OK this is pretty cool (from a microbe-art-science point of view): An Artist Who Paints Portraits With Mold | WIRED. Seung-Hwan Oh “had to set up a micro-fungus farm in his studio” and he puts film in a warm wet environment (note to self – there could be a new human microbiome aspect of this project depending on what warm wet environment is chosen) and sometimes seeds the system with some mold. And then he lets nature do its work.
See more about his Impermanence works here. (Really – check out the works – they are wild).
At that site the work is described in the following way:
The visual result of the symbiosis between film matter and organic matter is the conceptual origin of this body of work. The process involves the cultivation of emulsion consuming microbes on a visual environment created through portraits and a physical environment composed of developed film immersed in water. 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. This creates an aesthetic of entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral, and results in complete disintegration of the film so that it can only be delicately digitized before it is consumed.
Also see his Tumbl page where one can find many other images like this one:
Hat tip to Kate Scow for posting about this on Facebook.
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