wet specimens, ephemeral algorithms, and media theory

dead things in jars

what holds, and for how long

A glass jar holding a pale coiled specimen in clear liquid, on a patterned mat, against black.

Held in suspension

Time is a current that yields to no one. We capture moments to suspend them, to observe them, to hold on to them.

When it fails

One inaccuracy can turn a careful reading of the present into something else. Strange shapes appear. Are they only errors?

Notes

  1. Sealed The preserving fluid is trusted to stay as it is, and nothing carried by time is meant to get in.
  2. Fixed, washed, kept The last step rests on a hope that time will be kind.
  3. Through something else The specimen reaches you only through glass, so part of what you see is the glass.
  4. About this piece This is a web poem made from Gaussian splats and meshes of wet specimens. It is my own reading of what I saw and captured. It is not an account by the collections that gave me access, and it does not speak for them. TEXT TO COME
  5. One inaccuracy From COLMAP to thousands of Gaussian blobs, a small error carries through every step after it.
  6. Strange patterns The points drift and slice apart, and the pattern shows how fragile the algorithm is.
  7. What I thought was steady Libraries go out of date and my old creative coding projects no longer run. Consistency was an assumption.
  8. One glitch Keeping something suspended is a bet that nothing goes wrong, and sometimes something does.