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Proposal One of the oldest dream of mankind is to find a dignity that might include all living things. (Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape) Since Darwin's presentation of his radical theories, ideas about evolution have themselves evolved. The number of kingdoms has blossomed from two to five, and the internal stucture of those kingdoms has undergone both subtle and profound changes. Currently, the supposition is that one-celled creatures were the first to populate the planet. Bacteria, of the kingdom Monera, have evolved precursors for all of the relevant survival mechanisms, including photosynthesis, hunting, and symbiosis. In my project for the Arts Technology Center, I'd like to create a short video that uses bacteria as a lens through which to examine contemporary ideas about evolution. This video will be constructed with an immersive environnment in mind, using Maya to create three-dimensional creatures that inhabit a fully surrounding world. This world is a virtual sea, home to dozens of swimming bacteria. Pulsing, spinning, dividing, consuming each other and endlessly experimenting with new genetic combinations, these bacteria slowly emerge at the beginning of the video, build to a heavily populated crescendo, and then fade to a few fleeting spectres by the finish. As they swim overhead through the oceanic space, the surfaces of the bacterial bodies become tiny movie screens, alive with images of their kin in other kingdoms, in a sense their progeny. An undulating Rickettsia's surface might shimmer with video images of a creeping inchworm, slowly moving in the opposite direction of the bacteria. Another, a string of pearl-like Cyanos, might flicker to life with images of starlings flying from one bead to the next. A Sulfolobus might show images from a genetics lab, where thousands of microbes multiply in a stack of petri dishes. Together, these images will hopefully trigger a recognition of deep relationships between the emergence of form and its inexorable change. An accompanying audio track will bring together the simple sounds of a watery world with excerpts from texts by contemporary authors that write about biology: Each
of us contains atoms that were used by Homer and Buddha, as well as
by billions of worms, fish, birds, extinct crustaceans and corals, and
Stone Age men and women. The biological basis of life is a sequence
of cellular fields, each one nested upon a previous one, so that the
shapes of plants and animals emerge from the configurations of prior
species, from a beginning in simple inanimate crystals which themselves
originated in unidimensional chemical clusters. (Richard Grossinger,
Embryogenesis) |