bio.display

the bio.display project is featured on the front page of the Hungarian online newspaper HVG, together with other bio art projects.

• HVG article – in Hungarian

The Fab@Home 3D printer I used to create the bacteria prints is now being utilized by hackerspace budapest, a new formation created by IT enthusiasts in Budapest, Hungary. I really hope they will make good use of the hardware & contribute to the effort of developing a cross-platform control software for the Fab@Home printer.

Simon Park & Anne Brodie have created a photo booth where they take photographs by illuminating their subjects by bacterial bioluminescence – light generated by bacteria – instead of traditional light sources.

The created images are quite interesting.

• Bioart Windsor blog entry

Jelte van Abbema just won the Dutch Radio Prize for his project – printing by letting bacteria grow an fill in the area that should be colored.

Congratulations!

• via de zeen

Last weekend I held a short presentation about the bio.display project at the ART+COMMUNICATION 2009: ENERGY conference in Riga, Latvia, organized by RIXC. It was an interesting setting, as bio.display is not directly related to energy consumption.

It was also interesting to see Riga again – last time I was here I was at ART+COMMUNICATION 4, in 2000…

Yesterday I had the privilege to present bio.display at the Budapest New Technology Meetup. Here’s the video – albeit in Hungarian:

Maróy Ákos – bio.display from Budapest New Tech Meetup on Vimeo.

Yesterday I held a short presentation at the Ars Electronica Festival about the bio.display project, as part of the New Views of Humankind panel, at the SkyLoft. Other presenters were Manuel Selg from the Ars Electronica BioLab and Reinhard Nestelbacher from DNA Consult, who also works with the Ars Electronica Center.

Our efforts to realize the bio.display project at the Ars Electronica BioLab have failed, due to the reason that the lab used was contaminated by Clostridium bacteria, which were also ampicillin resistant. And, well, they took over, like a young cockoo in a birdnest.

For the experiments done at the Ars Electronica Center, I’m using 12×12cm plates again. This means that each plate would take about 120mm x 120mm x 7mm = 100800mm³ = 100.8ml. This means I can pour about 10 plates / liter of LB agar with bacteria in there. As per my protocol page, each liter of LB agar with bacteria will need 55ml of overnight liquid culutre. Thus, if my aim is to create 40 plates, I need to prepare for 4 liters of LB agar with bacteria, which is 55ml x 4 = 220ml of liquid cutlure.

As they have 500ml Erlenmayer flasks here, of which a quater volume (125ml) can be used for the liquid culture, I need to use two of them, which will bring me to 250ml of liquid culture. To create the same amount again based on liquid cultures, I’ll need 2ml of liquid culture to mix with fresh LB medium.

For a 125ml of liquid culture, I’ll need:

• 125ml LB medium
• 6250μg = 6.25mg of ampicillin (a final concentration of 50μg/ml)
• some bacteria from the streaked out plate

I’ll make two of these.

I’ll also make a smaller, 100ml Erlenmayer flask control with arabinose – to see if it glows as expected. This will contain:

• 25ml LB medium
• 1250μg = 1.25mg of ampicillin (a final concentration of 50μg/ml)
• some bacteria from the streaked out plate
• 125mg or arabinose (a final concentration of 5mg/ml)

bio.display is going to be featured at the Ars Electronica Center FutreLab in Linz, Austria this week, as part of the Ars Electronica Festival. The kind people at the FutureLab BioLab had be so kind to let me use their lab – they also grew the bacteria beforehand, and are providing material and equipment to recreate the project here. I’ll have a short presentation on the project at the Pixelspaces 2009 conference here, Sunday afternoon.