Binding Art and Science, a Journey through Drug Design

Group picture. From left to right: Neus Torres Tamarit, 
Dr Christelle Soudy, Bea Haynes, and Ben Murray

Binding Art and Science is a workshop developed in collaboration with Dr Christelle Soudy (Francis Crick Institute), artist Bea Haynes, data scientist Ben Murray, and myself (Ben and I as Phenotypica).
The workshop responds to Soudy's research in drug design for cancer research. 

The objective of the workshop was to use Soudy's lab equipment to do the research, as a metaphor for the designed drug, and the public would have to construct the tumor cell around it. To make the tumor cell, we took the sequence of aminoacids of a real cancerous cell, that Soudy has already worked with, printed it onto paper and cut into sequences. 

The real aminoacids are similar in shape, so we made five groups that were representative of those, we assigned them geometrical shapes, and we cut on the CNC pieces of foam with those shapes.
In the workshop, people took a sequence printed on paper, select the aminoacid shapes on foam, write the aminoacid letter on the foam using a fluorescent pen and assemble them using toothpicks.  

Workshop instructions

 

We presented the workshop at the Crick Late on March 2019 at The Francis Crick Institute and it was a great success! Some participants made two sequences of the same; one for the collective installation and one to take home with them!