Introducing LOC: Art on a Chip

It is my pleasure to present to you LOC: Art on a Chip (http://www.flickr.com/photos/labonachip/), a new LOC website for sharing your images associated with miniaturization/micro/nanofluidics and for the general enjoyment of our community. The site is a free service to all and will allow all in the community to upload interesting images from miniaturization conferences, images of award- and prize-winners etc.

The main purpose of the site, however, is to be the community focus for your artistic images and photographs (videos can be uploaded to the LOC YouTube site at http://www.youtube.com/user/labonachipVideos).

Luckily for us, our fields of research are bursting with art. We light cells up with colorful patterns and we paint tiny motifs of fluids with impressionist shades. I am willing to bet that your hard drive contains at least one gorgeous image that will make me catch my breath. In fact, I contend that all our hard drives together contain more art than the Louvre and all the Guggenheims could possibly house, and it would be a shame if it remained in cyber-darkness – that is exactly the reason why I proposed to Lab on a Chip that we should launch this website. I suspect that stored in your lab's hard drives lay dormant giga-bytes – maybe more – of stunning images that may not be publishable, but may be more visually arresting than the ones you ended up publishing. Please share the most beautiful of them with the rest of the community through LOC: Art on a Chip and spread the word that, from now on, everyone can be an artist. Let's show other scientists how creative we can be through the images that we have!

This website also has a more serious mission, in synchrony with the RSC's mission to disseminate knowledge. In the last few decades, we have seen education become more and more specialized. Our children have to choose career paths at an increasingly younger age. One of the first choices that they face is, invariably: “Arts versus the Sciences”. Why should they be mutually exclusive? I know very few scientists that do not have a deep appreciation for painting and music, and fewer artists that do not feel a fascination for scientific phenomena.

Arts and sciences should never be considered to be incompatible, as they complement each other. Science encompasses the pursuit of objective knowledge while art embraces the recording of subjective experiences. Therefore, science and art contribute to shape us as human beings through various objective and subjective experiences. Scientists struggle daily with the pursuit of objectivity, but often neglect the cultivation of subjectivity. As the example of Leonardo Da Vinci teaches us, this complementarity is enriching, maybe even necessary to form a well-rounded individual, so we should encourage our students to take some time doing art. When you manipulate and/or select your pictures, we want to remind you that you should consider yourself a dignified artist at that moment.

As it is hosted within Lab on a Chip, LOC: Art on a Chip images and its subcategories are necessarily restricted to digital photographs of specimens that contain some element of miniaturization technology. The submissions are divided into four very broad categories dictated mostly by what is found in Lab on a Chip: Fluids on a Chip (the specimen must contain fluids in the visual field), Cells on a Chip (the specimen must contain cells in the visual field), Fabrication (the specimen cannot contain either cells or fluids in the visual field), and Artistic manipulations (for the more artistically inclined, including Photoshop manipulations, Lab on a Chip cover-style, etc.). There will also be a Quarantine category for incorrect submissions. It is left up to the artist to decide which category to upload onto if the specimen fits in two categories (for example, a picture of cells in a microchannel would fit both in Cells and in Fluids; uploading into both categories is not encouraged, as we prefer that you make the effort of interpreting which is the most important “subject” of the picture, the cells or the microchannel). In general, most photographs will be taken using microscopes, but a snapshot of a microdevice, for example, is also allowed under the above definition. Several examples (from my own lab) have been posted already that can be used as guidelines. Every submission must be accompanied by a Name/Lab, an Institution/Department, and a brief explanation of what is seen in the photograph (this is also a good place to insert references to a relevant publication or to a website). The addresses and other details will not be verified, but if any of the required fields is left blank, the image will be placed in the Quarantine section until the submission is corrected.

I will be running this site on behalf of Lab on a Chip as Lab on a Chip Art Editor, so watch this space and the website for details of competitions that we will host in association with this website.

Happy uploading!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/labonachip/

Albert Folch

Lab on a Chip Art Editor

University of Washington

USA

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