In Silico, In Vitro, In Vivo: Programming in Processing and in Life at ACADIA 2020

‘In Silico, In Vitro, In Vivo: Programming in Processing and in Life’ was a workshop held at this year’s ACADIA conference: Distributed Proximities on October 24-30.

Watch below the summary of the 2 day workshop featuring some of the students work

Workshop Leaders:
Prof. Martyn Dade-Robertson 
With contributions from Carolina Ramirez Figueroa (Royal College of Art), Dilan Ozkan and dr Jane Scott.

Description of the workshop below:

This workshop is an introduction to biological modelling using the Processing programming language. The backbone of the workshop will be a series of two 5-hour crash courses in the Processing language for complete beginners. This will act as an introduction to the core concepts of programming and Object-Oriented Programming – including writing functions and objects. The workshop will be organized around the building of a simple Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA) system which simulates agents (cells) which aggregate in response to a simulated chemical signal. The resulting aggregations lead to branching patterns in 2D and possibly 3D. Developing this simple biological model, we will also explore ideas of self-organising systems and emergence in biological pattern forming and show the universality of certain types of model. The DLA model we will develop, for example, can be effective at modelling viral transmission (which is itself a type of biological patterning). The workshop will give the participants some of the fundamentals they need to begin to code for biological simulations and we will include links to online resources and relevant books and articles to help them develop further as well as sharing our code examples with the group. We will also introduce fundamentals of biological pattern making and the field of Synthetic Biology – looking to the future of biology as a programmable medium for design.

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