Subtle Technologies

The paper was entitled 'Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0' and the abstract is available at http://www.subtletechnologies.com/2009/?page_id=219. Excerpts from the paper will be incorporated in a book being published shortly. Her trip received significant funding from The Research Student Fund. The paper outlined Dumitriu’s recent artwork of the same name, which was shown at The Science Gallery in Dublin to an audience of over 40,000 between April and July this year.

Her project (which is a transdisciplinary collaboration between an artist, a philosopher, a microbiologist, an artificial life programmer and an interactive media specialist - based across several universities) attempts to extend the notion of the technological sublime into a kind of microbiological sublime, reflecting the far greater complexity of the communication that is taking place at a microscopic level in comparison with human communication technologies such as the Internet.

'Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0' is a multiple screen projection, which makes explicit the correlations between bacterial and human communications networks. The work combines, in real time, the raw network traffic taking place live around a gallery space (including web traffic, mobile technology and Bluetooth) and data from a time-lapse film of bacterial communication (involving two strains of genetically modified (GM) bacteria which indicate the communication taking place by changing colour). From those two sources a new Cellular Automata artificial life form based on Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ is generated.