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Journal of Visual Culture
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Winogradsky Rothko: Bacterial Ecosystem as Pastoral Landscape

Jenifer Wightman

Cornell University, Jw93{at}cornell.edu; website: www.audiblewink.com

Made in the dimensions of a Mark Rothko painting, a steel and glass frame was filled with mud and water. By applying a microbiology technique developed by a 19th-century soil scientist, Sergei Winogradsky, pigmented bacteria that existed in the mud and water composed a landscape. As bacteria colonize their optimal zones, they change their environments by depleting their resources and releasing by-products. As a bacterial species reaches its carrying capacity, the environment no longer hospitable to the original colonizer may now be the optimal environment for a potential successor to that zone resulting in an evolving color-field of living pigments. The appearance/disappearance of color indicates both procurement and loss of finite material resources; the agents that act out upon the landscape and synthesize change become acted upon by their consequentially changed world. For this article, the ecological industry of the figure and field of Winogradsky Rothko serves as a point of departure for thinking toward a notion of ecological rationality.

Key Words: bacteria • decomposition • ecological rationality • exponential function • figure • landscape • living pigments • Rothko • transformation • Winogradsky

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3, 309-334 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412908096339
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