Symbiotic LabsColophon

Plates

Cyanotype impressions: where our colours, and the organism on our home page, come from.

You found this page by looking closely, which is how most of what follows was found too.

Plate IBerlin, around 1706

Prussian blue an accident

A colour maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach was trying to make a red. The potash he used was tainted with animal matter, and the batch came out a deep blue instead: the first modern synthetic pigment. It travelled as far as Japan, where Hokusai printed The Great Wave with it.

Plate IIEngland, 1842

Cyanotype sunlight and iron

Sir John Herschel found that paper washed with two iron salts turns Prussian blue wherever sunlight reaches it. Anything laid on the paper stays pale. Rinsing in plain water fixes the image.

Plate IIIEngland, 1843

British algae the first photobook

Anna Atkins laid seaweed straight onto cyanotype paper and published the prints as Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, often called the first book illustrated with photographs. Living things, recorded in blue.

Plate IV1870s onward

Blueprint plans in reverse

The same chemistry copied architects' and engineers' drawings for about a century: white lines on blue. "Blueprint" still means the plan for something not yet built.

Plate VJapan, 2000 and 2010

Physarum polycephalum no brain, good maps

A yellow slime mould with no nervous system found the shortest path through a maze. Given oat flakes placed like the cities around Tokyo, it grew a network much like the region's railways. The simulation on our home page runs tens of thousands of agents that follow the same rules.

Plate VIGermany, 1877

Symbiosis a word for lichens

Albert Bernhard Frank coined the term for lichens: a fungus and an alga living as one. Anton de Bary widened it two years later to different organisms living together.

Plate VIIToday

Antidote the blue that binds

Taken as a medicine, Prussian blue binds radioactive caesium and thallium in the gut so the body can clear them. It is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

People and agents, drawn as a blueprint: a living system, recorded in Prussian blue.

Our pages are Prussian blue #1D4FA8 on cream, and at night the print itself, cream on blue. Type cyanotype on the home page to expose it. Plate VIII is still growing.

Sources

  1. Prussian blue, including its use as a medicine.
  2. Cyanotype and Blueprint.
  3. Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae (1843).
  4. Nakagaki, Yamada & Tóth, Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism, Nature 407 (2000), doi:10.1038/35035159.
  5. Tero et al., Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design, Science 327 (2010), doi:10.1126/science.1177894.
  6. Symbiosis: Frank (1877) and de Bary (1879).
  7. WHO Model List of Essential Medicines: potassium ferric hexacyanoferrate.