Tag: microbial art

Today in microbes and art: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu

I could spend a lot of time on this website: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu.  I found out about it from a Tweet from Dumutriu:

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And it is right up my alley (being interested in the interface between art and science, especially in relation to microbes).  Lots of interesting sections here including:

Sequence
Super-organism
Don’t Try This At Home
[micro]biologies: the bacterial sublime

Modernising Medical Microbiology

And many more.  I do not know much about the artist but really glad she pointed me to this.  

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Microbe-themed art of the month: Seung-Hwan Oh portraits w/ mold

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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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Are you a knitter? Interested in microbes? Well this is for you: knit a microbe for a Glasgow school

This is the first time in my life I wish I knew how to knit; Calling all knitters: we need germs! – The Glasgow South and Eastwood Extra.  Yup – there is an attempt to break a world record for the most hands washed in a single session – and the place doing this is calling for help in making knitted microbes.  They have even posted patterns for making knitted microbes including ones for Penicillium, Common cold, Swine Flu, TB, Cholera, and more.

From Pinterest.

And what could be better than this?  They have a Pinterest Board with pics of the ones they have received:

See below

Follow Glasgow CityOfScience’s board Knitted Microbes on Pinterest.//assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Nice microbe-art-education example from Cornell

Cool story from the Cornell News: Bacteria research inspires students’ creative artwork | Cornell Chronicle.  It discusses a course taught by Prof. Greg Page “Introduction to Print Media”.  As part of the course the students got a guest lecture from none other than Ruth Ley – who is a faculty member at Cornell and who does some of the most interesting microbiome work around.

Anyway – this guest lecture inspired some of the students in the course to make some microbial themed art works.  And the ones shown on the Cornell News site are wonderful.  Consider this one:

Image obtained from Cornell News.

“Tribal Warfare,” lithography and screen print.by Rebecca Potash.
I also love the lines from Ruth Ley on why she got involved in this and what she plans to do in the future.  Consider this:

“As part of my teaching at Cornell, I plan on training science students in the interpretation of concepts in visual arts and eventually even have them learn some basic skills for producing images or video,” Ley said. “I also want to bring science to fine arts students, and my collaboration with Professor Page was my first attempt at this.”

Nice.  Got to try and do more things like this myself … 
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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From io9: Even more microbial art "Bacterial communities swarm into gorgeous works of art"

Another quick post.  There is an article in io9 about art from Eshel Ben-Jacob and his beloved Paenibacillus: Bacterial communities swarm into gorgeous works of art.  Some pretty cool images there of these organisms grown on plates and then artistically enhanced.

Definitely worth a look.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Another week – another microbial art project

The use of microbes in art projects continues to spread.  Here is another example: Bioluminescent art: Beautiful bacteria glow in the dark | MNN – Mother Nature Network.  The article discusses the Bioglyphs project which involved “some microbiology training, imagination, and a lot of petri dishes.”  Definitely worth checking out …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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The human microbiome never looked so good

Another week, another microbial art project — this one is from Erno-Erik Raitanen who is creating self portrait “bacteriograms” using his own microbiome.  See stories at Petapixel: Photographer Erno-Erik Raitanen Creates ‘Self-Portraits’ Using His Own Bacteria and CoCreate: INSTAGERMS: SEE A PHOTOGRAPHER’S STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL PORTRAITS OF HIS OWN BACTERIA. 

From CoCreate

“The process itself is pretty much a replication of the processes used in microbiology to cultivate bacteria on agar in petri dishes,” Raitenan says. “Instead of agar, I just used the film gelatin as my growth medium. As the bacteria grows, it consumes the gelatin layers that together make all the colors in a color photograph, and creates all these random patterns and colors.”

The human microbiome never looked so good …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Cool bacterial art makes gizmodo #MicrobialArt

Quick post – cool bacterial art project has made Gizmodo.  See Bacteria Never Looked So Beautiful.  From an Art of Science competition at Princeton.  I wonder what Artologica – my favorite microbial art artist – thinks of this.

For some other posts about microbial art see:

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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My new microbial art for my office: salt evaporation ponds and goethermal spring stamps

Thanks to Russell Neches in my lab I found out about the Earthscapes series stamps from the US Postal Service.  Two of the stamps feature microbial ecosystems and I ordered framed, enlarged versions of the photos for my office.

They are available at the links below:

Go microbes.
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Microbial art for the holidays from the J. Craig Venter Institute

Saw this Tweet on Christmas Day

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js It was from Russell Neches, a PhD student in my lab.

Went to the site “La boite verte” and checked out their post “Des champignons de Noël.”

Discovered it was based on a post from none other than the J. Craig Venter Institute’s blog: Holiday Art” JCVI Blog. The post is by Stephanie Mounaud from December 2010 and it has three wonderful fungal art forms. I am embedding the images of them below:

Fungal Christmas Tree

Fungal Snowman

Fungal Christmas Tree2

Enjoy.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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