Professor Courtney Barr of Louisiana State University’s School of Art is creating visual art from complex genetic data, according to an April 27 announcement. Barr, who serves as Associate Director of the School of Art and teaches graphic design, transforms DNA code into images that aim to help people see connections between species and generations.
Barr said her interest in genetics began with family genealogy. She explained, “I got interested in genetic information as a sort of family genealogist, dealing with my own family tree and finding interesting ways of mapping out genealogical connections between all of my relatives, and mapping out my family history.” After discovering that companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe allow users to download their own DNA data as spreadsheets full of letters, she sought ways to make this information more accessible through visual means.
Her work involves converting the A, C, T, and G letters representing DNA into color-coded symbols. “With these pieces, I am using DNA barcodes, short snippets of genetic information that have been identified by scientists to represent this specific species,” Barr said. She noted that this approach helps create designs that are less dependent on traditional letter forms.
Barr’s projects have included comparing her own DNA with those of her mother and grandmother by visually overlapping their sequences. She has also explored open-source databases focused on extinct species’ barcodes. “It’s just a way to highlight the uniqueness of extinct species and highlight the fact that all we really have left of these species is the DNA data they’ve left behind,” she said.
Barr hopes her work makes dense scientific information more approachable for non-scientific audiences. “When people are looking at my work, I hope they walk away with a better understanding and a higher level of interest in understanding genetic information,” she said.
She concluded by emphasizing the universal nature of genetics: “Genetic information is shared across not only human beings—related individuals like mother to grandmother—but also across species or across individuals within a species. It’s a visual language that we all share. It’s all within us.”
