Evolution of Proteins Animated

I’ve previously mentioned William Latham’s mutator work. Bruce Sterling alerted me to a recent short animation by Latham that will scour your eyeballs. 

The film shows the evolution of a protein structure mapped into the FormGrow space traversing 20 nodes in an extrapolated phylogenetic tree covering about 50 million years (back and forth in time). The film shows a highly original representation of DNA on its journey from the human liver to the eye lens, initially backtracking towards their common ancestor and then moving forward to today’s time. The animated form interpolates between each node on the tree. DNA is used both to generate the forms and produce the soundtrack. The work is an extension of Latham and Todd’s ideas of the late 1980’s to the early 1990’s, where, this time, FormGrow is connected to modern genomics and proteomics. The film represents an attempt to cross the divide between scientific visualisation of DNA and aesthetically pleasing art.