Vitruvian WoMan / A Breath for Leonardo

VITRUVIAN WOMAN : A BREATH FOR LEONARDO

I rise like a Phoenix

bit by bit, atom by atom changing energy into matter with eternal mastery...

Vitruvian WoMan : A Breath for Leonardo 3D interactive hologram display/installation Soundscape: Andre Bartetzki

Interface: Piotr Slomczewski / Andre Bartetzki

Abstract / Introduction In Mathematical Universe The Big Net of Life RNA Labyrinth of Shifting Identities Vitruvian Woman / Breath for Leonardo Documentation

The artwork is realised with the support of Prof. Janusz Bujnicki’s Lab, at the International Centre for Molecular and Cell Biology Warsaw,

Abstract Vitruvian WoMan: Breath for Leonardo is an interactive installation in which the famous drawing of Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci changes into the dynamic, multidimensional geometry of the basic molecule of life, the RNA molecule. Using his/her breath, the interactor transforms molecular states and moves along different paths of the poetic labirynth of diverse molecular structures and their identities.

Vitruvian WoMan It is hard to imagine the western tradition of art without the Vitruvian Man, an anthropometric canon derived from Pythagorean concept of mathematical Harmony of the World, the idea of beauty and truth expressed in numbers. The famous drawing by Leonardo, depicting the figure of a man inscribed in a circle and square, was a reflection of the Renaissance inquiry into "cosmography del minor mondo", the relationship of man with the universe. At the same time it manifested deep links between art and science and the centuries-long double path of our cognition.

Vitruvian WoMan evokes Renaissance tradition, proposing a new orientation of the mind.

The piece poses questions about human identity in the context of modern scientific research, in the reality ruled by biological and digital algorithms, in the universe of interactive data.

The Big Web of Life—RNA molecule The female form of Vitruvian WoMan is not inscribed in a flat diagram, but in the threedimensional complex model of the molecule of life, the fractal structure of RNA, from which, according to the RNA World hypothesis , the Great Network of Life evolved.

Though components of RNA molecule resemble the DNA code, it rarely assumes a stable double-helix shape.

In fact, the RNA biomolecule is a maze of all its possible conformations, which it must pass through to adopt the final form and function. However, there are RNA molecules that have retained their original ability to switch, like a molecular werewolf, between various forms and functions under the influence of environmental factors.

The mechanisms of structural and functional variability of RNA is considered one of the basic mechanisms of the variability of biological forms and the evolution of life.

The artpiece uses the RNA-riboswitch structure, synthesized by the research group of Prof. Janusz Bujnicki at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw.

The DNA double helix became an icon of the progress of civilization in the 20th century. It is not excluded that RNA, as the basic tool of biotechnology and bioengineering, will become a symbol of 21st century achievements and challenges.

We live in times when algorithms of life are no longer governed only by nature.

Increasingly, power over biological processes is taken over by man and the technologies he develops, opening a new chapter in the evolution of life

However, the question arises whether we are in fact able to fully understand and effectively control self-organizing complex organic and inorganic complex systems and wisely head towards what we want to become?

New Renaissance There are many similarities between the cultural revolution of the Italian Cinquecento, which Leonardo became a symbol of, and our times. It is not just about the recurrence of the paths of science and art or the pursuit of interdisciplinary discourse and holistic knowledge.

Like 500 years ago, we are facing a civilization crossroads, in the face of a crisis of institutions, ideology and values. Like 500 years ago, we experience opposites, extremes and paradoxes. The greatest period of the Medici and the activity of the Renaissance umanisti community was also a time abounding in the atrocities of numerous wars, inquisitions, conspiracies, killings and widespread corruption Today, the incredible scientific and technological progress is overshadowed by global crises: ecological, economic, social and political. A cultural revival becomes necessary, in order to break the eternal narrative of the Anthropocene based on profit, consumption and acquisition, and to redefine the concept of humanity, designating a new path of its development.

A Breath for Leonardo We exist in a dynamic data universe where every breath counts, where every action, every thought has a value. Nothing is lost in it, nothing is annihilated or „disappears�.

Thus Leonardo da Vinci's data are also present here and now, in various arrangements and aggregations, This feature of our physical world inspires the imagination and the question of who / what is Leonardo today, who / what could he become tomorrow?

Genius is a spirit of time, the result of a unique data configuration that, like a wave, occurs periodically, amplified by countless small waves. Will the development of biodigital super-intelligent networks result in the creation of a new kind of genius, Leonard of the 21st century? If so, how will I contribute to it?

Our bodies consist of an astronomical number of atoms, mainly oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, formed in the nuclei of distant stars. To enter my body, every carbon atom underwent photosynthesis, each oxygen atom was once a part of the ocean. However, these atoms do not stay in my body for long; approximately every seven years, 99.999% are replaced by other atoms. Among the atoms that make up the retina of my eye, there may be an atom of Leonardo that was previously part of a jellyfish, leaf or bird.

Breathing…. Breathing in…. Breathing out... Slowly I am calming down my mind-body cobweb. Breathing ... Breathing in ..., Breathing out...

I imagine 25 sextillions (or 25, and then 21 zeros) of air molecules that filled my lungs and warmed up with the heat of pulsating tissues.

Breathing out ... I slowly release active bits of information.

Breathing in ... a wave of air permeates my darkness ... impatiently I am sorting its content I put aside the molecule that once was Leonardo’s breath, and the one that visited lungs of the pterosaur, and the one that created the shockwave of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima ...

Breathing out….

Breathing in ... I absorb the dust that made up the solar system and the wind that touched the Sahara dunes ... I plunge into the bowels of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano Breathing out – bits of information now mix with a breath of a passer-by, they float in cigarette smoke, thicken with street smog.

Breathing in… I can feel the salt of the sea and the bird's screaming in the musty air Breathing out… 25 sextillions of particles float enveloping the earth with a sphere of air.

I breathe.

The piece was presented in the form of an individual exhibition at the 7th EUROBIOTECH Congress in Krakow 2019, on the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, as a tribute to his creative mind at the threshold of the digital era of the New Renaissance.

The piece is part of a wider project EpiMimesis Epizone V: Shifting Identities awarded the Magnus Laurentius Medices Medal, Florence International Contemporary Art Biennale 2019

In Mathematical Universe The concept of the Harmony of the Universe, based on mathematical structures and proportions, originates from Pythagorean thought. His idea was taken over by Plato, combining the ability to perceive beauty with man’s cognitive powers.

Since ancient times, the search for the essence of beauty which, according to Socrates, was the only divine and visible thing, was identified with the search for truth.

Mathematics, capable of generalizing properties and making analogies between distant and seemingly unrelated things, has become the key to the secrets of the universe.

The search for the most perfect, "harmonious" proportions between individual elements of the whole and between elements and the whole, was seen as a path to the essence of its "beauty and truth" .

The ancient faith in the power of numbers united Greek and JudeoChristian traditions, while placing man as created in the image of God (s) at the center of cognizance. Proportion and symmetry, the fundamental concepts of Greek geometry, set the foundations for anthropometric perfection, which aimed at simplicity, balance and complementarity.

These ambitions found expression in the famous canon of Polikleitos - a detailed description of the human body as a form based on a series of mathematical operations. 1 : √2. )

However, for Leonardo, the direct inspiration was not a Roman copy of the sculpture of Doryphores, but a monumental work De architectura by Marcus Vitruvius written in the first century BC. In the third book devoted to the construction of temples, the Roman architect gave a description of the proportion of man as a model for a harmonious building.

Also for Leonardo, the mathematical image of man was an embodiment of knowledge about the nature of the world, cosmography "del minor mondo".

His famous drawing is not a portrait of a particular person. Following the ancient principle of mimesis, it is the result of many years of studies, including anatomical ones, of the Renaissance master.

Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio shows the figure of a naked man in two superimposed poses. One, with joined feet and outstretched arms, was inscribed in a square, while the other resembled a "spread eagle" was closed in a circle. However, one can notice, that the arrangements of arms and legs actually creates sixteen different positions, suggesting the possibility of moving from one position to another.

Mathematical figures were closely associated with Leonardo's alchemical search. The circle was a symbol of perfection, heaven, transcendence, externality and infinity, while the square suggested an internal zone related to human corporeality and the earth. The center of the cosmic circle, omphalos mundi, was situated in the navel of Vitruvian man, while the center of the square Leonardo placed in the lower abdomen, changing the original idea of Vitruvius.

The idea of mathematical harmony of our universe remians one of the main stimuli of our cognition. Pythagorean intuitions, neo-Platonic inquiries of Leonardo and Renaissance umanisti were replaced by modern methodologies and scientific thought The imagination of the 20th century was affected by the Theory of Great Unification, the Theory of Everything (ToE) including the holographic 11-dimensional M-theory.

Today, imagination is stimulated by the hypothesis of the mathematical universe (or rather multi-universe) of Max Tegmark. According to the Swedish physicist and cosmologist, mathematics is not only a tool for discovering and describing reality. The amazing utility of mathematics in natural sciences (Eugene Wigner, 1960) can only be explained by the hypothesis that the world is mathematics.

All mathematical

constructions and transformations exist physically. This hypothesis ultimately destroys the dualism of thought and matter, abstraction and nature. The map of Jorge L. Borges is identical to the territory of our experience. Postmodern simulacrum becomes only a convenient metaphor concocted by our limited knowledge, Plato's cave, which itself turns out to be an illusion.

We do not know whether Tegmark's mathematical universe will ultimately prove to be a triumph or a dead end of Cartesian reason. Scientific methodology requires empirical evidence that we are unable to provide at the current stage of our development. Nevertheless, this hypothesis sheds new light on the greatest secrets of our existence and provokes reflection on the consequences of its veracity.

If our physical world is a mathematical structure with an infinite number of initial random conditions, then the algorithms of life, including conscious life, acquire new meaning. Tegmark uses the poetic term "awakening of the universe", establishing us as part of the cosmic process. The ageold questions about the relationship between micro and macro worlds take on a new context, making us realize that it depends on us whether the Anthropocene era turns out to be a short episode or the beginning of a new chapter in the history of not only our planet.

Unable to comprehend the Whole, I direct my attention to a fractal, looking, as in the past, for a relationship between a fragment and unity. I immerse myself inside cozy self-born spaces. As I leave, I grow into a crystal of broken symmetries Of Life Non-trivially infinite Ragged I discreetly spread out probabilities of occurrence

Vitruvian WoMan is a multidimensional fractal, a fundamental molecule of life, a labyrinth

Vitruvian WoMan

HUMANISM— De himinis dignitate You may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be, through your won decision. To rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine�

Pico della Mirandoli De himinis dignitate (1487) This tribute to the dignity and unlimited possibilities of man expressed in the famous oration of the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandoli (1487) acquires a special significance on the threshold of the new digital Renaissance.

The humanism outlined in the Renaissance thought can be defined through the prism of the idea of the incompleteness of a man, condemned to a constant process of becoming.

Based on uncertain premises, the drama of his freedom.

This drama was inscribed in the hierarchical concept of the world, taken from Greek philosophy, and based on the decree of the heavenly forces, Scala Naturae. In this system at the top of the "ladder of beings" there are gods (or God), beneath them (or Him) angels, demons, then people (kings, princes, nobility, ordinary people), animals, then plants and below precious stones and metals and other minerals. Man's place on the level between natural and divine beings marked his privileged but labile position.

The position of a man on Scala Naturae, on the border of entities between angels/demons and animals, was the source of his inner tear, the drama that breeds a constant conflict between spirituality and corporeality, the desire for good and evil. (St Augustin) The trap of dichotomy

Vitruvian WoMan

Today we stand on a different border of beings, between organic and inorganic life, Between Icarus's dream and the nightmare of falling.

Uncertain premises of freedom

THE BIG WEB OF LIFE The Ladder of Beings (Scala Naturae) introduced a pattern of thinking that took root in our imagination, becoming a determinant of the hierarchical systematization of nature from Aristotle's dendrogram to Charles Darwin's phylogenetic Tree of Life.

According to Darwin's concept, its trunk was made up of LUCA, a primitive bacterial species or a group of cooperating bacterial species. As a result of evolution and natural selection, branches of new species began to grow. They ramified further forming a large branchy tree. Its highest branches represent organisms that have survived to this day. For Darwin, the phylogenetic tree was the basis for understanding the history of life on Earth based on the evolutionary "battle for life" and “survival of the fittest�

His clear concept, however, could not be kept long. The progress of scientific research methods and accompanying technologies deepens our understanding of the relationships and kinships connecting the world of nature. Today, we know that in addition to 'vertical gene inheritance', evolution has been affected by phenomena that cannot be represented in the form of a branching tree, such as horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, and interspecies hybrids. Today, epigenetics explores the impact of the environment and extra-genic inheritance processes, playing a growing role in evolution studies.

The image of a lonely tree, both as a model of the evolution of life on earth and a metaphor for life, has lost its power.

The Great Web of Life defies dogma. It is constantly growing, transforming, becoming more and more complicated and surprising. Our place in it resembles the place of the Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. It is neither central nor the most important, blue point on the periphery.

Anxious fractal of life We live in a time when man begins to have the power to shape himself and the environment to an extent he has never been able to imagine.

After almost four billion years of biological evolution based on natural algorithms, we are entering a new era of the evolution of life, which is driven by the marriage of the digital and biotechnological revolutions.

Vitruvian WoMan

RNA LABIRYNTH OF SHIFTING IDENTITIES The RNA molecule is essential for life. It transfers genetic information from DNA to proteins, catalyses chemical reactions and regulates metabolic processes in the cell. It is the basis of a phylogenetic network, the key to understand evolutionary relationships and connections between different species and biological entities.

The study of basic molecular mechanisms not only affects our understanding of the evolution and dynamics of complex systems, but opens up the possibility of designing new molecular structures and functions of great importance for modern medicine and for the future of society.

Although the chemical structure of the RNA molecule resembles DNA (it is a polymer of nucleotide residues A, C, G and U), it rarely forms long doublestranded helixes, assuming various spatial forms that determine its function.

While DNA is often associated with stability, continuity and determinism, RNA means instability, diversity, variability and a multitude of possibilities.

The RNA biomolecule is not a static composition of "balls and sticks", but a dynamic labyrinth of all possible structural conformations that it must "pass" to achieve the final form determining its identity and function. This maze is not

"imposed from the outside" as in many cultural narratives and myths. It is an immanent feature, the "essence" of the molecule, and its path is determined by laws of physics (such as thermodynamics) and environmental factors.

However, there are RNA molecules called riboswitches that, like a "molecular werewolf", can take on two (or more) alternative and even different structures and functions depending on the conditions. It has recently been discovered that shape-shifting or form variation is a common feature of many RNA molecules, including naturally occurring sequences that play biological roles, as well as completely random chemically synthesized sequences.

The mechanism of structural and functional RNA variability can be considered as one of the basic mechanisms of variability of forms and evolution of the living world.

The mechanisms of structural and functional variability of RNA has become an inspiration for the Vitruvian Woman, an artistic Labyrinth of our Shifting Identities

RNA—LABIRYNTH OF SHIFTING IDENTITIES

VITRUVIAN WOMAN A Labirynth of Shifting Identities

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Is any identity then a momentary state of data?

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A transient “snapshot” within a larger dynamical enfolding?

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A complex algorithm of different assembling of entangled data?

I have come a long way since the Great Beginning thrown into physicality increasingly complex and complicated

I remember the taste of quartzite and sharp morning air like a razor cuts through lungs of swaying tree I spin faster and faster spreading arms of dimensions I pulse with the heat of the fluid that feeds me inside everything living dendrites of my being humid restless blind are searching

I don't know if Vutruvian WoMan is my avatar or if I'm her Avatar. The relationship between the creator and the work is ambiguous.

Vitruvian WoMan is not a character but an evolving system: A dynamic set of data; of what I know and what I don't know, but also the vastness of what I don't know that I can imagine a dream that dreams its reality a thought that no language found an idea that is looking for its shape a rhythm of arrested breath a laboratory Vitruvian WoMan is a search for equilibrium, internal balance between structure and chaos, logic and emotions, rationality and intuition, the individual and the world.

Vitruvian WoMan is a maze that undergoes constant transformation, it is an opening of form for a change, for otherness that fills with fear, but cannot be avoided a chance Like a larva in a cocoon, I want to trust her. soft susceptible to turbulence indestructible.

The labyrinth structure assumes various variants of choices and paths that one can follow.

Vitruvian WoMan, as an artpiece, is a closed form.

However, it suggests the possibility of going beyond the limits of oneself. After all, this is inescapable .

A breath for Leonardo / Vitruvian WoMan 7th Central European Congress of Life Sciences EUROBIOTECH, EXPO Krakรณw, PL

EUROBIOTECH

EUROBIOTECH 2019

Interactive 3D projection

A breath for Leonardo / A Vitruvian Woman as a part of EpiMimezis: Epizone V Shifting Identities XII Florence Biennale, Forteza da Basso, Florence, IT

Intercative 3D pseudo-hologram—part of the imultimedia instlation