BEAUTY

A Phylum project

Beauty (2020-ongoing) is a hybrid biological-technological installation featuring a bio-driven artificial intelligence system that remediates a contaminated soil ecology while generating an audio-visual composition in real-time. The work creates a situation where the fates of the contaminated soil and a group of bacterial cultures are determined by the whims of an AI that has an internal model of “beauty”.

This AI builds its model by observing the cooperative pattern-forming and swarming behaviors of numerous bacterial species. Paenibacillus dendritiformis for example, produce intricate dendritic growth patterns in response to environmental conditions. They are also known to aid in the bioremediation of heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (present in motor oil, coal, etc) that are often found in soils, rivers, estuarine and coastal sediments. Currently, we are working at Coalesce: Center for Biological Arts, to isolate and modify these bacteria to express other novel (and potentially aesthetically pleasing) features (e.g. colors).

The bacteria will be genetically modified in a way that manipulates their stress-response genes to express the aforementioned “beauty enhancements”.