Animalia
The images in Animalia were made directly by living animals as they moved across a flatbed scanner. The result of the interaction between the moving organisms and the moving scanner bar (which paused periodically) is a time-lapse pattern unique to each species, a kind of signature.
After each scan, I made a thermal-wax printout of the computer file. That turned the already unnatural colors even more lurid and “atomized” the image into halftone dots. When I photographed the printout with negative film and printed it twice life size, the visible halftone dots became a metaphor for the limitations of reductionist biology. The closer you look the less information you get. Like the organism itself, the image emerges from the organization of its constituent parts. The most detailed examination of dots or molecules can never reveal the structures that emerge from their relationships.
Carol Selter
1995/2002