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2 1 1 Too often, science and art are spoken through their antagonisms—science is seen as dealing with truth, whereas artists deal with ego and expression. But for myself and many other artists, our pursuit is not one of personal expression , but of interrogation. Interacting with life scientists, I see with increasing clarity that both science and art are about knowledge. Collaboration between them can deepen our understanding of this beautiful and complex world. The illustrations in this book derive from a “Data Set” of watercolors, born out of my conversations with scientists at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard University. These watercolors are painted on 3-by-3 grids of 8-inch square sheets of paper, which I then scanned into my computer. Not only did the work allow me to explore what I was learning about science, but also, by serendipity, helped me to develop a “high-throughput” drawing process, which formed a kind of experimental data. The process yielded a data base of serial images that could be shifted, sorted, analyzed, and reworked in a variety of ways. When reorganized, the images produced patterns like those seen in some pages of this book. From the data we can discern patterns. From the patterns we can extract new meaning. In the same way that experimental results can raise more questions than they answer and lead to new hypotheses to be tested, an image in my database could be removed from its original series and serve as the seed for a new grid. Within the digital environment, I can remove a mark from a painting and begin a new one around that single element. The database has afterword Science and Art in this Book: Exploring the Genome Together 2 1 2 A F T E R W O R D thus become a way for me to use image-making to process the science that I’ve learned and to develop a multi-dimensional tool to create new images, some of which appear in this book. Western science tends to isolate the system it is studying from its environment . Until now this has been one of its strengths. Scientists can talk about the “organs” of a cell without mentioning the cell itself. In the realm of genetics, DNA is almost always isolated from the genome’s epigenetic features. The context is assumed. We often see the genome depicted as a one-dimensional string of A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s. In “reality,” however, it is a three-dimensional chemical structure with shape and action and a place in the cell. To work around this we played with different ways of contextualizing this process, finally settling on the idea of sizing the elements—DNA, histone proteins, cells—so that each element is mapped within the next. The resulting image illustrates epigenetics in a new, contextual way. This experience underscored the rising importance of dimensionality to contemporary science. This is a dual problem, involving both understanding and communication. How do you conceptualize and manipulate a space in many dimensions? How do you collapse that space into the two or three dimensions that we have evolved to navigate intuitively? And how do you represent it in such a way that it is understandable to others? Exploring this dynamic view brought me to wonder about time-based networks. A typical view of networked elements, such as genes, will show all measured relationships between the elements. In a complex process, such as stem cell differentiation, this leads to what is expressively called a “hairball,” where there are so many connections that the parts are no longer visible. By giving time properties to the edges in such a network, one could begin to see operative connections for a given time point or cell state. These actual links may be more informative in this context than the full set of all possible connections. In this case, of course, less is more. From my own experiences moving around the globe and adopting new cultures, I know how long it takes to learn the shape of a new space and transform it into something significant. Clearly this is only the first stage of my own investigation, which I call my défrichage—French for the clearing that happens before wild, forested land can be planted. I know that the images I have created so far are only superficially connected to the science, but they are also a necessary point...

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