sarah roberts

a piece of my mind

2012-01-20T13:17:00.000Z

This comes from a drawing of an actual slice of an actual brain of an actual person. The Brighton & Sussex Medical School Art Society kindly let me sit in on one of their Dissection Room Drawing sessions. Thank you BMSMSAS, thank you Actual Person, thank you Physarum polycephalum.

I like to think that there is a reciprocation for the Actual Person, that somehow all the jolly colours get transmitted through the past to him as nice thoughts, which of course is bollocks but I encourage that sort of thing in myself as I believe it to be a useful cultural way of remembering to respect the things I interact with.

Dark Matters

2012-01-09T07:20:00.000Z

Please come to my show! Pictures made to be seen in the dark. Things you can't see, don't often see, things you might not want to look at all of the time: monsters, memories, movement, myths, moths, maths, molecules, microbes, mites, Maggie. With stunning collaborations by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.

It's at Gallery 3, Art’s Complex, St.Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh, EH7 6AE. Map here , if you're coming by car there's a confusing car park:

Booze 'n' schmooze night is 3rd February, 6.00 - 9.30 pm, and the exhibition is open every day after that until the12th February from 10.00 am - 6.00 pm.

Slime mould on drugs

2012-01-04T19:28:00.000Z

See this is what happens if you don't get your plasmodium to come off your painting in time. Sadly I think it is too late for this little big cell, I have been doing some intensive care but it seems to be thoroughly contaminated.

Luckily I got some of it to form a sclerotium in earlier, happier days. And now I have a persuasive agent to help it decide to come to the safety of the clean things: this slime mould, it seems, will do tricks for tranx. Valerian root - lovely, boiled with the porridge, or just on its own as a snack. (Valium for micro-organisms, or humans, but the cat uses it as an upper and goes off in a drug-crazed frenzy to wage war on cardboard boxes. Slime mould doesn't seem to care for catnip though.) Thanks to Andy Adamatzky, font of Physarum Wisdom for that hot tip, in this paper.

doing thinking with slime mould

2011-12-28T14:26:00.000Z

Here's what Prof. Andy Adamatzky has to say about Physarum plasmodium doing thinking:
"Plasmodium’s foraging behaviour can be interpreted as computation, when data are represented by spatial configurations of attractants and repellents, and results by structures of protoplasmic network . Plasmodium satisfactory solves many computational problems with natural parallelism, including shortest path, implementation of storage modification machines, Voronoi diagram, logical computing, process algebra... "
Read all about it in his nice paper "Slime mould computes planar shapes" here.

Well that's very nice for me that somebody has gone to the trouble of doing sums to prove that the thinking of bodies can indeed be thought of as thinking, that Ms. No-brain, No-symbolic language here is doing the math all over my pictures. Maths even.

(Nice for me to admire too is the confidence and certainty of the phrase "natural parallelism", I'll have that for my funding applications and talking to fools in general as a replacement for "er, sort of analogous" and "well, let's say 'resonant with'" and "um, a bit like" etc. which although possibly the truest ways I could talk about my own work makes it sound like my art is all Factless Waffle. Which indeed it is, and rightly so, and all the better for it. No don't worry, I won't do that, tell lies just to sound big or squeeze a bit of cash (Investment!) out of Creative Whatever.

Look! A naturally parallel spinal cord!)

Anyway more to the point for me is the slime mould's responsiveness to things in general. This is a much more complex adventure for the Physarum than the smooth laboratory agar. All the different patterns it is creating here are responses to changes in humidity, available nutrition, light, the textitily of the substrate and other things I don't know about, all at the same time. I'm not at all sure how much it notices or cares about the grease and dirt left by my hands and the ubiquitous cats paws, sneezes, coffee spills and so on. I don't know if it is happy enough on the paintings because when I soak them after they are painted they get a thin coating of the size that the paper is impregnated with.

I don't know if it has any kind of memory. Or even what I think I might mean by memory here.

I have no idea why it seems to be happy to forage endlessly across paintings carrying a burden of fluorescent powder with only the occaisional break with a clean oat flake on a bit of damp kitchen roll. But then I can't say I understand why I do, either.

Imaging the brain using old technologies

2011-12-27T22:08:00.000Z

The mouldy painting from the last post. Anyway it still works fine and it's going in the show. Maybe put this one behind glass though, health & safety and all that...

When good paintings go bad

2011-12-27T18:46:00.000Z

Another decompositionist work. Unintentional this time. Well it was only a matter of time before this happened.
The pretty greenish white fungus seems to have come on to the painting with the black paint, which I must have left sitting around for a bit too long. Then had a nice incubation as the painting lolled about damply waiting for the slime mould to finish with it. Dunno about the brown sugary-looking one but the white starry fungus belongs to the slime mould alone.

If anyone could identify any of these I would be very happy.

biopogonomy

2011-11-29T09:19:00.001Z

Physarum polycephalum as facial fungus.

The hard part of collaborating with slime mould is getting it to come off the picture again. You can not make a slime mould do something it doesn't want to. It may choose to sporulate, sclerotinise, ramble about all over the place on the off-chance it finds some more dinner or just give up and die altogether, and the best I can do is hope to create the conditions in which it might decide it is in its own best interests to do the thing I want. Interesting that it hangs around on the paintings so long, given that it will escape exuberantly from every other substrate I have given it at the drop of a hat.

extended cognition

2011-11-26T01:37:00.001Z

There now, Mrs. Embodiment Personified of the Many 'Eds to the rescue. That picture above is a big one, if you want to ramble around in it.

Mrs 'Ed

2011-11-25T02:40:00.001Z

Here's Mrs. Classical Epistemology 'Ed. I thought about filling her head with flowers and bunnies and talking deer and horoscopes and crystals and healing and feelings and alternatives but I'm not in the business of reinforcing gender stereotypes and besides what annoys me about those pals of mine who are into all that shit is not that shit in itself – which is all fine by me if it has powers of explanation or narrative delight– but the fact that they are often unreconstructed classical-epistemology-'eds themselves and all that shit is just a decoration over a tired old same old same old story of what we are and what we do and what we think we are doing.

"Oh stop grumbling and give her a bath," I can hear you saying.

Ok.

As-yet unravished bride of etc. etc.

2011-11-22T23:31:00.001Z

Meet Mr. Classical Epistemology 'Ed. Now drying out for the night before his meeting with Mrs. Embodiment Personified of the Many 'Eds. Do you like his unilinear brain-maze? The black lines follow the lines I made tracing round the actual head of my beloved companion-human. Very uncomfortable. But I want the process of making to be all about bodily interactions. And nice, anyway, when it's finished, that we were all there, on that paper, at those times.

I have to soak the paintings in water so that the slime mould will be happy on them. Then they go and sit damply in a big plastic tub. There is a risk that Mr. 'Ed might just float off. Or go off.

Tomorrow I do my own 'ed. I'd like to do one with two people looking at each other but the under-bed storage box ain't big enough and I got a very funny look when I went into Poundland and asked them for a tupperware big enough for two human heads.

there's no place like chrome

2011-11-19T01:04:00.001Z

Well my little study has turned out inconclusive, pretty much as expected. The only really interesting thing going on here is that it is the chrome green my many-headed friend has chosen to pick up and run around with. That was the Serratia marcescens' favourite too, I wonder what the fascination is with Cr₂O₃ for the microorganisms...

Empiricalish, experimentish

2011-11-18T00:29:00.001Z

What do you call that? Doing a bit of look-and-seeing but not bothering about being systematic about it. I'm asking the slime mould if they have any particular preferences for watercolour paints.

wonderful spam

2011-11-14T09:28:00.001Z

How I love the interwebs. Here is the wonderful spam comment I got today from who knows who. And who knows what it might mean, except for "Hello, I want your money!"

"Hello,

Here you provide some information about Immunoglobulin. These provides a complete home care nursing treatments of services. It is a nephropathy genetic testing not to mention benefits of organic food has been harped upon by many nutritionists... "

thinking again...

2011-11-07T00:57:00.000Z

Might as well stay here...

2011-11-06T10:03:00.000Z

So once it made a bit of a home for itself on the circles it just wouldn't get off. (I tried tempting it with oat flakes and changes of humidity but it wasn't having any of it. ) No idea what the whitish stuff on those sporulations is, doesn't look too healthy from here, will have to have a good look at that later.

It seems that what is going on is that the slime mould is laying down a layer of sacrificial self upon which it is then able to form a self-regulating microclimate within itself. That might be bollocks, I'll have to have a good look at that later.

What is fascinating me here is the question of "where/how are we social and where/how are we individual?" Of course I am looking at the slime mould's being-in-the-world as analogous or similar or illustrative or something- of human being-in-the-world.

I hope it is clear that I am not thinking of this work as "Putting stuff somewhere and seeing how it react to other stuff". I am thinking of it as "Seeing how we all interact."

As I do this work with this marvellous organism I am claiming and feeling a strong kinship with it. (I care about it, want it to be happy, particularly given that I have hijacked it from its 'normal' functioning.) "Where do we stop being each other, Slimey?" I am asking, a question I also ask of my cat, my partner, my freinds, Heidegger and all that lot, the people I do my cleaning job with, the people I do my cleaning job for, the materials I use, the vehicles I travel in, the doughnuts I eat, all the individuals and all the institutions in all the world, the murderers, rapists, bankers, Margaret Thatcher...

Actually I am not all that keen on doughnuts, so there is not much of an overlap on the Roberts-Doughnut Identity Venn Diagram. As for the rest of it, it all has to be examined on a case-by-case basis, and constantly re-examined as new information comes to light.

Slime mould, with paint

2011-11-04T09:27:00.000Z

Some fascinating responses to the painted substrate...

I have used some commercially manufactured watercolour paint, and the more opaque stuff is Turner Acryl-gouache.

So there is some kind of quorum-sensing activity going on as the Physarum polycephalum moves from the watercolour, which it doesn't seem to care much about either way, to the acryl gouache, which it seems a little unsure about. Bunching up and then launching itself onto those areas.

It seems to have a preference for the green,over the greys and I couldn't say why. The acryl-gouache is a very sophisticated sort of paint, has an amazing similarity of handling qualities across the whole range of colours, which must mean an attention to the specific chemistry of the medium for each individual paint colour. So what appears similar to me as is going to be experienced very differently by Mr. Chemotaxis-heads here.

There

thinking...

2011-11-04T00:41:00.000Z

mind is in it all

2011-10-30T18:28:00.001Z

So, at what point can we say that chemotaxis becomes thinking?

working from home

2011-10-26T11:27:00.000Z

I'm moving studio this week, working from home in the meantime. How is a person supposed to do their work in a place where there is also a large orange cat hell-bent on doing his conviviality work? In a minute he gets up and starts playing Twister with the big circles. He is very good at his job.

making paintings with bacteria

2011-10-25T13:20:00.000Z

In Simon's lab at the University of Surrey

Before and after pictures of these two plates of collaborative paintings between myself, Serratia marcescens and Simon Park.

So the paint medium is this wonderfully contaminated but nevertheless fragrant and delicious mixture of gum arabic, honey and glycerin in water. The pigments I'm using are:

A: ultramarine (Na_8-10Al₆Si₆O₂₄S_2-4 , a.k.a. Reckitt's or dolly blue)

B: phthalo blue (C₃₂H₁₆N₈Cu , humanity's contribution to the porphyrins)

C: diarylide yellow (you can buy 100 tons per month from this company)

D: phthalo green (like the blue, only the phthalocyanine is chlorinated)

E: cobalt violet (Co₃(PO₄)₂ )

F: zinc white ( Philosophers' Wool to you)

G: chrome green (Cr₂O₃)

H: lamp black (we scrape it off the gas lamps on our way to t'mill in the mornings and keep it in our flat caps.)

Because of the interactions with those opportunistic chaps in the paint this is a total flop as regards answering any of my paint-bacteria questions, and so much the better, sez I, as it means I can use some of my favourite phrases about it such as "inconclusive" and "poorly understood" and will therefore just have to do some more of this very fun and nice work.

boundary issues

2011-10-25T11:48:00.000Z

I've overstepped my ethical boundaries here with this incarceration of M. luteus inside a fortress of cobalt violet, chrome green and zinc white, further hampered with a no-go area on the left there made by my own tears, to which it is sensitive, poor wee things.

Shame on me! I should be crying, tears of shame, not that crocodile tear that was so hard to squeeze out on that suny afternoon in a happy lab. Thing is, I think I knew that this bacteria would not like it in there and furthermore I was doing it purely for my own pleasure and voyeurism without regard for it and without giving it any way out.

It's the just-for-a-laff aspect I don't like. I'm quite happy to feed things to other things, do farming, interrogate the lives of anyone, and if it is a case of doing bad things to answer actual questions we can talk about that on a case by case basis. Hunting is fine by me too, as long as you are going to eat what you kill. (In fact my own death of choice would be to be knocked off my bicycle and eaten by a tiger, at the age of 121.) And I'll kill any amount of bacteria and other organisms simply because they I don't want them around, and not think too much about it. But this little vignette here is the opposite of what I want to do.

What I want to do is let things reveal themselves to me in the course of their activities. Or not reveal themselves, if that's the way things turn out. Preferably give them conditions they might enjoy. I'm pretty sure the Serratia are having a fine time of it, rampaging all over and doing their fabulous swarming and replicating and what-have-you. And I don't feel too bad about the other small colonies of Micrococcus that are gently swelling into placid globs of quorum-sensing activity in their little circles here. But this is a step too far, to leave a thing no choice but to sit glumly and wait for death, a small, sad, shit, truncated life, a condition we humans find too easy to impose on others and indeed ourselves. It is on a par with keeping hopelessly inbred dogs in handbags and keeping big cats in cages and making people have to work for Blue Arrow as far as I am concerned and I don't want to do it again. Bad Human! On your Rug!

More painting bacteria!

2011-10-24T21:22:00.000Z

Well I was going to wait and put these up on my website whenever I get round to making it but as I seem to have your attention right now thought you might like to see some more of the nice pictures made by Serratia marcescens, Simon Park and me. These are close-ups from two plates, in no particular order.

There are also some Micrococcus luteus and Micrococcus roseas in there, rather drowned out by ythe Serratia. And some other bacteria who hitched a ride in the paint, I don't know what the tiny pale colonies are but they probably came off me and found my gum arabic/honey/glycerin medium a delightful place to live.

Photos by Simon Park.

A mention in Nature!

2011-10-20T20:31:00.000Z

My dear Friend-in-Bacteria Simon Park got us a mention in Nature newsblog for the lovely work we have been doing with Serratia marcescens as co-collaborator. Ain't that grand! Here's Daniel Cressey's nice post.

Flikr pics of glow in the dark slime mould

2011-10-18T11:31:00.001Z

polly seffalum's photostream

Here's the lovely Physarum polycephalum after a big dinner of magic porridge, under a UV light.

shape shifter

2011-10-17T18:09:00.003Z

Here's the Oscar-nominated performance of Physarum polycephalum doing a bit of flagellated swarming. At least I hope that's what it is...

painting pictures of bloody trees

2011-10-15T17:24:00.000Z

WAKE UP ARTISTS YOU STUPID GITS from the wonderful Mark McGowan, The Artist Taxi Driver. I love this. Won't stop me from painting pictures of bloody trees.

I think, I am!

2011-10-12T20:44:00.001Z

Yet another head for the polycephalous Slimey. Good thing he doesn't have any trouble with his Cartesian Split.

This is me & the slime mould, being on the same page about thinking.

painting, with slime mould, later...

2011-10-12T08:35:00.001Z

painting, with slime mould, part two

2011-10-12T08:14:00.003Z


Day 3

Day two

painting, with slime mould, part one

2011-10-12T07:37:00.000Z

painting, with Physarum polycephalum, day one.

day two...

polly seffalum's photostream

2011-10-11T16:26:00.001Z

polly seffalum's photostream on Flickr.

here's Slimey's beautiful new sporangia, and my beautiful new Flikr account.

shortest distance

2011-10-06T16:38:00.000Z

So Slimey and I are in perfect agreement about the straight lines then. Seems to be unbothered by the ink, which is a good start.

My beautiful slime mould

2011-10-05T22:55:00.000Z


	My beloved Physarum polycephalum.

I'm only posting all these because I am so enamoured with the slime mould, there's no art or anything going on here. Yet. Heh heh.

Oh Carolina

2011-10-04T22:10:00.001Z

No, that's not my lunchbox, that's my lovely new slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Came in a box all the way from Carolina. Delightful.

ow ow immunoglobulin E

2011-09-27T17:39:00.000Z

So here's this poor geezer getting savagely attacked by proteins.

The hard thing here was, having got hold of that delicious celtic knotwork of the Der p protein, not to carry on in a similar vein to make a grand schematic of how the protein interacts with everything else, using similar kinds of information. (If you want to see someone do that, and do it very beautifully, look at the great David S. Goodsell's work.) But my brief is to make pictures of how I understand or might go about reaching an understanding, rather than what I understand or might be able to understand. If I take a line out of the messy confusion of Everything, I come to some conclusions, how do I then assimilate that back into my messy conception of Everything? I want to dig into the process of this, you see, rather than presenting a product.

And the problem is, not how you make pictures of stuff you do understand - that's just ordinary work, has a beginning middle and end and you know when you've done it - but how you make representations which give proper acknowledgement of what you don't fully understand or know about or feel you have a poor or incomplete grasp of. Which is where all the fun is.

Well hooray for the linguistic gymnastics of paint. Here, for instance, I can use these little fluorescent dots (activity) to suggest active sites on the molecule (activity) and the itchy experience of allergy (activity). And that's the sort of thing people get very easily, without even having to think they've thought about it.

cutting edge

2011-09-23T12:21:00.000Z

Torn-edge technology, as you can see. Was hoping to have all kinds of fancy electronic digital mediators for this kind of carry on by now but an unfavourable economic climate means that choices about capital investments still take place in Lidl's. (Shall I go for the broccoli today, or the milk?") I mean, it's not even proper tracing paper, it's greaseproof paper, and that, I can assure you, is no picnic.

Anyway it's probably a good thing to be thrown so heavily back upon the resources of the Body and to get the hands all sticky with imagined structures at this point, if what I'm wanting is response and narrative and filth and error and conclusion-jumping.

What I'm looking at here is this nice dust mite allergen.

dust mite, allergen, mast cell

2011-09-21T14:21:00.001Z

What do you reckon, do you think someone might feel they just have to buy this to put up in their living room because it matches their curtains?

sneeze sneeze dust mite

2011-09-18T23:37:00.000Z

Here we are then, a pretty confection of eosinophils and basophils and dead skin cells artfully rendered in the finest quality watercolours on archival paper for your viewing delight. Didn't ruin it, did I?

I'm working up to a picture of Everything in the world, starting with an allergic reaction to Mr. Dermatophagoides pteronyssimus and keeping him at the centre of it. Why start there? Well it's as good a place as any. That's the bright Idea for today, anyway, though the Plan is actually to go only as far as apoptosis. But what hope for a person with a gluttonous and undisciplined researching style who starts off looking at changes in cell morphology caused by reactions to cysteine and somehow ends up looking at fascinating instructional videos about two-handed Fair Isle knitting?

Hee hee dust mite

2011-09-17T00:42:00.000Z

There. That's my day's work. Isn't he lovely. Wanted a record of this for posteriority because I'm going to have to hide him now and that might ruin him altogether.

I must say I got fond of this gadgie the more I drew him. He performs a useful service in my life in dealing with my terrible incontinence of dead skin cells. Yes, I am allergic to dust mite faeces, but that is my problem, and down to having an immune system that thinks it is the military junta of a tin-pot dictatorship, and whose general performance is played out as 'bad cop, ineffectual cop' . And, when it gets bored of persecuting mildly infective agents it is prone to savage in-fighting and creating unnecessary factions which lead to the immobilisation of infrastructure and ends with tying up everything in red tape, leaving genuine antagonists free to slip through scot-free. (Sneeze a lot, inflame the mucous membranes, get a cold. Not the dust mite's fault!)

Above is under UV light, below the same under daylight. Hee hee.

Someone's been eating MY painting

2011-09-13T12:59:00.000Z

An update on those propogations. Well it's kinda working, room for refinement. Thing is, I've forgotten why I was doing this in particular, and what I thought I might do with them... if I ever knew in the first place? People who live with cats will recognise this as as a "losing your mouse behind the fridge" activity. And no bother at all, the important thing being to stare at the fridge itself for hours.

Buttons for Heaven's goonie

2011-09-09T00:57:00.000Z

Today's project was some friends for the lonely sun in the shape of emission spectra of sodium, mercury, lithium and hydrogen. (Clockwise from the one with the single yellow stripe.)

A bugger to paint, these; the fluorescent paint is the most unforgiving medium and the 1mm thick black lines are prone to wander if the breathing isn't absolutely focused. Internal police have been whinging all day:

"Why don't you just do it in photoshop or something? Take you an hour!"

"Well, um, compression of time into picture ... wanna leave gestural detritits... thingyness... by taking time I open up possibilities for weaving into understanding rather than chasing bits of knowledge.. oh for gods sake this is what I do and so by extension do you so you'd better get used to it and shut up and let me get on with it."

Internal police aren't happy, but it is their job to be unhappy.

Also a bugger to photograph, the camera doesn't know what to do about the ultraviolets. This picture is much nicer in the flesh, but I suppose you'll have to take my word for it.

A goonie is what they call a night-dress around these parts, and if you're thinking of moving here you had best make sure yours is made of thermal fleece or merino wool or at the very least winceyette.

Heaven's night-cloths and all that

2011-09-08T11:25:00.000Z

Another prototype, another 'dark matter' painting. Boldly going into the final front ear etc. which is a place, let me tell you, I do not like one bit. I mean, I do like it, in a way, but only as long as it stays there and I stay here and don't have to think about it too much.

It's horrid, cold, inhospitable, full of vacuums and deterministic behaviour and infinity and other monstrous stuff. Folding dimensions and huge things moving at impossibly slow speeds or doing all that sickening hurtling. Tiny specks floating forever in solitary confinement in fuck all. A place where it is possible to imagine a stuff that isn't a stuff and isn't nothing either that wanders around gobbling up everything, including things that aren't there. Ugghh. (Unless Sun Ra did actually make it out there, in which case everything's ok.)

But, you know, I don't think there's any harm in taking the head out of the sand every now and then, just for a while. So anyway I got all interested in the Harvard spectral classification system and thought it would be a fine idea to start thinking about this by turning the Sun's absorption spectrum into a circle.

A worrying moment for me; as I said before it is my firm rule that I don't do Data. Not my department mate. I can look at it if I want, but my own findings have to be published in the form of analogy, allegory, rhyming, chiming, responding, wondering, mix-up, mashup, whatever happens next; and always in in-the-world dirty mudpie handandheartandhead fabrications. Thinking with Things is my business and everything else is just a hobby. That's the rule. However this activity made necessary the use of a ruler and sums (well, divide by 2) which is, in my book, measuring and maths and therefore Data. I have grave misgivings about this, fearing the start of a slippery slope which might suddenly lurch into a freefall of Fourier transforms and C++ programming.

Not really a problem, as it turns out, plenty of scope for playing fast and loose with the intensity and brightness of colour, especially if you're messing about with fluorescent paints. Which is something that I may attempt to make more factually accurate in the future. What's really fun is the slippage between light intensity and the intensity of coloured paint, which is where all the phenomenological hoodoo is for a painter. Its as if stuff itself transmits its own energy in addition to the light it reflects. A sort of Ki of inanimate matter. (Is it me? Is it it? Yes and no, it's in the field of relationships between you and it and everything else, yada yada yada.)

Here's the same thing with a blacklight.

I can sing a rainbow (2)

2011-09-05T18:38:00.000Z

Irridescent paint, la la la, this one does a blue-shift, subtly sparkly fun.

I can sing a rainbow, too.

2011-08-31T10:48:00.002Z

Diatoms posing as chromosomes - well, being chromosomes (coloured things).

Here's me playing with bent light and trying to make a reality out of coloured squares when I really should be filling in funding application forms, which is psychologically identical to trying to scale the north face of a brutalist cold-storage unit in Cumbernauld wearing flip-flops.

Oh well, back to the grind-nose....

comic relief

2011-08-29T20:49:00.002Z

Did I tell you that my hobby is illustrating legislation for laffs?

This is from the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 .

just because I can't see it doesn't mean it's not there...

2011-08-28T10:31:00.006Z

This is from one of the boring dusty-looking slides I've been growing. Lovely dust! And covered in all kinds of Diversity!

I'm besotted with the beauty and charm of the tiny diatoms. I bet they taste nice. I bet they are juicy-fresh-tasting and sugary-salty like a lovely cucumber salad in a delicious crispy coat. Now surely any mollusc would fancy snacking on that for a light starter.

Still, not much use for my purposes. Perhaps it's time to raid the Winogradsky column...

Huxley reveals snail, snail reveals Huxley

2011-08-27T13:59:00.002Z

So I gave the slide to Baby Snail to see if it was to his taste.

Underneath is a copy of Huxley's nice 'Diagram exhibiting the disposition, nervous system, etc., in a common Snail (Helix). '

Baby Snail tucked in with gusto and devoured about a quarter of the dinner in a matter of minutes then charged to another part of the slide and just sat there for ages.

"What's up? Overeaten? Feeling sick? Poisoned even?"

Baby snail couldn't say, at least not in a way that I could understand. And neither could any of my interwebs, either, because they are interested in the eating habits of others only from their own perspectives. Who is to care whether a snail feels nausea? Plenty out there deny a snail feels at all. Many who deny a snail an autonomous sense of being-in-the-world due to a lack of "soul" or the right kind of CPU. These people I have no time for, whether they call themselves religious or rational; they are actually mean-spirited narcissists who allow their understanding of the world to be governed by "if-I-can't-see-it-it's-not-there" and "if-I-can-see-it-it-must-be-true-in-an-absolute-sense". Now this is very wrong and stupid of them but perhaps nobody spent quite enough time playing peek-a-boo with them when they were babies so they are more to be pitied than blamed.

slide show

2011-08-27T13:54:00.003Z

Just having a look at what is actually on that crusty slide I grew, to see what I could see... lots of fungal hyphae and fruiting bodies, yeasts, bacteria, algae, what you'd expect really...

Shop shop!

2011-08-19T13:59:00.003Z

Gotta make some money, gotta eat, gotta fund my fun projects - here's my new Etsy shop.

I'll be selling lovely works on paper. I hope...

Knock knock.

2011-08-18T10:34:00.009Z

Who's there?

Amoeba.

Amoeba who?

Amoeba about to do something goood.

Putting together some drawings of some nice local amoebae.

See, I've been hassling the local waste-water treatment facilities for a good while now, trying to get access to their works with a view to making some lovely art, ideally in collaboration with them.

"I'm particularly interested in your Activated Sludge processes, and your Anaerobic Digestion Tanks," I'm saying. "I'm intending to make a series of beautiful paintings celebrating the wonderful co-operative interactions both of the communities of micro-organisms and of the humans involved in this social processing of our waste.."

The nice people at Veolia Water collapsed into helpless giggles when I eventually managed to find someone to speak to, said they couldn't let me in to the Seafield sewage works out of concern for my health & safety, but haven't ruled out the possibility of this happening elsewhere... perhaps.... one day...

I also got in touch with Edinburgh Council Scientific Services labs who do tests on the various sludges and waters. They pooh-poohed the idea out of hand.

However I intend to carry on undeterred.

This pretty picture, by the way, is available for sale at the knock-down price of £140 + p&p (unframed) , all proceeds to go towards funding a Park-Roberts-bacteria based collaborative pile-on we're cooking up , of which more later. If you would like it, do let me know.

growing paints

2011-08-17T19:13:00.001Z

And so far the only takers for the growing on glass job have gone for the dilute fertilizer-skimmed milk powder combination happy meal...

bit of a wash-out

2011-08-17T18:41:00.002Z

Prototype is a cheap print-out of a drawing by T. H. Huxley pinched from the net at very low resolution, I didn't seal if off well enough so it is growing on the inside instead...

Slime Scene Investigations

2011-07-22T06:32:00.002Z

Owen is calling this my 'murder tent' but luckily the neighbours I share the garden with see it as 'nurturing'.

Hoping to grow algae mostly... for my molluscs... then hang the pictures willy-nilly on quiet walls

Very glad to have finally found a suitable use for the horrid gold frames purchased from Ex-Hotel Furniture for £1.50 a pop which hve been taking up valuable real-eatate in the studio for four years like city commuters whose only interaction with their new village is to hire a cleaner for not enough pay.

(Thought I'd be able to use them as the basis for some luscious paintings-as-commodities activity; cheap frames = better margins, but it just didn't work for me. Don't think it works that way for paintings at all. I mean, if you are going to spend your time making objects specifically to have monetary exchange value within an existing market, wouldn't you want to make something useful like ever-better prosthetics or a new kind of shoe that helps old people not to fall over in the snow?)

we know who you are because we can see where you've been

2011-07-21T07:16:00.004Z

More of the little animalcules, and billions of 'em, moving furiously with their little paws like pissabeds being thrown against a wall, as dear old Granddaddy Leeuwenhoek might have said.

Look what they did to the Chrome Green! I think some of the paint here has been floating on top of their swarming and they seem to have carried it with them.

These are Simon Park's wonderful photographs.

breakthrough

2011-07-20T10:54:00.002Z

bacteria-over-friendly-paint

2011-07-20T10:44:00.004Z

Ha! My paint is full of life!

photo Dr. Park.

A maze ing

2011-07-20T08:48:00.005Z

More of the triangular Park-Serratia-Roberts collaboration. Such fun!

For the benefit of my dear fellow paint-nerds, the stripes from top to bottom go:

Serratia marcescens (bacteria)
Chromium Oxide Green
Cobalt Violet
Zinc White
Phthalo Green
Phthalo Blue
Ultramarine
Cadmium Yellow hue (actually diarylide yellows, why don't they just say that? )
Chromobacterium violaceum (bacteria)

I put the paints I thought would be the most repulsive to my bacterial friends near the top to give the purple bacteria—which I've found to be a bit slower off the mark—a fighting chance. But no! I read that the green (Cr2O3) is mutagenic to bacteria and used medicinally as an anti-infective agent. But my Serratia have just been revelling in it. Partying like it was 1999. And then, some of my bacteria-friendly paints seem to have come ready-populated.

But I love how the red guys seem to have magically jumped over the nasty purple-white space into their green comfort zone. Simon reckons they "probably snook down the side between the agar and the petri dish, clever chaps."

I know they operate by chemotaxis but I'm fascinated by the scale of their sensing abilities. If you are only 2μm long, that thing a centimetre away is far far away. I'm jealous. It's as if I, starting at the bottom of Leith Walk, could simply sniff the air and realise that the Royal Mile has nothing to offer me and I'd have much more fun taking a detour via Arthur's Seat. Without ever having been to any of those places. If only my visitors could do that...

photos: Dr. Simon Park, Sarah Roberts.

natural history unfolding

2011-07-05T22:13:00.003Z

Well the glass surface was certainly popular with diners. Not much of the spreading paint around as they were more inclined just to devour everything methodically. But this is just a test piece anyway to see how it looks if they uncover their own natural history by their real-life actions.

I felt especially close to the dude whose enthusiastic gorging dyed her head red, watching me with one eye.

the pretensions of brushes

2011-07-05T19:06:00.004Z

I know what they're up to, these brush makers. They needn't think they can pull the wool over my eyes.

They know we have magical relationships with our tools, and they know about the magical relationships between the naming of things and consequent powers of those things. They want to make us believe that if we buy their tools we get extra magical powers.

Simply by using the Van Gogh or Da Vinci brush I can summon their genius to come on down and inspire mine. In effect, I become what my paintbrush sez it is.

Do you know, I hate those Connoisseur brushes (a useful, mediocre sort of a brush) simply because I don't ever have any interest in seeing myself as a bleedin connoisseur.

A short, flat/bright fine hog, on the other hand, perhaps even university bright - now that is something to be. And the ultimate aspiration for us all must be to be a Renaissance Squirrel. though in reality I suspect Factory Second is all I will ever amount to .

natural history

2011-07-04T11:53:00.001Z

you can guess where I'm going with this, can't you.

rock art

2011-07-04T10:35:00.004Z

How do little old ladies do graffiti then? It's important, sisters, these are our streets too. And we too own the spaces within which we move. We have to find a way of throwing in our own two-pennyworth! We have to fuck with them, all those visual shock-jocks and leg-cockers, the ad-men, taggers, patriarchal council-people, land-owners, car-worshippers and anyone in general who clothes their insecurity by peppering the public arena with visual demonstrations of their dominance and wish to control by force.

A small quiet start here on the Eastern Breakwater. Some very circular circles as a marker of a definite human action and a watery solution of everybody's-favourite-skimmed-milk-powder and a bit of Baby Bio. Who will use this and how is anybody's guess, likewise whether anything gets a chance to before it gets washed off...

Other recipes for encouraging lichen include cow dung in human urine, pro-biotic youghurt, porridge and beer. Some recommend putting a layer of p.v.a. down first, though I'm not sure about this putting plastic everywhere. Though of course it is only a matter of time before something evolves that will happily munch away on our long-chain hydrocarbons all day without getting sick.

everybody likes paint

2011-07-04T08:43:00.004Z

Lichen on paint on the big slabs of granite of Granton Eastern Breakwater. Presumably somebody painting their boat one day left this nice blue souvenir.

later still

2011-06-27T20:31:00.005Z

Another night, another bite. This time repainted with the coloured veggie mashes mixed with skimmed milk powder (everybody's favourite) , gum arabic (oh yes, actual paint) and Herman friendship cake dough (full of wild yeasts).

So here we have the guests arriving promptly for dinner, and a lovely homage to Van Gogh.

Note the decided preference for the paint over the delicious bit of cucumber. Now I'm not doing these cross-species collaborations for vindication of my own practice as a painter-in-watercolours at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable, but I must say I'm pleased about it.

serious grown-up work

2011-06-25T00:19:00.003Z

More scribbly fun responses to the marvellous and generously shared work of Howard C. Berg et al. This is 'Swarming Serratia marcescens', again, tracing the paths of individual bacteria.
About three seconds of the film here, took me a day.

The background—or substrate as I like to think of it—if you're interested, is a cannibalism of a thing I made playing with Shiori and a stethoscope, which I couldn't use for anything else because it just looked like a watery plagiarism of Juan Usle's work, no surprises there as he paints to the rythmn of his heartbeat.

propogation

2011-06-24T22:43:00.004Z

Now we wait... I'm hoping these will establish different zones of bacteria, algae, and fungae.

I'm looking for a modern take on our national anthem, Ilkley Moor bar-t'at: "Then slugs shall come and ate up microbes..." at which point a hedgehog or similar edible species could be introduced into the food chain, eventually allowing me in a round-about way to eat my own paintings, which of course is what every painter really wants more than anything.

No I'm not, that's a lie. Actually all I want is to have some nice gentle take-it-or-leave-it interactions with whoever is up for it.

...later

2011-06-24T22:22:00.008Z

I think they are Limacus flavus. And very nice. I am enjoying their unhurried itinerant curiosity and their calm voraciousness. Have completely got over the overnight decimation of the job-lot of marigolds I got from B&Q last year which were supposed to cheer up the shared drying green but just made it look like a Paul Nash painting.

They liked the oatmeal so much they took some of the top of the paper off while they were at it. So next time more protein, more starches, complex carbohydrates for my molluscy friends.

drawing with slugs

2011-06-21T00:40:00.003Z

Thought it was high time for another sluggy collaboration. This is some nice watercolour paper painted with carrot, beetroot and red pepper juices, also macerated spinach, oatmeal, honey and turmeric.

I put the picture out in the yard at 11.00 p.m. , people started turning up at around midnight.

dark matters

2011-06-18T09:48:00.008Z

More of this paintings to be seen in the dark lark.

Monsters, memories, microbes, maths, the mysteries of the universe, manual workers... I want to talk about things that are hidden, invisible, overlooked, all those important things that you may be happy to address sometimes but generally find a bit scary-please-get-that-out-of-my-face.

Now you know me, it's not my style to go around epater-ing the bourgeoisie and all that, (if I wanted to do that I'd have gone into pensions, hit 'em where it hurts). None of that nonsense for me, thanks! This way you get to find these things for yourself in your own good time, using your own hand-eye gestural activities. ("It's interactive.... got a button you can push!")

data-tracking

2011-06-09T08:04:00.004Z

Ha! Course it's not data. As you have probably gathered by now, dear friends, data is what I think other people do, and very nice in its place, but not for me, thanks. No, this is Natural History, if it's anything.

I'm following the activity of individual bacteria at the edge of a thinned-out swarm of E. coli on an agar slip. This is "12 seconds at the swarm edge" and is a kind of transcript of video sm05 published in a paper by Yilin Wu, Basarab G. Hosu and Howard C. Berg.

In this case, I'm just following the paths the bacteria take, but there's more, so much more in Wu et al's grainy grey fountains of delight...

showing off

2011-06-09T07:21:00.003Z

Here in a gallery setting, some of Simon Park's nice photos and my paper thing talking about bacteria-in-the-world doing their thing and humans likewise.

Looking very posh in their white frames. (Although posh is exactly what I have a problem with as what you gain in attractiveness you lose by alienation.

"Why should I pay any attention to you?" you ask
"Because I'm Posh"... it's not a very good answer is it, though it is still standard issue for western culture.
My beef is that it makes everything so horribly ad hominem, steers the conversation away from what actually is interesting and what might start out as genuine enquiry into the whats-going-on-here-then gets trampled by the tired old choreography of performances of authority and dominence. So we start out having a fun chat and end up talking about nothing but who's the bleedin' Daddy.

"Why on earth are you dipping your toes into this murky can of worms at this hour of the day, when it is clear you are going to do nothing more than trot out a couple of personal platitudes and wander off on a new half-formed itinerant rant?" I hear you ask.
But of course you know the answer, don't you, I'm avoiding doing something else. It's breakfast-avoidance, in this case.)

The Bloody Avant-Garde

2011-05-21T11:12:00.006Z

Here's me, performing my spoken word piece 'The Bloody Avant-Garde' at the Drill Hall last year. Fabulous photos by Katherine Emtage.

bacteria-friendly paint: day 1

2011-05-21T09:12:00.005Z

More of the exciting collaboration between myself, Simon Park and Serratia marcescens.

This is day 1. A variety of paint media, agar plate, some swarm-ready bacteria.

All photos here by Simon Park, who is doing this work in his lab down in Surrey.

bacteria-friendly paint: day 2

2011-05-21T08:40:00.015Z

And here at day 2.

All kinds of exciting things going on here. Lots of lovely traces of the chiral flows of their swarming activity, the power of their rivers of swarming to dislodge particles may times their size (think of a flash flood, filled with living car-wash brushes, with a parcel-post system by which they talk to each other). Zones of inhibiton around the purple (cobalt phosphate, very nasty, who would want to go for a swim in that? And great big heavy particles too. But interestingly they had a right good swarm through it in the watercolour medium all the same.)

I'm delighted that it's the actual watercolour medium they really run away with. I didn't add the traditional ox gall or any other surfactant to the mixture because they make their own in the swarm fluid (serrawettin). It's just gum arabic, glycerin, honey and water and pigments, no extenders, fillers, no fungicidals.

Again, the lovely photography here is all by Simon Park, please don't reproduce his images without his permission.

divergence

2011-05-05T22:11:00.005Z

so it turns out that 'the Joy of Peristalsis' very quickly became 'er, dunno, a tree... lungy thing... principle vessels of the baw bag?'

And then, finally a dark matter, as shown here in the wee on-its-sidey video, filmed with the lights out and a UV led on a chopstick, my glorious invention. ("Hooray! I've invented the torch!")

state o' that film studio

2011-05-05T21:32:00.003Z

well the jury is still out as to whether there is actually any art going on here at all, but anyway this is the state of it.

hydrophiliac

2011-05-05T10:01:00.008Z

another watery treat from the internationally aclaimed Blue Peter School of New! Media.

This is Dave Murray-Rust with a home-made hydrophone recording bacterial by-products in a vibrating column on audio and me charting the formation of the substrate for "the joy of peristalsis" in my state-of-the-art film studio.

big mushroom

2011-05-01T00:15:00.000Z

painting with bacteria

2011-04-30T21:44:00.011Z

So here are some nice pictures of a collaborative work between myself and Dr. Simon Park of the University of Surrey and some bacteria.

The fluffy fractals are the ubiquitous soil bacterium Bacillus mycoides and the red painting fellas are everybody's favourite star of bathroom tile grout and shower curtain, Serratia marcescens, which has the enviable ability to become its own paintbrush by growing extra flagella to swarm with. And secretes its own surfactant in the swarm fluid, which is very handy if you want to dissolve watercolour paint. And uses the river of its swarm fluid to communicate with other members of its colony. Lovely.

All the photos in this post are by Simon Park, and the bacteria collected and cultured by him.

And thanks to Anna Dumitriu for introducing us as part of her fantastic Laboratory Life experience.

How to read paintings

2011-04-17T11:52:00.003Z

Of course I know that you already know how to read paintings, you look at 'em and see if you feel they resonate with you in any way and then you can say "Oh yeah I get that," or "Well I don't know what you might mean by any of this but I like the look of it," - or not.

But for those of you that do like to feel you Know Things here's a handy device for accounting for the curvature of the space-time continuum on two-dimensional encrusted surfaces. Feel free to knock one out on your 3D printer, the dimensions of the ruler itself are what-fits-in-your-handbag x how-you're-feeling.

Note the canny addition in this model of the grisly Second Zero, the off-at-the-plug Just Not , Not Ever, ugh-I-get-vertigo-just-thinking-about-it Dreadful Nought of Nothingness, to be distinguished from the comfy not-now or not-in-this-case functional zero of life processes and things we can understand

abstract microscopy

2011-04-13T09:15:00.004Z

Watercolour paint, agar, the red stuff is a pigmented bacteria, I don't know who, though I have my suspicions. It's alive at this point but the interesting swirls are caused by mixing rather than motility.

Everything went wrong with this, suffered from First Pancake Syndrome but I liked the pictures anyway so I've put them up in case anyone else does.

phthalo blue

2011-04-12T08:25:00.002Z

watching a great film in the garden

2011-04-10T14:35:00.002Z

A combination of children and bacteria and other small and virulent organisms has turned this old-sink-posing-as-planter into something resembling a toxic waste dump.

Currently sporting this gorgeous biofilm in all the latest must-have spring colours.

how clean is your hose?

2011-04-10T11:00:00.006Z

Even I am beginning to be a bit revolted by the fascinating biodiversity that was hanging out on the shower head. Perhaps it was a 'don't try this at home' thing after all.

I mean it wasn't really that bad, look!
I mean, it wasn't even "...oh God and I simply must remember to bleach that shower head before The Cleaner gets here and can you just pop a seed bar in Daniel and Nigella's lunchboxes darling yes Nigella I know everyone else gets Blue Ribands but you're getting an organic fair trade unrefined sugar seed bar honestly you don't know how lucky you are and what on earth has that cat got in its mouth now?"

It isn't the colour, or the form, I don't think, but a quality of pustulence. I reckon it's the biofilm that's so recognisably nasty-ass looking. I'm having to remember that this stuff has been daily raining down on me for years with no obvious ill effects.
"Ah yes," I hear you say, "but not in great quorum-sensing globs like that it hasn't, try rubbing that on your hair and see how your volume & shine is..."

Any road, I've got some pink stuff, and it's on the move....

a nice cartoon from xkcd.com

2011-04-10T09:56:00.005Z

A nice cartoon from http://xkcd.com/

so what are little girls made of then?

2011-04-08T08:10:00.008Z

I grew up with that vile, insidious, orientalist, biochemically inaccurate and indefensibly twee bit of social engineering calling itself a nursery rhyme. No I will not quote it! Neither will I link to it! If you aren't familiar with it, then so much the better, that is probably why you grew up to be such a well-adjusted and sensible person.

What did they think they were doing? Did they not see me reaching for my gun? Why was I expected to believe myself and my sister a pair of sickly confections whereas my bothers (inferior beings) got to be manufactured of active, interesting materials?

Such horseshit. I suppose we are all, to an extent, made of sugars - but equally we are all made of snails.

Those jelly pictures at the bottom are made of leftover agar. I thought about culturing them but I'm a bit superstitious about what-you-make-pictures-of-comes-true and being careful what you wish for...

pro-bacterial paint

2011-04-07T20:10:00.001Z

I've been making paint for bacteria.

I'm sending it to Dr. Simon Park at the University of Surrey, in the hopes that he'll paint with it and then some bacteria will.

we're right cultured in our house we are

2011-04-07T20:07:00.004Z

Handbasin tap, shower head, day 3.

I'm looking for Serratia marcescens.

C.S. I. : Co-operation Scene Investigation

2011-04-06T15:53:00.001Z

Thought it was high time I put up some pictures of what I got up to at Esra Ozkay and Rocio Jungenfeld's 'Weaving Plants' project in the glasshouse at Lauriston Castle last year.

Rocio and Esra were exploring the theme of 'home' - here's my contribution.

I took the microscope along on the bus and pottered round collecting 'evidence' of all kinds of normal interactions and life processes, looking particularly for traces of co-operation, commensalism, mutualism, kindness and fun. Because I wanted to do a sort of inverse of C.S.I. the telly programme I wore sensible shoes.

The glasshouse is regularly used for craft workshops, so in addition to the traces of art working going on at the time and of the activities and bodies of the diverse organisms that made the glasshouse their habitat, there were all kinds of bits of glitter and other shiny coloured things nestling in the dust.

I called my own piece 'who's coming to bed with me then?'. The blanket is made of photographs, micrographs and drawings from the glasshouse, along with an assortment of other pictures I have been making and collecting.

One of the things I spent a long time doing was printing digital images onto the thickest, most heavily textured hand made paper I could stuff into my battered old Epson Stylus. The point being that anything that smacks of a dichotomy needs to be enveloped with Messy Reality as soon as possible. (The printer didn't like it, we had words.)

Colours were taken from studies of the lovely autumn skies and grounds of the castle. The bed was made of anything I could find, and the delicious bed-time drink is a nutritious filamentous algal concoction from a puddle behind an outhouse.

a fun guy to be with

2011-04-02T23:34:00.003Z

micropaintings

2011-03-29T23:18:00.002Z

really I care...

2011-03-29T22:04:00.006Z

A series of messages left by an imaginary carer, and the person she cares for. The idea is that you don't always know which is which...

If any of these are your house, please don't think it is anything particularly to do with you, I'm hoping it speaks to a universal experience of domestic work and caring relationships.

orange cat as a unit of measurement

2011-03-26T09:08:00.005Z

There you go. Think it'll catch on in the way that say, tennis courts or baby's-arm-holding-an-apple did?

Capillary action paintings

2011-03-24T23:58:00.007Z

More little tiny paintings close up.
I'm looking at what watercolour paint does at a microscopic level because I think it has things to tell me about what water does with stuff at a microscopic level and therefore I can find out a little bit more about what's going on in and around me.
That's all very well, I hear you say, but when is Kelly going to do something about her cellulite? Or Paris Hilton?
I'm afraid I can't answer that, I don't know either Kelly or Paris Hilton, though I do know Wolverhampton Travelodge.
I put the picture of the cat sitting on the painting to give a sense of scale, but I dont know how much that helps, as you have no idea how truly gigantic the cat is.

some yoghurt

2011-03-24T23:17:00.005Z

It claimed to be bio-live, and so it was.
Yum.

it came from outa face: planet sinusitis from the neb nebula

2011-03-18T22:58:00.011Z

Yes it's just a bit of snot. I was going to Gram stain it to see if there was anyone there I could add to my Forever Freinds Commensals Corner but it started to crystallise so beautifully and look like some citadel that was built by an ancient and superior civillization that got subsequently wiped out by a horde of rampaging savages armed with a combination of guns, soil-depleting monocultures, sexually transmitted diseases, gene patents, Keynsian economics, racism, mechanically recovered meat products, punitive laws, pesticides, badly-conceived irrigation systems and high culture ...

living o'er t' brush

2011-03-18T22:16:00.005Z

more from the hack-o-scope, this is a size 0000 prolene brush.

It's as exciting as watching paint dry

2011-03-15T13:40:00.007Z

Yup, it's a real-time video of paint drying.

"Dim the lights! Order a pizza! Crack open a tinny and settle down to watch this breathless romp through the world of brownian motion!" (Hannibal Snodgrass, Particle Monthly)

pip pip

2011-03-12T09:20:00.006Z

Playing about with lighting microscope slides in different ways. This is a bit of dried out old strawberry left over from some work I was doing with Liz Tainsh last year.

the crop of the pick

2011-03-09T13:39:00.006Z

Here's some of my very own nose flora.

Thanks to Dr. James Price for this fascinating cultural experience.

hack-o-scope

2011-03-09T11:43:00.009Z

Thanks to Andy Gracie for sharing his Hackteria knowledge of how to make a video microscope out of a PS3 camera at the Laboratory Life project in Brighton.

Here's mine, I took up his suggestion of using Little Lego Men.

Little Lego Me's, what's more, complete with painting dungarees and true-to-life physiognamies.

Also here the first stills from the hack-0-scope, showing a Daphnia in a variety of different lights.