Forking Paths: Depicting Mitosis Through Process-Based Diagramming

ABSTRACT Artist researcher Anderson shares a series of drawings developed through the experimental interdisciplinary project ‘Representing Biology as Process’. In this project Anderson and collaborators have developed a new approach to depict natural history through ‘relational process drawing’. With focus on the dynamic patterns of the processes of life and guided by principles of choreography, they draw together relationships between energy, time, movement, and environment at the molecular, cellular, and organismal scale. The drawings discussed are a kind of hybrid representation – composed to varying degrees of visual, numerical and linguistic expressions – that both provide new insights and generate new questions for future research.