The Microscopic Opera

Matthijs Munnik, Microscopic Opera (detail)

In the Netherlands lies the most prestigious Genomics Centers which are now being used by artists and designers to create new artworks ranging from topics of sustainability, food, health, bio-informatics, agriculture, and safety.  There is a competition for Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award (DA4GA) where they are able to collaborate with these Genomics Centers.  

Exhibited on January 8th at Naturalis, many different projects were on display.  The piece that I most enjoyed in reading about was called the Microscopic Opera developed by Matthijis Munnik with Richard de Boer.  The article explains that the lab worm's (commonly used worldwide in laboratories for research) movements are converted into sounds and images.  The artwork utilizes the lab worms in this piece to cohere to genomics because lab worms are the first multicellular organisms to have fully sequenced genomes.

Matthijs Munnik, Microscopic Opera 

Munnik and de Boer use software tracks to convert the movements to sounds into abstracted opera singing as well as a range of other sounds.  There are images shown of the lab worms on screens of the magnified organisms.  These organisms are kept in petri dishes and each dish holds up to 1,000 worms!

More projects from this exhibit can be viewed at http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/bioart/

This piece is a "New Media Literacy" in that the lab worms are a part of a performance.  Although not staged, they are the subjects that are being viewed and their movements converted to images and sounds.  Munnik and de Boer worked together for this piece and this literacy can be classified as "Collective Intelligence" as well.  More literacies can be learned about in my article about Media Education for the 21st Century post!