morphogenR8
Software I built to render halftone imagery on top of chemical reaction-diffusion simulations.
In 1952, the famed mathematician Alan Turing published a chemistry paper called The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. It was the last major work he published. In this paper, Turing established the mathematical foundation for an idea I’ve been obsessed with my whole adult life: how diverse and complex behavior can emerge from very simple rules.
Before Turing, everyone assumed the intricate patterns we see in biology, from human fingerprints to animal stripes and spots, need instructions (i.e., DNA) and sophisticated machinery (e.g., proteins, RNA, cells, etc.) to take form. Turing showed that assumption was unnecessary by constructing a simple model of two chemicals he called morphogens.
Turing modeled two morphogens, called X and Y, that do only a few basic things: they are produced at a certain rate, destroyed at a certain rate, they diffuse through space at a certain rate, and they react with one another according to simple rules. That’s all. For example, in the Gray-Scott model (which generalized Turing’s approach), X is fed into the reaction space at some fixed rate, two copies of Y react with X to create a third Y, and Y is destroyed at another fixed rate while the morphogens diffuse. Solving the underlying differential equations yields a wide variety of patterns (widely known as Turing patterns) defined by the boundaries between the X and Y phases.
Turing’s predictions have now been demonstrated in real life countless times. Simulations of these systems, called reaction-diffusion models, look more like animated art than chemical theory. They are beautiful and dynamic and alive, just like us.
morphogenR8 is software I created so I could create and visualize reaction-diffusion systems on my own and build artwork on top of the models. Plenty of reaction-diffusion simulators exist out there; my favorite is the RD Tool by Karl Sims. My own contribution with morphogenR8 is to take these simulations one step further into the domain of digital art by “imprinting” images onto Turing patterns using the halftone effect. The halftone effect creates the illusion of an image within a field or grid of dots, lines, or patterns by appropriately varying the weight of the features to simulate luminance.
In morphogenR8, Turing patterns appear to magically arrange themselves into the shape of any chosen picture while evolving, flowing, and breathing as the simulation runs. I’m developing a series of portraits and animations that honor Turing himself alongside all the wonderful lifeforms that owe much of their beauty to reaction-diffusion morphogenesis. I’m keeping the software to myself for now, but I’ll release it to the public when I’m completely happy with it.
Read morphogenR8 out loud and it says “morphogenerate”, which is what the software does. R8 is also the founding photoreceptor of every unit eye in a fruit fly, the first cell chosen in each of the several hundred units that make up the eye. Those R8 cells space themselves evenly across the eye through activation and inhibition, which is exactly the sort of periodic pattern Turing’s model predicts. The name points at both, so the fly had to be in the collection.
Animals
Portraits
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.