More biomimetic art. Artist Ruth West, director of visual analytics and interactive technologies at the UC San Diego National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research and research associate with the UCSD Center for Research and Computing in the Arts, has come up with an exhibit entitled Ecco Homology. Bioinfo Online describes it thusly:
Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, a meditation on how one becomes what one is, the project explores human evolution by examining similarities – a.k.a. "homology" – between genes from human beings and a target organism, in this case the rice plant. [...] Custom software turns genes – incomprehensibly long strings of As, Cs, Ts and Gs – into luminous pictograms that resemble Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy. Based on currently available biophysical information, the pictograms are scientifically accurate representations of proteins encoded for by the genes.
Ecce Homology will be on display at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles from July 31 through August 4.
The website for the exhibit has numerous pictures, as well as a more detailed explanation of how they are derived. This definitely looks like something to check out if you're going to SIGGRAPH.