paul theke

what is the sound of evolution? how does selection smell? can we grasp epigenetics by touching it with our hands?

the one-day workshop “science for designers“, jointly organized by the ensad and the institut curie in paris in early may, tried to explore such ideas. focused around the thematics of evolution – 200 years after darwin, once again – well-known biologists from around the world gave lectures on their research in front of design students. in the afternoon, small groups of design and science students came together with so-called “art facilitators“ and one of the lecturers each to develop design ideas based on or inspired by their work.

a friend of mine from germany, himself a design student, and i have been in the (only english speaking) group on epigenetics; in the morning, ueli grossniklaus presented his research on the presumably epigenetic evolution of the “monkey flower“. what is epigenetics? it’s the idea that the environment interacts with the genome of certain species without necessarily changing its sequence, but rather by modifying its structure, e.g., the way the dna is folded. despite the – at least popular (?) – belief that all information of life and development is stored in the genetic sequence (GATTCATTGATA…) of organisms‘ dna, other molecular mechanisms influence the actual “translation“ of this code. two identic sequences might lead to two different outcomes, depending on epigenetic modifications, may they be inherited or not.

our group performed rather poor that afternoon – epigenetics is rather difficult to grasp, even for scientists. but later on in the evening, with a couple of beers in a bar, we started to get some ideas… however, it turned out that our paris design students had a pretty tough schedule and didn‘t find the time to continue the project. finally, the two of us decided to finish this on our own, and this is what we came up with:

the keys of the epi ano grow and shrink depending on the melody which is played. the – static – code is embodied by the sequence of black and white keys, the playing hands symbolize the environment. as certain keys are used more often, they react and get bigger. in a certain sense, the piano adapts to this specific “environment“. only by carefully playing already smaller keys, the keyboard changes slowly its state. in a more explicit analogy, the hands stand for molecular epigenetic factors, and the melody itself represents a specific environment. moreover, the actual melody we hear is the outcome of the interaction between us and the epi ano – this is the entwined music of life…