About this project

Vice Controller places its audience in a pivotal position to oversee and manipulate the health, evolution, and eventual fate of a colony of multi-cellular organisms that possess nervous systems, sexual cycles and digestive organs. Your funding will help us purchase the components necessary to build this installation (listed below), construct it, and then apply to exhibition spaces when our work goes live.

We are Neo Chung and Ashwin Kulothungun, and we've collaborated on various projects, such as an interactive video installation (watch here), a visual interpretation of genetic analysis (watch here), and a conceptual healthcare system (read here). Our work focuses on re-imagining the relationship between the biological sciences and the public. Neo: has worked in biology and bioengineering laboratories, and is familiar with the methods used to design a regulated biotic system. He's also proficient in statistical computing, and is helping to write the image processing and visualization software in Processing. Ashwin: has experience in digital and graphic design. He will be creating the automated culture apparatus and mechanical dispensers, and helping with the programming. We're both students of the biological sciences, and we're planning this with instantaneous interactivity, visual impact, and biosafety in mind. 

The installation centers around a magnified projection of an on-site colony of Caenorhabditis elegans (unharmful diminuitive roundworms) and a mechanical system that dispenses nutrients or mutagens. A digital microscope captures real-time video of the colony, which is fed to an on-site computer to analyze movement patterns, individual size changes, and population density. The real-time feed is complemented by stored video clips that show the history of the culture, and by information overlays from the computational analysis. This magnification, projection, and analysis of the roundworm community will create an atmosphere of constant surveillance and absolute control. The audience is invited to directly control the supply of nutrients and mutagens to the culture. Roundworms will thrive and multiply in the presence of nutrient-rich broth and bacteria, but the addition of mutagens may result in dysfunction, morphological deformation, or even death.

Vice Controller is a representation of our networked ecosystems and societies. Manipulating model organisms is a vital technique in biological research, and we want to amplify that process to present an experience of our ability to direct biological and environmental change. Similarly, the fight for the control of food and supplies within societies is familiar, and we engage with it here through a metaphor that asks the audience to consider who exerts this control, and how this fight will affect our fate.

Materials and Components:
We are covering a portion of the costs ourselves, and your Kickstarter funding will help us purchase some of the necessary equipment listed below:

$150 Digital microscope
$500 On-site desktop computer
$100 Computer accessories
$800 Display projector
$150 Raw materials for automated chemical dispensers
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$1700 Subtotal

$150 Lysogeny broth (a nutritionally rich medium)
$250 Agarose, agaropectin, and biochemicals
$250 Pipettes, latex gloves, bickers, and other glasswares
$125 Caenorhabditis elegans
$100 Non-pathogenic Escherichia coli
$125 Ethyl methanesulfonate (may be replaced with another mutagen)
$400 Lab/working space rental
$400 Misc.
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$1800 Subtotal

$3500 Total Estimate