I’m writing this in Dec 2020, many months into the COVID pandemic. Last February feels like a lifetime ago when the Illumination show opened at the San Diego Art Institute. I did a piece in collaboration with scientists working in microscopy at the La Jolla Institute of immunology. My finished piece was a video of living human cells dividing, a printed volume of Chromosome 22, and wallpaper with images of the scientists in the pattern.
Here’s the official write up on the piece. Many thanks to the La Jolla Institute of Immunology, Dr. Zbigniew Mikulski, Dr. Sarah McArdle, SDAI, and curator Chi Essary.
Chromosome 22
Dimensions: various
Printer, video, wall paper
2019
I visited the microscopy lab at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology three times between November 2018 and May 2019. On my first visit, scientists Dr. Zbigniew Mikulski (aka Dr. Z) and Dr. Sarah McArdle gave me a tour of their facility and an overview of their research. On the next two visits, Dr. Z helped me use one of their microscopes to image living human cells.
It’s very hard to summarize the emotional impact of these encounters. The work they’re doing at
LJI is a fundamental challenge to my perception of self. Like many, I’ve understood myself to be
made up of discrete organs, all of which are described around their functions, in the simplest
terms. This is the medical understanding I absorbed through high school and college biology
courses. Those experiences were a dull walk through endless taxonomies punctuated by lab
experiments that didn’t smell good. As a younger person, I had little interest in biology. My
favorite science was astronomy - it was visual, philosophically challenging and took place on a
grand scale.
These encounters with Dr. Z and Dr. Sarah are the first times I’ve ever experienced biology in a
way that felt like astronomy. Operating the microscope felt like (imagined) space flight. The
world they’re exploring is three dimensional, inconceivably vast, and describes human tissue not
with taxonomy but as a chimeric assemblage of aliens. It’s breathtaking.
This video, documents human cells multiplying but it also captured me, a very exciting amateur,
pushing and pulling at the controls of a spaceship. (microscopes really are space ships if you
think about it) The screen is the view from the ship, what’s before you is something wondrous -
living human cells that are reproducing outside the body. They are immortal.
At the microscope, I was amazed to see cell nuclei split. I wondered how much data is in the
nucleus of a human cell? Printed pages are a familiar metric, so I decided to print one
chromosome sequence on paper. This 10,000-page document represents chromosome 22. It is the
smallest of the 23 human chromosomes. Most cells in the body contain the full set of 23
chromosomes and an average adult human has trillions of cells.
The wallpaper pattern is made from images of the scientists working. The repetition of the image
is a reflection of their precision and persistence.