Professor Kosuke Fujishima & More Lab Time –

This morning we had a talk by Professor Kosuke Fujishima from the Fujishima Lab at the Earth Life Sciences Institute in the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Experiments from The Grow Lab

The plan for today was to to get as much material as possible together in order to assemble a presentation that would align with our chosen topic of ‘Beyond Earth’ and the chemical gardens.  Shem the lab technician had suggested that displacing the chemical garden solution and replacing it with epoxy resin might be a great way of preserving the structures.  As lab space had been particularly tight in the last ‘Grow Lab Session’ only 3 members of each group were allowed to work in there at any given time.  We managed to organise this really well between us.  I was interested in recording what was being created and Kismat wanted to remain behind to work on the group’s zine.

We decided to create a short film, a variety of chemical gardens and a zine for our presentation scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Below is a selection of images and closeups that I took of my chemical garden and also one of our epoxy resin creations.

Petri Dish Chemical Garden Preserved in Epoxy Resin

Experimental Soft Focus Images of the Petri Dish Chemical Garden

Normal Range and Close up Shots for Comparison

I really do think that the chemical garden structures are particularly beautiful and I would certainly like to explore this medium further.  I intend to make enquiries as to how feesible this might be in terms of introducing this as an art technique in the college where I work.

Dendritic Painting

While Sarah, Hyejo and Leah worked on the epoxy resin chemical gardens, Charlotte was busy exploring dendritic painting. the technique known as dendritic painting employs mixtures of ink and isopropanol atop paint, yielding intricate tree-like patterns.  While researching this I came across this really informative video showing an easier way to get started.  As soon as I finish my film I am hoping to try this as I can think of multiple ways that this could be developed.

Dendritic Paintings

Below is a gallery of some of Charlotte’s dendritic paintings that were either shot by me or images that were taken under the microscope.  This gallery can also be found in the Mattering Life – Workshops Day #2 blog post.

Summary

I felt that today was a really productive day.  I managed to take some interesting shots of Charlotte’s (one of our team members) beautiful dendritic paintings.  I felt that these shot using a very soft focus might make useful images to feature in our film that I was planning.  The rest of the team were busy working on more chemical gardens while Kismat was working really hard to create a zine for the group.  Hyejo was going to produce the Powerpoint presentation for us tomorrow. Therefore it was so important to ensure that we had everything ready so that she could compile our work into one document.