Nature produces an array of intricate patterns. For researchers at the Crick Institute the focus is on those found in minute cellular and molecular forms. A new exhibition aims to capture the dynamic nature of such patterns as they grow, shrink, move, connect, break and rearrange.
The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research center in London.
The institute, which opened in 2016, is a partnership between Cancer Research U.K., Imperial College London, King’s College London, the Medical Research Council, University College London and the Wellcome Trust. The institute isthe biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe.
The Institute is named after Francis Harry Compton Crick, who was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson.
This new exhibition, which opened in February 2018, has three artist commissions at the centerpiece. These works were developed between artists and Crick researchers. The brief was to discover alternative ways of exploring the microscopic patterns at the cellular level.
They first is a poetry and soundscape piece by Sarah Howe and Chu-Li Shewring. This is called Infinite Instructions. This looks at work undertaken by scientists in scrutinizing patterns within different areas of the human genome.
With the exhibit, visitors can stand inside giant listening devices to hear different recordings of poetry and sound.
The composed music that is used with this part of the exhibit is called simply ‘A New Music’. It delves into the form, function and rhythm of the genome.
The second part of the exhibition is based on a sculpture and film by Helen Pynor. The work is called ‘Transforming Connections’, and it looks at the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly is key to many experiments in genetics. The fly also undergoes an interesting metamorphosis as it develops.
One area Crick Institute scientists are studying is how neural networks develop to form connections within the optic lobe of the fruit fly.
The third part of the exhibit is a movie produced by a young filmmaking group called KaleiKo. The exhibit is called ‘Breaking Symmetry’ and the move is called ‘Selection’.
A related part of this exhibit display micro-pattern cubes. These allow scientists to model the changing surface structures of patterns in nature.
The movie focuses on the work of the Polarity and Patterning Networks laboratory, which is interested in understanding how cells acquire their sense of direction, which is known as polarity.
To learn more about biomedical science at the work at the Institute, the exhibition is worth visiting. It achieves its aims in an unusual way, combining both artistic and scientific processes to create a novel exhibition.
