POETronicA | Videopoetry + Bioart

Aerial landscape of the Earth, terrestrial landscape of the Moon

Bioartistic videopoem made from the display of some of the thousands of bacteria found in a cross section of chewing gum with a microscope at 10x. A chewing gum seems to be a miniature brain and when we are looking at it very closely, it is a reminiscent of the Earth from space and the lunar surface with craters.

Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a Mind; that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit (George Berkeley).

Siete barriles desvencijados. Siete barriles como pretexto para catorce brazos rivales. Cuarentay nueve sacos, sacos de harina de trigo sarraceno para el ánimo pugil. Moscas, un ciento. Siete camisolas que palidecen con siete barriles. Sal por puños. Catorce brazos rivales, siete mares, una

Conception

In mid February 2014, I took a bioart workshop with the artist Edith Medina. Over four sessions, I get closer to biology as I never imagined. The first exercise of the workshop was the collection of biological material at the Luis Cabrera Park in the Roma Neighborhood of Mexico City. Of the five items that I collected, I noticed a chewed gum found in a container nearby the park. With the intention of maximizing the writing process, I decided to make a poetic approach to the chewing gum.

Realization

Firstly, I stored the chewing gum in a dropper bottle that can be sealed to avoid external contamination. One part was selected to have a cross-section to view it in a microscope at 10x and 40x. On February 24 I was able to determine that the 10x magnification was ideal for recording. I carry out a brief test recording in which a similarity of bacteria with the Moon and the Earth was found. This video draft was presented at the workshop on March 9 for group feedback. On March 26, I made a recording of an hour and a half, which reveals that chewing gum is a microscopic image of the universe. This recording was edited to have a video poem of a two minutes long. The soundtrack is an experiment with seven sounds related to an astronaut breathing. The result is a poetic image of the Moon.

Aerial landscape of the Earth, terrestrial landscape of the Moon was launched on April 1 (2014)..

Technique: microscopic recording.

Keywords: videpoetry, bioart.

Year of creation: 2014.