Silver Installation Design · 2023
Cryptographic Beings Artwork
- A' Design Award 2023 Silver Winner in Installation Design
- Awarded April 15, 2023
- CLIENT: Michael Sedbon
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 23,346
- Verification code 3DC9980CF9 · Verify this award
About Cryptographic Beings Artwork
Cryptographic Beings is an art installation that stores digital data in living algae. The work consists of thirty vegetal bits, each one a glass vessel holding filamentous algae. Photosynthesis produces gas vesicles, so the algae float in light and sink in darkness. Each floating or sinking state represents a digital zero or one, and the installation can store a five letter word. Motorized robotic arms control the light reaching every vessel, and a custom colour sensor reads each state. The machine runs autonomously for months during an exhibition.
Michael Sedbon's Cryptographic Beings Artwork occupies a distinctive position within contemporary practices that interrogate the intersection of biological systems, technological infrastructure, and emergent complexity, suggesting resonances with the bio-art tradition while extending into territories of systems aesthetics and computational ecology. The installation presents as an elegantly engineered vertical cultivation apparatus, wherein transparent modular units supported by precision-machined metal frameworks house living plant specimens beneath artificial grow lights, creating a self-contained ecosystem that operates according to both biological imperatives and programmatic logic. The technical achievement evident in the work's construction demonstrates sophisticated understanding of material properties and engineering principles, with the interplay between industrial components and organic growth establishing a visual dialogue between the manufactured and the cultivated, the designed and the emergent. Compositionally, the towering structure commands its industrial setting through sheer vertical presence, the stacked cylindrical modules creating rhythmic repetition that guides the eye upward while the concentrated light sources establish punctuated moments of visual intensity against the surrounding darkness. The work appears to explore fundamental questions regarding the nature of life, autonomy, and care within technologically mediated environments, positioning the viewer as witness to an ongoing process of growth, maintenance, and systemic interdependence. The title suggests engagement with concepts of encryption, digital identity, and the emergence of novel forms of being within computational frameworks, perhaps proposing that life itself might be understood as an encoded system of information transfer and material transformation. One might observe references to both laboratory apparatus and sacred architecture, the modular tower evoking associations with both scientific experimentation and devotional structures that mark vertical aspiration toward transcendence. The installation invites contemplation of our increasingly complex relationships with nonhuman agencies and the systems we construct to sustain, monitor, and interact with living organisms within controlled environments.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Cryptographic Beings is a technological proposal that leverages our ability to control and abstract biology to perform digital information storage.
Marimos are large spherical colonies of algea.
Photosynthetic activity produces gas vesicles visible to the naked eye
This property allows them to float when exposed to light and sink in the dark
This property is used to store digital data: The floating or sinking state representing digital 0s or 1s
This robotic setup is capable of storing a 5 letter word - Dimensions & Packaging
- Width : 60 cm
height : 300 cm
Depth : 60 cm
Weight : 300 Kg - Tags
- Artificial Living Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Bio-Hybrid Computers, Living Machines, New Media Art, Robotic
- Production Technology
- This work was developed as part of an ongoing research project on bio-hybrid computation exploring the possible morpho-space of computing devices. Michael Sedbon questions the information-processing properties of living matter through the creation of novel technologies embed into sculptural artefacts.
This work has been developed as a functional prototype of a digital data storage device on vegetal media. It uses living algae, custom electronic and software code to store information. - Design Challenge
- Cryptographic being is both a technological and an artistic proposal. The technology used to store digital information in vegetal media is a pure creation for this work. During its development, numerous technical challenges such as the design of custom sensors and engineered mechanical parts had to be overcome.
As an artistic project, it also had to communicate its (highly technical) subject in an understandable manner. Great care was placed in rendering biological processes visible. - Project Duration
- The project was conceptualised and prototyped in summer 2021. The production occurred from September 2021 to March 2022. This work was shown at Au Dela Des Pixel, a digital art exhibition curated and organised by 36 Degres, in March 2022 in Paris.
- Operation Flow
- This autonomous machine consists of an array of 30 vegetal bits made of filamentous algae held in glass vessels. The control of the information flow is handled by a set of specifically developed robotic arms that control photosynthetic processes in each of the bits. The state of each bit (the digital information) is retrieved by a custom-made device based on a colour sensor.
The machine is designed to run autonomously for months throughout an exhibition. - Research
- Living organisms perceive and interact with their environment through computation. Recent advances in the life sciences allow researchers and designers to envision machines of new kinds that leverage the massive and specific capacities of living matter in computing.
How would these bio-hybrid machines change our perception of nature and culture, what can be used to compute, what can be computed and what form will they take? These are the question this work approach. - Inspiration
- The first part of the 20th century witnessed simultaneously the discovery of the basis of information storage in DNA and the revolutions of the modern computing era.
Since then, the fields of computer science and modern biology have co-evolved in a conceptual framework that looks at life as an information processing system and at digital computations as Intelligence.
This cultural relationship is allowing us to design new kinds of bio-hybrid computers leveraging the massive capacity of life.
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