Microbial Me World.Self

Microbial Me investigates the boundaries between self and world by positioning the human body as an assemblage. In this framework, Self is constructed from the interactions of millions of organisms at different scales, creating a fractal ecology. In a paper titled Mind altering microbes, Cryon et al. 2012 (see references section) outlines the essential role that microorganisms play in the emergence of not only the physical reality of the macroscopic organism, but how the ecology of these microorganisms directly effects neuro-emotional experience.

Microbial Me, consists of long-term observation of my microbial self under light microscopy. Every week, or at times more frequently, I collect samples from an area of my body and observe the organisms that live their and contribute to ecology-me.

My visual investigations into my own microbial ecology has inspired a desire to characterize the microcosmic evolution of a specific area of my body over time. This will entail sampling a single spot with a clean cotton swab, and comparing the structures and organisms present there over time. I would also like to create an affective map of this evolution by correlating these microbial worldings with my emotional states. I will also be experimenting with creating affective maps through the comparison of fecal samples, which would be compared over time in context in diet, mood, and alcohol consumption. I am figuring this part out now. More to come!

Intimate Microcosms: Affective Self-Mapping

This next section of Microbial Me questions the distinctions between I and we in context of the effects of dynamic microbial worldings on human neurobiology. In this section of our documentation, I will be referring to the Artist, the embodied ecology (Mamoun Nukumanu Friedrich-Grosvenor, using a mixture of we and I, with the hope of further blurring and interweaving the ecologies that produce our consciousness.

Once a week, in an act of ritual introspection, I take a small sample of waste from toilet paper using a Q-tip. The ecology on the Q-Tip is then transferred to a fresh microscope slide. A drop of NYC tap water is added to the sample, and a glass slide cover is placed over it. On the morning of the ritual, directly after waking up, I record our emotional state through the creation of a poem that captures how we are feeling. These poems are paired with the daily stream of microscopy images to create an affective data set describe self as world.