ProtoCulture

ProtoCulture

A petri plate where life evolves while you watch

1. Each colony is a lineage grown from one seeded strain. Its genes set how fast it divides, how far it swarms, whether its edge stays round or branches, its color, and the lock a virus needs a key for.
2. Rings of a made-up poison rise toward the center in steps of ten. A colony can grow into the next ring only when a daughter is born with one more step of tolerance. Watch fronts stall at a ring, then break through.
3. Phage, viruses of the plate, land now and then and burst the cells whose lock fits their key, leaving clear holes. Strains with a different lock grow back in.
4. Nothing scores them. Tolerance, swarming and gene-sharing all slow a strain down. Lineages keep clear of each other, the agar is lean, and whatever grows here earned its ground. Nearby strains can take whole genes from one another.
5. A plate runs a day. At an event, visitors seed strains with their initials, and at the end of the day the plate becomes a print with every lineage on it.

ProtoCulture is an artwork inspired by the MEGA-plate experiment (Baym et al., Science, 2016), in which bacteria on a 2-by-4-foot dish evolved to survive 1,000 times the dose of antibiotic in about 10 days. It does not simulate real bacteria. Keys: F full screen, H hide panels.

A living world from Ira Greenberg Studio