The Living Mirror

source: c-labcouk

C-LAB is an arts collective and a small organisation that engages with critical and contemporary amalgamations of art and science.

Headed up by London-based artists, Howard Boland and Laura Cinti, it focuses on artistic explorations of meaning and idiosyncrasies involving life both organic and synthetic.
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source: c-labcouk

C-LAB is an art collective and organisation that engages with critical and contemporary amalgamations of art, science and technology. Headed up by London-based artists, Howard Boland and Laura Cinti, it focuses on artistic explorations of meaning and idiosyncrasies involving life both organic and synthetic.

C-LAB is internationally recognised as an interdisciplinary art platform that generates and participates in both artistic and scientific forums brokering discussions on the intersections of art and science.

Recent activities include exhibiting living synthetic biology artworks at Techfest 2012, Mumbai, India and curating public art exhibitions for the EU funded European Public Art Centre – EPAC (2010-2012), a European-wide collaboration between organisations exhibiting public artworks focusing on art, science and society for which C-LAB is UK partner.

C-LAB aims to be a body where artworks and ideas of culturally challenging nature can circulate and mature. This is a place where such stories, ideas and documentations can be accessed. To an extent, we are promoters of resistance aimed at challenging structures and ideas in our culture. We do not wish to be advocates of a world that is better to live in, to generate order out chaos or even be a mirror to the world. By hacking the codes of our culture we seek to create substances that circulates between our culture, reality and the other. From a theoretical stand we also open ourselves to texts in a more ephemeral way by using argumentations that allow inventions of new language. Even irrational rhetoric can be a linguistic construction that serves logic and our interest lies in texts that re-codes and break formal constructions. As organisations mature they have a tendency of formalising themselves into semi-academic bodies and our objectives is to resist this by allowing ruptures, disparities, irrationality and inventiveness. Finally, we want to be advocates of intensities and for intensities to be acted out with great expression.

Howard Boland is co-founder and artistic director of C-LAB and an artist working with Synthetic Biology. His research focuses the use of standardised genetic parts using the MIT-based biobricks library through a laboratory-based practice. He holds a PhD (funded by the AHRC and the University of Westminster) titled “Art from Synthetic Biology” combines synthetic biology and art to produce novel visual expressions in bacteria. The research was situated at The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and daily practice at the School of Life Sciences working independently and alongside science researchers. He has degrees in Mathematics (University of Oslo), Software Systems for the Arts & Media and has a Masters in Digital Practices with Distinction (University of Hertfordshire).

Howard has taught and worked extensively with award winning interactive productions for clients such as HSBC, Vodafone, Sony, V&A and Microsoft. His strong professional involvement with the creative industry include heading up interactive digital teams for major agencies. The work crosses highly technical activities and liaising client services.

Laura Cinti is an artist working with biology. She is co-founder and co-director of C-LAB, an internationally recognised interdisciplinary art platform that generates and participates in both artistic and scientific forums. C-LAB has been invited to range of international conferences, exhibitions and continues to contribute in publications to broker discussions on the intersections of art and science. C-LAB is currently co-organiser of European Public Art Centre – EPAC (2010-2012), which focuses on collaborations between art and science across Europe and funded by the European Commission.

Laura has a PhD from UCL (Slade School of Fine Art in interdisciplinary capacity with UCL Centre of Biomedical Imaging), a Masters in Interactive Media: Critical Theory & Practice (Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London and BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class) from University of Hertfordshire.

Her artworks have been exhibited and presented internationally at venues such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville), Stone Bell House (Prague), Microwave International New Media Arts Festival (Hong Kong), Göteborg New Media Art Festival (Röda Sten), International Astronautical Congress, Less Remote (Glasgow), Mutamorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences (Prague), Arts and Genomic Centre (Amsterdam) and Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Publications and features on her artworks include; Leonardo, Next (Michael Crichton), An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/Guattari (Bernd Herzogenrath), Det Menneskelige Eksperiment (Museum Tusculanums Forlag, Copenhagan), Wired Science, The New York Times, USA Today, Wiedza I Zycie (Poland), New Scientist, Ceska Televise Port TV (Czech Television) and Scientific News Program (Vox Channel, Canada).
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source: we-make-money-not-art

Last week, i mentioned my quick trip to Leiden to see the winning projects of the third edition of the Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award, an international competition that gives artists and designers the opportunity to collaborate with life science institutions carrying out research into the genetic makeup of people, animals, plants and microorganisms.

One of the winning works is The Living Mirror, a ‘bio-installation’ that combines magnetic bacteria with electronics and photo manipulation to create liquid, 3D portraits. The piece was developed by Laura Cinti & Howard Boland from the art-science collective C-Lab in partnership with AMOLF, a research institute focusing on nanophotonics and physics of biomolecular systems.

Living Mirror involves cultivating magnetotactic bacteria, a group of bacteria able to orient along the magnetic field lines of Earth’s magnetic field. The artists collected the bacteria and used an array of tiny electromagnetic coils to shift the magnetic field, causing the bacteria rapidly reorient their body that changes how light is scattered. The resultant effect can be seen as a light pulse or a shimmer. Taking pixel values from darker and lighter areas in captured images, [C-Lab] programmatically harmonise hundreds of light pulses to re-represent the image inside a liquid culture.

I had a quick Q&A with the artists:

Hi Laura and Howard! The Living Mirror, to me at least, almost belongs to the world of magic.It uses software, hardware and wetware. It is a particularly complex project. How did you know it would work out in the end? And what were the biggest challenges you encountered during its development?

Indeed, as a work it has been a very ambitious undertaking that integrates quite complex processes of wetware, software and hardware. We had to work very closely with various types of engineering disciplines and work as engineers ourselves. Over the past few months we built several prototypes to help us understand how a magnetic culture of bacteria might work. In the beginning when we worked on pulling biomass our biggest challenge was to generate enough bacteria and have a system that could produce a significant magnetic pulling force.

The interactive art installation was aimed at producing real-time images using living bacteria – but pulling biomass was slow. When we discovered that these bacteria produced a shimmering effect in real-time we were intrigued and felt that this was a better phenomenon to pursue and also allowed us to work with much lower magnetic forces. By changing the magnetic field we were seeing bacteria rapidly switching direction in a synchronic rotation causing light to scatter and producing a visible shimmer. So the major challenges we have encountered so far has been cultivating these bacteria and producing the electronic boards needed for approximately 250 individual magnetic coils.

There are many unknowns in the project which is what makes it quite exciting for us – having living bacteria respond in real-time is not something we experience on a visual scale we are accustomed to and finding out whether this system will be able to produce shimmering pixels that can form a portrait image is to be seen in the weeks to come.

In LIVING MIRROR, multiple pulsating waves of bacteria are made to form a pixelated image using electromagnetic coils that shift magnetic fields across surface areas. By taking pixel values from darker and lighter areas in captured images, LIVING MIRROR programmatically attempts to harmonise hundreds of light pulses to re-represent the image inside a liquid culture.

In the proposal you wrote for the competition, you say that “Recent years have seen the human body reconfigured as an ecosystem of mostly non-human bacterial cells. Together with fungi and human cells, these form our complex ‘superorganism’, an image the work seeks to renegotiate by literally reflecting and fleshing out these ideas.” Could you elaborate what you mean by that?

Until recently, our understanding of human ‘self’ was, at least biologically speaking, thought to be ‘human’ cells. This perspective is now understood to include microbial communities and interestingly, these microbial cells not only outnumber our own ‘human’ cells but our bodies contain significantly more of microbial DNA than our own genome. (Our bodies contain a mere 10 per cent of human cells and 90 per cent microbial cells). In this sense our bodies can be seen as a ‘superorganisms’ – working collectively as a unified organism or an ecosystem.

As a liquid biological mirror, LIVING MIRROR draws on the idea of water as our first interface predating today’s screen-based digital technologies. It points to the myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own image by believing it was someone else in the water reflection. Drawn into the image, he tragically drowned – a reminder of how we continue to immerse ourselves in similar mirrors as we extend our identity into the virtual. Simultaneously, the work highlights how contemporary science has shattered the idea of our own body by recognising that we are mostly made up of non-human bacterial cells. These ideas have shaped digital and biological understandings of our human self and are technically and conceptually reflected in LIVING MIRROR.

A living mirror is a very seducing idea. Do you see possible applications for it? Or was it just an artistic experiment?

Throughout the project we have been in communication with many leading researchers and there are certainly some specific technological overlaps (i.e. possible use of shimmer as a magnetic measurement or methods for orienting or guiding cells). As a display what can be seen is certainly different to existing technologies and LIVING MIRROR remains a research-based artwork.