A "data art" piece I made as a submission to the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. The issue was themed on "Addiction" and I wanted to respond with a piece that incorporated the science of addiction in some way.
Process
1) In the NIH History of Medicine archives, I found two images under the heading "Two PET scans taken from a former opioid addict under the influence of morphine".
2) From the NCBI database, I took the amino acid sequence of the protein Delta-FosB, a protein that's heavily involved in governing addictive behavior.
3) I grabbed a modern image of a PET scan from Wikimedia Commons and sampled the colors from it using Ross Godwin's awesome web tool Palette Knife.
3) I then assigned one of the colors to each amino acid and then computationally recreated the protein's alpha structure as a series of colored bands in Processing:
4) Finally, using Photoshop, I put the colours and the brain images together. I think I succeeded in depicting an "addicted", that has literally nothing else on its mind than addiction.
