Recently in biological body notation #6 Category

I thought I would post a quick update on my slime mold project now that the semester is over. It is a project that I want to continue, but it is also one that I need more time to conceptualize and to write up (in poetry form) before seriously executing the visual component.

I think I am attracted to the wordplay between "sublime" and "slime," so I've been reading up on the sublime as a concept (or have been, prior to the always mad rush that is the end of the semester). I also think the weird ways in which slime mold functions--taking on different states, sharing nuclei, growing in systems--can be related to the sublime in various ways. Especially the morphed, weird post-modern iterations of the sublime that can be found in The Sublime (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), which I've been using for ideas on things to read related to the subject (in regards to "the subject," pun intended).

I also think I learned a lot from the project we did at the end of the semester--a project that I'm really happy with. I was thinking about doing some time lapse with slime mold, but I wasn't sure how to execute it (I had downloaded some software and so on). So, at some point I threw out the idea to my (awesome) group members that we should maybe try something with time lapse. I really didn't know enough about what was involved and I was playing around with it (with little success). Anyway, we ended up making the "Subterranea Project" and I feel like I learned so much from it--I can't wait to get back to incorporating some of the things I learned into my own work.

At some point my slime mold samples got too contaminated (even the original sets of petri dishes I kept on the side as backups), but I did start doing things like dye both the agar and oats with food coloring before growing the mold...

Here I colored, dried, and ground the oats (to use in text stencils):

I also colored just colored whole oats:

[I would post some of the growths from these, but I was vaguely obsessed with learning DIY sterilization at the time, so most of my "infected" attempts did not get photographed... I think I'm going to try ideas that "intentionally infect" in the future so I have to worry about this less]

...I also keep trying new sterilization techniques (I haven't executed some of these yet, but I did manage to pick up a pressure cooker and steam basket to use as a DIY autoclave). Once I have some poetry/text written that gives me ideas in terms of what to include in my mold experiments, I'll order some more mold.

I got the idea to dye the oats from this book (which is awesome):

I also picked up a copy of Jane Blocker's book What the Body Cost (that she presented on earlier this semester, so I suspect this class is infecting my practice in all sorts of ways). I had seen the book before (since I took a class with her), but I had no idea how much it overlapped with some of the stuff in my previous book--which includes a series of "somatic portraits" on petri-dishes. Given that I want to use the Slime Mold "stuff" as an extension of my previous project (and that I want to include more bodily samples, etc), it seemed like an awesome place to get some inspiration. I've been enjoying reading it and thinking about how I can better conceptualize various body parts in relationship to the poetry/visuals that surround them textually within a book project. I was also thinking about the Cell Storm project and how that pulled the micro up into the macro level in an interesting way--which is also something that I'm interested in thinking about (and I think my ideas on it have matured through the work that Kate, Sara, Christy and I did for our project--especially in terms of thinking about how to execute a project related to it).

Anyway, I won't dwell too long. But I'm interested in what other people think they'll pull from the class going forward?

Yeast.pdf

So, looking back at the entire study of a biological body, here are my stats:

Biological Body of Choice: Ted the cat (an animal)
Characteristic habit/mannerism that was peculiar to Ted that I observed: his sleeping patterns around 10:00 pm every night for 5 weeks.

Originally I was just going to observe him for one hour every day. But I found that I couldn't always do that due to my schedule, and he was sleeping or just laying around for the majority of the time that I watched him (the times that he ate or went to the bathroom only occurred in spans of a few minutes while the rest of the time he was just laying around). So, I simply began noting where he happened to be sleeping around 10:00 pm - a time when my three roommates and myself were all home by that point in the evening most nights.

Any time I found Ted sleeping in a new spot, I drew a picture of him in that location with crayons. For a total of 36 nights I ended up recording only 6 spots in our apartment that he liked to sleep in at 10:00 pm and they are:
1) The tall chair with a red cushion by our large sliding window door that leads to the balcony (it's the tallest object he can sit on).
2) My roommate Heather's bed (she shares the larger of the two bedrooms with me. Her bed is next to the window in our room).
3) My roommate Lucie's bed (she shares the smaller of the two bedrooms with my other roommate, Leslie. Her bed is also the one closest to the window).
4) The orange couch in the living room (in the center of the room in between the tall chair and Ted's brown basket bed on the opposite side of the living room. It's higher than the ground but lower than the tall chair).
5) The ornate rug that is underneath the couch and covers most of the living room floor (the rest of our apartment is tiled).
6) The brown basket bed underneath the shelf on the opposite side of the living room from the tall chair (it's on the ground).

Reason for doing this mostly in crayon:
I had to keep in mind that my observations might not accurately portray Ted since my own act of observing him sometimes caused him to change his patterns of movement and behavior. Not only that, but I also had to be aware of my own human projections onto him and continuously remind myself that my feelings are not his - that they are my own. Crayon is playful and reminiscent of childhood and brings to attention how un-precise my observations are; I liked the juxtaposition of scientific observation with this playful medium to convey the ideas above. I also decided against coloring his eyes and always drew him so that they were covered - that all we could see was his body so as to have less chance of projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto him.

After completing the observations for 5 weeks, I found out I was interested in mapping his sleeping patterns in multiple ways to see his movement through multiple lenses. So, from the data I collected I made some charts (again out of crayon) documenting different ways to visually view Ted's sleeping patterns at 10:00 pm.

- The Dot Graph looks at a visual representation of height of the objects he sleeps on (the tall chair is the tallest, the two beds and the couch are mid height, and the rug and basket are the lowest - being on the floor). These different variations of the dot graphs also allow for the possibly make music out of the patterns - perhaps some little tunes if each colored dot is associated with a musical note.

- The Bar Graph just looks at frequency of visitation and gives a visual for how much more often Ted prefers the tall chair to the other objects for sleeping.

- The overhead map gives a visual of the layout of these objects in relation to one another in the apartment space. This could give ideas for why he prefers certain spots over others and tracks his movement through the space in relation to traffic of my roommates and I through the living space.

Here are my scans of the attempts to draw perfect lines and circles with casted arms/hands. Some dates are missing, illustrating the inconsistency of biological creatures and paralleling the imperfection that this project points toward.

My casts come off tomorrow, so a second set of drawings will possibly provide a point of comparison.

02/11/12