My Pigments.

01 / AGROINOCULATION

The science behind the art

The visual work starts with a standard plant virology method. Agrobacterium tumefaciens carries DNA constructs into leaf cells. Those constructs can transiently express a fluorescent marker or launch an infectious clone, so the plant itself becomes the place where the viral program and the image are produced.

In the Sociovirology Lab practice, Nicotiana benthamiana is used because it is a highly permissive model for plant-virus work. The plants are agroinoculated with TuMV-derived constructs and then observed in visible light and under UV, where GFP and chlorophyll signals expose patterns that are almost invisible by eye.

02 / TuMV CONSTRUCTS

Viral constructs as colors

The core Sociovirology set has one GFP agroinfiltration control, two TuMV infectious constructs and their mixed inoculation. In the lab notebook, these are treatments for studying growth, defense, RNA silencing and viral accumulation. In the gallery, they become a palette because each condition changes the plant and the fluorescent readout in a different way.

• GFP / Agrobacterium control. A non-viral fluorescent control used to account for the agroinfiltration procedure itself.
• TuMV 6K2-GFP. A Turnip Mosaic Virus construct with an extra copy of the membrane-associated 6K2 protein fused to GFP, useful for visualizing virus-induced replication vesicles.
• TuMV ΔHCPro expressing free GFP. A construct where the viral silencing suppressor HCPro is removed and replaced by a cleavable free GFP signal, exposing how a major counter-defense protein changes infection.
• 6K2 × ΔHCPro mixed infection. A combined treatment where the question shifts from single-strain effects to how viral variants may interact inside the same biological system.

03 / BASIC PALETTE

The basic viral palette

The palette begins with two biological lights. GFP gives a green signal where the reporter is expressed; chlorophyll can return a red autofluorescent signal under UV. Together with plant symptoms and leaf architecture, those signals define the basic BioArt color space.

The Nicotiana benthamiana 16c line adds another layer to the story. It carries a GFP transgene driven by the Cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter and has been widely used to visualize RNA silencing. In this work, the same molecular visibility becomes a material for pieces such as The Hidden Gaze.

04 / MIXING PIGMENTS

Mixing pigments, reading cooperation

Mixing the pigments adds a layer of diversity. In a single-construct view, the image can look like a competition between treatments: which viral variant dominates, which symptom is strongest, which fluorescence is most intense. In mixed material, another possibility appears: viral variants can interact, complement each other or reshape the host environment together.

That is the connection with the Sociovirology question. The mixed 6K2 and ΔHCPro treatment asks which growth and infection effects prevail when viral functions meet in the same plant. As BioArt, the same idea becomes a visual question about cooperation, overlap and emergent color.