My name is Bahareh Barati. It is my pleasure, also on behalf of the coauthors, to shortly present to you the results of our study,
titled as Living Light Interfaces: An exploration of bioluminescent aesthetics.
Our paper introduces the concept of “Living Light Interfaces” (LLI) as a new research space focusing on new aesthetics and
interaction qualities of bioluminescent microorganisms.
As an initial attempt, in our exploration of Living light interfaces we focused on a specific strain of dinoflagellates
called Pyrocystis Fusiformis.
The work builds on the existing frameworks and notions within the emerging fields of bioHCI and biodesign,
namely "Living bits" (Pataran et al., 2020) and "Living Material Interfaces" (Merritt et al., 2020)
and takes interest in the temporal dimensions of materials aesthetics,
in connection to the previously introduced concept of "Ephemeral User Interfaces" (Döring et al., 2013)
and our recent work on "Living Artefacts" (Karana et al., 2020) , where Living Aesthetics become an important design focus.
It also reviews the state of the art in dynamic light characterisation
to identify the relevant qualities when characterising algal bioluminescence.
There is a great deal of publications on the science of bioluminescence particularly in the field of marine biology,
and already a number of designers and artists have incorporated these organisms in their installations.
Bioluminescence in dinoflagellates is known to occur when shear stress is induced on the cell,
for instance when larger animals swim by or waves break on the surface.
Please check the paper for more information on any of the related topics.
For sake of keeping within the time, I will move directly to our experiments.
For our experiments, we worked with Pyrocystis Fusiformis algae cultures from PyroFarms,
which we kept in sterile Erlenmeyer flasks, capped with non-absorbent cotton wool.
In the middle image you can see the visible changes in the culture over the period of 8 weeks
as the algae cells grow in number and metabolise.
In order to effectively grow and maintain the dinoflagellate cultures, we kept them in a modified wine cooler,
which allowed for a constant temperature, between 14 to 16 degrees Celsius and a controlled lighting regime.
A lighting regime is crucial as photosynthetic dinoflagellates are regulated by a circadian clock.
Beside the controlled temperature and lighting conditions, and the sterile and breathable containers,
the culture needs nutrients every 4 to 8 weeks to stay alive.
We have designed an orbital shaker to perform different but consistent types of kinetic stimuli.
Here you see a video of the shaker in action.
To induce vibration, a wooden plate consisting of 7 small piezo discs was prototyped
that could be mounted on the same base and controlled with the same Arduino Uno.
18 various patterns within the three main types of stimuli, namely,
rotation, pulse and vibration were tested in the study, as listed in this table.
In the remainder of the presentation, I will present some of the results and show the video footages
to supplement the results presented in the paper.
For intensity variation over time, the video footages were analysed frame-by-frame using an existing MATLAB script,
which calculates the mean luminance value of all pixels within each frame and plotted the values over time.
The presented graph compares the intensity variations of the 90 and 120 rpm rotational speeds.
As evident in the corresponding video, the peak value in 120 rpm is up to 4 times greater than the peak value in 90 rpm,
while the total light output is almost doubled.
Adding intervals to the 120 rpm rotational stimuli resulted in an interesting observation.
As shown in the graph the total lightness increased around 15% percent in case of paused rotation.
The direction of rotation has also an impact on the intensity variation.
As clearly depicted in the graph in the first 5000ms of video footages, overall,
the mean luminance value of alternating rotation is 2 times greater than paused rotation.
Our experiments show that duration of light emission is influenced by the type of stimuli,
while the longest was attributed to rotation and the shortest to vibration.
Overlaying the response curves as output in relation to the mechanical stimulation as input,
we noticed the initial delay in response was affected by both the type of mechanical stimuli,
and the prior condition of the liquid culture.
A culture, which has not been stimulated before, compared to a previously stimulated one, resulted in shorter delay in response.
Particularly, once a culture is exposed to a large shear force,
such as a high-speed rotational movement
as shown in the video,
it shows almost no bioluminescent response to following, more gentle stimuli.
We think that this behavior could be explained by organism’s loss of sensitivity.
We used long exposure trajectories of the moving light pattern and frame-by-frame propagation of the pattern
to report the differences across kinetic stimuli, namely rotation and pulsation.
Previously, researchers have used fluid dynamics models to describe the dynamics of the observed light pattern.
Our results attest to such a mechanical relationship
between the fluid dynamics and the emergence and propagation of the living light pattern.
Thus, any parameter that governs the fluid dynamics,
including the shape of a container and volume can have influence on the spatial propagation of the living light.
The last cluster in our flash characterisation study is textural qualities, which concerns the perceived texture.
According to our close-up images of the local areas,
type of stimuli, speed and condition of culture has an influence on the textural qualities.
As the rotational force pushes most bioluminescent cells into a tight cluster near the edge of the glass,
the resulting light texture is a uniform glow with barely any visible individual dots.
Pulsation and vibration tend to create highly textured lighting patterns,
as cells throughout the whole liquid are triggered but not pushed together as much.
Expectedly, speed of rotation also had an impact on the visibility of the algal individual flashes.
Another interesting biological factor was the age of culture.
Over time the culture is cluttered by the metabolic processes of the cells,
which clearly had an impact on the textural quality as shown in the video.
So, on the right you see a fresh culture and on the left you see an aged one.
To conclude, our paper presents a study of the living aesthetics of bioluminescent algae in a liquid media.
To that aim we used 18 variation of rotation, pulse and vibration kinetic stimuli.
Further research could focus on studying people’s interacting with Living Light Interfaces in real-life settings.
While our exploration involved simple kinetic stimuli,
more complex range of stimuli with the support of modelling and simulation tools can be a next step
to support designer’s better understanding of the textural qualities and spatial distribution of a living light.
In the attempt to make our characterisation results accessible to a wider public,
we designed a Living Light Interface for the exhibition STILL ALIVE.
In the video, you see the first iteration of the design, which incorporates a metal frame and a stronger DC motor.
For the next iterations, we plan to map the kinetic stimuli to input from visitors, by incorporating ambient sensors.
With that, we hope to further explore the links between living light qualities and the fundamental concepts of interaction such as input/output.
Thanks for listening!