The latest issue of the journal Antennae, titled ‘Microbial Ecologies’, features the SSHRC-funded Fossilation project, co-directed by Bio Lab Director (and Concordia’s Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality) Alice Jarry.
The featured paper, Form taking/force shaping, written by Alice Jarry, Marie-Pier Boucher, Brice Ammar-Khodja, lee wilkins, Vanessa, Mardirossian, and Samuel Bianchini, provides a critical reflection on the collective installation Fossilation and the research and creation process that informed the project. The whole issue offers a “timely range of multidisciplinary practices, approaches, methodologies, and conceptions to help us see and value the microbial worlds that until recently have remained invisible.”
Fossilation is large bioplastic membrane and an apparatus harvesting residual energy from its environment to interact with light. The work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris within the context of the exhibition Matières d’images in February 2021.
Antennae ISSUE 59 — AUTUMN 2022
Microbial Ecologies
Matthew Halpenny and Philippe Vandal
Video documentation of the making process of Fossila tion’s bioplastic membrane, 2021.
A transparent membrane made of bioplastic hovers over the floor at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Many cables extend directly from the membrane towards the ceiling and appear to be held in place there as if by static cling. Arranged like tentacles in search of food and energy, sensors and suspended cables running along the exposed piping (a signature architectural feature of the Centre) also interface with the membrane, converting the building’s residual flow, energy, activity, and traffic into electricity. This energetic and electri – cal “grip” on the building serves to power a light arrangement that illuminates the membrane from the inside, modulating its intensity and creating an effect reminiscent of a flickering film strip. The membrane is imprinted with counter-forms depicting bare, obsolete electronic components—flat screens, cables, computer components, and peripheral devices. The forms progressively merge and fade into the media, like an open-pit mine being gradually filled, frame by frame, creating a fossilized imprint of our era.
Form taking/force shaping (2022), Alice Jarry, Marie-Pier Boucher, Brice Ammar-Khodja, lee wilkins, Vanessa Mardirossian, and Samuel Bianchini.
Read the full article and download the complete Antennae‘s current issue open access here.
