Amoebas from the World

Project Organizers: Alex Song, Amaranta Kahn, Arthur Charles-Orszag, Fatma Gooma, Nicole Dames, Sarah Guest, Tina Wiegand.
Microbial Diversity 2023 Alumni

In the exhibition “Living Like An Amoeba”, enter the universe of free-living amoebas where we show how being an amoeba is a lifestyle. Let your imagination slide and bleb along with those incredibly diverse and unique microscopic predators. Imagine yourself in the middle of the Atlantic, surfing in Cape Town, swimming in the great lake of Michigan, which friends will you encounter, what will be your chosen dance, what sounds would you hear? What will you see? Contemporary and digital irreproducible organic arts, capturing the most singular motility esthetics.

Living like an Amoeba text on colorful backgrounds

Current state of the project:

We have been testing each member's laboratory material (microscope, camera), and gathered what is necessary for amoeba enrichment (culture flasks, carbon source, cell scraper, microscope plates).

Some amoebas have been enriched from the Atlantic, and filmed.

The current movies were both trials to estimate our capacity to enrich amoebas outside of MBL, the image resolution of the cameras, and the motility/shape of the enriched amoebas. Additionally, the current movies were sent to our sound collaborator (PP+BL and machine arrière), who started working on the creation of a sound for one of the long amoeba movies.

We are currently enriching for more amoebas in order to take videos with amoeba with different morphology and motility, and different backgrounds (ciliate, algae, cyanobacteria, diatom etc). Once we will have a broader and more satisfying panel of videos, we will work on the video editing. We are currently preparing an exhibition possessing several multimedia outputs showing amoebas in their many forms.

We aim to have a social media ready presentation in the coming weeks. Our main objective is to show the exhibition in August 2024 in Cape Town during the ISME 19 conference. We are in discussion with Colleen Cavanaugh about a potential exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Natural History.