Another Boston-based artist taking advantage of the area's rich and extensive scientific community (see Daniel Kohn) is Brian Knep, and ongoing Artist in Residence at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Knep, a new media artist whose work is often interactive, has used his residency to develop a series of images and video installations exploring the life cycles of frogs.
To create the video pieces for Aging, Knep took thousands of photos of tadpoles at different stages of development and created a computer program to blend the images together (see an article from the Weekly Dig). The result (shown in the second half of the video above) is an animal that morphs between tadpole and frog as it attempts to swim across the screen. Gray lines moving from right to left add a sense of imperative as the frog appears to struggle against an unseen current. As soon as the amphibian makes it all the way forward, it slips back again, struggling to stay on the screen.
Knep uses the striking changes frogs experience in their development to create a metaphor for human life. The frog appears to struggle to make forward progress, but the progress never lasts and seems almost fruitless as the frog slips backward to start the struggle forward all over again. The struggle is the same for all stages of the frog's life, as it constantly morphs back and forth into frog, tadpole, and breathing tadpole, each kick forward echoing through each stage of development. What could be a frustratingly obvious existential metaphor questioning the meaning to life is elevated to a subtle display of interconnectedness, transformation, and beauty. Forward progress may not be the right way to gauge our lives; perhaps beauty and satisfaction can be found in the cycles of our species and our lives.
While Daniel Kohn has attempted to develop useful visualization tools to help scientists as well as find an abstract visual language for "genomic space" inside cell nuclei, Knep has gone another route by relating ideas from science to our own lives. Moments in his work yield a special kind of relevancy that isn't often seen in the art world: cold hard facts of science transformed into metaphors for the human struggle. In fact, Knep could benefit greatly by including even more scientific concepts in his work that further nuanced his metaphor for human life. Incorporating the frog's metamorphic changes with incredibly rigorous and precise observation is very compelling, but suggests further questions: Why does the frog go through such a life cycle? What causes these changes to occur? How do these changes occur within the frog's body? While Knep's work would benefit from the inclusion of even more ideas from science, the way he ties scientific concepts and observation to human emotion has made his Aging series a true success.
Read more about Knep's work at Harvard Medical School in an interview at ArtSake and an article from the Boston Globe. The photo is from Knep's website.
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