'Living Mirror': Bacteria as human portrait (pictures)
Two science-minded artists combine magnetic bacteria, electronics, and photo manipulation to create real-time liquid images of people. See how they did it.
Beautiful bacteria
Bacteria can do a whole lot of things. Two London-based artists have taken advantage of the fact that some types can be rotated in ways that cause light to scatter, creating a visible shimmer inside liquid, to bring a novel imaging technique to life.
Laura Cinti and Howard Boland combined magnetotactic bacteria, which can orient itself along Earth's magnetic fields, with electronics and photo manipulation to create real-time liquid images. They call their interactive installation "Living Mirror," as the manipulated cells form a "living mirror" within liquid that essentially mimics images captured of people.
"Multiple pulsating waves of bacteria can be made to form a pixelated but recognizable image using tiny electromagnetic coils that shift magnetic fields across surface areas," explain Cinti and Boland of the art-science collective C-Lab. "By taking pixel values from darker and lighter areas in captured images, 'Living Mirror' attempts to programmatically harmonize hundreds of light pulses to re-represent the image inside a liquid culture."
The resulting image might not work for a passport photo, but it does represent a rather unusual blend of art and science.
Pixelated portrait
A mirror, of sorts
Magnet manipulation
Magnet reaction
The "Living Mirror" project took months, and a number of prototypes, to refine. In the early stages, C-Lab artists Laura Cinti and Howard Boland worked on developing a system that could produce a significant magnetic force to pull biomass. Here, fluid reacts to magnetic forces. The fluid forms the artists' liquid media.