At the grand opening of Bacterial Orchestra at New Media Meeting in Norrköping all expectations were surpassed. Our organism truly had a life of its own. It developed to be resistant still adaptive. It rarely did what we expected.
The experiment was conducted in a underground corridor in connection to the other activities. The laborative site was perfect. The reverberation from the naked stone walls and the concrete floor transported weak sounds to distant cells.
A constant dripping from the roof provided a constant, silent base rhythm for the organism when the organism was left in silence.
The reverberation of the room also provided an opportunity for the organism to break the rules we had tried to enforce on it.
The cells are programmed to die from too loud impulses. But as it turned out the acoustics led to swelling, resonant sounds with no impulse. These sounds could grow and grow creating quite a noise from time to time. When one cell picked up one of these sounds, all the others were infected. Clearly the epidemic didn’t want to be controlled…
Another thing we learned was that the organism grew up to be quite social. When we left it alone for a while only the cells that listened very hard would survive. This led to a big susceptibility to these swelling sounds. When no one around Bacterial Orchestra could be heard crying in the distance.
Put to the test the organism managed to cope under more stressful conditions. When a noisy group of school kids showed up it didn’t take many minutes before it screamed and cheered along with them.
All in all the first conducted experiment turned out to be a quite an epidemic. Most people were really fascinated! Not only by the idea behind the organism, but also by the music it created.
Let us just hope for a short period of incubation before the next outbreak.
Cute little bacteria making music. Hee!