Combining methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water in the presence of an intermittent electrical discharge, his miniature world yielded amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. We have re-imagined his apparatus as a functional art installation to consider worlds Miller could not. In this version, we test whether recreating the primordial sea along with the primordial atmosphere will yield not only amino acids, but nucleic acids, too – the building blocks of genetic information and sources of cellular energy.
