Continental Divide

Human dispersal, read as rock: five continental ancestries stacked as flowing sedimentary strata across the genome, each band swelling where that population's DNA pulls away from the rest.

Every human population carries a slightly different pattern of DNA, shaped by where its ancestors lived and how they moved. This piece maps five continental ancestries, African, European, East Asian, South Asian, and Admixed American, along the full length of the genome, marking the places where each population's sequence pulls away from the others. Those places are the genomic fingerprint of human dispersal, the record of tens of thousands of years of migration written into the chromosomes.

The twenty-two autosomes are joined head to tail into one continuous axis running the width of the sheet, with a hairline break at each chromosome boundary. At every position the five ancestries are stacked as flowing bands whose thickness is that population's share of the local sequence, riding a drifting baseline so the whole silhouette undulates like layered rock. Where an ancestry swells, the strata bulge; where it thins, they settle.

Read left to right, the piece is a cross-section of the genome as sediment: five populations laid down in bands, their divergence felt as the rise and fall of the strata rather than named in a chart.

Provenance

Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) genome stratifications, continental ancestry (GRCh38)
https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/genome-bottle
Genome in a Bottle Consortium / National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Reference genome GRCh38 from the Genome Reference Consortium.

Materials

Archival giclée print on fine-art paper, a faithful digital reproduction of a pen-plotted work. Each print ships with a signed data-provenance insert card.

Included

• One archival giclée print (unframed)
• Signed data-provenance insert card
• Care instructions

Studio

Genetics of Design is a data art studio that uses pen plotting as its medium. Each piece begins with a public record, whether road networks, genomes, star catalogs, or species data, translated through custom code into composition, density, and line, and published alongside the provenance of the data it came from.