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Biological mirror
An experimental Interactive generative interface.
November 2019
 
  • Place: Technarte, Bilbao, Spain.
  • Software: Custom-made program for video frames transferring.
  • Programming languages: Java + Processing
  • Hardware: Non-invasive Arduino-based sensors and ‘CMOS Camera’ wereattached with a microscope ‘Confocal Microscopy from Olympus’.
  • Bio-medium: Neuron Dif-ferentiation Kit No: MAN0015919, from ThermoFesher + a highly efficient serum-free pluripotent stem cellneural induction medium,ThermoFisher induction medium No: A1647801. 

Documentation:
>> Technarte.
>> Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
 
Supported sustainable development goals:
SDG

A recorded video from the biological mirror's real-time system.

To view all the generated faces that were automatically sent to the project's Twitter account, click "Bio-Pixels" account.

Biological Mirror is a stem cell-based interactive generative cellular automaton visualization made interactive through a range of inputs. The interface explains how the borders between the digital and biological realms of genes are dissolving, and therefore, our understanding of reality as a concept faces uncertainty. One of the main contributions emphasized by this interface is that exhibition visitors and remote social media (Twitter) users cooperate in manipulating emerging visualizations, reflecting the vanishing borders between the physical and virtual worlds.

The 'Biological Mirror' represents the sophisticated second phase of the "Bio-Pixels" project. It was developed to re-render the stem cell's remodeled digital differentiation processes in the first phase within the context of interactions with digital and social platforms. The final interface acts as a biological mirror that digitally resynthesizes viewers' shapes within the real differentiation processes, serving as a digital technology that examines the concept of self-making visually.

Therefore, the project redefines the regenerative growth of human enhancement within the context of the interactions between the gene-based media (the biological world) and the bits-based media (the digital world) to raise a fundamental question regarding our understanding of the real being. The project assumes the digital regenerative biology of human enhancement as a new form of reality instead of describing it as a fake extension of human beings.

GENERATED FRAMES
Interactions between the world of atoms, the world of genes, and the world of bits
CONCEPT

The biological mirror, in this way, is an interactive generative interface that reflects the surrounding physical environment (the world of atoms), but after re-synthesizing it within the context of the interactions between the world of genes (differentiation processes of the biological substance) and the world of bits (differentiation processes of the digital substance), through a level of control derived from an interactive social platform (Twitter as a digital society). See the side diagram

Metaphorically, the generative biological mirror broadens the conceptual scope of the mirror itself, feigning our physical existence. Here, the system materializes this fake existence into a digital genotype derived from the biological core system and a digital phenotype derived from the interface appearance.

 

At the exhibition's physical location, the custom-made program is installed and run on a PC. Once the core system began, it automatically connected with the real-time remodeled differentiated cell stored in the online project laboratory repository and the project Twitter page using a Wi-Fi connection.

The program produced an interactive generative interface that will be exhibited by a projector on a flat wall. Viewers must use their smartphones and set up the Twitter app to post their genetic tweets to the project's Twitter page. As viewers could automatically post their faces, which emerged from the remodeled differentiated cell, on the project Twitter page, the Twitter page was shown on a separate screen or projector so that spectators would see their videos posted on the page.

Viewers outside the exhibition's physical site could also interact with the project by posting their tweets, but only if the core system was running while they were writing them. In this way, the project's full interactive and generative functions are operated on the exhibition's physical site as well as digitally on the Twitter page.​​

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© 2019 | Diaa Ahmed Mohamed Ahmedien | All rights reserved

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