Artist statement
Press on your closed eyes and forms appear (phosphenes). For me, on waking, it is an uneven and shifting ring of light. I have always found it pretty, and for years I have wanted to bring it to life. Here it is.
I usually work with charcoal and wax, materials with weight and body. I trained as a computational biologist, studying how cells signal to one another, and now AI is my daily material. I have created a health company with it.
This ring builds on my professional work, made from equations and code written with AI. It looks like the phosphenes I see, but unlike my usual materials, it gives you nothing to reach for.
It is made to be held. Scan the code and interact on your phone. Many people can hold it at once. What can you bring to a world constructed by AI?
About
Edgar Basto Piamonte is an artist and computational biologist based in Melbourne. He holds a PhD in computational biology from the University of Western Australia, where he worked in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics on how cells signal to one another. From 2021 to 2023 he was co-director of DaRawnature, a gallery in Perth, and worked mainly in charcoal. He is completing a Graduate Certificate in Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where his practice has moved into sculpture: wax, wire and light. He also builds software with AI, most recently the app Ask Baseline, and treats it as one more material, a way of bringing separate skills into a single piece of work.
Decipher: a computational pipeline for context-specific cell-signalling analysis from single-cell profiles — Cell Communication and Signaling, 2026.