project microbiology meets art

Firstly I want to thank you for reading my blog. I follow the biohack academy at the Waag society. In this course I will work on my own project and in this blog I will document this. So please feel free to read it.

I am an technichian that worked for a long time on a water research institute on a microbiology laboratory. So I have some knowledge about bacteria and how to work with them. My knowledge about art and design is not so big so my idea is to meet both worlds: microbiology meets art.

I choose a painting from a famous dutch painter called Johannes Vermeer: The girl with the pearl.

The challenge for me is to convert the drawing into lines en put them in the computer. I used natrual tracing paper to get the lines that I want on paper.

I load the drawing in Inkscape and trace the lines. Then save as a dxf file. The first prototype was in MDF and looks very good.

Then I tried transparent Acrylic. I test the material because it was thick (5mm). I used the setting: Speed 5, power 100, corner 30. The result was good. Now I want to scale the size up. I have a bigger petridish (size 145 x 20). This time the laser speed was to low. There was some burned places in the acryl. But I will use the acryl lasercut to test how the bacteria grow.

Next thing to try is to see how fast the bacteria will grow on the ager and wich collors they are! The acryl was cleaned with ethanol(70%) and was placed in the petridish. Then I filled out the nutrientager in the open spots. I use these bacteria to paint with:

I made a buildingblock from lego and an empty beer glass, placed the plates below it by 21 degrees en put my telephonecamera above it to make a timelaps (App imotion). Every hour it takes a picture en after 48 hours I stopped the film. See what the result was! The bacteria grew en the collors were actualy quite good. Only the collor of the face and body was not so good.

I let the plates grow for a about a week and look for the pictures what happend. The blue one is taking over. And the eye was not closed so the grey one is also growing on others places. After a week the girl isn’t looking very well.

I also did the same experiment only this time I used MDF 3mm. The result was quite different. The bacteria don’t want to grow!. I think that the mdf is toxic for the bacteria.

For the BioHack Academy 3 Graduation Show I grew my own certificate. I made a yeastogram. I used the recipe #1 from http://pavillon35.polycinease.com/category/recipes/ Instead of black cole I used green agar powder from the chinese shop. My image is ofcourse the girl with the pearl. The plate was covered with yeast an was placed in the UV-chamber. It grows for 24 hours.