 Paintings with glow-in-the-dark microbes exhibited this week
Artist Robert Royhl has worked with some unusual media--deer glue mixed with mineral pigments come to mind--but never has he painted on petri dishes using laboratory pipettes loaded with marine microbes. "It's really magic," enthused Royhl, a professor of painting and drawing in the MSU Art Department. "It transforms reality." He's speaking of the way the microbes--invisible as they're painted onto the agar plates--begin to glow with a bright blue luminescence in about 24 hours. Turn off the lights and each petri dish visually hums with color like individual pixels of a digital photograph. Royhl, MSU adjunct professor of painting Sara Mast and others will show their glow-in-the-dark paintings starting Monday, April 22, in the Exit Gallery. The opening reception starts at 4 p.m. The show ends Friday when the microbes die and lose their ability to glow, with the best viewing expected Monday through Wednesday. The collaboration between art and science began in a campus laboratory, where research associate Betsey Pitts, chemical engineering professor Phil Stewart and graphic artist Peg Dirckx dreamed of a sculpture that would showcase the spirals, pinnacles and other shapes formed by clusters of bacteria called biofilms. Pitts and Dirckx work at the MSU Center for Biofilm Engineering, where Stewart is deputy director. They talked with Mast and Royhl and a collaboration began. Mast was spearheading efforts for "Art Infusion," a weeklong series of projects designed to involve other campus disciplines in art. After touring the biofilm labs, Mast said she was taken by the idea of using glowing bacteria as paint on an agar canvas and involving students from art and biofilm departments. Bioluminescence occurs in some land species such as fireflies but is primarily an ocean phenomenon, Pitts explained. The same chemical reaction that makes a jellyfish glow makes certain marine microbes glow, often when they sense that their numbers have reached a critical level. "We work with organisms like these all the time and can't help but admire their beauty," Pitts said. The exhibit is called "Bioglyphs," named for the way the agar plates of living organisms are configured into simple images similar to rock carvings called petroglyphs. The exhibit's most ambitious configuration will resemble the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming. Royhl and Mast will pipette microbes onto more than 200 individual petri dishes--which will probably take them a day--and cart the dishes from the lab to the Exit Gallery. Because the microbial solution is clear and colorless, they won't know for 24 hours when the microbes begin to luminesce whether the configuration resembles their model. Other shapes in the exhibit include abstract and representational images such as sea grass, a jelly fish and a repeating pattern based on a Caribbean quilt. In all, about 1,000 petri dishes will be used. The painters include campus artists and scientists, students as well as faculty. To accentuate the glowing microbes, the gallery will be completely dark, making the organizers wonder how visitors can avoid bumping into each other while viewing the strange art. Someone suggested that fluorescent name tags might work. Just that kind of problem-solving and experimentation has marked the project from the beginning, Pitts said. She learned, for example, that the microbes need plenty of elbow room to grow and glow. Spread the solution too thick and the microbes in the center lack the oxygen necessary to produce light. "These are our collaborators," Pitts said, waving a hand toward the microbes, thought to be from a family called Vibrio and selected from a collection maintained in the microbiology department. "We're really trying to understand their needs." Funding for the bioglyphs project came through Stewart at the Center for Biofilm Engineering and from ASMSU Arts and Exhibits. written by Annette Trinity-Stevens and posted April 22, 2002
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