27th of February marked our induction into the Microscope room, the University’s most well hidden non-secret. Sometime before, our group had asked John Smith if we could have a look in the room, as we wanted to see if we could experiment with microscopes and close up images for our project. We had a quick introduction, where John showed us the differences between the two microscopes in the room; one being grey and blue (and weaker in microscopic power) and a fully black one (which was much stronger in power). He briefly went over how they both worked, and he also showed how we would be able to film the things underneath. On both microscopes, there are adaptors of sorts above, and you needed to remove the lens off the camera and screw some sort of ring in its place, where you could then screw the camera onto the adaptor, giving a clear and amazing view of the things underneath. He also showed us a number of samples we could view under a microscope, such as slides with nerves or fly legs, or a large box with a number of dead fly’s, bees, and so on. Real pleasant stuff.
This time however, we were finally allowed to get hands on. Our induction was really just John Smith going over all the stuff he already went over last time in slightly more detail (since we already got the picture), and then us finally being able to look at some of the samples ourselves; with John’s supervision, of course. From the samples that were already there, we had a look at a bunch of dead fly’s, bees, and so on. Real pleasant stuff. Aside from that, we also looked at some of our own stuff or things we found in the room, such as a fingerprint, a leather wallet, a pound coin, a dead leaf, torn Blue Tac, and a cracked phone screen. These stuff all ooked pretty interesting under the microscope, as getting so close to whatever subject we chose ‘transformed’ (like the theme of the module!) our perceptions of it. A dead leaf under a microscope looked oddly fleshy and veiny, the ‘skin’ (?) of a dead fly gave bold colours and imagery that looked rather nice, despite being on a fly, and a cracked screen gave strange, glassy, and occasionally liquidy / icy visuals (???).
And that’s about it. We took a number of pictures and filmed a couple very short videos, but that’s about all we did, and all we really needed to do. Our project isn’t about dead insects, or dead leaves, and especially not Blue Tac, as we were only just experimenting with things we found or had on us, and anything we shot there would pretty much just be for the blog, and speaking of the blog, here you go:
Transcendence 