This is just a quick update. Full-time academic (oh yeah, I’m now a lecturer in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington! It’s been a great move, but busy…which is why I’ve been a bit absent online…hoping to fix that this year with more creative work!) life has slowed down my updates (and process) on this project, however it has taken a new turn over the past two years. I’ve held short art residencies at the https://www.depaololab.com the last two years. Last year was a proof-of-concept, and this past summer we did a full run. What does that mean? Lots of data!
I’ve started to incorporate lab science into the project, wherein we culture samples of fermenting food (kimchi and sauerkraut) from start to finish and grow bacteria on agar. We then sample the bacterial colonies and identify them in a mass spectrometer (a MALDI-TOF, for those interested). I have data from a batch of kimchi and a batch of sauerkraut, which I’m just beginning to think about how to sonify (represent the data through sound).
This has always been a sound project in my mind. The initial “real-time'“ projects were fun, but I always felt the the sound was never complex enough, and not focused enough on the bacterial processes, just their results. So, while this approach (where we collected data a few days a week over three weeks) loses the real-time aspect, it will gain a lot of depth in sound and data. It’s been very interesting to practice in a lab, with experts, and learn from them. The entire team in the DePaolo labe have been absolutely fantastic, and I hope to return to work with them in the future.
We are in talks about how to exhibit this work, probably around spring of 2020. But for now, here are a few photos from the lab for your viewing pleasure.
Images from the lab! The fourth one above is from 2018, but I really love it as an image. The rest, cultured much better for getting data are from this year’s run. Looking forward to developing this project over the coming months.