Color Plates

Plate 1. Victimless Leather: A Prototype of Stitch-­less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific “Body,” by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Tissue Culture and Art Project, 2004. This living, two-­inch-­tall jacket, created using processes of tissue engineering by seeding mouse cells onto a jacket-­shaped scaffold and growing it in a bioreactor, was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition (2008).

Plate 2. Hylozoic Ground, by Philip Beesley, at the Venice Biennale, 2010. Image by Philip Beesley. Olive oil and water in this glass vessel, along with other trace chemicals and small infusions of Venice seawater and carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors to the installation, form pre-­protocells.

Plate 3. FOA’s phylogenetic tree diagram, inserted at the back of Michael Kubo and Albert Ferre in collaboration with Moussavi and Zaera-­Polo, eds., Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark (Barcelona: Actar, 2003). This diagram of FOA’s architectural practice is based on the same conceptual and linear branching structure as Darwin’s tree of life (Figure 3.4).

Plate 4. Fluorescing “tool-­kit proteins” made by hox genes reveal future segmentation and growth in the development of a fruit fly. Photographs by Jim Langeland and Steve Paddock, courtesy of Sean Carroll, University of Wisconsin–­Madison. By engineering cells in a fruit fly embryo to fluoresce under UV light when certain proteins made by particular hox genes are present during development, Carroll and his lab could visually see these genes in action.

Plate 5. Horizontal gene transfer reconfigures the microbial tree of life into a net of life, by Victor Kunin, Leon Goldovsky, Nikos Darzentas, and Christos Ouzounis. From “The Net of Life: Reconstructing the Microbial Phylogenetic Network,” Genome Research 15 (2005): 954–­59, available at http://genome.cshlp.org/content/15/7/954.full. Color key: bacteria = cyan, archaea = green, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) = red..

Plate 6. Two toadflax flowers, Linaria vulgaris, both have the same genome, yet the one on the right has five separated petals and radial symmetry whereas the one on the left has five combined in a different tubular form and bilateral symmetry. One gene in the yellow five-­petaled phenotype has a distinct methyl cap; this epigenetic marker is external to the DNA and is hereditary. Photographs by Enrico Coen, provided by the John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom.

Plate 7. Photomicrograph of fluorescing smooth muscle cell with striated actin filaments (red) connecting nucleic DNA (blue) to the extracellular matrix (green), by Peter Lloyd Jones, 2005. From Agne Taraseviciute, Benjamin Vincent, Pepper Schedin, and Peter Lloyd Jones, “Quantitative Analysis of Three-­Dimensional Human Mammary Epithelial Tissue Architecture Reveals a Role for Tenascin-­C in Regulating c-­Met Function,” American Journal of Pathology 176, no. 2 (February 2010): 827–­38.

Plate 8. Normal (a), malignant (a′) and reverted (a″) morphologies of malignant breast cancer cells, where the changes in morphology are not changes in whether the cells possess genes for breast cancer (all of them do), but changes in the chemical makeup of the extracellular matrix. Changing the matrix causes malignant breast cancer cells to produce the malignant morphology, but it can also cause malignant cells to revert to the normal morphology. Images by Cyrus Ghajar and Jamie Inman. From Valerie Weaver, O. W. Petersen, F. Wang, C. A. Larabell, P. Briand, C. Damsky, and Mina Bissell, “Reversion of the Malignant Phenotype of Human Breast Cells in Three-­Dimensional Culture and In Vivo by Integrin Blocking Antibodies,” Journal of Cell Biology 137, no. 1 (April 7, 1997): 238.

Plate 9. Images from Peter Lloyd Jones and Jenny Sabin’s syllabus for ARCH 745: Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design, Fall 2008, University of Pennsylvania, demonstrate their process of computational modeling of pathological and normal tissue morphologies in breast cancer. See Agne Taraseviciute, Benjamin Vincent, Pepper Schedin, and Peter Lloyd Jones, “Quantitative Analysis of Three-­Dimensional Human Mammary Epithelial Tissue Architecture Reveals a Role for Tenascin-­C in Regulating c-­Met Function,” American Journal of Pathology 176, no. 2 (February 2010): 827–­38; and Sabin and Jones, “Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design: Surface Design” in Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation, ed. Andrew Kudless, Neri Oxman, and Marc Swackhamer (Morrisville, N.C.: Lulu Press, 2008), 54–­65.

Plate 10. Branching Morphogenesis, SIGGRAPH 2008, Design and Computation Galleries; Design Team: Sabin+Jones LabStudio; Jenny E. Sabin and Andrew Lucia in collaboration with Peter Lloyd Jones and Jones Lab members. Special thanks to Annette Fierro for critical commentary. Production Team: Dwight Engel, Matthew Lake, Austin McInerny, Marta Moran, Misako Murata, Jones Lab members. Image courtesy Jenny E. Sabin. This large-­scale hanging textile installation, created out of 75,000 red and white zip-­ties, illustrates the forces in lung tissue “exerted by interacting vascular cells upon their matrix environment.”

Plate 11. PolyThread Knitted Textile Pavilion, commissioned by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum for Beauty: The Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, 2016. Images courtesy of Jenny Sabin, Matt Flynn, and William Staffeld. Compare with Sabin and Jones’s images of cells in their matrix environment (shown in Plate 9, bottom left in vitro images). Here, the hooplike border visually references the extracellular matrix, while the cellular architextile made of thread that glows response to light within its borders shows tissue morphology.

Plate 12. Synthetic Neoplasm, by Marcos Cruz, 1998, described as a “collage of human organs showing the inner side of a synthetic neoplasm.”

Plate 13. Genetic Barcelona Pavilion (2007), by Alberto T. Estévez (with Marina Serer), in Genetic Architectures III: New Bio and Digital Techniques, ed. Estévez (Santa Fe, N.M.: SITES Books / ESARQ-­UIC, 2009), 20. Photograph by Alberto T. Estévez. Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929) is remade most likely using polyfoam board, marble, chicken breast, and toothpicks, to demonstrate the possibilities of living “genetic architectures.”

Plate 14. Hylozoic Ground, by Philip Beesley, at the Venice Biennale, 2010. Image by Philip Beesley. The person in the center-­right provides a sense of scale to this interactive sculpture that moves in response to motion in the room. Pre-­protocell glass vessels (shown in Plate 2) are interspersed within these interwoven, pieced, acrylic forms.