About half of the human genome is repeated sequence, and a large share of that came from a single family of mobile elements called LINE-1. A LINE-1 element is a stretch of DNA that copies itself and pastes the copy back into the chromosomes. It has been doing this for tens of millions of years. Its youngest lineage, L1H, is specific to humans and is still active today.
Most copies arrive broken. The copying machinery tends to fall off before the job is finished, so the genome is littered with truncated stubs. That failure is what makes the data legible: a copy's length records its history. Short fragments are ancient, degraded relics. The rare full-length elements, near six thousand base pairs, are recent arrivals that landed with their machinery intact.
Mobile Genome draws this record. The data is the set of human-specific LINE-1 elements longer than 500 base pairs in the GRCh38 reference genome: 902 elements across the 22 autosomes, from the Genome in a Bottle genome stratifications published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The stratification files exist so that scientists can benchmark variant calls in difficult regions of the genome. Mobile-element insertions are one of those difficult regions, which is why someone catalogued every one of them with coordinates precise enough to draw.
The composition joins the 22 autosomes head to tail into a single closed ring. Every element sits at its true genomic position along that ring and is drawn as one radial spoke, reaching outward in proportion to its length. The young, intact copies flare out of the crowd. The old stubs stay close to the ring. Dense pickets mark where mobile DNA piled up. Sparse arcs mark where it did not.
Nothing else is drawn. There is no decoration layer, no invented texture. Where the print looks busy, the genome is busy. Where it looks quiet, the genome is quiet.
The piece is square because the data is a ring, and it is offered at 16 × 16 inches, its native proportion. It is printed as a giclée on archival paper from the studio's render. Mobile Genome was shown at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Art & Science Festival in July 2026.
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Data: Genome in a Bottle Consortium / NIST, GRCh38 genome stratifications, L1H elements over 500 base pairs. Reference genome from the Genome Reference Consortium.
