences, enthusiast, friendly neighbour, Australian.
