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Bio Art: living masterpieces

“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” - Leonardo da Vinci

Art exists since the origins of humanity. Likewise, science has always been prompted by a desire of knowing more and more about the world, the nature and life.

One of our main concerns is to demonstrate the existant synergy between art and life sciences. This is nowadays called Bio Art: a contemporary art form that adapts scientific methods and biotechnology to explore living systems as artistic subjects (1).

Activity: Bioartists for one day

How to attract people to SynBio? It is possible to achieve this challenge in a subjective and eye-appealing way? We thought it could be possible, so we designed the didactic practical session ‘Bioartist for one day’.

The activity took place in the Mustang Art Gallery (Elche), a cultural space dedicated to the diffusion of contemporary art. This workshop involved last year high school students of arts, science and social sciences, so we could interact with a wide range of different profiles.

In this activity, they created their own ‘living masterpice’. Previously, we did detailed explanation on how to properly use the lab material and cells during simple microbiology protocols such as plating. Then, using solid agar plates as a canvas, inoculating loops as brushes and a palette of pigmented bacteria we self-made in the lab as tempera, they blew their minds to do imaginative Microbial Art. As soon as they finished, petri dishes were collected, kept and sealed for a later incubation in our lab. Finally, a gallery of all their artistic works was published in this Instagram account, so everyone could share it and so create interest into bacterial art.

We also thought that, in the network era, students could be a great help in the promotion of SynBio by simple talking about their experiences, so we created the Instagram hashtag #MAGPRINTERIA to encourage them to share their own pics and impressions during the activity.

Yturralde: fusion between art and science

José María Yturralde is an spanish artist widely known for his relationship with science. He collaborated with artists and scientists to expand and redefine his understanding of shapes, and explored ways that the mainframe computer could be used as a tool for complementing his art practices (2). In this context, we thought it could be a great idea to introduce him to the vast possibilities of the BioArt world.

We decided to recreate one of his most famous masterpieces with our own genetic engineered bacteria. To do so, we used a 3D printing mold to delimitate the barriers of the drawing, so we could inoculate each coloured bacteria in a compartiment of the solid agar medium. By this way, we were able to recreate the final artwork perfectly.