Artist Kate Thompson worked samples of synthetic DNA into the ink and acrylic coating for her portrait of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin.
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/artist-dna-pioneer-rosalind-franklin/
Art imitates life, but few works of art reflect their subject as thoroughly as the portrait of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin that’s now hanging in the University of Washington’s Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science and Engineering.
On one level, multimedia artist Kate Thompson’s work shows the black-and-white visage of Franklin — the late biochemist whose famous “Photo 51” revealed the double-helix structure of life’s most vital molecule, even though she didn’t get her full share of credit for it.
Look more closely, and you’ll see a mosaic of 2,000 images submitted by the general public as part of UW’s #MemoriesInDNA project.
And if you were to scrape off a few flakes of paint and process them in a DNA lab, you could read out the pixels that make up all of those images and more, translated from the four-letter genetic code of life to the ones and zeroes of digital data.
Storing digital information is quickly becoming unsustainable from both a lifespan and an energy standpoint because our worldwide information production is far outpacing total available storage elements manufactured, and mainstream technologies are quickly approaching their limits.