Recently in biological body notation #1 Category

I have been observing the activities (and sometimes lack thereof) of a Giant Pacific Octopus via webcam housed at the Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University. Here's the link to the Octocam if you're curious. She is a new octopus at the facility and they're keeping her in a quarantine tank until mid February to make sure she's healthy and acclimate her to people. When I'm at home I have the live feed on most of the time and have been writing a journal entry of sorts each day. Now I need to start translating the entries into notations. Her color and texture shifts are so dramatic sometimes and I'd like to notate those expressions.

Kate Casanova

This score represents the first step in a process I am using to compose a piece for double bass about the growth and death of yeast. Each staff contains pictures of the yeast at different stages. In the first staff, each measure captures the yeast at one minute intervals. The second staff captures the yeast at five minute intervals. The third staff captures the yeast at intervals of one hour and the fourth captures the yeast once per day. Tomorrow, I will coat the surface of the yeast in sugar and reverse the time intervals.

Yeast Staff1.psd.pdf

These are macro lens photographs of Physarum polycephalum engulfing and consuming sterilized oats. This is my first attempt growing the organism from the initial culture I received.

I am observing my breath cycle while singing. As I sang a piece by Reynaldo Hahn entitled, "À Chloris," I used a stopwatch to time every inhalation and every exhalation of breath. Inhalations are recorded on one half of the page, exhalations and their accompanying poetry (when applicable) on the other.

1/22/12

Recording the biological bodies of meal worms.

I have set up a box lined in paper, and then sprinkled in corn meal. In that box I have placed 10 meal worms. The corn meal will record not only the eating habits of the meal worms, but also the paths that they travel and their waste (exoskeletons, excrement, and perhaps bodies).

For now, I have resorted to photography as a recording device to communicate the passage of time. I would like to somehow be able to preserve the paths and other treats left within the cornmeal in another fashion, perhaps through lacquer or some other hardening agent.

Any other recording suggestions, leave a comment!

For a short period of time I observed the movements of Sea Monkeys in a small tank. Sea Monkeys are a hybrid species of brine shrimp called Artemia NYOS.

I used a flashlight to send light through the tank and I recorded the paths of their shadows. Because the light was passing through the tank at a downward diagonal, the bottom of the image represents the top of the tank and the top of the image represents the bottom of the tank, and the two flanking lines are the edges of the tank. Some paths become thinner as it moves toward the top of the image because the sea monkey traveled toward the bottom of the tank.

For this image I tracked the movements of three koi fish in our aquarium. I took a 30-second video so that I could follow the movement of each fish during the same period of time. From the video I traced the movement of each fish with a blind contour line following the head. Each fish is represented by a different colored pen.