Creating an art medium from bioluminescence.

Dream it.

Throughout the ages bioluminescence has inspired myths—and it's no wonder when massive blooms of jellyfish or algae can turn the ocean into a reflection of the night sky rife with stars from the depths. One such wonder has attracted the fascination of mankind for ages. Long ago, sailors in the Indian Ocean have long encountered massive bioluminescent blooms as they sailed through the water, lighting the wakes of their ships like the spokes of a wheel carrying them to their destination in a chariot of wind and water. They called this phenomenon “The Wheels of Poseidon”. Our goal is to harness the beauty of bioluminescence to create a new medium for artistic expression, creating a medium for the telling and creation of new myths from the depths.

Team it.

Specifically, we submit the challenge of generating a living, programmable bioluminescent display, with pixels and voxels built of bioluminescent plankton floating freely in the water column and stimulated to glow by a programmable pattern of pressure waves in the water.  Doing so requires experts with a wide array of skills sets; through this collaboration we hope to have artistic, social, scientific, and technological impact.

Creating such a programmable bioluminescent display requires merging a biological system (plankton suspended in the water column) with a synthetic control system. The key to controlling this display is that plankton (for example, Pyrosystic fuciformis) glow in response to acoustic waves in the water.  

Build it.

We can thus create localized bursts of light by targeting sound waves to specific spots in our display.  This can be achieved for example by creating a phased array of ultrasonic transducers in open water, or by exciting suitable combinations of standing waves in a tank via transducers arrayed along its walls.  As a first proof of principle, we created a 2D display in a shallow tank, with a dense grid of acoustic transducers embedded in the floor of the tank. Ultimately, however, our goal is to be able to selectively excite a dense volume of bioluminescent voxels to construct a rich variety of 3D shapes and images. Initially this can be achieved in an enclosed lab setup but it would have the potential to be deployed in aquariums or at locations with endogenous bioluminescent algae for onsight usage.