History of the Species

Work by the MRG at Goldsmiths.
Including: William Latham, Stephen Todd, Frederic Fol Leymarie, Miki Shaw, Ben Jefferys, Lawrence Kelley.
http://www.mrg-gold.com

The film shows the evolution of a protein structure mapped into the FormGrow space traversing 20 nodes in an extrapolated phylogenetic tree covering up to 50 million years per second (back and forth in time to a common ancestor). The film shows a highly original representation of DNA on its journey from the human liver to the eye lens, initially backtracking towards their common ancestor and then moving forward to today's time. The animated form interpolates between each node (protein) on the tree. DNA is used both to generate the forms and produce the soundtrack. The work is an extension of Latham and Todd's ideas of the late 1980's to the early 1990's, where, this time, FormGrow is connected to modern genomics and proteomics. The film represents an attempt to cross the divide between scientific visualisation of DNA and aesthetically pleasing art.

"At the core of this work is the idea of feeding DNA data sequences into a rich 3D form generator called FormGrow, to generate organic-looking 3D growth structures, creating an equivalence of the DNA mapped into an alternative multi-dimensional space."

The 3D forms for each frame of the animation were produced in part by using computing resources provided by the UK National Grid Service: http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/
We thank the Rutherford Appleton Lab (RAL) for helping us using their supercomputer.
The rendering of each frame was performed using PIXIE, the open source RenderMan, with the guidance of one of its creator, George Harker
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pixie

We were selected to present our recent animation ("The History of Species") at Siggraph in San Diego, in August 2007, in the Sketches section

MRG also presented its latest work on 3D genetic art at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) part of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Mill Hill, North London, on Thursday November 1st. This was followed by a 6 weeks exhibit of the work at the NIMR. It included the HoS animation.
http://www.mrg-gold.com

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• 3d
• graphics
• organic
• art
• computational
• evolution
• Latham
• Leymarie
• proteomics
• genetics
• visualization
• Goldsmiths
• Todd

[superdiza]

1/you would need much better narration for convey your message.

2/are you suggesting an "eye protein" had a common ancestor with a "liver cell", 50 mil ago?

3.will it not be cooler to graph this on a scale of novelty, that is change/per million year per organ/life form etc. the human neocortex should be an interesting part to watch.

[folleymarie]

@superdiza

(1) We could do a better job, yes.

(2) Yes: you find proteins in the eye lens and liver that share a common ancestor; It is "up to 50 million years per second" (indeed this movie needs a better script).

(3) Our idea is to have a dynamic multimodal art piece reflect evolution. NB: the sound/score is also driven by changes in the genomic structure. But you are right to point out that there are many other ways to reflect such changes.

Thanks.

[dltanner99]

Alternative view of evolution see video book trailer

[ACLNM]

Very interesting. Even if you don't really belong to the science community, you can still enjoy the great visual show.