Painting with Microbes

I chose relatively basic microbe combinations for my paintings, but wanted to see what the different mediums would do to the microbial growths. I was extremely upset by the lack of E. coli for the presence of the deep metallic green I had seen in images of this project.

I cannot upload the images of my microbial plates, but I created a fish, a flower, and a stylized ‘S’.

My intent was to create three different pieces using the same microbes, and see how differently they could all look. I didn’t look up how the microbes would interact with each other, or how they would grow on the different agars, because I thought it would be a more interesting artistic process to set the microbes down on medium and see how they went from there. Something of a Deistic process, where once things have been set in motion, they are not interfered with, regardless of if the result is what I had initially pictured or not.