Can we create artworks with microfluidic chips?

A creative art-residency in a microfabrication lab.

Written by Julien Ridouard, 2023.

“Come closer, and look. It is a heart on a transparent glass slide. The little and invisible cardiac cells are beating slowly, using nutriments coming from this thin tube. We call it a heart-on-chip. It reproduces the simple functions of your heart.

• Is it happy? Could it feel emotions like us? asked the little girl near the experimental lab, looking through a protective glass. 

• No, it’s not like our heart. responded the scientist who created this little heart.

• But, could it be sad? I don’t want it to be sad. Can I hug it? […]”

This fictive situation is the starting point of the art residency initiated a few months ago by the artist Julien Ridouard and the company Elveflow. A strange collaboration: an artist in the microfabrication lab! 

The idea of the residency is to interrogate our own emotion and empathy with the microfluidic technologies linked to health, medicine and specifically organs-on-chips. 

For this goal, the artist started to learn how microfluidic chips are made, helped with the team in the microfabrication lab. He developed specific pigments to be permanently fixed into the microfluidic chip and new possibilities happened: Art-On-Chip. Could we imagine a new way to create artworks with microfluidics? 

Art, Science and Technology partnerships are not new. It developed with the emerging electronics field and is more and more linked to all science and technology fields. It is a way to think about our technologies and create a dialogue with society. 

The outcome of this residency will be presented gradually on Elveflow and Julien Ridouard’s social media. It’s a new approach in the art-science field to be more in contact with innovative startups. A new way to build a better society with artists taking part in the innovation process. 

Julien Ridouard

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