A few artists are already interested in using CRISPR to explore the border between biology and art, but scientists have so far been able to develop the artistic potential of genetics more elegantly and surprisingly. In this Nature paper, George Church’s group recalls the beginnings of cinematography by introducing old images of a galloping horse into a dividing bacterial population. Harvard researchers have chosen a historical sequence captured by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1887, using a code based on nucleotide triplets to specify pixels tonalities. The exploit is technically astonishing, and it is not just a divertissement. It represents a proof of concept that one day perhaps we will be able to build cellular recorders, that can collect and store what is going on inside cells. But enthusiasm for futuristic research applications is joined here by an ancient sense of wonder. That galloping horse turns upside down proportion and hierarchy: it is the great in the small, the elegant in the primitive, the mammal in bacteria. Science has become magic. Art indeed.