organism: making art with living systems

Joe, Aged Seven (2 minute exposure) / Josh, Aged Six (2 minute exposure)

Simon Park says:

I have collaboration with an artist called Anne Brodie in which we have developed the world’s most unusual photobooth. Using the booth we take portraits of people using only the ephemeral blue-green light produced by bioluminescent bacteria (100s of agar plates and 10 litres of culture). We will be using the photobooth at the “Infective Art” evening at the DANA centre of the Science Museum on 26th November.

Unlike sunlight or artificial light, bacterial bioluminescence is of a pure and refined quality (a single wavelength of ~475 nm), a property that endows it with unique revelatory properties. When a human body is imaged with bacterial light, it does more than illuminate; the light is of a type that penetrates adornments, glamour, and the inconsequential surface features of the face revealing far more about the individual behind it than does the unrefined cocktail of light wavelengths that is sunlight. An example of its properties can be seen in these portraits of my children.

If you’re interested in being represented by a unique form of portraiture then please come along: http://www.danacentre.org.uk/events/2008/11/26/456