Collaboration between Agnieszka Kurant, Michael Levin, Emily Ertle,
and Jenn Leung
Read Seven Big Ideas from 7x7 by Michael Connor here
And if a pattern can serve as a home world for a synthetic organism, if the environment an organism inhabits is, at base, a pattern electrically or bio-chemically delivered, then it becomes possible to deliberately design those environments, to ask what kinds of minds might emerge from what kinds of worlds.
We took on the brief to genetically encode finitude in synthetic organisms via patterns. With this we built an agent-based simulation following Emily’s research to guide each agent’s movement through a 10x10x10 space by a shared pattern source: a painting, random noise, the cosmic microwave background, patterns found in nature.
Each agent’s trajectory over its life-time, shaped by its genomic sequence and its encounters with chemicals that altered its mutation rate, became a kind of thought form, a record of a life.
The life paths are then transformed into a microfluidic chip design — a miniaturized model for a physical form that can mimic the physiological functions of tissue. The negative space of the thought forms became channels through which living cells could be deposited and guided to grow.
Pattern becomes behavior; behavior becomes life trajectory; life trajectory becomes physical scaffold; scaffold becomes home world for the next generation of organisms.