As part of a Fellowship at Terreform One, a nonprofit architecture and urban design group based in the New Lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I was tasked with proposing and rapidly prototyping museum interactives for the as-yet-unfinished Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium. One of my protypes was an immersive interface for 3D computed tomography (CT) scan data of painted lady butterflies, the goal of which was to give museum-goers a sense of agency to engage with a process of scientific discovery.
As part of building this prototype, I had the lovely opportunity to learn to capture CT scans using a Micro-CT scanner. The process looked roughly like this:
- take recently deceased (natural causes) painted lady butterflies,
- mount them on (x-ray transparent) styrofoam blocks,
- scan specimens in a micro-CT scanner,
- reconstruct scans digitally,
