Anna Dumitriu, a research student in the Faculty of Arts recently presented a paper at the 12th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival and Conference, held on 12 June 2009 in Toronto, Canada.
15 Aug 2013
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.