Stress-o-stat

Stress-o-stat is a living artwork that visually captures stress in bacteria as light. The work explores convergence between life and machine, where the machine becomes lifelike and the bacteria, engineered through synthetic biology, machine-like. Stress-o-stat is a result of an immersive and independent laboratory practice using synthetic biology to develop new types of artistic expression. A special genetic switch involved in stress response was located and combined into a genetic construct to produce fluorescing proteins. Once implemented in bacteria, fluorescing proteins are expressed during oxidative stress, producing a yellow-green color in response to blue light.