8/10/2023 0 Comments Social microcosm definitionFrancé wrote about the reactions of his students when they used the newly-improved microscopes of their time to observe algae. A hundred years ago, for example, the German scientist R. Even so, from our perspective now, these confocal images are filled with stunning revelations of hidden beauty.Įach epoch seeks an opportunity to perceive the world in innovative ways, in keeping with existing biotechnological capacity. These microscopes are now being employed for routine investigations on molecules, cells, and living tissues that were not possible just a few years ago.” No doubt, this technology will continue to evolve, rendering our current cutting-edge tools for perception obsolete. In most cases, integration between the various components is so thorough that the entire confocal microscope is often collectively referred to as a digital or video imaging system capable of producing electronic images. To be more precise, according to the authors from Florida State University, the knowledge crucial for this method of seeing was perfected as recently as a decade ago in 2010 (though Jill Pflugheber disagrees with the lateness of this date): “Modern confocal microscopes can be considered as completely integrated electronic systems where the optical microscope plays a central role in a configuration that consists of one or more electronic detectors, a computer (for image display, processing, output, and storage), and several laser systems combined with wavelength selection devices and a beam scanning assembly. Decades would pass, however, before the technology necessary to do the work that can be appreciated in the confocal images of these plants collected in Microcosms would come into existence. The Olympus Microscopy Resource Center website, with information from late 2012, includes a brief history of the confocal microscope that begins with Marvin Minsky, a Harvard University graduate student who patented the basic concept of confocal microscopy in 1957. And the confocal images of the sacred plants in combination with the psychoactive properties many of them possess and have shared with humanity can be effective tools for truly critical perception, as well as for new phytocentric collective visions of eco-activism and militancy. The plants are heroic emissaries from a moribund world, and, as Terence McKenna puts it, inter-species chemical messengers that serve to transfer information from one species to another. These vivid experiences are extremely difficult to assimilate in their magnitude and are accompanied by feelings of outrage and despair. Indeed, the plants often reveal the grotesquely destructive human behavior that has threatened biodiversity on a planetary scale, including, of course, our own species, accusing us in no uncertain terms as being responsible for this ecocide. Like much contemporary art, these visions are not always pretty. This microcosmic world is also an invitation to explore the visionary realms that these plants (held sacred in spiritual accords by Amerindian groups spanning the continent) can open to those who use them with respect. The magnified plants-with their stomata, trichomes, vascular tissue, xylem and pollen-create new definitions of art derived from living biological material: a leaf, a stem and, sometimes, a flower. And perhaps we can be inspired to learn to become with them. The plants in this unique gathering each reveal their particular microcosms, their secret stories as a species, their meaningful vegetal lives within lives. In “The Miniature,” Susan Stewart believes that “the microscope opens up significance to the point at which all the material world shelters a microcosm.” She also affirms “that the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life-indeed, to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception.” For Stewart, “this is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance.” It is precisely in this multiple sense that I would like to begin to define Microcosmic Phytoformalism as a critical framework, a lens through which images produced by the confocal microscope can be analyzed.
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