Super-Organism
A full-body interactive installation reveals visitors as shifting fields of digital bacteria, turning the human microbiome into a public, participatory encounter.
Super-Organism is an interactive installation by Alex May and Anna Dumitriu commissioned for Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam in 2014. Developed as part of a wet and dry bio-digital research laboratory for young people and families, the project invited participants to investigate their own bacterial ecosystems through hands-on activity and digital image-making. Visitors first worked with bacteria in Petri dishes under the artists’ guidance, then stepped into an installation where their bodies slowly emerged on screen as colonies of digital bacteria spreading across a virtual Petri dish.
The work makes the microbiome graspable by giving it scale, duration, and bodily presence. Instead of leaving bacterial life inside specialist language or laboratory procedure, it turns invisible biological systems into a shared public experience shaped by touch, movement, and recognition. That shift, from hidden process to participatory perception, sits close to May’s wider concern with how technology changes what can be seen, understood, and held in common.
Additional notes
- Commissioned for Cinekid Festival, Amsterdam, in October 2014.
- Created with Anna Dumitriu.
- Developed in collaboration with Dr John Paul of the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project.
- Built as a wet and dry bio-digital research laboratory for families and young audiences.
- The interactive installation used custom C++ software and an infra-red camera to track participants in space.
- Images were generated in real time from collages made from hundreds of stop-motion films of bacterial colonies.