What happens when the probably brighter reflective or refractive light of the microscopic slide supersedes the fleeting light of the fluorophore that we use to render the microscopic subject? We take autofluorescence as artifact. As interference. As noise. As the cause of an unwilling suspension of the gaze.
What, then, constitutes the "real" in the dialectic played out in and on the visible of the slide? The effects, it would appear, of photosensitive dye. And so it is that the real gets rewritten as the effects on an injection. As the short-lived effects of a glowing dye.
So there's an attraction here. The potential of an induced autofluorescence. A xenographic encoding on the surface of the slide. An inscription prior to seeing. And a willing redirection of the gaze.
What happens when the light of the microscopic slide becomes the subject of the microscopic slide? We then take autofluorescence as subject. As carrier. As the deliverer of some foreign message.
What's interesting here is the idea of the long-standing physical attributes of glass acting as a type of inhibitor, or limiter, over what it is that glass lets us see in the first place. When we inscribe the surface of the slide to encourage this type of internal glow we cut a channel through our own field of sight.
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So, tonight we discussed turning the bane of microscopists (the artifactual glow of autofluorescent species on the sample slide like dust and/or the autofluorescence of the slide itself) into an art medium. You compared this to a movement in philosophy that confronts authenticity, the real, and in music where sound artifacts: mistakes (a record skipping, static) can be transformed through looping etc into the subject of the music, rather than the unfortunate by-product. It seems although artifacts of this sort have traditionally been viewed as
unwanted, disregarded as junk, or discarded, now there is a movement in many disciplines (music, philosophy, science) to
reexamine these left overs and challenge the concept of authenticity. I'm curious to hear some musical examples.
Also, I am reminded of exons (expressed regions of a gene) versus introns (intervening regions). Introns (in fact, a lot of RNA floating around the cell) were traditionally viewed as "junk" sequence. Last year's Nobel Prize was awarded to a group that realized that a subset of these junk sequences were very vital indeed. I did my Plan II thesis on group II introns, a class of so called junk molecules that it turns out can do and do do all sorts of interesting things in the cell. So, this reexamining of what is "real" in the genome is also a trend in the biological sciences at the moment.
Meanwhile, we have decided to address this in our project through an idea I proposed earlier to nano-etch the score of your composition onto glass microscopy slides, which I can then image at high resolution with a laser-scanning microscope. The artifact, thus, becomes the real object of inquiry.
Which brings to mind our first discussion on direct versus indirect observation.
And noumenon versus phenomenon.
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