Mutation
Someday you mutate into seed heads
Hungrily cloying away
Reversing voices into silences.
The night chasing moon shadow
Straining it from memory
Village maids look for crystal buds.
People love in swearing secrecy
Other words are too strong, too bitter
Collide with assured calmness.
Sparks
never step into the flame,
Tossed and clapped around
Your palm can’t remember the past.
My thousand silences
On your tiny Petri dish
Wavering in the dark.
Jellyfish with Candy -- Klari Reis
Agar (kanten) is a jelly-like substance obtained from algae that was discovered in the 1650s or 1660s by Mino Tarōzaemon in Japan. Robert Koch was the Nobel-winning founder of modern bacteriology, known for his role in identifying the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax, and for giving experimental support to the concept of infectious disease. In addition, he created and improved laboratory technologies and techniques. On the suggestion of Angelina Hesse, the New York-born wife of one of his assistants Walther Hesse, the Koch laboratory began to culture bacteria on agar plates, and Julius Richard Petri invented the shallow cylindrical glass (or plastic) cell-culture dishes to facilitate the research and developed the technique of agar culture to purify bacterial colonies derived from single cells. The Petri dish made it possible to rigorously identify the bacteria responsible for diseases. It is partially filled with warm liquid containing agar and a mixture of specific ingredients that may include nutrients, blood, salts, carbohydrates, dyes, indicators, amino acids, or antibiotics. After the agar cools and solidifies, the dish is ready to receive a microbe-laden sample in a process known as inoculation or "plating." Often, the bacterial sample is diluted on the plate by a process called "streaking": a sterile plastic stick, or a wire loop which has been sterilized by heating, is used to take the first sample and make a streak on the agar dish. Then a fresh stick, or a newly sterilized loop, passes through that initial streak and spreads the plated bacteria onto the dish. This is repeated a third, and sometimes a fourth, time, resulting in individual bacterial cells that are isolated on the plate, which then divide and grow into single "clonal" bacterial colonies. Petri plates are sometimes incubated with the agar on top to lessen the risk of contamination from airborne particles and to prevent water condensation from accumulating. Since 2009, Klari Reis has been perfecting the art of painting in Petri dishes, making a new three-inch artwork every day of 2013. When she first started working with epoxy polymer, the substance in which her paints float, she would leave a project and the next day it would look completely different, so she began working with three different types of epoxy, industrial plastics typically used for flooring, but each with its own drying time. Every Petri painting has between three and five layers. Temperature and humidity are essential to the final look, so Reis works with multiple heaters in the room to ensure the space stays between 70 and 80 degrees. She often uses a blow torch and a hair dryer to tease out certain effects. Typically, she exhibits her tiny artworks in clusters of 30, 60, or 150 paintings.
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