Micrographia

A poetic soaring within a laboratory of genetics . With Marie Coutelier & Nicolas Maille A movie from Marie Coutelier (Scientist) & Alexandre Labarussiat (Filmaker) With the collaboration of Michel Dequet & Nicolas Maille The team thanks l'Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière (ICM) &

Tears for Lost Frequencies explores our complex relationship with plastic. Our intention is to highlight plastic as a matter that cannot be separated from the "natural": a material everywhere and becoming our "nature" and our "uninvited" collaborator. We ask whether we carry microplastics in our mos

Inspired by the last essay Charles Darwin wrote on the action of worms, I intended to craft a film where the artistic action is placed in continuity with the work of earthworms, digesting and feeding the soil microscopically day after day. The film intertwines direct observation, video projections a

Microscopy, timelapse, and observation beautifully captures a lab's full study of squid embryonic development. Original score gives a momentum and underscores the aesthetic beauty of these images and data. Squid Development with music composed and performed by Kristina Dutton and Nathan Clevenger.

Consider the human brain––a weakly pigmented anatomical complex with wrinkled lobes folded up neatly in your cranium, running on less power than a refrigerator light bulb. The organ manages the most spectacular of human abilities: it thinks. But how?⁠ From Pioneer Works, this is SCALE. ⁠

Entanglements of Being: Microbial Ecosystems investigates the profound intricacies of microbial life, an invisible yet foundational stratum of the biosphere. By illuminating the microscopic worlds that structure and sustain all living systems, the project foregrounds the intimate interdependencies t

This animated feature celebrates 17th-century citizen-scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, whose discoveries of microbes changed our view of the biological world. In 1674, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of lake water through his homemade microscope and discovered an invisible world that no o

The first dive-in of a Monarch butterfly wing revealing the intricate scale structure, the pigmented scales, (fuzzy) borders. The borders of the wing evoke the borders between countries, notably between Canada, US and Mexico. The soundscape was created by director Alexis Gambis in collaboration with

Among the arguments made in favor of cinema as a source of scientific knowledge, the most obvious one right from the start was that film not only records movement, but in many cases makes it perceptible in the first place. Magnification reveals cellular processes; time-lapse and slow-motion effects

A filmmaker documents his own subtropical parasitic disease... Twenty years ago, I was in Ecuador documenting a U.S. scientific team's fight against Chagas disease. One of the crew from the C.D.C. had a small camera with the ability to record microscopic image video. Fascinated with its capabilities

A scientific and dreamlike documentary at once, Ghost Cell is a stereoscopic plunge into the guts of an organic Paris seen as a cell through a virtual microscope.

Life exists on multiple scales. These are all relative to our own sense of scale - the human scale. There is the macro world, and there is the micro world. before my beginning is an experimental film that kicked off an exploration into the possibility of using macro-micro scales of perspective to ex

Fossil Lights is a video composed from archival photographs of a particle physics experiment conducted in the 1980s using the BEBC bubble chamber at CERN. By animating these scientific images, the film reawakens a time when the invisible was made visible through the luminous trails of passing subato

The digital format breaks when trying to replicate neural activity. Rapid eye movements occur in one of the stages of sleep where the body is paralyzed while consciousness is obliged to exist between two dimensions, it is on this frontier that transient images appear leaving an immaterial trace.

In the incredibly dense yet invisible world of the cytoplasm in biological cells, complex interactions can be thought of as a playful dance between macromolecules, minerals, ions and proteins. These cytoplasmic playgrounds are reimagined using dynamic particle systems that play out and evolve differ

Littleness uses the scanner as microscope to explore the edge of printed legibility. Animated sympols of "progress" (both evolutionary and techniological) parade across the screen and page.

An examination of the human body as an extraordinary landscape that is also otherworldly and harrowing, from five hospitals in northern Paris neighbourhoods.

Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist's dream. Prima Materia is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. It is an homage to the first, tentative photographic record

…moving on from the Macro Kingdom, we pass through the portal of a microscope to venture into the Micro Empire … surrounding us … inhabiting us … Stranger than fiction… molecular conflict and mitochondrial warfare … a heart-stopping, subcellular epic &hellip

Contents: 1. Sea Urchin Development - Seth Ruffins and Charlie Ettenson, Carnegie Mellon University (4:56) 2. Slime Mold Morphogenesis - John T. Bonner, Princeton University (5:46) 3. Snail Polar Lobe Formation Rachel Fink, Mount Holyoke College, and JoAnn Render, University of Illinois, Urbana-Cham

An attempt at mourning both personal and political futures that never arrived, organised around a broad interpretation of the trope of the ghost. We see depersonalised figures, urban ruins, consuming fires and microscopic images of decaying bodily matter; footage was shot in Washington DC, Lima and

Part science, part history, 2cent / 10coil is an exploration into the physical properties of a U.S. postage stamp and the anomalies it presents when subjected to the beam of an electron microscope. Integrated within, are the philosophical musings and speeches of a man in his last weeks of life on a

The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, Last Things observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts — evolution and extinction, from the POV of rocks. The immensity of our existence is

Gregor and Harold, two corals living in the underwater remains of Miami, share their dreams with each other. Made without any computer effects, using real coral specimens.

In his laboratory, an oceanographer conducts temperature and salinity tests to determine the necessary conditions for the micro-algae Protoceratium reticulatum to survive in the Saint Lawrence Estuary. The filmmaker, moving between the seen and the unseen, follows the scientist as he studies the din

Wearing well is a collaboration between Enrico Milanese, Researcher in Computational Solid Mechanics and Markos Kay, Computational Artist. The film visually reimagines Milanese's research whereby the microscopic effects of contact and wear between materials are studied through the use of high-perfor

Party and celebrations have always played a central role in our societies and traditions. This is an ode to celebration, joy, music, dance, questioning its limits and frame. The movie was shot with a widefield fluorescence microscope under a 20 X and 40 X objective lens. The music accompanying the a

Excessive microscopic seeing. That might be the main idea behind the images in occhiolino , Michaela Grill's and Sophie Trudeau's finale to their five-part found footage series. Or rather, behind the appropriated material from a 1920s scientific film that has been condensed here to an enchanting aud

"EVERY HOLOGENOME FOR THEMSELVES" is an artist film, created during the first months of lockdown in USA. It uses stories from microbiology, and kitchen-sink bio-hacker techniques to create a series of microscopic stages, and DNA inspired performance scores for the world we live in now.

Sperm with hooks!! I guess make sense when we say: hookup. These are not from the movie alien, they are from a rat. Sperm come in all different shapes and sizes in different species. The differential in sizes and shapes have evolutionary significance. Taken with LabCam on a microscope with Different

Florotica is a short video that reveals the hidden beauty of flowers through the microscope as never before seen. Dr. Gary Greenberg's 3D microscope shows stamens, pistils, and petals magnified hundreds of times. It exposes what flowers might look like if we were tiny insects living and working insi

Iridescent waves, geometrical gardens, and spiraling sand dunes found in the landscapes of a crystal's microscopic structure. Made possible at the RISD Nature Lab

FORMations reflects the natural ecology of food and flora in the region. Sampling the earth, indigenous and collected plant species, and leftover foods, FORMations examines the constant evolution within an ever-shifting cultural and geographical landscape; the petri-dish environment makes visible th

In modern times, but also since the beginnings of human history, our struggle to "encounter the other" has always been present. Whether it is reflected in the religious and social ideal of the "second-half", whether it is reflected in Don Quichotte fighting for his Dulcinee, or in D'Artagnan looking

Corps Exquis is an album and live multimedia performance out on New Amsterdam in June of 2013. This segment was directed by Alexis Gambis and is a journey through the microscopic intertwining lands of the organic and inorganic. Praised as one of his generation's "imaginative and skillful creators" (

In early 2017, Andrej Ondracka, a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, sent a message to John LaCava's "Sounds of Science" project asking if anyone would like to collaborate on a project mixing science and the arts. Bernie Langs, one of the Direc

'Interfacing' explores research into lipid membranes at The Biophysical Sciences Institute, University of Durham. In the film, scientists speak about unexpected outcomes in their experiments, and the roles of chance and creativity in their work. Creative coding methods are combined with scientific m

Cells that are resident specifically to the tip can be cut away completely, and be rebuilt from the remaining tissue as the root regenerates. Here we see two cell types, in green and in cyan, gradually returning to the root tip after having been cut away. (The bright flashes are short bursts of high

Two immigrants recount the changes brought about by their journeys to the U.S., paralleling that of cells migrating in response to a wound. ISFF13 Symbiosis

"Sincerely Yours" is a portrait of representation in science centered on the developmental biologist Ethel Browne Harvey and her work with sea urchins. Positioning the camera lucida–a drawing device foundational to the history of biology–as both an instrument of scientific visualization

A microscopic perspective on the endurance of organization. A tug of war between opposite forces of deconstruction and reconstitution plays out on various chemical substances as they recrystallize after being melted and dissolved.

Filmed through a microscope, this piece superimposes footage from Anna May Wong's performance in the silent film "Piccadilly" (1929) unto a magnified strand of my hair. The film sampled is a scene from "Piccadilly" (1929). Anna May Wong plays a dishwasher in the London theater. The theater director,

In "The Curtain", Kundera said that History (the one of Humanity) has the bad taste to repeat itself; whether art is here to create its own story. In the French language, l'histoire means both History and story. In our modern time but also since the beginning of human history, we are used to both an

Through the mirror was created in a science lab, it is by the interrelation between the eye, the camera, and cells captured through mirrors that a journey develops. Repetition, reflections, movements, and gradient of colors: all traversed the cells, showing how the most minimal part of our bodies re

The video was prepared for inclusion in a full length documentary titled 'The Dark Gene', produced by FilmTank, and directed by Miriam Jakobs and Gerhard Schick. We have created the animation of the serotoninergic synapse, trying to interpret in visual terms the knowledge available about this very s

Water has been shaping our existence for as long as there has been an "us" to speak of. It is everywhere and always in motion. Planetary waters and the waters within human bodies merge and mingle, dissolving boundaries between species and ecosystems, and impacting both human and non-human worlds. 'T

"How to Use a Microscope," a classic instructional video from the 1980s, is a comprehensive guide tailored specifically for college students. This educational resource delves into the fundamental aspects of microscope usage, covering essential topics such as magnification, resolution, lens adjustmen

A powers-of-ten plunge into the molecular mechanisms inside an egg cell that reset the biological clock to zero days old. Ageing is an inevitable fact of life. But one type of cell can reset its age to zero and continue as the immortal lineage that will populate our future. "Live Forever" is a multi

Icolette is a transcendental multimedia experimental film that mirrors natural systems and cycles. The film follows a young girl determined to collect the skin of a fish. In response, the fish fights for its life. Their interaction is curious, intimate, sexual, painful, and ultimately lethal. It is

Sometimes you see something with the microscope which is not exactly, or not at all what you had intended to see. Yet it is so interesting you spend some time imaging it. In this case, I have no idea what these objects were, pollen, fungal spores, alien lifeforms? They look biological, vaguely menac

In this film, series of long takes guide us from a fictional prosthetic factory through the nostril, skin and tissue to the nervous system and into the cell. The modified 3D model of an animal cell becomes a strange world inhabited by different living and non-living organisms. Here, we see the body

Gestures trapped in photographic stillness call to be freed by movement. At their most base form pixels do their dance pretending to be trees. Comprised of 35mm print stills from the family archives of composer Jill Fraser, dating to the midcentury, reenactment and re-photography animate and marry t

Revolving Rounds is a cyclical film in both form and content. Shot at an agricultural field on the outskirts of Vienna, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik's 3D short begins as it ends, tracking a planimetric path alongside three greenhouses as the early morning sun beams across the surrounding lands

A whimsical take of what happens when one organism (the parasite) benefits at the expense of the other (the host).

A dish of beating heart cells differentiated from embryonic stem cells. As long as you give it food (fresh culturing media), it will generate a self-paced contraction in a group. Captured by the first prototype of iDu LabCam back in 2011 with a phase-contrast microscope. Credit: Du Cheng, Paula Scha

Blood film is an experimental documentary exploring image making, process and interpretation within medical and creative practices. The medical definition of a blood film is a sample of blood which is smeared onto a glass microscopic slide and stained to allow the various blood cells to be examined

In Quantum Fluctuations, particle simulations are used to visualise the distinct micro-events that occur in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during a proton collision. Made as a series of conceptual experiments, the film aims to show the complexity and abstract nature of these unobservable aspects of

I-80 is a drive on the American road. Dirt and debris concealed in a layer of scotch packing tape, enacted into movement, magnifies the road and its millions of travelers. Following a woman in the privacy of her 2001 Lexus. This film is now on view at the FluxusMuseum in Paros, Greece.

Associated with the exhibition "Critical Zones" at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the work explores the ideas of "sila" and "critical zones" and was created as part an excursion from Filmuniversitaet Babelsberg to ZKM, Germany.

Cyan marks the cell membranes in this root, which fails to regenerate after cutting its tip away. Rather than new tissue outgrowth from the center (as in 3 days ), a kind of wound closure takes place. The small outgrowth at the end of this film is evidence of that cell becoming a root hair, a cell t

Magnified between 100-400 times, this video piece by science artist Danielle Parsons reveals the intricate beauty of freshwater pond organisms and fragmented plant structures, collected from an urban water feature. The bright pink backdrop and unexpected, refracted colors emerge from the orthogonal

Human activity appears to dominate our planet's urban spaces, but a closer look reveals that we share every corner of our busy cities with trillions of microorganisms. These microscopic investigations of downtown Vancouver reveal the blurry boundary between human society and the natural world.

The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre is a unique Australian institution consisting of a world-leading cancer research program integrated within a world-leading cancer hospital. Based on 25 years of research, we are the first site in Australia fully licensed to manufacture Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR

A microscopic observation of physicists' notes and equations jotted on whatever was on hand, bringing us into poignant intimacy with the scientific creative process and the travel of the human mind. Using physicists' notes made on whatever they happened to have at hand – napkins, scraps of pap

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum creates beautiful, dendritic fractal patterns, and shows signs of primitive intelligence. Over the past term, I have been working with Mark Lessard of the Jackson Lab's Imaging Department to capture microscopic images and video that showcase the beauty and intell

The second film in a trilogy on sound. "SoundPrint" explores the marks left by sonic frequencies. Imagery from optical soundtracks and micro photography of records play against similar signals received by sand, water, and people. Sounds of the ocean and the Midshipman fish are the backdrop for a ric

After joining the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1952, Zinder and Tim Loeb, his first student, isolated bacteriophages that could grow only on strains carrying the F (fertility) factor responsible for bacterial sex. Thus was the first phage with an RNA genome (f2) identified. Access to lar

This captivating short documentary takes viewers on a mesmerizing journey into the hidden universe within the human body. Guided by a passionate microscopist, we explore the intricate tapestry of life beneath our skin using stunning visuals captured by cutting-edge microscopes. From the delicate pro

Microsculpture is a unique visual experience. The beautifully lit, high magnification portraiture of Levon Biss captures the microscopic form of insects in striking high-resolution detail. The film shows Levon Biss and his pioneering photographic technique as he captures beautifully lit high magnifi

​A conversation through time between a woman and her great grandmother. Piibe Kolka uses PXL2000 toy camera to record pixelated visuals and various messages on audio cassettes in an attempt to establish a time travelling communication. The film probes an epigenetic hypothesis that individual life ex

Butterflies and moths comprise 12% of all species known to man (180,000 species!), and their seemingly endless biodiversity is visually translated on their wings through color and pattern variation. Incredibly, we humans share these specific wing shaping genes with butterflies, and actually these ma

Originally created for a Houston city public art project, Steinke and Cook merge the micro with the cosmic in their new film U-SCOPIC. Drawing inspiration from microscopic creatures and audio and imagery from the NASA archives, the artists animate new forms using various experimental techniques. In

Late last year, while photographing a film in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I noticed a solitary dolphin slowly making its way across a shallow bay. Having never seen one in real life, I was enamoured, but also intrigued: dolphins move in pods - why was this one alone? As it turned out, dolphin and porpo

Adopting the form of a video game trailer, Immunecraft presents a fictional game which gives users agency over a real life cell culture to compete against opponent players. It explores the parallels between popular gameplay mechanics and some of the most important principles of the human immune syst

In just 4 minutes a group of scientists (active in the fields of protein motion and visual representation of cell biology) will lead you on a journey to discover an entire new world: a human cell.

The AIDS epidemic has become silent, but it is not yet over. Our best chance to solve it, after prevention, is through ongoing research aimed at finding new therapeutics and possibly a vaccine against the causative agent, HIV. The short video shows the initial events of infection, when a healthy whi

Planktonium is a short film about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures. These stunningly beautiful, very diverse and numerous organisms are unknown to most of us because they are invisible to the naked eye. However,

A researcher falls in love with a microscopic girl in his petri dish.

In The Pussification of Biotech: Period Brain , menstrual blood is reclaimed as both origin and operator of knowledge production. This film captures the live cellular unfolding of primary tissue explanted directly from a menstrual cup and cultured in N2B27 medium with murine FGF and EGF for 44 hours

As Arctic ice melts, borders shift once inaccessible places and resources become accessible, and new claims to raw materials and territories are made. The Arctic is changing like never before, from a romanticized image of wild, harsh nature to a technological place full of economic interests. The Ar

How many neurons do you need to recognize your mother? "A Sentimental Science" explores the limitations of our understanding of how our experience is encoded in neural activity. ISFF13 Symbiosis

A short film that reveals the hidden layers of a cake recipe from Chile. camera: Elisa Gómez Alvarez sound: Théo Diblanc

What if we could hear the voices of the nonhuman others and live in harmony with the ecosphere around us? Can we still restore the damage done to Nature? "MetaLife" is a speculative audiovisual metaphor exploring the potential trajectories of our collective evolution, fostering empathy towards a bal

the mystery of the crystals under closer examination. what is it that makes them possess magic powers as claimed by mystics thorough the ages? by growing crystals directly on film their mystical qualities shine straight to the screen. unfiltered, only aided by light which gracefully breaks its rays

Homologous recombination is crucial in repairing double-strand breaks in DNA, correcting errors, and maintaining genomic integrity.

A biochemist who just arrived in a small town of The Netherlands, is building an artificial cell to understand the origins of life. Through his diary and microscope footage, Colin keeps track of changes in his new life, spent between the lab, his friends and his love for Simone.

This never-before-seen footage from a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Physics and Astronomy shows microscopic particles moving in a drop as it dries. Penn physicists have recently shown that simply changing particle shape can eliminate the ring-shaped stain that is left

Researchers are trying to inject DNA from photosensitive algae to heal our retinas. From ocean blue to the computer blue screen, the vision is hybridized.

Fluorescence footage of the many color morphs of the Phymanthus crucifer anemone

A brief impression of everything. An attempt to glimpse oneness, in the face of escalating world division and disassociation. A lyrical film culled from footage accumulated over more than a decade of productions, old family archives, and stock sources.

While cleaning the fridge, I found the soffritto pronto my father had preserved in salt before his death—now covered in mould. I could no longer recall his voice, but cooking with it kept his memory alive. But now, not anymore. All of a sudden, the creeping process of my fading memories was ma

Anarchafeminist Divinations is an experimental documentary that reimagines the traditional Anatolian practice of coffee-ground fortune-telling, blending it with the photochemical process of chemigramm. While traditional readings focus on heteronormative themes like family and love, the film transfor

23 natural history films by Coral Morphologic, remixed/ remastered and compiled into a half-hour odyssey of the sea.

As her team digitises the traces of an unidentified creature, a palaeontologist mourns a loved one. A meditation on preservation, daughter of discovery and mother of loss.

This is a 2 channel installation consisting of two separate films made by painting directly onto 35mm film and working with various chemical solvents. The two films are projected side by side and slightly out of sync, creating a type of 'visual stereo' as they make random juxtapositions. The soundtr