Life, as the expression goes, isn’t always pretty. And this is typically true all the way down to the microscopic level. But with a few tricks of the lab, life in its simplest, single-celled forms—bacteria, yeast, fungi, protists—can be precisely manipulated into a thing of preternatural beauty. The practice of making art from microbes isn’t new—Sir Alexander Fleming, the father of penicillin, used pigments from living bacteria to create elaborate paintings in the early 1900s. But the aesthetic side-projects of today’s researchers-cum-artists are becoming increasingly more experimental and radical. Advancements in biotechnology are broadening nature’s palette with new colors, florescence, and media. As part of this movement, evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory collaborated with Niall Hamilton, an industrial biologist who has been making colorful images with bacteria and fungi since 2003, and microbialart.com was born. The site acts as a repository to capture a growing number of ephemeral pieces—living works, which ultimately overgrow their desired forms and die. “One can put significant effort into creating a piece, only to destroy it a few days later,” says Gregory. “It’s both amazing and tragic in a very intriguing way.”
