World Science Festival Street - What Grows?

Thank you to everyone who visited our tent at the World Science Festival Street Fair on Sunday -- and a special thanks to the 200+ artists who contributed drawings (or written ideas) to our Impressions of Growing collective art project. We will be very VERY busy in the lab growing your ideas in e. coli over the summer! Check back (or subscribe to our blog) for updates on our progress... and our plans to share this work with you. See more photos from the festival below...
*Annie, Lissa & Ivory... our deepest thanks, we couldn't have done it without you! 

Printing Day at the Harlem DNA Lab

photo by joey o'laughlin

Success! After 18 hours in the incubator, our bacteria designs emerged in a beautiful range of blues and effects. The students/scientists/artists had mixed both transformed and normal bacteria together to create subtle combinations of blue and white designs... and many strong blue images were grown and printed today. Bravo!  See how it all came together after the jump...

Harlem DNA Lab - World Science Festival

As part of the World Science Festival's outreach events, we introduced our living paint to 9th graders from the Thurgood Marshall Academy. Thanks to our host, Ileana Rios and the Harlem DNA Lab (a project of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) students learned how to perform a genetic transformation of e.coli bacteria (each making their own version of our "paint") and everyone made 8-10 bacterial paintings. We can't wait to see how the images grow -- all will be revealed on Friday when we return to print our work! Check back for updates.

Talk at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to share the story of our collaboration with my arts-education colleagues at the April 21st "Inspiration is the Destination" conference at the Brooklyn Museum. A few photos from the slide-talk, thanks Emily Shu!

Ecoli -- natural variations on a theme

This is a favorite piece from the show. A self portrait of our media.

Installation Images from Serrano Contemporary

Our show is down -- but here are some photos in case you missed it. Above is the installation of 30 E. coli prints mounted in glass petri dishes. Close up below. Click on any photograph for a larger view.



Artist & Scientist

Upcoming Exhibition - Growing Impressions

My scientist collaborator, Kristin Baldwin, and I have the opportunity to exhibit this work at Serrano Contemporary in NYC from Feb 19 - March 18. Invitation below. Come on by!

Work from Jan 09 -- growing and printed

An image in bacteria, growing on agar -- and then printed onto paper

Translating Bacteria Prints to Cyanotypes

Very excited about learning this old fashioned photographic process - using the sun to make contact prints from a "negative".

I've selected some of the bacterial prints, which are typically small on 2, 4 or 6 inch circles... and enlarged these onto transparency material using a photocopier. Then... waiting for a strong sunny day to printed these onto paper i've sensitized. The one above happens to be very dark... others come out much lighter, depending on the strength of the sun and length of exposure time.