Concepts: Microscopic violence & decay
Death / Decay
decaydecompositiontimelapsebacteriatransformation
Working with live microscopy means constantly encountering violence at microscopic scales. Bodies rupture, dry out, leak, collapse, and are consumed from within by other organisms. Bacteria rapidly multiply around dying tissue while larger microorganisms feed, tear apart, and recycle bodies into shifting ecological relationships. The microscope turns these processes into intimate encounters, collapsing emotional distance between observer and specimen and revealing decay as an active, crowded, and deeply physical process.
Gallery
Film
Death Reel follows plankton and microscopic animals at the end of their lives. Copepods slow and leak their cells, Bosmina are consumed from within by ciliates, tardigrades and rotifers become trapped as the slide dries. Around dead bodies, bacteria multiply into dense clouds, a ciliate ruptures and disappears. The sequence ends with amoebas and rotifers chemically fixed on preserved slides, held in an unnatural stillness. The video is accompanied by a composition by Senem Pirler utilizing sounds sourced from my internal body and improvised live electronics, emphasizing the bodily-affective relationship between the observer and the observed.