Brian Knep : Journal

Recently met Daniel Kohn and Julie Miller, both also currently or formerly artists-in-residence (AIR) at local scientific institutions.

The first meeting was arranged by Bang Wong at the Broad Institute, where Daniel is in residence. The benches, the tools, the people, the vibe…it’s the same culture as Harvard Med School. Daniel is a painter and has created a studio in the middle of a set of lab benches. It’s a heavy traffic area, and he’s covered the walls and windows with drawings and sketches. A nice way to create opportunities for chance encounters and dialog. His residency is officially over, but he’s hopeful they’ll find some money to keep him around for longer.

At the Broad we saw a bunch of DNA-on-a-chip, or DNA microarray, devices. Each holds thousands of binding sites, each binding to a different bit of DNA or RNA. You can determine what bits of DNA are in a sample by washing it over the microarray and seeing which sites bind.

Julie was at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute, where we met our second time. Her residency has also ended, but her show there was still up. We checked it out and got a quick tour of the lab of one of her friends there. He’s working on protein folding. In particular, he’s trying to understand how a protein changes when it’s activated by a calcium ion. Julie told us that he had been very vocal about her work, arguing that art needs a focus, like a beautiful flower with a blurry background. To appease his aesthetics, she created and showed one flower print in the middle of her show. Very cute; he was appreciative.

I’m not sure how much my work has in common with Daniel’s or Julie’s. I don’t know enough about their process or where their work will go. But I do know that I like to use the science not only as inspiration but also in a direct way to create/push the art—filming frogs or simulating natural patterns, for example. I also like to maintain enough distance to be able to comment on the role of science in our society. The aging pieces, for example, are not only about time and aging, but are a comment on the value we place in scientific research, in using technology to solve our ills, in looking for external solutions to our fears.

Spending most of my time fixing up my new studio but just sat down to create a looping version of Frog Time designed for the small screen. It will be shown tonight at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority’s Summer Street Solstice party.

Break

Show is over and I’m taking a bit of a break, a vacation from home. The show got some nice press:

and happily won an award:

IBM Innovation Award for artistic creation in art and technology

Now it’s time to take a break, read some books, catch up on life.

Up and Over

Show is up. Big push is over!

The final show at Judi Rotenberg has three pieces. Two large, non-repeating videos (Frog Time and Frog Triplets) and a set of 24 images that tell two different stories of a frog’s life (Frog Path).

Afterwards, I feel burned out and a bit sad–kind of a post-partum depression–but now am feeling up again. Going to take a bit of a break and then hopefully start filming worms and yeast cells. I hope to make a series of pieces about time and aging.

Tonight a contingent of scientists are visiting from the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Med School, where my residency is hosted. Eager, and a bit nervous, to see what they think of the work. Not scientific enough? We’ll see….

Countdown

That’s what it feels like, a countdown to the ‘big’ show at Judi Rotenberg. This will be the first time I’m showing the frog/worm/yeast work and I’m worried I don’t have enough time to do it justice. I’ve titled the show “works in progress,” but I still want to have pieces that are finished, perhaps with a little needed polish but essentially complete works. I’ve gotten some great footage of the frogs, it just takes time to absorb all the information, mentally process it, dig for deeper resonances, and produce work. “Cafe time” I call it.

Wish me luck.

BZ Cocktail Waves

A short movie Natalie made by bravely holding her Macbook up over the petri dish. She gleefully tells me her former advisor, Robert I. (protector of the social amoeba/slime mold distinction), talked about doing this for over five years with no sucess.

Safety Coat

Hamming it up in my new lab coat. I was told clearly that I am prohibited form doing more chemistry without supervision unless I take a lab-safety course. Guess what’s on the agenda?

Comp Bio

Leon Peshkin invited me to sit in on today’s Computational Biology group meeting. They are working on ways to filter through, understand, and represent all the data (particularly gene relationships) about a particular disease in all the papers ever written about that disease. Reminds me of the work my brother is doing at the Alzheimer Research Forum with the AlzGene project.

Here’s Leon looking very handsome:

Natalie and BZ Cocktails

Been chatting with Natalie Andrew, a relatively new postdoc in Jeremy Gunawardena’s lab. Her bench (lab space) is down the hall from my frog room, and she’s been studying Dictyostelium, a type of Slime Mould. They are amazing one-celled organisms that group together when starving to form a slug. This slug crawls to a new place and forms fruiting bodies which disperse the mould. Very cool, but this entry is about BZ Cocktails.

No alcohol required, ordered from a high-school lab supply house, the BZ Cocktail is a set of chemicals that, when mixed together in the right concentrations, form a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. This is a classic reaction-diffusion reaction, like I use in much of my work (e.g., the Healing Series).

Natalie and Prabhakaran Sudhakaran, another postdoc in the lab, got a BZ Cocktail Kit and have been playing with it. She excitedly brought the chemicals into my room and mixed them up in a test tube.

First you mix…

Then you get Green…

Then you get Red…

And it keeps alternating between. Boring huh, but kind of cool when you think about it. The instructions say that it will oscillate back and forth 20 times, although we didn’t count.

Stay tuned for more exciting things from BZ, including spiral waves!

Dig Press

Jason Feifer wrote a nice article for Boston’s Weekly Dig about my residency and new work (cached here). And the Ronald Feldman show is one of Resolve40’s gallery picks! Not sure what that means, but yay.