| OCR Text |
Show I have with the person whose bacteria I am painting, relationships with myself and the hours I spend painting alone; the relationships I have with paint, and medium, and brushes, and the people I interacted with earlier that day. What I am really doing is arguing the semantics of selfportraiture and portraiture as a distraction from the likely more accurate notion that, just because I am painting the bacteria of someone else, I never stopped painting myself. I think Basil Hallward was right, when he told Lord Henry, …Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. (Wilde 10) 2.4 That Other Time I Did Really Cool Things With Bacteria: I spent several hours a week in the lab, checking and documenting the bacteria cultures. Although I most frequently interacted with Adam, Shin, and my undergrad assistant, Ian James, Colin Dale noticed the time I spent, and showed me a new bacterium. Dale, and the Dale Lab discovered this bacterium, and they named the strain Human sodalis. The lab referred to it as strain HS, which conjures up images of apocalyptic viruses, straight from a science fiction novel. What was, and is, really exciting about strain HS is that is shows social motility in a way that has not been seen in bacteria. The colonies of HS moved together, as if in communication, spiraling and spinning, beading off into pearls. An interesting discovery was that the motile colonies appeared to pick up bacterium from colonies that were genetically modified to be immotile. Amongst other interesting things about HS, was, rather than the profligate reproduction that bacterium is known for, HS seemed to exhibit some kind of population control. This is also the first bacterium with a symbiotic relationship with an insect that has survived, and able to be studied, once extracted from its host. Symbiotic relationships are common between insects and bacterium (see bacterial breakdown fact 9) and considered to be a part of biological diversification. By extracting HS, they may better 41 |
