multitudes

We are able to culture only 1% of our microbiome in laboratory conditions. It is 2 kg of body weight and affects our health and well being. I build a 60 times bigger Petri dish, where I gathered microorganisms living on a cell phones. I could observe their mutual interactions, taking also a place when we shake each other hand, kiss other people, or come into the world. It is a visualization of the world that is not accessible to us because we can not perceive it with the naked eye. Bacterias usually are thought of as harmful, whereas only a small fraction of them are pathogenic. Most of them collaborate with us, protect our organism and drives life on our planet. The microbiome is a unique biological imprint. Here I was also interested that they live not only on us but they can make their habitats almost everywhere, even on created by humans devices such as cell phones.

This work is a result of my ongoing research with bacteria and. This giant petri dish was built especially for this occasion. After filling it with agar LB medium I asked several people to put for a few seconds their mobile phones on the surface of a petri dish. This way I gathered microbes, bacterias, fungi and viruses which live on their of several people. where the microbiome from cell phones of different people was gathered.

P.D. shows an invisible world of human microbiome leaving on our bodies but also on our equipment. It also shows up a multilayered relationship that we have with technology. After two weeks we decided to preserve our big dish in resin.

Work was made in 2018 during workshops “Layers of Life” lead by Amy Karl, in the Copernicus Science Center