microscopy correspondence

Moving forward in my optics work, I am privileged to access my 7+ year correspondence with the Director of the Georgia State University microscopy lab in Atlanta, author, artist, and microscopist, Dr. Robert Simmons, PhD.  

This ongoing professional correspondence delights me and informs my practice.  With Dr. Simmons’ permission, I am opening up our correspondence and some of my related studio explorations.

In 2007, I contacted the Microscopy Society of America with a question, from an artist’s perspective, about how a certain microscopic image is produced. The front office of the Microscopy Society forwarded my inquiry to Dr. Simmons, telling him, he recalls, “that they had been contacted by an artist who wanted to know about microscopy and I was the first person who came to mind for whoever it was that got your question. We took off from there and it’s been lots of fun.”

Of course the office person thought of Dr. Simmons, because in addition to being a scientist, he is also an active, museum-exhibiting artist with works in glass and photography.   His photographic work is on display at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, GA.  Dr. Simmons focuses on microscopic fungi and microscopy of sand.  He serves on the Editorial Board for Microscopy Today.  He and his wife, Camille, travel the world for art and science, including a recent trip to Italy for glass working in Murano and Venice.   It means we can speak artist-style about science – my favorite.

At this time, in my studio I see light passing through glass optics, falling on surfaces in a particular way that I want to understand and talk about.  In search of a beginning point, I checked in with Dr. Simmons about the name for this common phenomenon.  And anything else he might know about it out of a microscopist’s thorough understanding of lenses.  

I sent him these pics I recently posted, along with my inquiry:

Hi Robert,

I had decided to not pester you with this question even though you may know the answer.  But when I noticed you saw my recent work experiment on Facebook I decided to ask you after all…

Can you say what is the term for what is falling on the wall in my work – the thing I called an optical shadow on Facebook yesterday – when light passes through glass or anything transparent, and the photons get going (through) the transparent materials … and end up in lots of different places in the room including commingled with the more shadowish optical trace. So it’s not a shadow which represents the silhouette form of an object.

Can you say what it is called, or recommend an aspect of science where I might search around for it?

Thanks for being so open to my inquiries.

I hope you guys are well and warming up.  Weather is still hopeless up here.

Dana

 to which he generously replied not once but twice:

Hi Dana,

Nice to hear from you. That’s a very interesting question. The first thing that came to mind for me is an Italian painting term – Chiaroscuro, which I have always understood to mean contrast or moving from light into darkness (or the reverse). There is another set of terms hanging around on the edge of my mind that I’m going to sleep on and maybe they’ll come into better focus. I really did think of whole cell imaging when I saw your photos. Very cool stuff.

More soon!

and then a day or two later, with this continuing reply, the present letter on the desk in the correspondence.  I am simultaneously composing my response and this post:

Here’s a term that I find interesting and applicable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucoloris

I also like the non-technical phrase Shadows and Light, but it’s been used as a CD title by John Doyle (Irish musician).

I did some searches using lighting terms, coma, shadow vector, etc. I hope this helps some.

Weather down here is a real mixed bag, going from freezing rain to highs in the 60s and 70s almost overnight. It’s been hard on the body. We’ve both been down with the cold from Hell that won’t go away. We’ve got a trip planned to the Gulf coast (St. George Is.) in April – the sea is calling and we are more than ready to answer.

Robert

and I am presently composing my response.  I will be  bringing up the second thing I observe about the shape of the light  through glass in the picture, and the shape of diatoms, which are also silica. 

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Correspondence Archive

A look at earlier correspondences and some of the studio developments borne in them:

Dr. and Mrs. Simmons had seen my art on exhibit while they were traveling, and he wrote

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I read that article – just never checked the author’s name. Very nice, thank you.

I just did my Master of Fine Art degree, which culminated in a large installation that was initially seeded in a microscopy image of human neurons.  image attached of the piece, and also of a photoshop x-ray trick on a segment of the piece, which shows the aesthetic origins a little better.

Best,

In my studio work, I became increasingly interested in the similarities and differences between size scales, and wondered about seeing one of my own projects at a completely different scale.  I had just completed Goat Barn, and wrote to Dr. Simmons proposing a trade, art for a visit to the electron microscopy lab.   He replied:

Hi Dana,

… I’ll be more than happy to give you the deluxe tour of the EM lab. We can look at stuff in the TEM and SEM and whatever else you want to do. Let me know if there is anything in particular that you’d like to see and I’ll see if I can set it up. I would really love to have a small piece of your art for our collection. We really like having original pieces from folks we know.

Keep me posted on when you are coming and where you are going to be staying. We’ll look forward to seeing you!

Robert

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Hi Robert,

I am wondering if you and Camile have had a chance to think about which type of my art you might like to have.  I will have some good time in December to make something special for you, which is truly what I want to do, rather than give you an old piece, unless there’s one you want.

I was looking at SEM images of bone and was reminded of a well-known painting.  I thought you might find the attached images as interesting as I did.

Are you available Friday Feb 3, or Monday Feb 6?

Let me know about the art – or if you prefer to be surprised then tell me something about your collection.

Best,
Dana

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Hi Dana,

:

   

  

Hi Dana,

I was looking at some fungus samples in the SEM today and took a couple of extra images that I thought you might find interesting. The Aspergillus is growing on a pecan. The Chaetomium is on a piece of paper.

Hope things are going well on your end of the world. My life got pretty busy for a while there and I didn’t get much done on the art side. Hopefully the balance will be returning soon.

See ya

Robert

   

 

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Hi Robert!

Wow these images are amazing — thank you so much for sending them. I hope you’ll publish them — they are really gorgeous pictures.

I have been sculpting aluminum mesh lately, and noticing that my snapshots of the work look like images of microscopic fungi.  I’ll attach them.  It’s a wonder to me that there is so much self-same in the way things look.  I def did not intend for my sculptures to look like anything at all in particular besides themselves.

Likewise, I recently painted an oil painting that began as script, that later crowded and morphed its way to being a non-representational image.  I noticed after I finished it that it looks like the goat hoof image we took in your lab.

ways of seeing!

Earlier this spring I was introduced to some physicists at FermiLab who are searching for art for the campus, and I got a few personalized tours of the facilities.  Your microscopy lab is not unlike FermiLab in many ways – and both are like art studios, except with rigorous cross-checking and good record-keeping!

Whenever you get images of your glass work ready to share with galleries, I will help you connect with galleries.

Dana

  

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Hi Dana,

It’s been a while, how you doing these days? Life really got busy on us for a while there after Camille’s mom passed away and we didn’t see much of our studio for a while. We got up to New York /city back in march for the opening of the Jewelry in the Space Age at the Forbes Gallery of Jewelry on 5^th Ave. One of my beads that went up on the space shuttle made it into the show so we got to go and represent Beads of Courage. It was great fun.

I made a glass sculptural piece for an exhibition called Lifeforms that is going to be at the Pittsburgh Glass Center this summer. I know that I’ll be in the on-line catalog but don’t know yet if the piece will be included in the live show. There are some pretty interesting pieces submitted, you can see the galleries here: http://www.glasslifeform.org/home.html

My photomicrographs of the sand components have finally found an audience. Who knew that there was an International Sand Collector’s Society and that they would be meeting at the Tellus Museum just north of Atlanta in November? I was invited to do an exhibition of the pictures plus give the keynote address about science and art.  Now I’m reaching out to all of my art friends who have an interest in science. The main thrust of my talk is going to be taking images from micrographs and using them as a basis for art works in other media. I, of course, do glass and I have a friend down on the Gulf who does cut paper assemblages. Are you doing anything that is microscopy-based these days? I would love to have the opportunity to bring some of your work to a new crowd if there is a piece that I could include in my PowerPoint for the talk.

I’ve been messing about with sand a bit more of late and have some new SEM images of diatoms and such that I’ve extracted from the sand. There may be some new virus images on the way soon as well if you have an interest.

Hope all is going well on your end of the world.

Robert

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Hi Robert,

Great to get your email!  I’m sorry to hear about Camille’s mom’s passing.

I bet the show in NY was a lot of fun!  I wonder what qualities you made for a bead that would go up in the space shuttle, do tell!

Lifeforms looks awesome – the fragility of the gorgeous piece they picture makes my teeth itch! I assume you entered fungi forms to them? I can’t wait to see. Congrats on the show!  Corning is having something this summer, too, I assume you know about it, but if not maybe look into it.  Some sort of historical bead show.  You are probably hooked in with them already.

I am thrilled you’d like to include my work in your lecture, thank you.  I am continuously influenced by microscopy images, and microscopy from a more philosophical perspective about how we gather information and form ideas.  At this time I am doing Shadow Matrixes, which are even more directly related to microscopy than usual.  These are aluminum screen sculptures whose form is directly influenced by microscopy images.  That is not to say I copy anything I see, but I see the patterns that emerge in microscopy images, the shared structures of what appear to be very different bodies at the macroscopic level.  These screen sculptures are informed by the look of the building blocks of the material world, particularly the organic world.   I incorporate LEDs into the sculptures themselves, and cast giant, dramatic shadows on the wall.  What can I say, Robert?  Is that not very similar, at the most basic level, to capturing a microscopic image, including the relativity of the light position? I plan to incorporate optics as well, and just attended Lightfair in Philly to that end.  I have Fresnels on the way, and a glass artist friend blew me some optics.

I will be making photographs of an evolving Shadow Matrix installation throughout the summer.  Likely those images could apply to your talk, plus any you see on my fancy new website, www.DanaMajorArt.com

Send the virus and diatom images!  Have you noticed a similarity in the look of a diatom and of a 3D rendering of the Mandelbrot sequence? the look of the building blocks of what is.

Thanks for writing!  My best to Camille.  I am trying to remember if I met her at any point, can you say?  You tell such good stories about your adventures that I feel like I know her, too!

Best,

Dana

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Hi Robert!

I hope all is well with you and Camille!  Mike and the kids and I are doing well – kids started a new school this year and we love it.

All is really great in my studio – getting shows, work unfolding creatively, and potential exciting new studio location – don’t want to jinx it so just wish me luck!

I’m doing an installation right now – you can check my website for new work and updates.  DanaMajorArt.com

I wonder if you’d be willing to take a look a this photo and speculate about what you’re looking at? This is just for fun, so don’t sweat it!  I will likely weave your response into a blog post in the near future where I’ll also tell, at last, about the visit to the microscopy lab.

Thanks!

Dana

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 Hi Dana,

It’s good to hear from you. Glad to hear things are going well on your end of the world and that the work is flowing. We seem to have been running flat out for the last few months and hope to get a little bit of a break soon. There is a trip to Italy planned for late October when I can escape my classes for a little while and I’ll get to spend a couple of days on Murano and Venice communing with the glass workers. My first photographic  exhibition is finally in place at the Tellus Science Museum now and we’re going up to take a look at the final setup tomorrow. It’s exciting to see my work on the all in a museum!

I’ve looked at your image and the first thing that comes to my mind is a scanning electron micrograph of a surface that has some sort of biofilm involvement. The small white particles remind me of coccoid bacteria and the filmy material looks like the slimy capsular material produced by bacteria in wet environments. Poke a microbiologist and that’s what you get. I’ll be interested to see what it really is!

I’ve got one new project in the oven as of last night. I got a call from the National Geographic Channel inviting me to participate in an educational program that they’re doing about glass. I’ll be over in Ft. Payne, AL, on the 23^rd for filming at a glass blower’s studio with the guy who does the Smarter Every Day UTube series. This should be lots of fun.

I’ll check out the web site. I saw on FB that  you had some new stuff in the works but haven’t had time to follow up – I’m kind of a drive-by FB person most of the time.

See ya

Robert

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Hi Robert,

Whoa!  Congratulations on your work hanging in the Tellus Science Museum!  That’s so very awesome!  How can I see images of these works? And the National Geographic Channel show sounds so fun!  Maybe you’ll spin off into your own scientist/artist show host!

Thanks for the great response!  I wanted to find out to what extent this organic object might be identified as any other organic object at radically different scales.  I really liked how detailed you were able to respond.  I am interested in the similarity of patterns and “looks” at different possible scales of human/mechanical seeing.  Thank you so much for your great speculation – it helps my creative work .  The image was an iPhone photo of a regular human life-scale cobweb in the black ceiling corner of our favorite Thai place.

Enjoy Italy!  I’ve never been but it’s very high on my dream travel list.

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Hi Robert,

You are about to go to Italy –  Have a wonderful trip!  Please post images of your work and also of your and Camille’s view of Italy.

You may not have any time right now, so only reply if the spirit moves you.  It might look like lazy research, but really it’s more fun to ask – Can you say anything about the difference between the way SEM sees and optical seeing?   I am about to start working with optics in my studio, and I seem always to want to check in with microscopy.  I’ve been noticing that the entire field in SEM images seems to be in sharp focus, and I wonder about that.

Also, just want to make sure it’s ok with you if I do a blog post about some of our investigations, say your name, and use some of your images as well as the goat ones.

Bon Voyage!

Dana

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Hi Dana,

I’ve got a few minutes this morning while I’m fixing some yeast cells for a TEM experiment. Hopefully I can answer your question.

I we’re thinking about light microscopes we have two different concepts to deal with. The first is usually referred to as a Stereo Microscope, aka Dissecting Microscope. These use illumination from light sources mounted somewhere above the sample (epi-illumination) and show you magnified detail on the surface of your sample. What you are seeing is light reflected from the surface. Color is generated by some wavelengths of light being absorbed while others are reflected. These microscopes have a moderately deep depth of focus but as you got to higher magnification levels this depth decreases. I used this type of microscope for most of the images in the Unseen Beach exhibit.

The electron microscope analog to this is the Scanning Electron Microscope. Instead of light being projected onto the sample we are now scanning a beam of electrons across the sample surface in a ‘raster’ pattern (a series of lines forming a square). Some of the electrons are reflected but most will interact with the surface and, in the process of losing much of their original energy, will generate multiple ‘secondary electrons’. These have lower energy than the original beam electron. As these secondary electrons rise from the surface of the sample they are attracted to a detector with a low positive voltage applied to an open grid. This will cause the electrons to accelerate towards the secondary electron detector and be recorded as energy pulses. In this type f detector the electron energy is converted to photon energy and then back to an electrical signal in a photomultiplier tube. This amplifies the signal. The signal detection is synchronized with the movement of the beam as it sweeps across the specimen so the energy pulses are recorded and converted to an image by the image processor system, which then displays it on your computer screen. Scanning electron microscopes have a much greater depth of focus than light optics, relative to the magnifications involved.

Philosophically it’s the same thing: examination of a surface at some magnification but the physical process is much more complicated when you get to the EM world.

In all imaging systems the wavelength of the illumination is a major limiting factor for resolving power. Visible light is from around 700nm to 400nm wavelength. The wavelength in an electron microscope is determined largely by the acceleration voltage in the electron gun, but in general it is several orders of magnitude shorted than visible light, thus giving much greater resolving power for seeing tiny things in detail.

We leave for Italy a week from Wednesday an we’re getting excited about the prospect. Lots of stuff to do before we get out of town, but we’re really looking forward to the trip.

You are most welcome to blog about our microscopy adventures, take my name in vain, use the images, etc.

I hope that the ramblings above are helpful to you. If you have any more questions just drop me a note. I’m away ow to torture my students with fluorescence microscopy. Fun with glow in the dark technology!

See ya

Robert

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Dear Robert,

Thank you for this generous and helpful reply!

I will keep you posted about my work with the optics.  I think it’s funny we think we “see” anything, and your eloquent description of the permutations and secondary routes of EM function only bolster my opinion.

And, last month I had asked to to look at and speculate about an image that was really a cobweb against a black wall.  Your reply helped guide the installation I was preparing at the time, which is now at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, IL.  You can see photos of the installation on my blog.  http://danamajorart.com/blog

Enjoy Italy and give my best to Camille!

Dana

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Hi Dana,

Very cool installation. I can see all sorts of diatoms and jellyfish in there.

I’m glad that I could be of help in some way. I have attached a couple of images from the SEM that I thought you might find interesting. I was looking at some charcoal sections taken from an archeological site in Belize (I occasionally get some really fun stuff!) and this piece just grabbed me so I saved a couple of images separate from those going with the student (with permission, of course). Enjoy!

Robert

 

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 Wow!  Beautiful, and similar to some aspects of 3-D renderings of Mandelbrot sequences/fractals.  I’m especially interested in the altered symmetry found in both.

 Thanks, again!

Dana

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which takes us to the present email, how this piece begins