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you
I always love to collaborate with
scientists because he gives me an idea
that we can perhaps meet in the middle
somewhere and make this perfect piece of
art it's exactly this combination of
matter and meaning
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not only is the collaboration between
your scientist and an artist trying to
make pictures out of living things
tiny tiny living things
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there's prints of bacteria cancer cells
and also cells that have been infected
with viruses and the series as a whole
is basically pairings of these materials
with different types of images that tell
a story I got interested in art as a
graduate student when I was making all
these bacterial movies and I found them
to be a lot more convincing when they
were both beautiful and interesting
science they have a rhythmic behavior
it's almost musical or you can imagine
these bacteria sort of like dancing at a
rave or something
I met a vic through a friend at MIT and
then i started showing him all of my
bacterial movies things like yeah we
have to work together and i remember the
next day he came to the lab and he said
what about can you do like a picture
with like like my bacteria he
immediately got this swab and say open
your mouth and i say now they say yeah
so he stuck this thing in my mouth
we made a self-portrait of it with the
bacteria from his chip so that was the
very beginning of the project
I never would expect that I would meet
somebody that was working with that
level of complexity to my surprise he
could do it and to his surprise it was a
lot harder than he thought in synthetic
biology pre-programmed life and we
started thinking about the ways that
nature designs life and the ways that we
can imagine and redesigning life to do
things that they don't normally do here
at MIT what I've been doing is actually
engineering bacteria to detect cancer
and the idea behind that is bacteria can
actually grow within tumors once they
grow in these tumor environments you can
get them to sense that environment and
produce a molecule that allows you to
easily detect the presence of the tumor
do you think of bacteria is something
bad you know but in fact they ruled the
world we have more bacteria than human
cells in our bodies if we didn't have a
small portion of these you would be dead
it's a lifelong collaboration
to think that we could use that also
that is so present in our life inside
ourselves to create an image to make you
look at them for for what they are you
know they're fascinating things we
started with very simple patterns they
would pair something that is in our
minds very chaotic to something that's
very orderly something that was created
by the minds of man but as soon as we
started doing that you know we felt
tempted to try different patterns like
traffic jams crowds in sports events
circuit boards it's like somehow trying
to pare mind and matter together and see
what it comes out of it
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the process for making these images
consists of three steps the first step
is to make a master image way for using
photolithography techniques the second
step is actually to cast a rubber stamp
from this wafer and use that stamp to
make a sticky image on a dish that
cancer cells or bacteria could stick to
and then the final step is to apply
cancer cells or bacteria to this dish
and allow them to bind to the sticky
material then taking images on the
microscope
you can actually see the individual
bacteria and cancer cells with this
high-powered microscope but then if you
zoom out you can actually see the image
in its entirety
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it is quite beautiful to actually have a
picture of cancer cells something so
scary you know in something so outwardly
and just form that into something that
could inspire beauty
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the answer is a very complex word it's
something that has a very strong
emotional connection and in the everyday
world it's one of the worst words that
you can imagine you automatically think
of death and then for me as a scientist
you grow these cancer cells in the lab
you want your cancer cells to be happy
and healthy for your experiments to work
out and in fact one of the worst things
in the lab is when your cancer cells are
contaminated and they die it's a very
different kind of relationship with
cancer that we have and I found that it
was really interesting that in the
calling series we can sort of explore
this beauty of the cancer cell art that
we're making for these things to become
part of everybody's life
you do need a picture you need a way to
experience you know that's a way in
which artists can partner with
scientists they can provide the vision
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you