BioText: Microgeographical statements that use unique bacterial inks to convey their message This text is generated by the bioluminescent bacterium Photobacterium phosphoreum.

BioGraffiti: Microgeography draws our attention away from the macroscopic world to one that is normally invisible.  Here graffiti using  bioluminescent bacteria, and their beguiling and lure-like light, does just this.  

 

Ecologies of the Sole:  These unconventional and unique maps trace microgeographical  journeys. They do  not report  distances, or reflect the visible layout of our cities or towns, but emerge from the  accumulated  microflora that we unintentionally gather on our travels.  In these examples, walkers were given a pair of sterile shoes, and after their own personal journeys, the microflora that had accumulated on the sole of these shoes developed by imprinting them on bacteriological growth media.    





Rules: A community of photosynthetic algae on a road sign. In a world where we constantly seek to separate our world into the natural, urban  and domestic, microbes are obvious boundary breakers. The ceaseless majority who refuse to be constrained by our made rules and who might help us learn once again to live beyond our self-imposed borderlines.

Zones of Inhibition 2: Roof tops in the Georgian town of New Alresford  showing the Urban Cryptobiotic Crust (please see posts below for a description of the UCC) with obvious  zones of inhibition beneath the windows caused by lead runoff from the flashing beneath them. Lead is inimical to life including microorganisms.  These roof top microbial ecologies are striking in that they are  over 300 years old.

A Roof Enriched: A roof in a seaside village that has been embellished with a dense growth of orange lichen. The growth of the lichen is unusually prolific because seagulls have perched on the roof's apex and their nitrogen rich faeces has fertlized the ecology. Note also the striking areas of inhibition underneath the windows, caused by the runoff from the lead flashing poisoning the ecology.

Daylight

Twilight

Night

 

   

Transduced Ecologies: Microgeography also embraces playful and inventive strategies which might take pedestrians off their predictable macroscopic paths and jolt them into a new awareness of the urban microbiological landscape. Here is such an intervention. Where there is opportunity life always finds a home. Fractures in the hard manmade continuum of our urban environments, cracks harbour overlooked but wondrous ecologies that are underpinned by microbial activity.  Here the natural ecology of a crack between concrete paving stones has been carefully removed and replaced by a natural deep marine ecology containing bioluminescent bacteria in order to draw attention to what is normally overlooked.