Student Award Winner

Jewels of the Sea - Maximilian Seeger (Germany)

Artwork description

Every fourth breath we take is sponsored by diatoms since these photosynthetic unicellular organisms produce about one-fourth of the world's oxygen. Although these microscopic organisms are so incredibly important for our carbon cycle, few people apart from biologists and microscopists are familiar with them. The reason for their general unfamiliarity is probably their size. Diatoms are between 1 and 500 micrometers in size and only become visible under the microscope. In the past, however, not only biologists but also artists have become enthusiastic about the diverse geometric forms of these glassy unicellular organisms. This work shows an approach to generatively create digital diatom models based on real diatoms that are identified live under a light microscope using deep-learning-based image detection. The digital diatoms are generated in real-time by a custom-written algorithm, which is able to create an infinite number of virtual diatom models corresponding to a huge variety of different diatom species. The created installation makes it possible to place any water sample under a light microscope and explore the microscopic live image on a big screen, while diatoms get automatically detected by AI-based image recognition. Hand-tracking makes it also possible to play around with the digitally computed diatom models, grab them and view them from all angles.