Biology-Inspired Art

Swine flu, eye color, and what fractals have to do with gene sequences.

Science and art have long been enamored with each other, albeit on more abstract levels. Today, we look at four examples of art that borrows from science in the most literal of ways.

ARTFORMS IN NATURE

In 1904, German biologist Ernst Haeckel published Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) — a beautifully illustrated book full of artistic interpretations of the biological forms Haeckel studied.

Recently, the copyright on the book expired and all the images entered the public domain — they are now available for free on Wikimedia Commons.

Depicted with amazing, fractal-like clarity of symmetry and detail, the illustrations bespeak an intersection of art and engineering — more than a century before the current fascination with science-centric design and biomimcry.

GLASS MICROBIOLOGY

Sculptor Luke Jerram explores the microscopic and scientific on an artistic macro scale. His series Glass Microbiology depicts various viruses and phages as large, transparent, three-dimensional sculptures.

From swine flu to e.coli, the sculptures offer a perfect play on the tension between the aesthetic beauty and functional ugliness of these biological villains.

Thanks, Maura

DNA ART FORMS

Dancing around the line between interpretive art and factual science, DNA Art Forms identify 15 unique regions of your genetic code, have an artist capture it as your choice of abstract form, landscape, or portrait set against the background of the actual DNA representation image.

The artwork isn’t your grandma’s digital art — it’s real oil on canvas. But it does come with a hefty price tag: Portraits start at $1,350.

MY GENE IMAGE

My Gene Image takes genetic portraits to a whole new level. Well, sub-level, really. They let you select a specific gene you are interested in — like, say, eye color or pheromone or circadian rhythm — and identify it in your genetic sample, then render the gene sequence of A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s against a colorful background.

Talk about making interior design very, very personal.

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Robots In Our Image

How a biblical creation myth replays itself from bone and muscle to jazz improvisation.

In labs around the world, a new breed is arising. A friendly breed of intelligent machines designed to look like us, move like us, behave like us, and interact with us in ways that seem less and less distinguishable from the human ways.

Cutting-edge AI projects aim, with an impressive degree of success, to embed human social and cognitive skills in intelligent machines that will eventually be able to seamlessly integrate into our social and cultural fabric. These machines will soon be able to read and understand our mental and emotional states and respond to them. They will be able to engage with us, to learn, adapt and share, challenging us to redefine our very conception of human identity and essence.

Here are 6 compelling beacons.

ASIMO

Robots walking amongst us has been a science fiction dream for many years. Recently, however, science is rapidly catching up in bringing this dream into reality. Japan’s technological giant Honda has been building an experimental anthropomorphic robot since the 80’s — ASIMO. His name stands for Advanced Step In Innovative Motion, but it’s hard to avoid associating it with Asimov, the iconic science-fiction author who envisioned intelligent humanoid robots in his stories and was the first to lay down the then-fictional 3 laws of robotics, regulating human-machine interactions.

Since as early as 2000, ASIMO’s advanced models have been capable, among other things, of demonstrating complex body movements, navigating complex environments, recognizing objects and faces, reacting to human postures, gestures and voice commands, and much more. ASIMO can safely conduct himself among us (not bumping into people) and perform an impressive set of complex tasks, like taking and order and serving coffee. Recent models even have limited autonomous learning capabilities.

KISMET

Social interaction, usually taken for granted in our everyday life, is a very complex system of signaling. We all use such signaling to share our rich mental and emotional inner lives. It includes voice, language production and understanding, facial expressions and many additional cues such as gesturing, eye contact, conversational distance, synchronization and more.

The Sociable Machine project at MIT has been exploring this complex system with Kismet, a “sociable machine” that engages people in natural and expressive face-to-face interaction.

The project integrates theories and concepts from infant social development, psychology, ethology and evolution that enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction.

The most significant achievement with Kismet is its ability to learn by direct interaction the way infants learn from their parents — previously a skill inherent only to biological species, and thus a major paradigm shift in robotics.

NEXI

Developed at MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, Nexi combines ASIMO’s mobility with Kismet’s social interactivity skills. Nexi presents itself as an MDS robot, which stands for Mobile, Dexterous, and Social.

The purpose of this platform is to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social learning. In particular, the small footprint of the robot (roughly the size of a 3 year old child) allows multiple robots to operate safely within a typical laboratory floor space.

Nexi’s design adds advanced mobility and object manipulation skills to Kismet’s social interactivity. Nexi’s facial expressions, though basic, are engaging and rather convincing. It’s also hard to overlook the “cute” factor at play, reminiscent of human babies.

While still slow and very machine-like in appearance, Nexi demonstrates today what was science fiction just a few years ago.

HANSON ROBOTICS

Hardly anything is more essential to the recognition of humanity than facial expressions, which modulate our communication with cues about our feelings and emotional states. Hanson Robotics combines art with cutting-edge materials and technologies to create extremely realistic robotic faces capable of mimicking human emotional expressions, conversing quite naturally, recognizing and responding to faces, and following eye contact.

We feel that these devices can serve to help to investigate what it means to be human, both scientifically and artistically.

Jules, a Conversational Character Robot designed by David Hanson, has a remarkably expressive face and is equipped with natural language artificial intelligence that realistically simulates human conversational intelligence. This, together with his/her rich nonverbal interaction skills, offers a glimpse of how fast robots are becoming virtually indistinguishable from us — social, interactive, eerily affective.

The team is also working on a futuristic project aiming to develop machine empathy and machine value system based on human culture and ethics that will allow robots to bond with people.

ECCEROBOT

In the quest to create machines in our image, of particular interest is ECCEROBOT — a collaborative project coordinated and funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

ECCE stands for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. Simply put, it means that while other humanoid robots are currently designed to mimic human form but not its anatomy and physiological mechanisms, ECCEROBOT is anthropomimetic — specifically designed to replicate human bone, joint and muscle structure and their complex movement mechanism.

The project leaders believe that human-like cognition and social interaction are intimately connected to the robot’s embodiment. A robot designed according to a human body plan should thus engage more fluently and naturally in human-like behavior and interaction. Such an embodiment would also help researches build robots that learn to engage with their physical environment the way humans do — an interesting concept that brings us a step closer to creating human-like robotic companions.

SHIMON

Music, many of us believe, makes us distinctively human — playing music together, especially improvising, is perhaps one of the most impressive and complex demonstrations of human collaborative intelligence where the whole becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

But extraordinarily skillful music-playing robots are already challenging this very belief. Earlier this year, we saw the stage debut of Shimon — a robotic marimba artist developed at the The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Shimon doesn’t look the least bit human, entirely lacks mobility and affective social skills, but is capable of something definitely considered exclusively human — playing real-time jazz improvisation with a human partner.

Shimon isn’t merely playing a pre-programmed set of notes, but is capable to intelligently respond to fellow human players and collaborate with them, producing surprising variations on the played theme. The robot’s head (not on video), currently implemented in software animation, provides fellow musicians with visual cues that represent social-musical elements, from beat detection and tonality to attention and spatial interaction.

Spaceweaver is a thinker, futurist and writer living in future tense, mostly on the web. Check out his blogs at Space Collective and K21st, and follow him on Friendfeed and Twitter.

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Design-Off: Top 3 Live Design Competitions

Cardboard monsters, digital marathons, and why design is just like tennis.

Geeks may be the new rock stars, but designers are the new jocks. Live, real-time design competitions are springing up as gauntlets of creative prowess. Here are the top 3 live design-offs, where seasoned designers and rising stars alike get to hash it out for honor and glory.

ART CLASH

Every year, 10 artist duos from all around Europe get invited to Zurich’s Art Clash — a live art battle, where teams compete against each other in 3 rigorous rounds of painting and drawing on different objects, from a cardboard box to the back door of a car.

The competition is a super-condensed version of the creative life, reduced to the bare bones of a design career: deadlines and ego.

In June, Austria’s Permanent Unit, took home the 2009 title.

See more of the work, impressive in its own right but even more so in light of the adrenaline-inducing time constraints.

LAYER TENNIS

We love Coudal and their numerous incarnations. One of them is the cleverly conceived Layer Tennis — a series of live design events, held over a “season” of Fridays, where players from all over the world face off with with video, animation, sound, photos, typography and more.

The format is part competition, part collaboration — two players swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley,” after which the artwork gets posted to the website. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action during each ten-volley match. In the end, the 9,000+ Season Ticket Holders — that’s how seriously they take the tennis metaphor — vote on the winner.

Chattanooga-based designer and developer Shaun Inman took the Second Season title in July.

Sign up for next season’s tickets — it’s free — and join in this glorious work/leisure intersection for creatives. Once you do, you’ll have the opportunity to nominate yourself or a friend to actually compete — they’re now accepting nominations for next season.

CUT&PASTE

We’ve featured Cut&Paste before, so we won’t overelaborate. Suffice it to say the global digital design tournament has only been getting more intense over the years, drawing high-profile designers and animators from all over the world, backed by an army of heavyweight sponsors.

The competition includes three divisions — 2D Design, 3D Design and Motion Design. Each round is a grueling 8-hour face-off, where four competitors go head-to-head, frame by frame, to render their way to victory.

After a series of qualifying events in 16 cities worldwide, this year’s global championship will be held on October 16 in New York, where the 48 finalists will battle it out for the grand title. The event will be broadcast via live webcast, so stay tuned.

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The Human Face, Up Close and Personal

What the CIA has to do narcissism, attractiveness and Autistic children.

The face, with its intricate lace of 33 different muscles, is a powerful gateway to human emotion and thus the subject of relentless research aiming to pin down how and why we express our inner selves on that living canvas. Here are 3 fascinating projects that probe what lies beneath.

RESPONSIVE FACE

NYU Media Research Lab professor Ken Perlin has the ambitious goal of isolating the minimal number of facial expression elements that capture our character and personality.

His project, Responsive Face, is a 3D animation demo that lets you play with various facial elements — brows, gaze, head tilt, mouth and more — to see how they change as they capture emotions like fear, anger, surprise, disappointment and happiness.

The eventual goal of this research is to give computer/human interfaces the ability to represent the subtleties we take for granted in face to face communication, so that they can function as agents for an emotional point of view.

The demo is based on the iconic Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the study of emotions through the taxonomy of all conceivable facial expressions and whose work is now being used by anyone from lawyers to actors to the CIA. (Ekman also collaborated with the BBC on the excellent series The Human Face, which we couldn’t recommend enough.)

Perlin’s work is also being implemented in helping children with Autism, teaching kids not only how to “read” other people’s expressions, but also how to manipulate their own faces to communicate their emotions.

FACE RESEARCH

If you’ve ever made a few beer bucks in college participating in paid psych experiments, you know those can be long, tedious, and possibly involving being stuck in a a big, noisy fMRI machine for an hour.

Enter Face Research, an online portal for psychology experiments about people’s preferences for faces and voices, where you can help the advance of science from the comfort of your own living room. The project invites users to take a series of personality questionnaires and participate in various experiments in exchange for a look at the findings once data is collected. Granted, that won’t pay for beer, but it does indulge the psych geeks among us.

Previous studies have investigated fascinating topics like the relationship between averageness and attractiveness, women’s preference for masculinity in men’s faces, and various other aspects of why we like what we like.

The project is a joint venture between the University of Aberdeen School of Psychology Face Research Lab and The Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews. Sign up and help coin the cultural definition of attractiveness.

THAT’S MY FACE

That’s My Face lives in that awkward limbo between the scientific and the bizarre, with one foot firmly planted in the questionable. Simply put, it’s a tool that lets you upload photos of yourself and explore your face in 3D as you manipulate age, race, gender and other attributes.

So far so good. But then comes the questionable — the site offers various souvenirs of narcissism, such as your own action figure, framed 3D portrait, and custom 3D crystal. There’s even an affiliate program, where the more, um, entrepreneurial can make a few bucks off of other people’s self-worship.

That’s My Face was founded by a grad student from University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. We think it’s an interesting metaphor for the value of a PhD in today’s cultural environment — make what you will of that statement.

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