The Human Super-Organism
An interactive installation turns bacteria from visitors' hands into spreading digital colonies, making the human microbiome visible at the scale of touch.
The Human Super-Organism is an interactive installation by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu commissioned by Eden Project for its permanent exhibition Invisible You: The Human Microbiome. Focusing on bacteria from the hands, the work invites visitors to place their hand on an interactive screen that behaves like a virtual Petri dish. In response, blooming fields of colour and texture appear across the surface, drawing on the ways bacterial colonies from human skin can be grown on agar in the lab.
The work matters because it shifts the microbiome from abstract scientific knowledge into a bodily, public encounter. Touch becomes the trigger for seeing what is usually invisible, and digital mediation does not simplify that hidden ecology so much as give it experiential scale. That movement, from microscopic process to shared perception, sits closely within May’s wider practice, where technology changes how living systems are recorded, understood, and made present.
Additional notes
- Created with Anna Dumitriu as part of the wider Super-Organism series.
- Commissioned by Eden Project, Cornwall, for the permanent exhibition Invisible You: The Human Microbiome.
- Focuses specifically on bacteria from the hands rather than the full-body interaction used in the earlier Cinekid version.
- The wider series also includes the original Super-Organism installation for Cinekid Festival and the video work Super-Organism: The Living Microbiome commissioned by Wellcome Collection.