New Zealand designer’s synthetic 3D-printed Venus flytrap even creepier than the real thing
Wellington designer creates ‘Chromatose’ saying technology allows us to write DNA and mutate it
By Jamie Morton
As if Venus flytraps weren’t strange enough, a Wellington designer has used 3D printing and other innovative approaches to create his own biomimetic version of the famous subtropical plant.
Chromatose, as Mark Wilson has called it, is a synthetic organism that responds to touch, opening and closing its buds just like its carnivorous inspiration.
“Due to recent advances in digital fabrication technologies, with code and algorithms, we have the ability to write or script a digital DNA of anything and everything,” Wilson said.
“This can then be modified and mutated as if it were actual DNA, dictating the organism’s qualities and characteristics.
“These opportunities offer us the unprecedented ability to fully exercise and implement biomimetics, with which we are able to simulate, reproduce, and even enhance organisms found in nature.’‘