Daniel A Becker – Visualising DNA (and barcodes)
Friday, 9 January 2009
Visual-DNA – Daniel A Becker
Daniel A Becker brings to light visual and aesthetic patterns contained within otherwise ‘unreadable’ code sequences. In his Visual DNA project he assigns colours and shapes to each of the 4 letters (A, C, G, T) that represent ‘the architects plan of life’. This is done for the first 1050 positions of the initial chromosome for different species. It allows us to have a more specific visual reading of the difference between the DNA sequences for humans and fruitflies, for example. A different work, Barcode Plantage, produces an organic representation of a standard barcode, which shows information about the product such as its country of origin and manufacturer. The data is formed into an abstract tree by connecting coloured bezier curves that ‘grow’ from the actual barcode itself.
