Science has designs on art

Design, meet science. Science, meet some innovative artists. That's the idea behind Design and the Elastic Mind, an exhibition currently on show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) until May 12. As I stepped off the sixth floor escalator, I was greeted by the show's introductory text, elegantly printed atop a pattern of pink, purple and grey lines, reminiscent of the striped dress shirts worn by many of the hip Manhattan museum goers. But when I looked beyond the big block letters, and stared closely at the wallpaper, I saw a swarm of tiny A's, C's, T's, and G's. These letters, 76 million in all, collectively spell out the entire genetic code of human chromosome 18, with exons in purple, introns in pink, and grey for all the spaces between the genes. This piece -- called Genomic Cartography by Ben Fry of the MIT Media...