A sketch for a fungal re-creation of Harold Edgerton’s famous Milk Drop Coronet photo stands over the collection of tools and artwork that blend together in Ross’ studio.

is curating and also exhibiting in. Held at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the show assembles a group of artists whose work incorporates biology, alongside works from industrial technologists, ecological researchers, and biological engineers.

Fitting everyone together in a museum is “like a temporary hospital-space-slash-research-lab, in a setting that doesn’t really accommodate that.”

Art museums are just not comparable to, say, a university’s ability to pay the overhead for all this science. But Ross’ ability to network, ask for help, and call in favors from his friends and allies, “taking little bits from all over, volunteering from all around, and stitching it together,” will allow works such as the one planned by Australia’s Tissue Culture and Art Project, that will involve growing out a specific mouse cell line. The “McCoy” cell line will need to be ordered, cultured at the nearby Exploratorium, and then transferred to the museum and kept in a bioreactor.

There’s also a concurrent educational event tied to the show, called Technebiotics, a day of demonstrations of biological techniques by artists, scientists, and other show participants.

“I love showing people how easy it is to build all

this stuff,” Ross says. Teaching art at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz, he proves that the line between artist and scientist is very slim. The barrier of having the right tools, he demonstrates, is low indeed, with exercises like “Medieval DNA Extraction” in which he shows students how to extract DNA from mammalian or vegetable cells, using candles as a heat source, some water, and not much else. “In the end you have this vial in front of a candle, and it’s almost an alchemical thing: suddenly you have DNA.”

The thinking is the important thing, and the willingness to try. “Almost all biologists that I know, their greatest skill is observation and comparison and very good data acquisition. You can just sit and watch the grass grow and come up with phenomenal postulations about the nature of life. A notebook is pretty much all that Darwin had, and he did pretty well. Anybody can engage.”

Philip Ross’ artwork: philross.org

John Alderman ( john@supereverywhere.com) is a writer and user experience consultant who lives in San Francisco and travels often, for work and whimsy. His recent book, Core Memory, was featured in MAKE, Volume 10.

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