The Art of Science

“The brain sends out powerful electrical signals from the frontal cortex. We have used sensors and pipes to create a system by which water drops according to a person’s thoughts,” said Think Tank’s creator Sai Krishna Mulpuru. Outside the gallery, two other works vied to be recognised as art. Cryptobar featured the nuances of lock picking. By using subversion and playfulness, Cryptobar, by Science Gallery, Dublin, provoked people to think about censorship and security.

For 11-year-old visitor Alexander D’Souza, science and art met to create magic in Flashback. “The Flashback Photobomber Hoodie protects the wearer from being photographed,” he said. Made of highly-reflective glass nanospheres, the hoodie shows up as ghostly silver shape in photographs and blacks out the wearer.

An option for birthday gifts was a board game titled The Wheel of Revival that featured cut-outs of endangered animals as well as complex food chains. The game Rhizome represented the moving audience members on a giant screen — and served to highlight the interactions of species — while the installation,The Blue Dot, was a visual and sonic representation of Earth’s seismic activities.

Dev Ethan Valladres covered the walls of his gallery with hieroglyphs. His work, Typographic, used the letters that represent the genetic component of the DNA, Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine, as typefaces. The permutations and combinations of the typefaces of the letters A, G, C and T on a computer created a range of images, from a skull to a squiggle. “If the genetic code can communicate so much through just four letters, why can’t we?” says Valladres.