We combined our love of art, science and Woods Hole history recently through a photo/video collaboration with ArtLab and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The show, Through the Lens of Time, featured a photo retrospective of past MBL researchers, paired with their contemporaries in the same field. We also created video features on three current scientists and live actor performances of past MBL investigators. The result came together in a show this week at the MBL Club.
We’re not used to having our work shown in a physical space, so was fun for us to see people enjoying our videos on tablets and peruse Daniel’s modern portraits. It was a special treat to work with ArtLab, a theater company based in New York – as well as all the MBL scientists who took time out of their busy schedules to pose for photos and be interviewed.
While researching for the wall text or writing scripts for the actors, we learned so much about the MBL and Woods Hole history. Not only that famous women like Rachel Carson and Gertrude Stein took courses here. Not only that Noble Prize winners Thomas Hunt Morgan and George Wald spent much of their careers here. Lesser-known scientists made biological observations and breakthroughs at MBL, such as the animal behavior studies of Warder Clyde Allee, and the embryo development research of E.B. Wilson. Above all, we learned how painstaking work (like drawing each stage of clam worm cell division) makes it possible for modern scientists to continue on the path of biological discovery with much more advanced technology.
The video series, viewable below, features Roger Hanlon, who’s trying to figure out who cephelopods (cuttlefish, octopus) defeat their predator’s visual systems through camouflage; Jen Morgan, who looks to the eel-like lamprey for answers about spinal cord regeneration; and Duygu Özpolat, who uses video imaging to better understand cell lineage.
