>> John Boylan: Hi, welcome. I'm John Boylan and I coordinate the studio 99 project which is
Microsoft Research’s effort to look at the intersection between art and science. Today we have
Allison Kudla who is at the Institute for Systems Biology and received her PhD from DXARTS
program at the University of Washington. I won't go into detail about her bio at this point
except to say that you have been doing some remarkable work that we are going to be hearing
about right now. I think that's it for me except to say that on September 10 we are having
Michael Goff who is the corporate vice president for design talking about visual literacy and
drawing. If you haven't received the notice, let me know and I'll make sure you get it. I think
that's about it. Allison, welcome. [applause].
>> Allison Kudla: Thank you. Thank you for the wonderful introduction and for inviting me to
speak. As you mention, I'm Allison Kudla and I'm going to present my Biological Systems Art
Artistic Research today. First I'm going to give you an overview of the places that I've been
affiliated with. I received my B of A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the
end of my time there, my last two years, I was in the art and technology studies department
and I was doing a lot of work with nonlinear animation and these are graphics that were driven
by sensors, data taken from the external world. Shortly after that I moved to the DXARTS
program after I finished my B of A and started a PhD at the University of Washington Center for
Digital Arts and Experimental Media. I know that the speakers there had a few other people
from DXARTS so you are probably familiar with this program, so I won't go into too many details
about it. After I finish my candidacy I moved to Bangalore India where I work as a visiting artist
and also it program coordinator at the SRISHTI School of Art Design and Technology. At that
time I was also finishing up a lot of the practice-based work from my PhD for my dissertation, so
I was also working at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, which was
fortunately close to SRISHTI and they already had a great relationship with that school. I do, as
John mentioned work now at the Institute for Systems Biology. This is a nonprofit scientific
research organization located in South Lake Union. Have people in the room heard of it? It was
cofounded by Doctor Leroy Hood, who is famous for inventing the automated DNA sequencer.
He's the reason we have so much data about biological systems. Well, he's one of the reasons.
He developed the Institute for Systems Biology because he really wanted to study biology from
a more systemic way. There are two tropes that I use to help understand what systems biology
is all about and to help push it along a little bit further. Essentially, one of the core tenants is
that to make systems biology you have to potentially develop new technologies and in the
process of that making of new technologies, create new data spaces. And then you need to
build new computational tools to understand that data. A kind of repeats as you get new
insights from that technology that you have created. The other aspect beyond that innovation
cycle or as they sometimes call it the holy Trinity, beyond that is also the network of network.
And this is essentially getting at the idea of biological systems being multiscale, so our genome
molecules cells and organs and the human body and onto the environment and even social
networks. This kind of helps to understand the difference between reductionist biology or
traditional biology and what makes systems biology unique or different. I have broken my talk
into four basic sections. The first section is kind of an overview of my framework for why I
make the work that I do. And in section two I will explain a couple of the projects that I made,
the first two products that I made as I was exploring making work with living systems. The third
work is kind of the main focus of my dissertation, and then the final section is newer projects
that I've only been going on this past year. One of the things that I really believe important in
making artwork is to understand that matter and meaning are in a constant feedback. When I
say that I am addressing an idea similar to what ISB has said about developing new technologies
to drive your research. When you have an idea you have to kind of think about what material
would be appropriate for that idea. In turn, you may need to develop new materials. On the
other end of that your materials can definitely feed meaning back into your work. I think
making sure to think about that when making work, that's always been something that's really
important to me. A great example of that is the milk drop coronet that the invention of highspeed photography is the reason that we even have that very well known image. Another
tenant is this idea of objects becoming systems, so art doesn't need to be confined to
traditional materials. It was probably about in the seventies art historian and theorist named
Jack Burnham first posited the idea of systems art and it's essentially a paradigmatic shift
moving away from objects and towards systems. So not so much about a painting or a
sculpture, but about something that is interactive or relational to you and you may think that it
probably has to involve a computer or some kind of mechanical system, but spiral jetty is a
perfect example of a systems artwork that doesn't involve things like computers. Beyond that,
as I said before, art doesn't need to be confined to a computer's operating system either. This
was kind of a turning point for me as I started thinking about this word emulation which was
often spoke about when I was getting my PhD, Sean Brixey who is pictured here. Emulation is a
pretty difficult concept to grasp but it is essentially -- it was difficult for me anyway. But the
way that I finally started to understand it is in the quote that I only shortly. Be on that, I also
want to speak to the idea that once in artwork is made and an audience perceives it then the
work takes on a life of its own and even the viewer becomes a part of the work. To explain
emulation art little bit further, this quote comes from I think the only paper that they wrote
about it. The paradigm shift that emulation art suggests is the inevitable result of hybrid art
research praxis at the intersection of scientific discovery, informatics and aesthetics, as we seek
to understand the universe as an operating system in which we perpetually engage on both a
microcosmic and macrocosmic level. What was so exciting to me about this was to begin
thinking that these kinds of systems that I was making before where the input was data from
the external world and the output was something on a monitor, for example, and a logic system
was residing on a computer’s operating system. But I could actually think in terms of the
physical universe as being my operating system and that was really mind blowing for me. Sean
Brixley really focused on physical systems, but I had a strong interest in biological systems, so I
started to trace out what might trajectory would be if I were making biological emulation art.
From there I began asking questions like what algorithms are running on biological systems, and
by algorithms I'm kind of talking about repetitive processes that are happening over and over
again in our bodies. A lot of times people refer to the machinery that's inside of our bodies, but
obviously, biological systems, their repetitive processes come together into something complex
and obviously can become emergent and that's another aspect of biologic systems that I think
are really interesting. So I started wanting to know what are some basic differences between
biological and physical systems and computational systems. And I kind of threw together a
quick sort of laundry list of what I call characterizations or behavioral aesthetics of a biological
system. These are like touchstones or art types for getting out what is unique to a biological
system. This was by no means exhaustive, but I certainly did end works on differentiation and
circadian rhythms and a few of the others that are listed here. Then thinking about what makes
a biological system unique from a physical or computational system, I also started thinking
about scales and this has been further emphasized as I've gone on to make other art works.
But biological systems are inherently multi-scaled. So there is the biochemical processes,
what's happening inside of the cells in your body. Then your organismic processes, what I'm
doing with my hands right now or the fact that I'm talking to you. Ecological systems, climate
change, weather and then evolutionary timescales like species change. It's a unique aspect of a
multiscale system, especially in comparison to making art on computational systems. For
example, in a biological systems artwork the art work itself its output is not on a digital
computer but rather you are modulating cells, genes, behaviors. Again, in a biological systems
artwork you don't care what your frame rates are or your CPU clocking speeds. Rather, what
you're concerned about is the lifespan or the bio-physically constrained time of the process is
happening in the living system.
>>: Just a question, I see the whole system, but I'm getting a little lost as to what you think is
art and what is not art. If you blend these things together that's the system in the subject of
things that go on, are they art?
>> Allison Kudla: One of the points that I'll get to later on in the talk is the concept of
consilience , such as the idea that at a certain point in time knowledge begins to unify and
basically, disciplines jump together which is what consilience means. I think that is exactly what
happened with at least my trajectory into the arts and that's why I feel really comfortable being
in the place that I am at the Institute for Systems Biology. Again, trying to break down these
very basic metaphorical components, I'm saying metaphorical but they are actually there but
I'm just saying these things have been fodder for the humanities for so long. The idea of life
and death, state transitions of evolution, the predictable versus the emergent, these are all
embedded within the systems that I would then be using in artwork. Of course, my favorite
that I mentioned earlier that biological systems are repetitive in many ways and their
mechanics can be studied but they are so highly complex that at some point emergence
happens and emergence is a very difficult thing for people to truly grasp. I think biological
systems is an excellent way to try to frame or reaffirm what that means. This is the very first
work I made with living organisms while I was at University of Washington and I started off with
the oxalis plant which is a photo traffic plant. Photo traffic simply means that it moves in
response to light. You can see in the top left that when it is not photo synthesizing its leaves
are closed and when it is they are open. It's almost like an umbrella. In darkness, and you can
sort of see this in this slide under the picture, it's very dark but those are leaves that are lifting
in darkness. And when that happened I was excited and surprised at the time. I did a little bit
of reading and that's when I found out about endogenous rhythms and the fact that these
plants actually have a biochemical memory. If you were to shine a light on them, a full
spectrum light, they would definitely lift their leaves. But they also have an expectation for
light, so even in darkness they would lift their leaves. That's when I got to this concept of
basically creating a piece that would emphasize this idea of biological time and put the control
of the sun rising in the hands of the plant by adding this mechanical system that would basically
act as a communicator between the physical universe and the biological organism. That
scanner that you see is basically waiting for the plant to lift its leaves and then once it gets the
signal that it has lifted its leaves to enough of an extent to call it awake, then it turns this
overhead light on. Those are narrow beam full-spectrum lights and each plant is off phase to
the other so at any moment you would see a six degree spectrum of 360 degrees of awake or
not awake. I think you probably have all read the quote that is on there. That was the basic
reasoning for making this work. I called it The Search for Luminosity and after making it a lot of
people at DXARTS, and especially my advisor, said to me I really need to meet this plant
physiologist at University of Washington named Doctor Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh. They told
me about how she is studying plant movement and I showed her that work and she and I got
along so well and she just really has a philosophical mind and we were able to talk quite a bit
about and she really understood what I was trying to do. I did interview her for my
dissertation. She has a really interesting history. She helped to start the society for plant
neurobiology. Obviously, when a lot of people heard this in the scientific community they were
quite surprised because obviously, plants don't have brains, so it was really interesting to
interview her about that experience of how she kind of created an epistemological rupture I
would say in this climate of scientists who did not want to say that plants had intelligence, and
frankly, only because they didn't have brains. And one of the key things that Liz studies is how
plants signal and respond. They ended up changing the name of the society to Plant Signaling
and Response just to kind of let it go a little bit. But there is a lot of interesting stuff there and
the reason that I put a picture of corn here is that her lab at University of Washington studied
why it is that corn wouldn't grow densely. And it turns out that it was sending a signal to say
hey. You are too close to me, so don't grow there. I don't know the name of the company
anymore but a commercial agriculture company asked her to find that gene and silence it so
that they could more densely pack this corn. That got me thinking like wow. People don't think
that plants have intelligence. And at the same time I was kind of moving into the biochemical
and cellular aspects, so with this work on ideas we coming at it from an organismic level. It's
like the easiest one for people to understand. Like a behavior like waking and sleeping is
something I do, but how do I go to the smaller, the cellular, the molecular? I started looking
into how plant cells behave, how they divide, what makes them become what they become. I
decided to think about this concept of, I found out there are things known as undifferentiated
plant cells. Okay. That's strange. What makes it undifferentiated? And I thought it would be
really interesting to create a machine that basically was expressing the differentiation of the
cell for it. I basically set out to make a 3-D printer that would print with undifferentiated plant
cells. In my first iteration I did Prevent That in New Orleans in 2007. It was really difficult
because [indiscernible] needs to stay sterile and it was definitely hard. Ambitious of me to
think that I could make a cellular printer, but I tried anyway and I'm certainly glad I did. In 2009
Lili [phonetic] actually asked me to present it in Bumpershoot. One thing I learned from the
experience of showing it in 2007 was that people's minds are blown by the idea of a 3-D printer
that could print with organic material. What was most important to me was that people knew
that it was printing something that was living. That's when I came to the idea of instead of
printing on a Petri dish, to be printing on a felt mat and have it be an extruding auger that
holds. Originally I tried most but it was too hydrophobic so then I went with algae which is very
happy with any in the auger. I added some rapid cycling [indiscernible] seeds. It prints onto
this felt that is capillary mat that holds water and so it wicks water to the surface and keeps the
plants happy and then over time the printer, what it's printing starts to sprout. The rapid
cycling meaning they grow incredibly quickly and these seeds that you are looking at here are
just after two days. This is what the machine looks like from farther away, so it's made from
aluminum extrusion rod and fluorescent lights and glass and big motors. It's very mechanical,
kind of cold. You are probably wondering what it's like when it moves. Similar to any other C
and C machine you give it a direction to go to and then it extrudes something wherever you tell
it to. In the next sequence you'll see what the animation is that it's printing. It is a fractal and I
picked this clip so that you could actually see what the original pattern was that the machine is
drawing. It is called the Eden growth model and it’s been witnessed in both bacterial growth
and urban sprawl. It's essentially looking for space and the presence of a neighbor and if it has
resources then it extends forward from there. One of the reasons that I selected it is because it
did a really good job of connecting multiple scales like the microbial all the way out to human
development and that seemed like the right choice. This is a diagram roughly of what
happened. When I present this normally it's plotting just a little bit in the center and then the
next day it extends it a little bit more until it becomes a fuller colony plot. And the timing of
when it deposits ends up being reflected in the amount of growth that you see and the seeds
that have been deposited. Typically the oldest growth is in the center and that's where you see
the tallest plants, the plants that are flowering and the plants that die first. These are rapid
cycling plants meaning they have lifecycle of literally 35 days, so they are sprouting in 2 to 3
days and they can have flowers as quick as two weeks. And they are very small. This is a shot
of it in Ljubljana Slovenia after it had been up for almost a month. Here you can see the quality
of the [indiscernible] in conjunction to the extrude design. Again, the algae if it starts to dry up
then it looks a little bit like this and then the plants kind of lay messily over the top. This project
had quite a life. After Bumpershoot in Seattle it got Ars Electronica honorary mention for
hybrid arts in 2010, so I took it to Austria and when it was in Austria it was actually shown in
Ljubljana and then after that it was brought onto a United States national tour called Intimate
Science and it traveled around the U.S. for two years and I wasn't even near it really. It had
some instructions and it broke a few times during those two years, but I was surprisingly happy
with how well it stood up to all the moving. And then it came back to Seattle about a year ago
and it was in a storage unit and that's when ZKM, The Center for Media Arts in Karlsruhe invited
me to be a part of this exhibition which is going on right now. Network will be shown in the
one called XO Evolution. Essentially the ZKM is one of the oldest media arts venues, museums
in Europe and so to celebrate the three hundredth year anniversary of their city they decided to
put on a 300 day celebratory show. So this show goes on for 300 days. My work is starting in
late October and finishing sometime in April. To get it packed out of the crate and make sure
everything works I had it at common area maintenance which is a new space in Belltown. It is
an art studio and it's all about providing portable workspaces to Seattle artists so they don't
have to go to Burien [phonetic] if they don't want to, so I think it's really cool that this exists
than we were able to accommodate me this past month. And I will be packing it up this
weekend it ships out on Friday. Going to the final work, while not final. The last one I made
when I was at DXARTS. It's called Growth Pattern and what you're looking at here is a square
Petri dish that has tobacco leaves that have been diecut and cultured in a medium that holds
nutrients as well as plant growth regulators. As I mentioned previously with the 3-D printer I
was learning how plant cells work and in the process of doing that I found some gems and I
really wanted to put them into some artwork and I didn't want to be stymied by the fact that
things were getting contaminated, so that's why I set out to do this work. I got the opportunity
to explore this concept in this work in this concept is that plant cells are totipotent, so any cell
in a plant can become any organ in a plant. And it's simply two regulators that when their ratio
is flipped it either will grow into, the cell will become a leaf or it will become a root and if they
are equal then it stays undifferentiated. I thought this is one very basic formula to begin
understanding the operating system of the plant, why the cells become what they become. I
went with this formula for my training experiments. This is a time lapse video of what started
out as a circular disk and you can see the shoots. I know it's not super easy to see, but they are
basically leaves that are growing out of the sides of these tiny cut disks, so these are really
small. And obviously that is condensation from the top of the Petri dish lid. I had done this
work with a couple of different patterns. The first time I actually laser cut the leaf tissue and
that turned out to be not what I wanted because the laser cutter treated the leaf just like a
piece of paper. What I found out was that the middle vein of the leaf actually holds a lot of
bacteria and microorganisms and so having that mid vein in the culture is not so good. I asked
myself again to consider the matter in leaning. I realize that I wanted to be doing a motif that
was bilaterally symmetrical and radially symmetrical just like a plant is. Sure enough era best
motives are all about the essence of the plant and in doing that from a geometric perspective
and so I set out to make this pattern and instead of laser cutting I die cut it and I made sure that
everything was as close to aligned as I could on that leaf. And then so you understand what I'm
talking about when I’m saying decontaminating the leaf, basically it has to be washed, so it's
washed in some soapy water and then put in some alcohol and then sterile water a few times
and you have to make sure the whole time that you are you doing this that you are not getting
your own bacteria and microorganisms in the plate as well as cleaning off the leaves so that
they can grow new shoots without anything else growing in that Petri dish. In the beginning
they all looked very similar, but then condensation starts and things start changing and this
manufactured pattern suddenly takes on a life of its own. And so now Petri dish ever ends up
exactly the same and they fall into roughly three categories. The first category is that balance
and sterility has been achieved, so I've totally cleaned the leaf and didn't clean them so much
that they died. What you see here on the end here is that I over washed them in an attempt to
get rid of all of those microorganisms. And you can't know because it's not visible to the naked
eye whether or not the plant has data at the time that you are culturing it, so it's really tough to
balance it perfectly right. And then I usually display it like this either on the ground or as a
table. It has taken on the shape of a square or rectangle. It doesn't really matter, whatever fits
the space best. I've had a few different patterns that I've done, some more geometric and
others floral. One of the qualities I really like about this work is that it asks the viewer to come
back and check in on that piece and see what's happening to it. I call it a performative
experiment. This is basically a time lapse video of an aerial view of when it was presented in
Belgium, so it's obviously backlit. There are bright fluorescent lights placed underneath and
cameras placed up pretty high. You can see right away in the top right that some red bacteria
has started to take over that dish and quickly you'll see some circular blooms of fungi
happening throughout the piece and also leaves turning brown. You don't get to see the
growth very well in this video for obvious reasons. This is over a period of two months that this
video is taking place. It's obviously a very ephemeral work. I don't think anybody would want
to purchase these Petri dishes and have them die in their homes, but you can purchase the
spore and I also documented the work with prints and these prints are actually part of the
Microsoft art collection. So if you have seen them or were wondering about them they are in
building 4 if you haven't seen them. They are essentially beginning state and end state
documentation of the work. Again, there is the protocol for it, so one of the features of this
work that I was pretty happy with is kind of like a move where I was able to leave behind some
instructions with a very capable person and then I didn't return to Belgium when they refreshed
the work a few months later. So she learned the technique. She already knew how to change
the filter, fortunately, so I basically just showed her the way that I was cutting the leaves and
the ratios that I was using in my dishes and she was able to carry out the work. Here are some
photos of all of the tiles that grew all put together, and some photos of the tiles where there is
more decay or death happening. And one of my favorites, you can see a really nice frond there.
I was trying to get at this idea of a plant extending a human abstraction of a decorative plant. I
was hoping for hyper symmetry and that the plant would emerge a more beautiful version of a
decorative pattern. It turns out to be pretty random where new ones grow shoots. This tissue
culture work got the interest of Monica Vakien [phonetic] in [indiscernible] and she is carrying a
band of a part of normal devices this year and she asked me to present this work which is called
the state of becoming. So I'm going to the UK in two and a half weeks. Abandon Normal
Devices is a pretty cool festival if you haven't heard of it. It's in the Griswold forest which is just
outside of London, well, four hours or so, and it's kind of about looking at technology from a
different perspective. This one part of this much larger festival is basically dedicated to plants
and they have related a special tent type pavilion for this particular show. So I will have a work
in a darkened room and it will be a phyllotaxis pattern similar to what you are looking at here
but rather than having differentiating leaves it will likely be seeds just because of the limitations
of not being able to find that tissue culturing institute. When I was in Belgium I was so
fortunate that they found a University where they were working on this and it's great to be the
catalyst for connections between universities and art museums. But again, sometimes people
can work really, really hard like they did for the show and still not find a good fit. And that is
what happened here. So I won't be doing tissue culturing in three weeks, but I will still be
presenting something along the lines of this project. Now we are on to the last section and I am
doing good on time, right? Working at the Institute for Systems Biology and one of the people
who works there and is an affiliate faculty there is Stuart Kauffman and I have always been a
fan of this person. To get to meet him was pretty amazing, and one of my favorite writings of
his is Prolegomenon to General Biology and in that he states that there is no intelling loss for
the biosphere, that everything is on pre-statable, reductionism fails and also that we as humans
are constantly contributing to cultural and technological evolution. He's kind of saying there is
no laws, but what we can say with certainty is that actuals create new adjacent possibles. I
started to give that a lot of thought and I interviewed him and he went on a kind of interesting
story of how he sees this concept of actuals creating new possibles, new adjacent possibles
within this sphere of telecommunications.
>>: [indiscernible]. A few years later John von Neumann, Turing’s invention of the Turing
machine did not cause it but it enabled von Neumann to invent the von Neumann architecture
which did not cause but enabled IBM to make mainframes whose widespread sale created the
markets that did not cause but enabled, along with the invention of the chipped personal
computer, I can say this easily because I have said it a bunch, which created an adjacent
possible. Lots of things can be done with a personal computer, right? Which could have
[indiscernible] ahead of time anymore then the screwdriver, but among the things that were in
the adjacent possible treated by it was word processing and Microsoft came into existence. But
the personal computer didn't cause word processing; it enabled it. Word processing then
enabled filesharing with the invention of the modem and widespread filesharing did not cause
but it enabled and created a use for the World Wide Web, which did not cause but enabled the
possibility of selling things on the web. And now we've got Craigslist and things like that. Then
there is content on the web that did not cause but enabled Google and Yahoo and Facebook
and social media and played a role in the Arab spring. Nobody could have said Arab spring or
Facebook before Turing invented the Turing machine, right? So right in front of us in the
economy there is a becoming of this unpre-statable, therefore economics which thinks you can
have mathematical laws for the economy and it does, can't talk about innovation. It's simply
beyond the framework because it's unpre-statable or partially unpre-statable in the same thing
is true for biological evolution. Who’d of thought elephants?
>> Allison Kudla: I love that so much, who'd of thought elephants, right? And that really got
me thinking. Evolution is unpre-statable and also cultural evolution is something we are
actively taking a part in. And one of the last paragraphs of the Prolegomenon to General
Biology is this one which basically states that we need stories. And so biospheres demand their
Shakespeares as well as their Newtons. I saw that as a great challenge. He echoes what
consilience is when he quotes C. P. Snow’s two cultures and he references finding an
unexpected and inevitable union. Then I began to ask myself how can art narrative and
storytelling, how can I do that? How can I create a narrative that allows the audience to find
themselves as active members in the process of cultural evolution? Obviously, I could have
made a poster that showed the timeline that Stuart mapped out in his interview with me, but I
thought that would only be talking about one specific instance in his specific choices and I want
to do something more data oriented, something more, I don't know, taking advantage of the
actual techniques that molecular phylogeny uses to organize and analyze biological evolution. I
organized these so I have plenty of resources for learning about this. I just needed to identify a
good data set and so I thought a place where there is kind of constrained creativity but could
potentially be run through these algorithms as the Thingiverse, so most of you probably know
what that is. It's a nominally and digital community that was created around the time of the
maker bot so that people could upload 3-D models and download people’s 3-D models and
print them at home. It's basically a place for people to share their 3-D shapes. Essentially, what
I was setting out to do was to, without the hierarchy of DNA, try to evolutionarily map the
choices people make with their shapes. I found a collaborator at ISB that works specifically on
molecular phylogenetics and developed a technique called the Espalier Technique. And this
technique looks specifically at DNA and its attributes or what makes it up and then uses that to
create a flattened tree. I could go into more detail about that if you have questions, but
essentially, what we decided to do was map the DNA to the 3-D object and then the attributes
to the DNA to the attributes that people use to describe the object. And then after loading in
that data set we analyzed it. This is an example of where we found all of the elephants that
were in the data. Then I went ahead and printed a subset of those and placed them in the
gallery around this plot. I had a lot of aspirations for that work, many of which weren't mapped
but I still continue to be interested in, like how can I create an artistic system for experiencing
the becoming or the unpre-statable and this other concept of creating names to affect cultural
and technological evolution. In some of the reading that I've been doing specifically Dawkins
and Wilson reference memes as being similar to the building block unit, like a cell is to a
biological system, a meme is to a cultural system. That's kind of interesting. Basically, I wanted
to also think about how big data science can shape our reality and also, again to out this idea
that we are all multi scale and we are all constantly contributing to cultural evolution. And that
each of these shapes would conjure or bring up new different memories for different people.
That gets into consilience. This is a sort of new program. Essentially in April of 2014 Doctor
Hood, president of ISB asked me if I would put on a symposium on the intersections of art and
science because he wanted to invite a painter that he is a fan of that lives in China. I created a
program around that and then in the process of doing that this word consilience popped up
and, like I said earlier, it means to jump together or that's its etymology. It was chosen or made
famous by a book by E. O. Wilson of the same title and he chose it because it means something
similar to coherence but it hasn't been diluted in the same way that the word coherence has, so
it still retains its one singular meaning which is the unity of knowledge across disciplines that
multiple disciplines can converge at the same answer. That's the social sciences, humanities,
art. Here is kind of a timeline of events of the program, and it's been very organic. In the
development of this program has been completely just kind of like an aside to let my existing
role is there. But essentially, we had a symposium in 2014 and I worked with Max on the
Thingiverse. I give regular discussion groups. This one happened, that was February; this is
March, about what it means for art to be researched and so I am trying to educate the
scientists upon where art has moved to with this presence of art PhDs happening. And then I
also helps to put on a cultural event which was a screening of biofiction which were short films
on synthetic biology and then we had a panel discussion afterwards. We also had a symposium
on [indiscernible] biology and life with Stephen Little from the LACMA and Xioadong Feng the
Chinese painter came back. We named him an affiliate scholar. I have also been in talks with
Mora Scott Payne and Genevieve Tremblay to do educational partnership with Cornish and ISB.
Also Jenny Ruffner has been visiting and interviewing our artists for her upcoming work. In
October we plan to have David Bilinski. When I say we I mean Cornish to present his films and
also give a talk. So the aspirations for this program is to really bring together disciplines more
than just science, technology and engineering but also the humanities, social sciences and art to
facilitate affiliate scholars, visiting artists symposia discussion groups, research, cultural events.
Thank you. [applause].
>>: Any questions?
>>: [indiscernible] the piece that's going to Germany and how you are going to do it since the
plans of a 28 day lifecycle, how are you going to keep it going?
>> Allison Kudla: Every month they replace the felt pack and start it over again.
>>: And just keep printing?
>>: Do you preserve the felt?
>> Allison Kudla: I have not done that. It has been suggested to me many times but no. I
could. It may be cool to hang it up.
>>: Cover it in resin or something?
>> Allison Kudla: When I made the work it was really about the performance in the machine
and the thing it was printing were totally linked, so to take it apart seems like kind of taking a
piece off of it. But, then again, now that I have been showing it as much as I have it seems like I
should do that.
>>: So the Institute for Systems Biology stuff that you're talking about is all of that a program
that somebody signs up for and does all at once or is some of that public? You can come and
listen to talks?
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah. This was a public event. This is something I did in my free time but
then that work got shown in Utah State University Logan. Anyway, it was shown at a gallery in
Utah State. My brain is fried. Then I also had a discussion group that is not open to the public.
That one was open. That was also open. So yeah, when we do the cultural events they are
totally open to the public and just have to get on the communications mailing list which is really
easy to do from our website. But yeah, it's all totally organic and hopefully going to grow more.
>>: Reading material that you would suggest if someone is new to this idea of melding these
two worlds.
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah, there's some basic ones like C. P. Snow’s essay about two cultures.
Kuhn has a great one about paradigmatic shifts in science, Thomas Kuhn. E. O. Wilson’s
Consilience. And then if you are interested in patterns and fractals and looking at multiple
scales, Philip Balz, The Self-Made Tapestry was really excellent reading for me.
>>: What are some areas you are excited about working on next? What do you think is on the
horizon?
>> Allison Kudla: That's a good question. There are a lot of things that I want to work on. It's
kind of about finding what I call a path of least resistance I guess, like natural collaborations,
partnerships that seem like they're just inevitable almost. Obviously, you have to make stuff
happen, but I've got a ton of ideas. There's no shortage of ideas, so it's more about like when
are things going to click into place that I can actually make this happen? I have become really
practical. When I was in my PhD program it was like whatever I want. I've got those student
loans and I've got all this time. Now it's like what makes the most strategic sense as far as what
I'm doing now and who I know and what's available to me.
>>: 3-D printing is also used I think more and more in food production. I was wondering if you
have thought of or are interested in thinking about the intersection between 3-D printing food
products?
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah. When I first showed that piece in Ars Electronica many people would
say something about it or whatever. I was thinking that wasn't why I did this and I did this for
such more sculptural or philosophical reasons. But now that I have been working at the
Institute for Systems Biology one of the projects that's been on our radar that we have been
working on is about aquaponics and basically trying to develop aquaponics systems to solve the
food crisis. And I also did work by an artist in the Netherlands where she created pastry shells
and then 3-D printed crests that then grew and it was a very fancy hors d'oeuvres. I guess for
me it would be like to work on it I would have to know that I was making, if I was doing
something for practical reasons like that I want to make sure that it was definitely the right
avenue to be going down and know what problem I was really trying to solve or what niche I
was trying to be part of. Does that make sense?
>>: I was just curious does it connect in your mind and to the arts side or more to the practical
[indiscernible]
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah.
>>: Just wondering what other connections did you see in all of this?
>> Allison Kudla: I would have to say that when I made this I was more thinking about art for
sure. I think right now the idea for solving larger problems I would definitely think lies more in
understanding the right kind of bacterial component of that aquaponics system and knowing
how to set it up in a way that will grow the best food. And so a crowd funded and also crowd
sourced with this and science around aquaponics is what they are doing at ISB. This is a new
project called Project Feed Ten Ten. It seems like a great approach to take to apply data and
technology and systems thinking to growing food.
>>: Can you talk a little bit about like using biological, biology as a material in an artistic sense,
like how that is different then maybe other working materials or turn it back to your very first
thought about this matter meaning. But maybe from more of like a first-hand perspective as
probably none of us have ever done that material work that you have done.
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah. There's a lot more unknowns. There are a lot more variables. But is it a
challenge that I want to solve? And it just so happens that I would rather figure out why my
dishes are getting contaminated then why my computer program was crashing. So for
whatever reason I took more to getting into that, but yeah, I mean it's keeping things alive in
the slower timescale. Yeah, there's something there that makes it tough. Like I can't just work
at home and I can't find out in a couple of days if my idea is going to work.
>>: Did you mention something about [indiscernible] plants to figure out how best to space
themselves so they can better capture the sun and stuff like that? Did you use any of that to
help in creation of the patterns that you came up with when you were coming out with this art?
>> Allison Kudla: You mean that diffusion limited aggregation factor? Yeah, that's what that's
all about. It's about being as resourceful as possible and it was taken straight from the logic
systems of biological [indiscernible].
>>: So then there will be more implications, right? Like consumption of gases and stuff like
that could be optimized, which is interesting. I am thinking about how you could capture more
carbon dioxide [indiscernible] take advantage of that small space and [indiscernible]
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah.
>>: Since you are working mostly with ISP is that mostly scientists?
>> Allison Kudla: Yeah, so in the communications department is where I work and there are
three of us.
>>: And from the arts side how do you interact with that with the scientists on the projects?
What is your role?
>> Allison Kudla: It is completely voluntary. If somebody works with me it's like yay. They want
me to make sure they have good websites and nice pictures for their blog posts and I am like
slowly trying to educate the culture. Not that they are not super educated, they are so
amazingly smart, so it's more just about trying to figure out how to make this other world make
sense there to. And they are really open-minded and so I think it's just a matter of time.
>> John Boylan: And with that I think we will end. Thank you.
>>: Thank you Allison. That was great. We appreciate it. [applause].