Super-Organism: The Living Microbiome

This video artwork by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu was commissioned by The Wellcome Collection for The Evening Standard “1000” award ceremony at The Francis Crick Institute.

It juxtaposes close-up high definition macroscopic video footage of the growth of colonies of bacteria with images of the parts of the human body from which they were sampled.

The piece shows the huge diversity of ways in which these bacteria grow and spread across a Petri dish filled with agar jelly (a seaweed based growth medium) and how they compete for ‘territory’, sometimes producing their own antibiotics to ward of other bacteria or producing biofilms, which help them to spread.

Also see the original Super-Organism installation commissioned by Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam.


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