Science has designs on art

Design, meet science. Science, meet some innovative artists. That's the idea behind Design and the Elastic Mind, an exhibition currently on show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) until May 12.

As I stepped off the sixth floor escalator, I was greeted by the show's introductory text, elegantly printed atop a pattern of pink, purple and grey lines, reminiscent of the striped dress shirts worn by many of the hip Manhattan museum goers. But when I looked beyond the big block letters, and stared closely at the wallpaper, I saw a swarm of tiny A's, C's, T's, and G's. These letters, 76 million in all, collectively spell out the entire genetic code of human chromosome 18, with exons in purple, introns in pink, and grey for all the spaces between the genes. This piece -- called Genomic Cartography by Ben Fry of the MIT Media Lab -- serves as the backdrop for the entire exhibition: Things you can barely see, but you know are there.

The human brain evolved to comprehend what we can perceive with our five senses. For millions of years, we couldn't see atoms, we couldn't hear radio waves, we couldn't smell TNT. But now, thanks to modern technology, previously unexplored universes have opened up and notions of scale are melting away. And yet, scale remains integral to how society interacts. In Design, hundreds of artists explore how human activities, restrictions and ambitions are all shaped by science and technology, with a continuous focus on scale -- from the nano-world to our globe-spanning connectedness.

DNA Origami

(Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)

Paul Rothemund's DNA Origami features smiley faces that are barely 100 nanometers wide. Rothemund, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, exploits the self-assembling properties of DNA molecules to bend and fold the 7000-bp genomes of M13 viruses using short DNA strands as "staples" to create familiar two-dimensional shapes. In addition to the iconic smiley face -- 50 billion of which could float in a single drop of water -- Rothemund creates words, snowflake-like lattices, and even a map of the Americas, all of which he then laser-etches on to glass slides.

The Honey Comb Vase "Made by Bees"

The word "design" in the exhibition's title is used to capture many different themes. For some works, such as Tomas Libertiny's The Honey Comb Vase "Made by Bees," where the artist "collaborates" with 40,000 honeybees for a week to create an ecologically-inspired flower vase, a structure is clearly designed in the home-furnishing sense of the word. Other pieces, however, use art and design to navigate more intangible themes.

In Protein Homology Graph, University of Texas at Austin researchers Edward Marcotte and Alex Adai explore the difficult to see. The bioinformaticians cum visual artists make 21 billion pairwise comparisons between 140,000 known genes to create nearly 2 million homologies, which they portray as a constellation of connections, revealing a genetic blueprint of functionality that resembles an exploding multi-color firework display. In Susanna Soares' Sniffing Others, future technologies supplant a basic human ritual: courtship. The artist envisions a small device that slots into the nose, much like a hearing aid in an ear, to enhance our sense of smell so the wearer can detect genetic dissimilarities between potential mates. But due to base human instincts, or perhaps as a comment on commercialism, the nose plug itself evolves to become an object of desire, taking on new shapes, colors, and styles.

The Pig Wings Project

Some of the exhibition's most socially charged works stemmed from an artist collective called The Tissue Culture and Art Project. The prototype of an in vitro jacket factory made from bovine skin cells appears in Victimless Leather, while The Pig Wings Project asks: if pigs could fly, what shape would their wings be? Pig bone marrow stem cells grown in Petri dishes offer three answers, as the artists create bone tissue in the shapes of pterosaur, bat, and angel wings.

The exhibition is often scattered and unfocused; each room is seemingly detached from the next, and the connections between two adjacent works on display can sometimes feel too abstract or forced. But that sensation of confusion only occurs when you look at the individual parts rather than appreciating the whole. Together, the exhibition functions like an ecosystem -- intricately interlocking -- and it somehow works, although the viewer might never be quite sure how. In the end, seemingly random complexity emerges to resemble (dare I say) design.

Elie Dolgin
mail@the-scientist.com

"Design and the Elastic Mind" is on view through May 12 at the Museum of Modern Art: 11 West 53 Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) in New York, (212) 708-9400, www.moma.org.