Forthcoming Events

Anna Dumitriu is exhibiting Kryolab as part of the e-MobiLArt Project, in Katowice, Poland 28th October 2009 - 15th November, alongside a new collaborative work called Enactive Dialectics. The work was recently shown in Thessaloniki at The State Museum of Contemporary Art Warehouse B1 from May 20th - June 10th see here.

Anna Dumitriu will be discussing the relationship between Art and Science with Blay Whitby at SUPSOC on 2nd December 2009.

Anna Dumitriu will be speaking about Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0 at Alergic 9th December 2009.

Anna Dumitriu will co-curate and exhibit microbiologically inspired work as part of ‘Unravelled’ an exhibition of extreme and conceptual craft based artworks that will take the form of interventions within the collection of Preston Manor during the Brighton Festival 2010. The project is funded by Arts Council England.

Past Events

Dr Simon Park and Anna Dumitriu recently spoke at Virreina’s Talks: A GAZE BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE at The Institute of Culture in Barcelona, Spain on 11th November 2009.

On 5th and 6th September The British Festival of Science at The Austen Pierce Building, University of Surrey features “Microbes: Invisible, Influential and Inspirational” curated by Simon Park. Featuring “Bacteria Tourism: A Performance by Anna Dumitriu including photographs by John Paul” - A holiday experience with a difference for nature lovers everywhere. Your rep Anna Dumitriu will advise you on the different tours available to seek out spectacular microbial field marks around the globe. You may visit the sublime Blood Falls in the Antarctic to view deposits of of autotrophic iron reducing bacteria; Lake Magadi and Lake Natron in The Rift Valley (including an exciting illegal border crossing between Kenya and Tanzania) to see the pink deposits of alkaliphiles and halophiles; the stromalolites of Shark Bay in Australia; thermophiles in Yellowstone Park and closer to home the radioactive nodules of uranium reducing bacteria in Devon. There will also be an opportunity to try the Bacteria Tours food menu and comsume some interesting moulds and lactobacilli and sign up for a forthcoming tour to see the iron reducing bacteria of the New Forest. See here for a PDF link and here to see photos .

“Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0” was recently exhibited at The Science Gallery in Dublin from 16th April until 22nd July 2009. The chemical communication of bacteria and the live data streams of our own digital networks (the wireless/bluetooth/RFID activity taking place in and around the gallery) are combined in real time to generate a brand new artificial life form. This installation explores the layers of complexity in both digital and organic communications networks and investigates the relationship of bacteria to artificial life. By Anna Dumitriu (IUR - Director), Dr. Simon Park (IUR -Physarum Dynamic), Dr Blay Whitby (IUR - Head of Ethics), Tom Keene and Lorenzo Grespan U.K.

Anna Dumitriu presented a paper about “Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0” authored by herself and Dr Blay Whitby at Subtle Technologies in Toronto in June.

Anna Dumitriu recently exhibited new bacterially inspired work from The Third Woman/Vienna Underground Project and the Kyrolab project as part of e-MobiLArt, in the Thessaloniki Biennale at The State Museum of Contemporary Art Warehouse B1 in May 20th - June 10th see here and Katowice, Poland in October 2009 (dates to follow).

Anna Dumitriu gave a Christmas Lecture entitled “The Self-organising Artist, Her Unnecessary Research and Why She Talks to Bacteria” in Vienna on 19th December 2008.

Anna Dumitriu spoke at The Tesla Group at University College London on 5th November 2008, see details here.

Anna Dumitriu spoke at Cranfield University on 12th November 2008 - details here.

Anna Dumitriu will be showed 3D bacterial Auras (in collaboration with Dr Simon Park) and other work at the Dana Centre (Science Museum in London) on 26th November. Details here.

School Flora

Evening view event for one night only:

Took place on 15th July 2008

5:30 -7:30pm

Varndean School, Brighton (location details here)

An entire school became a major conceptual artwork for one evening only, featuring installations, interventions and performances by Anna Dumitriu and science students at Varndean School in Brighton.

As part of 'Normal Flora', her major ongoing art project about our sublime microbial world, artist Anna Dumitriu has taken over an entire secondary school in Sussex in the largest event in the science-art programme to date.

The giant one evening only art event was open to the public and took over Varndean School in Sussex, involving students and staff. The art works are all based on the laboratory findings of bacteria, moulds and yeasts collected in the school and include: digital works, performances, interventions, bacterially inspired food and music.

Anna Dumitriu is an award-winning artist with an international reputation. Recently selected for the prestigious European-wide e-MobiLArt project, she has worked closely with the science students at Varndean for this event. The students took swabs of microbes all over the school - from the drinking fountain to the books in the library - these were then taken to a lab, placed in agar jelly and cultured. Working closely with Anna Dumitriu, the students then created artworks inspired by the microbes. The project goes far beyond a typical school art project and stands as a major work in its own right. These art installations set out to reveal the secret beauty of the microbial eco-system that surrounds us.

The project is funded by Brighton and Hove City Council.

The Normal Flora Project is featured on the Brighton Magazine here.

Introduction

The Normal Flora Project is an ongoing publicly engaged art project by Anna Dumitriu, which considers our relationship to the everyday microbial world we co-exist with. Artworks are developed collaboratively and participants take on the role of artist, researcher and scientist in a hands-on performative way, final outcomes emerge (taking the form of performative interventions, digital works, sound works and installations (often using craft based techniques such as embroidery)) in dialogue with the artist.

Normal Flora Microbiology is the study of the bacteria, moulds and yeasts, that we live with, in a complex, balanced eco-system. In fact there are more bacteria on the end of an average fingertip than there are people living in the world and over 8kg of our body weight is made up of bacteria.

These facts are hidden from us, the word bacteria is synonymous with dirt, the normal reaction to the suggestion that something is covered with bacteria is that of disgust, in fact it should simply be “of course!” Television programmes and advertising increase the misunderstanding. We are asked “How clean is your house?” when the question should be “How sublime is your eco-system?” or we are told “This cleaning fluid kills 99% of all germs”, but only around 1% of bacteria are harmful.

People are clearly ashamed at any suggestion that their worlds are teeming with microscopic life. Asking someone to reveal their normal flora is an intimate process of negotiation and education. Key to the Normal Flora project is Anna Dumitriu’s work to map all the microbes in her own domestic setting. The whole process of sampling microbes, growing them in the lab, identifying them through bio-chemical tests and freezing the samples at –80 degrees Celsius is performed either by the artists or by participants in the project. But Dumitriu’s aesthetic discourse of self-revelation is not a form of ‘confessional art’ she views herself as a kind of everyman, revealing herself so that others will feel comfortable with their own scientific revelations.

In 2007 Dumitriu worked with cleaning staff and microbiologists at Eastbourne District General Hospital who collected samples of microbes from their own homes, worked together in the microbiology labs (the microbiologists aiding the cleaning staff), and engaged in the creation of the artworks (including a major sound work for performance). The intimate process of a participant revealing the microbes in the home is strongly affected by current influences in the media and participation in the project leads to a paradigm shift for both participants and audience from that of shame to that of understanding. One outcome of the project at Eastbourne hospital was a performance by Anna Dumitriu which involved one to one conversations with people waiting in the hospital foyer and café where they were invited to crochet (a very easy technique to learn if they were not experienced) with the artist the microbes found on her own bed whilst gently chatting about normal

flora microbiology and the project. The project then continued in collaboration with Varndean School in Brighton in 2008.

The work is now evolving into several threads involving the wider environmental microbial life, such as looking at arctic bacterial flora and being extended to an investigation of bacterial communication.

Anna is a also co-director of Unravelled, a project working with a diverse group of artists using ‘craft’ in extreme and conceptual ways, such as performatively or through bioart. As part of this she is co-curator of an exhibition at Preston Manor in Brighton, scheduled for May 2010. Objects in the house have recently been swabbed for normal flora.