The animation, Changing nature, contributes to conversations people are having about the value of looking to Antarctica for knowing the future of life on Earth.
My aim is to animate Antarctica through more eyes than my own, to offer different ways of thinking about it.
Here are some questions you may consider responding to, to contribute your voice to this project:
How does this animation work towards achieving my aim?
What can you find in it that you can relate to?
Does it make you think differently about Antarctica, and if so, how?
How does the website work overall towards achieving this aim?
What can you suggest I do to further this aim?
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Navicular diatoms are described as motile and symmetrical:
* Valve is organized around a line (bilateral symmetry)
* Valves symmetrical to both apical and transapical axis
* Raphid system well developed, raphe on each valve makes cells highly motile
* This group has the greatest diversity among the freshwater diatoms
Antarctic Freshwater Diatoms: Naviculoid Morphology
The Free Dictionary defines motile:
mo·tile (mtl, mtl)
adj.
1. Moving or having the power to move spontaneously.
2. Of or relating to mental imagery that arises primarily from sensations of bodily movement and position rather than from visual or auditory sensations.
Slight variations from the symmetrical – eccentricities – can be seen in the photographs on the Antarctic Freshwater Diatom site of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research National Science Foundation.
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Jan Weckstrom, who currently works at ECRU, the Environmental Change Research Unit at the University of Helsinki… Diatoms are microscopic, unicellular brown algae covered with silica and present wherever light and humidity allow photosynthesis, Weckstrom explains. One gram of dried up lake bottom contains millions of diatom shells.
For example, bodies of water different in salinity, nutrient content and acidity favour different diatom species. When the optimal environment for different species has been charted, the changes in the distribution of the species tell something directly about the changes in the environment.
This reminds me of the day I flew by helicopter from Davis to Ace Lake, to help a scientist collect water samples from fresh waters below its ice. Chad, from Cambridge England, was studying life forms that could process carbon or photosynthesize, depending on conditions. They could behave like animals or plants – whatever was required to survive. (V2 2002)
University of Helsinki Quarterly magazine, Spring 2005
How is this relevant to my work?
Animating diversity in diatom forms suggests our own diversity. We might imagine ourselves the same as each other, to conform to social pressures. But in reality we are all, like them, shaped by our different and changing environments.
Finding the meaning of ‘motile’ as “of or relating to mental imagery that arises primarily from sensations of bodily movement and position rather than from visual or auditory sensations” excited me. It relates to human movement improvisation as a source of imagery for animating our self awareness in landscapes.