Think long and hard the next time you send a smiley face in a text message. Ever wonder how that smiley face got there? Sure, you pressed a few buttons. But how was it programmed to appear? Who programmed it? And once it’s programmed, what exactly happens in your eye that lets you see it?

You might not find the answers to these questions in this post, but here’s something to ponder: making smiley faces with our DNA! Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Paul W.K. Rothemund of Caltech built a bunch of smiley faces out of DNA base pairs. Hmmm, do we smell some art here? From his website:

“…I have developed a method of creating nanoscale shapes and patterns using DNA….[They] are actually giant DNA complexes imaged with an atomic force microscope. Each is about 100 nanometers across (1/1000th the width of a human hair), 2 nanometers thick, and each is comprised of about 14,000 DNA bases. 7000 of these DNA bases belong to a long single strand, a DNA molecule that just happens to be the genome of the virus M13. The other 7000 of these bases belong to about 250 shorter strands, each about 30 bases long. These short strands fold the long strand into the smiley face shape. I call the method “scaffolded DNA origami.”

Hip hip, hurray for MoMA on their recent exhibit, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” that runs through May 12.

Rothemund’s work (left) is but one of many that have been influenced, even created, by science. Also included in the exhibit is William M Shih’s Clonable DNA Octahedron, 2004 (above).

From the exhibition program statement:

“In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale….One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that science and art do, in many instances, coexist. Scientists are often artists in their approach to understanding their subjects, and artists are often scientists in their approach to physically and materially realizing their art (remember da Vinci?).

Go get your groove on at the MoMA (Friday nights are free), and afterward celebrate your newfound knowledge with a dirty martini next door at The Modern.