Painting with eukaryotes

This time I'm making paint for muticellular organisms...

Ha ha, that's right, humans, lovely, fantastic humans.  This is from a wee course in 'Winter flowers in egg tempera' at the Botanics.

 It's a very procedural business, you have to prime and gesso your own boards and then mix your pigments with your egg yolk and then get to grips with how to use the paint, which isn't quite like anything else.
If you want to know how to do it,  Koo Schadler is excessively good at it and generously shares her how-to expertise here.
We were doing this sort of thing:

I'm fond of doing this as it involves plenty of old-fashioned craftsmanship which is great for slowing down the thinking and making you focus on what kind of picture you think you want to make.  There's a lovely textility to the work, the paint is applied in lots of translucent layers of small brushstrokes so you get a very lively surface which is nice, the pictures look still from a distance but close-up are full of the joyful seething animation of everything as it cavorts about its business.
This really isn't for the vegans! There is something both creepy and glorious about the organism-ishness of the thing you make, with its wooden support, and its rabbit-skin glue colloids, and its boney, chalky ground, and its fatty eggy skin.

©Annie Barton

What are we doing here at the Botanics?  These classes are marketed as opportunities to "develop your skills and abilities", the idea being that students used them as a basis for follow-up work later on, if they wished, or simply enjoy them as a sort of hardcore way of having quiet fun.  So they have to function as 'leisure' or 'hobby' activities and be transformative-educational at the same time.  I've been wondering, what is the difference between 'leisure' and 'culture'? *

Why might the world need an enlarged dissection of a cycalmen in egg tempera? Who knows. But there you are, it's got one now, and it'll have to make of it the best it can.

One of the great things about this medium is that because you use food to make your paint, you are viscerally aware of the consuming nature of doing your doing. Especially as you use the yolk for the work, and the white for stiing in the fridge not being made into meringues. But help is at hand with  Marvellous Egg-white Dispenser, in the form of Blue, my wonderful studio neighbour's wonderful pal.

*The answer to that of course is; "If it's done by youngish men, then it's certainly Culture, and if it's done by older women, then it's certainly Leisure."

there's no place like chrome

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

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.

Might as well stay here...

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

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

making paintings with bacteria

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.

breakthrough

rock art

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

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.

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.