The Bloody Avant-Garde

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

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

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

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

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

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