"Ecce Homology," an interactive "bioart" installation to be showcased at SIGGRAPH 2005 in Los Angeles, July 31 through Aug. 4 quite literally makes BLAST and genomics visible.
Headed up by new-media artist Ruth West director of visual analytics and interactive technologies at the University of California, San Diego National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research and research associate with the UCSD Center for Research and Computing in the Arts the "Ecce Homology" project is an ongoing collaboration among 11 biologists, artists and computer scientists from UCSD, UCLA and the University of Southern California.
Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, a meditation on how one becomes what one is, the project explores human evolution by examining similarities a.k.a. "homology" between genes from human beings and a target organism, in this case the rice plant.
"We are living in a time when we are generating enormous amounts of genetic data," said West, who trained as a microbiologist and began her career in medical genetics. "But data is not knowledge it's not even information. A key concept of 'Ecce Homology' is to make an important subject like genomics accessible to the general public."
"Ecce Homology" uses a combination of dynamic media, computer vision and computer graphics to visualize genomic
'"/>
Contact: Inga Kiderra
ikiderra@ucsd.edu
858-822-0661
University of California - San Diego
19-Jul-2005