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AUGMENTED REALITIES OF THE INVISIBLE MICRO-WORLDS

By Catalina Giraldo June 21st, 2017

The first time I placed my eyes between a tube of two lenses it was in a cell biology class, by then I discovered the invisible worlds living under my skin, traveling through my blood currents and inhabiting my body in a way I never expected to see. I saw abstract pictures which trigger my imagination for revealing existing worlds inside of any living and apparently no living organisms. Years later, I found myself exploring all the possibilities I could choose to be a Biologist. During that searching, I started exploring with a team of neurobiologists, the peripheral nervous systems cells in order to understand how the sciatic nerve recover the path to repair when it is broken. Later on, during Geography, Geology and Botany classes I was astonished by the theories about how the Landscapes and Ecosystems changed on time as a consequence of climatic changes lead to galactic cycles around the sun but also changes in the Earth’s angle. However, which was more exciting to me about this hypothesis, it was to know the possibility of visualizing plants, types of vegetation and ecosystems that happened during these cycles of time and climate. I realized the power of studying the layers of pollen fossil trapped and conserved under specific humidity and pH conditions which are only possible to find in lakes, marshes, swamps, bogs, rivers and oceanic’s sediments.

I spent hours that become years sited in a special chair, watching through these two lenses and searching for special structures inside of dyed nerve cells which will reveal what happened with the sciatic tissues. Although years later, I chose the path of predicting lost ecosystems, traces of climate change, ecosystems of past times, dreaming with plants and landscapes of remote times, and it was when my travels in time and space started to thousand of years before present, travels I had the opportunity to do over the Amazon Jungles and rivers, over the Andean Cordillera’s forests, Páramos, dry forests, deserts and all the ecosystems in Colombia that captured my mind by those days, then I believed I had found my path as biologist.

I discovered pollen grains and spores as cells with a special structure whose design is such that will fertilize a flower carrying genetic information in a way of creating seeds and fruits. Then, the life would be a continuum of species moving in time and space. I would describe pollen as a tiny sphere or a dust particle constantly floating in the air, traveling in the rivers, along with the wind currents in the atmosphere, or as passengers of birds, insects, and mammal’s bodies. During their travels, some pollen grains find itself in a flower and will germinate to transfer the genetic information into a flower which will produce seeds, and these seeds will create plants and biomes or ecosystems, which the uniqueness are a response to the climate and geographies around the Earth.

Some grains of pollen will finish their trip falling on the soil and over time they will create a historical record, a library able to tell the ecological history of ancient times. Like the sand that flows through an hourglass to keep a measure of time, the pollen grains flow through the atmosphere and in the layers of sediment they land to record the time of the earth’s structure. The rain of pollen and spores is responsible for the creation of biodiversity and the flourishing of plants on Earth. It is like stardust that creates the universe. This cellular blueprint is the invisible structure that makes up our environment and provides for us a map of our current state of biological existence like traces in the sand.

I was just one of the explorers who used the same instrument or media object to amplify invisible micro worlds. Since the 14th century, the curiosity of experimenting with glass led to generate the firsts lenses, after combining them with tubes the first microscope was born. The microscope which means from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν, skopeîn, "to look" or "see". It was in 1590 when Dutch lens grinders Hans and Zacharias Janssen make the first microscope by placing two lenses in a tube, then in 1667, Robert Hooke studies various objects with his microscope and publishes his results in Micrographia. Among his work were a description of cork and its ability to float in water. Then in 1675, in Delft, Netherlands, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek a businessman and scientist discovered the "animalcules”, he uses a simple microscope with only one lens to look at blood, insects and many other objects. He was first to describe cells and bacteria, seen through his very small microscopes with, for his time, extremely good lenses. Centuries later, several technical innovations made microscopes better and easier to handle, which leads to microscopy becoming more and more popular among scientists. In 1938, Ernst Ruska developed the electron microscope with the ability to use electrons in microscopy that greatly improves the resolution and expands the borders of exploration in millions of times of original size (Nobel prize, 2017).

While I was researching and exploring microstructures, cells, organelles dyed with different color markers as blue or pink, I feel myself as a 'micronaut' or traveler of microworlds, where you have to push your mind and imagination to improve the knowledge in Science theories. But at the same time traveling in the glass slide from one side to the other, playing with the contrasting light, objective lenses for magnification, coarse and fine focus as a ship driver I found the abstract art of the structures which give a shape to pollen grains, trees, roots, leafs, insects and all the incredible micro-architecture of nature where deep sense of harmony, aesthetic and art is imprinted. That's why centuries after its invention, the microscope continues to prove that it is not only crucial to science but can also produce works of art and outreach (Schneibel, 2016). More Micronauts have been feeling the same from different science branches and definitely using to the maximum electronic microscopes to present amazing images which millions of augmentations are needed.

Some interesting examples are scientist and artist as Martin Oeggerli, a Swiss science photographer who has appeared in five National Geographic feature articles since December 2009 and is using his scientific expertise and personally executed preparation, scanning-electron-microscopy (SEM) and post-processing to display his unique perspective with profound clarity (Oeggerli, 2017). Gary Greenberg who combines his passion for art and science by creating dramatic landscapes of hidden worlds, and combines his passion for art and science by creating dramatic landscapes of hidden worlds (Greenberg, 2017). And for more than a decade, the Olympus Bioscapes has celebrated some of the world’s most amazing images of life’s wonders as seen through microscopes. The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition honors outstanding images and videos of life science subjects “shot” with a light microscope. Each year, nearly 2.500 still images and movies are submitted by scientists from over 70 countries. From those, 10 are chosen as winners (Stone 2014; Olympus Bioscapes America, 2017).

The microscope was my first media object to explore the hidden worlds living under the skin, under the soils, under the water and inside of any living and apparently no living organisms. Beyond imaginable, invisible worlds came up visible to my eyes as the augmented reality of nowadays, as micro-worlds that reveal macro-worlds from other times. Since then I never stop to observe the nature, first from microscope lenses but years later the analog and digital cameras become to be my second media object which combination bring to my eyes and brain beings of other times and places.

Cited Literature,

Greenberg, G. 2017. The Microscope Photography of Dr. Gary Greenberg. http://sandgrains.com

Oeggerli, M. 2017. The Art of Science: The microscope Photography Micronaut, the art of Microscopy, http://www.micronaut.ch

Schneibel, A. 2016. Award-winning images reveal the surreal beauty hiding in the tiny world that lies beyond human vision. Scientific American, December 8, 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-wonders-science-meets-art-under-the-microscope-slide-show/

Stone, A. 2014. 10 Award-Winning Microscope Images That Blur Science and Art. Mental Floss. http://mentalfloss.com/article/60798/10-award-winning-microscope-images-turn-science-art

The Nobel Prize in Physics, 1986. https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/microscopes/timeline/