“Protein folding” is a process by which protein chains are voluntarily folded into sustainable three-dimensional structures. The AlphaFold software for precisely calculating protein structures based on amino acid sequence data, utilizing AI trained through machine learning, received a great deal of attention in the field of bioinformatics when it was introduced in 2018. An artist who has been translating self-organizing processes and patterns into paintings and drawings, Murayama noticed the similarities between protein folding and his own “Woven Paintings” in terms of structural evolution processes, and created a series of works titled “Painting Folding,” which he unveiled in 2020. For a further developed version of these works for this particular exhibition, Murayama calculated Amino acid sequences from 3-D data of his own woven paintings, which he then fed into the AlphaFold software for predictive calculations, to ultimately design new protein structures that may exist naturally on a microscopic scale, based on paintings made by human hands.

Cooperation: MORIWAKI Yoshitaka (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo)