even suggested the traffic under the floor of the
Prague Museum.
In a natural way, as I became more familiar
with some new media technologies (such as
Alias Wavefront and 3ds Max), they, along with
The topic that subsequently captured me was scans from forms that I morphed with cellular
the process of ‘innovation’, how new ideas come automata or simulated in paint could be incorabout. How could I best visualize this process?
porated into my system.
My basic rule was to find the present in the past
and trace it over time like a genealogy. Natural
PS: Your experience as a microbiology technologist
history museums offered an intuitive starting
has shaped many of your more recent works, including
point for this kind of content, and so, too, did
your stellar exhibition, Colonizing Plato’s Cave:
the US Patent and Trademark Office (the USP- Remembering the Future (2013). Can you elaboTO) along with its set of evolved conventions
rate on how microbiology has inspired your work on
for drawings. For example, an upgraded manual both an aesthetic and conceptual level?
of the patenting procedure in 2005 explained
how to make two-dimensional orthographic
EL: My experience as a microbiology techviews readable as three-dimensional objects.
nologist shaped art work throughout much of
The manual instructed the drafter of the patent my career. It provided me with a knowledge of
design that “light should come from the upper
microorganisms and recipes for feeding (thus
left corner at an angle of forty-five degrees”
growing) them. I became acquainted with how
to the surface of the paper. Edges to the botAlexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin,
tom and right should thus be made graphically
playfully made ‘germ portraits’ by growing bacthicker, to indicate a shadow. It turns out that
terial cultures on Petri dishes to create pictures,
this convention is in keeping with our hardand at times I approximated this process in
wired expectations that light should come from the micro lab. After photographing and scanabove. Even the USPTO reflected some of the
ning bacterial cultures grown in the lab, I later
constraints of our perceptual system! I found
applied cellular automata programs to morph
that the USPTO shares many similarities with
them. I then incorporated the results and/or
biological evolution. Adaptive improvements,
painted their facsimiles in art works as approdiversification, and competition typify the hispriate. What appealed to me aesthetically was
tory of innovation. The key difference is that
how I could incorporate a biological process in
with artifacts you have nongenetically transmit- my art and use it to animate the resultant forms
ted behavior that occurs by learning—memes
in a visually expressionist-like way.
instead of genes. You have to take into account
the variety of forms and environmental conEvolutionary processes underlie fields apart
straints.
from biology. Darwin made a critical link between evolution and economics when he referNorbert Wiener, one of the founders of cyenced Malthus’s population studies. As a result,
bernetics, suggested that living organisms be
we now realize that nature tends to optimize
viewed as systems