Embryo bench
Proposal for Ann Arbor Museum of Natural History
Design Team: Merve Akdoğan, Dr. Pınar Yoldaş
Mechanism, structural design: Merve Akdoğan
Location: Michigan, USA
Bench for Ann Arbor Museum of Natural History, the system is moveable, and the tail changes, curls up.
This project aims to tell biological growth. From very subtle beginnings every day so many organisms move forward in time, protein by protein, organelle by organelle, cell by cell, following directions in a secret language whose sounds we are just discovering, if only we listen carefully, very patiently over decades. Embryonic development has been a curious topic as it sheds light on the very beginning of living things. Growth is a universal attribute of life. All organisms have life circles that include growth. The fundamental features of growth may be universal because the growth trajectories of most animals are very similar, but a unified mechanistic theory of growth remains elusive. Our research in the field led us to zebrafish, whose gem-like eggs in their honest transparency reveal the secrets of growth visually while offering a very fast growth rate which makes the artificial selection and genetic modification easy. Therefore fish has become a model organism not only for growth research but for other fields.
The new exhibits space in the Ann Arbor Museum of Natural History can be a perfect match for this piece which we tentatively titled "Embryo Bench". It is inspired by the formal attributes of the fish in its form, curvature, transparency, and natural glimmer.
