This article was taken from the June issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
It’s how capillaries are formed, shown with data you can touch. This is a detail of "Branching Morphogenesis", an artwork by Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia and Jenny E Sabin on show at the University of Pennsylvania’s Sabin+Jones Lab studio.
A 3m-tall, 4.5m-wide sculpture, the piece comprises five curtains made from 75,000 interlocking cable ties.
Each tie represents a force exerted by lung endothelial cells on the protein matrix that surrounds them as they form capillaries. Each curtain is a slice in time, connected at the densest areas of force distribution.
The work was designed by running a computer simulation of cell activity and positioning the ties according to the data that resulted.
Viewers can meander through what Sabin calls an organic datascape. "One of the questions we had was how to reinsert the body into all of this," she says. "You’re able to walk through and inhabit the object. It encourages an internal view of the body."
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x952/s_v/scivis1_h1_cp.jpg" alt="Cable tie art"/>
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
