Michael Ang

I moved back to San Francisco (though currently in Vancouver en route to Alaska… see the next post). Had the chance to take Strange Attractor to a meadow full of wildflowers in Northern California. The meadow was filled with several species of butterflies. There were white butterflies (positive ident forthcoming) feeding on the minerals in the mud at the edge of the meadow. I installed Strange Attractor and several butterflies came to visit over the course of a few hours. The white butterflies seemed to prefer the white laser cut flowers. The preference of the butterflies for the flowers seems to vary with the species but more tests would be needed to confirm this.

Aside from the “results” it was interesting to see the flowers out in a natural setting and wonder what role technology has in a mostly wild location.

Flickr photo set

Natalie Jeremijenko and I released two dozen butterflies in the OOZ garden. We helped them feed from some watermelon in the Strange Attractor artificial flowers then observed their behaviour. The Monarchs stayed at Strange Attractor longer and were more likely to leave, fly around the garden a bit and return to the flowers. The Painted Ladies were less likely to return once they took off. The flower design seemed to matter, with the laser cut acrylic disks being more popular than the inkjet printed designs. The blue, orange and red laser cut disks appeared to be more enticing than the white one.

A robotic Monarch was employed to see if it would attract or repel the real butterflies. They seemed mostly indifferent, but longer observation is needed as the effect is most likely to be seen as butterflies approach from a distance.

Flickr photo set

My thesis project presentation is online. Make sure you make it past the first few minutes of silent sparkles (the videos are archived automatically and the sparkles are when I was setting up).

I took some pictures at the Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? conference presented by the New York Academy of Science.

I hadn’t realized that Theo Jasen had used a genetic algorithm to get the lengths for his beach animals. There are 11 sections in each leg that contribute of the shape of the motion. If he had tried 10 possible lengths for each of those sections the possibilities exponentially rise. So he wrote a program to try some different possibilities, see how well they met the criteria, then use those as the basis for a new generation of possible solutions. The net effect was to navigate through the space of possible solutions in an evolutionary way. All this on an Atari!

A lot of thought provoking discussion in the talks. Awesome to see some of the scientists presenting their work and having some of the same enthusiasm as the artists. The talks on animal locomotion and how visual representation affects the teaching of science were standouts for me. Michael Joaquin Grey kind of blew my mind with his combination of conceptual, aesthetic and entrepreneurial work. Still processing…

I was interviewed about my thesis a little while ago for Jeffrey Leblanc’s online video show Talking To ITP.

Interview part one
Interview part two

I’ve done a lot of research and have started down a few different paths that could become the focus of my thesis or basis for future work. I wrote down the different areas/topics that I’m interested in on a bunch of postit notes and stuck them to the wall. They fall under the broad categories of Philosophy, Science, Politics, Art and Ethics. Each category has a different colour.

Under each category I made a list of each idea I’m interested in. Then I sorted the notes in each category with more important or interesting ideas percolating to the top. After that I started making clusters of ideas related across categories.

The main clusters (or “constellations”) that emerged are roughly as follows:

• The “what is the nature of life?” cluster dealing with what recent developments in molecular biology are telling us about the material basis of life and the relationship between humanity and nature (as affected and effected by our new tools for genetic manipulation).
• The “open source biotechnology” cluster dealing with issues of corporate and institutional control of biotechnology.
• The “ethics of biotechnology in artistic practice” cluster dealing with the use of living organisms and biotechnology in art.
• The “art as informal science education and arena for debate” cluster exploring the relationship between art, science and the public.

Things are starting to gel a little. Part of the challenge is that there is so much information to assimilate, and so few easy answers.

Thesis Mindmap set on Flickr

I gave a presentation this week on DNA computing to the ITP Artificial Intelligence and Biologically Inspired Computing discussion group.

DNA computing is fascinating to me since it offers the potential of massive parallelization (trillions of copies in a drop of water), use of DNA as input and output, and tiny power consumption. The basic idea is that you can encode “software” into physical strands of DNA and use chemical and enzymatic reactions to do computation. The most exciting example I’ve come across so far is a DNA computer developed by the Weizmann Institute that can recognize abnormal activity related to cancer that can be detected when four separate genes are active. The computer recognizes that all four are active together and then releases a strand of DNA that could suppress the activity. This has been shown to work in a test tube and there are huge hurdles to overcome before it could work inside the human body. Very interesting to think of molecular computers eventually working inside cells and programs modulating activity inside those cells.

Here are the slides from my presentation (.ppt). References from the presentation below. This biological nanocomputer animation from the Weizmann Institute is great.

• What is DNA - Genetics Home Reference
• DNA Computer Could Target Cancer - Nanotech Web
• DNA Computing: A Primer - Arstechnica
• On Constructing a Molecular Computer - Len Adleman
• Breaking DES using a molecular computer
• Injectable Medibots: Programmable DNA could diagnose and treat cancer - Science News
• First game-playing DNA computer revealed - New Scientist
• Programmable and autonomous computing machine
• Personal Biocomputing - Eugene Thacker
• Biological Nanocomputer - Weizmann Institute
• Biological Nancomputer Animation - Weizmann Institute
• Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes - National Geographic

Dare to compare this Flash animation of RNA translation into protein with the 1970s interpretation I posted earlier this week.

The brilliant (and twisted) Real Ben Brown sent me this fantastic video of a dance interpretation of protein synthesis carried out with hundreds of students on a football field in 1971. It’s narrated by Nobel laureate Paul Berg and check out that sound track! All kinds of awesome.