Barrie’s lab on the structure and evolution of
sea cucumber hemoglobin in my last year as an
undergraduate, I had been waiting for a chance
to publish and, hopefully one day realize this
idea of learning (as opposed to being taught)
the Krebs cycle through an engineered, computer-assisted embodied experience. During
an on-campus conference on African popular
culture in 2009, I visited Barrie to explain the
concept and secure his future support should an
opportunity such as this ever emerge. It made
perfect sense to him. Later, in 2013, when we
were unsuccessfully trying to get NSF funding,
he laughed when I wondered if people would
think we were mad. Of course it was mad, he
said: that was why he was interested in it.
The Dance of Life is a hypothetical interactive computer-assisted learning machine that
would be installed in a museum setting. The
Krebs cycle would be laid out on the floor in
an artistic exhibit arranged to depict a mitochondrion within a cell. The participant would
SciArt in America June 2014
“enter” the cell on foot. With each footfall,
the participant would physically activate each
step in the cycle. Through interacting with
the artwork, one would activate representations of the cell membrane-mediated transformations and transport processes, the energy
production mechanisms which constitute this
chemiosmotic system. Naturally I hear you exclaim—huh, what on earth is he talking about,
chemiosmotic? Don’t worry; for now this only
refers to things like the movement of hydrogen
ions across the mitochondrial membrane. The
details do not matter, yet; they would be experienced and thus learned through action and art.
In the proposed machine, you would jump—
a sort of hopping dance—into and around this
circular stepwise reaction. Every time you jump
from one molecule—illustrated on a pressure
pad—to another, lighted images would appear
in the floor and on the surrounding walls. You
would see the chemical structure and hear the
nomenclature. Each molecule created at each
step would rotate in three dimensions around
the gallery; wherever water, oxygen, and carbon
dioxide and other molecules are used or created, they will be accurately depicted. As the
steps generate energy, the machine would generate a tower of light in the center and lightenergy cascades flowing down the outer walls
corresponding to the amount of energy being
produced by the dancer. “What on earth is
taking place?”—that is what I hope other museum visitors would exclaim when they see the
light from a distance and are impelled to come
and see the molecules in motion and hear the
strange words and accompanying music being
generated by the first dancer. Hypothetically
then this museum experience would embed the
visual knowledge of the biochemical process of
the Krebs cycle in your mind and body. You will
have no choice but to learn biochemistry inside
out rather than outside in.
To allow for maximum creative interaction in
The Dance of Life, the participant could move
through it in any way they chose. For instance,
they could jump up and down to memorize a
structure through single repetition, go back or
go forward (but only one step at a time!), and
the more creatively they engaged the machine
the better. They could choose musical styles and
colors that best suited them. Special attention
would be paid to the integration and progres-
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