MICROSCOPY

The digital microscope I got for my 21st birthday has been waiting for me to open it since February.

My ex-boyfriend gave it to me. Not on my actual birthday, but a few months later. We’d already ended things at that point and were having closure brunch. He put it in a small pink giftbag covered in metallic hearts, which I later used to store bits of leaves and shrubs I found interesting. They dried up in the months that followed, untouched.

In the end, I threw it all out. I tried to incorporate the leaves into some paper mache but after a week it stunk. Now, when I’m cleaning out my studio I sometimes get a residual whiff of it and it makes me gag.

The actual apparatus is cheap as fuck. My surprise at the images were second to my surprise that the thing actually worked. I couldn’t download the software it came with (it was on a cd????) so I had to trawl dodgy software websites for a compatible program that would run on mac.

Turns out, it fully just interfaces with photobooth.

So, hours and malware risk totally wasted. But photobooth had its own psychological impositions; the bar at the bottom with the gallery was wigging me out. I ended up using a digital viewer app that looked like it was made in 2008.

Granted, the image quality is shocking, but after some noodling with photoshop i got it respectable at a glance. Taking the lens cap off also helped. I figured that out after a good hour of futile adjustments.

The moth wing had pieces missing, and I felt uncomfortable observing it. I introduced saline briefly to attempt pigment rehydration and vibrance (bottom right). All it did was propel the scales to run around the slide, and i had to stop and wonder if i was perverting something i couldn’t articulate. They moved like I had just reanimated microbes from stasis.

At the same time, the iridescence was amazing (top left) and I actually made a sound when i saw it. Structural coloration being different to the yellow pigment colouration, the physical grain of the scale fibres create contrasting refractions depending on perception angle.

crystallised cicada shell i collected while on Wurundjeri land (woodlands historic park). (bottom right) is the exoskeleton’s interior.

Fumbling around with the settings/focus/light/zoom with a tiny specimen was tedious. But it took me out of my body and into a causal relationship that was beyond me. What I would move on the slide, would shift on the laptop screen in the opposite direction. (Im assuming because of a similar mirror effect that happens with telescopes?) if i moved something to the left, the monitor would show it as right.

The logic of my movements became something else and my perceptions grew to be symbiotic to the microscopic world. It was like a psychosomatic adaption to understanding the world i was looking at. Like driving and understanding the car’s boundaries as your own.

I also felt like a was intruding on something i shouldn’t be seeing. Not that there is anything bad about looking at crystals under a microscope (the animal material i collected had been already discarded, or collected after their death). But since i have been researching nuclear violence, the advent of the microscope seems pivotal to the whole thing. Humans discovering that there are things beyond our perception to be commodified, begins with their observation. Am I commodifying things I should not know for artistic content?

crystallised spine of a sea urchin given to me by a friend.

idk. shit looks cool though.

And its exciting to have a tiny island of matter to explore. The formations I observe are monumentalised by my looking at them, they’ll never exist in the same way again. It gives me the same emotions as snorkelling – its a world i don’t belong in physically, i have to augment myself to survive in it, things operate by different logics, and everything is constantly changing; whether I can perceive it or not.

There’s an element of fear with snorkelling, like seeing something move out of rhythm with the waves, or coming into a strong current you hope you can get out of, and the silence. That isn’t there with the microscope. But the excitement is the same. It’s more intimate and very involved. Im still reckoning with the ethical implications of observing and collecting.

I should probably just enjoy it, but that’s not me.