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

painting with bacteria

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

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

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.