highlike

Kuflex Lab

Symbiosis
In the installation area, the human body is augmented with video projected virtual images. Viewer and technology enter a symbiotic relationship and as a result, bring to life wonderful biomorphic creatures. They change constantly – reacting to your every movement and turning into new and unique forms each time. The installation was inspired by the symmetry of living organisms, the structure of exotic insects, and reflections on extraterrestrial life forms.

Helene Steiner

Project Florence
Plants synthesize a very large amount of information via electrical and chemical signals and deliberately make changes to themselves, their neighbors and the land nearby for their benefit. This signals caused by cell depolarization through ions fluxes such as K + , Ca2 + , H + , Na + , and Cl alert the whole plant for localized stimuli, such as biotic and abiotic stress and are one of the most universal properties of living organisms. In project Florence we take advantage of the sensibility of plants to different light frequencies and use it to trigger a plant response through manipulation and compare the similarities between plants and natural language processes.

Lara Campos

beGrounded
beGrounded is a project that explores the relationship between humans and other living organisms, as an emotional and artistic act through textiles. It proposes an exploration of a new habitable space in the form of a woven garment with growing sprouts, as a sensorial and interactive experience.

Sui Park

Her Contour
My work involves creating a 3-dimensional flexible organic form of a comfortable ambiance that is yet dynamic and possibly mystical or illusionary. It is an abstract representation of objects or concepts that recreates our surroundings. It can be interpreted in various ways including landscapes, living organisms, social ideas or values, anything that we accept as given that they exist. Through my work, I try to create an opportunity for audiences to see, think and most of all feel our surroundings from various perspectives.

MIT Media Lab

Hybrid living materials (HLMs)
A method for printing 3D objects that can control living organisms in predictable ways has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere. The technique may lead to 3D printing of biomedical tools, such as customized braces, that incorporate living cells to produce therapeutic compunds such as painkillers or topical treatments, the researchers say.

PAUL VANOUSE

Latent Figure Protocol

Latent Figure Protocol takes the form of a media installation that uses DNA samples to create emergent representational images. The installation includes a live science experiment, the result of which is videotaped and repeated for the duration of the gallery exhibit. Employing a reactive gel and electrical current, Latent Figure Protocol produces images that relate directly to the DNA samples used. The above images were re-produced live. Each performance lasts approximately one hour, during which time audience members see the image slowly emerge. In the first experiment, a copyright symbol is derived from the DNA of an industrially-produced organism (a plasmid called “pET-11a”), illuminating ethical questions around the changing status of organic life and the ownership of living organisms. Future instances of the LFP will use the DNA of other subjects and create other images.

Local Androids

Like living organisms

“Like living organisms” Is an interactive skin-dress that expresses excitement like between two people when they first meet. Our work breathes; it shows a pulse through its veins on the hips and inflates/deflates the shoulder balloons. When approached it responds by increasing its pulse rate through the veins as if it’s excited. It’s now up to the visitor to respond to this excitement. Upon contact the suit will show it’s vulnerable side by deflating the shoulder balloons.

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau

The Interactive Plant Growing
Interactive Plant Growing is an installation that deals with the principle of the growth of virtual plant organisms and their change and modification in real time in 3D virtual space. These modifications of pre-defined “artificially living plant organisms” are mainly based on the principle of development and evolution in time. The artificial growing of program-based plants expresses the desire to discover the principle of life as defined by the transformations and morphogenesis of certain organisms. Interactive Plant Growing connects the real-time growing of virtual plants in the 3D space of the computer to real living plants, which can be touched or approached by human viewers.

xenobots

Xenobots – the First “Living Robots”
Researchers used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster and an evolutionary algorithm to design new life-forms that could achieve an assigned task. Then they built them by combining together different biological tissues from Xenopus laevis embryos, hence the name Xenobots.
Credit:A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard
PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910837117