Bacteria

We visited the Natural History museum in Oxford to see the “Bacterial world” exhibition. The thing that I liked most about this exhibition was it was a mix between science and art with loads of graphic/photography and animation. I also liked the fact that it focused on good bacteria rather then disease spreading bacteria which I would find interesting to look into further. 

Throughout the exhibition there were photographs of bacteria which I really liked because they were very colourful and they look like watercolour paintings almost.

For my project I could use these photographs and do loads of different things such as watercolour, make some prints, even photography somehow. There was also a slideshow with characteristics of bacteria and how they move which included words like speed/corkscrew/spiral/ball/branch which I could use to create a piece of work.

I started looking at other artists who use bacteria and came across Seung Hwan who takes portraits of people and leaves them in live bacteria, he described the process as “As the microbes consume light-sensitive chemical over the course of months or years, the silver halides destabilize, obfuscating the legibility of foreground, background, and scale.”   

I really love how Hwan has taken the photographs and warped them into something unrecognisable and the colours that have come out are incredible. Also the marks that are made are really interesting and it could be fun trying to recreate a similar thing with my own photographs or find other ways to warp my images. 

I also like the work of Erno Raitanen who creates Bacteriograms which he created with his own mouth bacteria. “Essentially, the process to getting such mystical results is the same technique labs use to cultivate bacteria in petri dishes, except minus the petri dish and add film. Rather than using agar as my growth medium, I am using the film gelatin. As the bacteria grow, it consumes the color layers and creates random patterns and colors on blank negatives. After the process has run its course, I just wash all the cultures off from the negatives and print them in darkroom.”

I want to use this and experiment in the darkroom to create interesting prints like Raitanens, I also want to try manipulating the roll of film before developing them to see what happens and to see if I can use that to show how bacteria spreads and focus on how bacteria can look incredible and also to draw attention to the science side by bringing people in with an incredible image like those above. 

words that come to mind-colour, zoomed in, enlarged,bio luminescence, marks, movement (long exposure), Petri dishes, dots, scratches, darkroom process manipulated, coil, branch (ink spreading?), prints, inverted, collage, texture, destroy, disrupt, warp/mutate,living