Microbe Sampling Lab
Microbe Sampling Lab
by Yunzhi/Melissa Li
Microbe Sampling Lab
Workshop and Petri Dish Installation • Sat 18 & Sun 19 July • Drop-in Sessions
Microbe Sampling Lab invites visitors to sample surfaces around Conway Hall, capturing the unseen microbial communities that surround us. After some brief guidance on safe handling and labelling, the collected agar plates are left in the exhibition space to incubate, forming living patterns that evolve across the festival weekend. Participants may photograph or sketch their colonies and add observations to a communal log.
Workshop sessions (drop-in):
Saturday 18th July from 15:15 till 16:00, starting in the Bertrand Russel Room.
Saturday 18th July from 19:00 till 20:00, starting in the Brockway Room.
Closing ceremony (to end the festival):
Sunday 19th July at 17:30 in the Bertrand Russel Room — to check on how the collected samples have grown and evolved.
The drop-in workshop encourages reflection on the entanglements between human activity and invisible ecologies, and accompanies the installation Southwark Park Stroll.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Yunzhi / Melissa Li (she/her) is a Chengdu-born, London-based computational artist whose practice spans interactive installations, web-based experiments and immersive 3D environments. She examines how images, code, and audience interaction shape our sense of identity, memory and place. At the heart of Li’s work is the translation of the intangible experiences, making the unseen visible. She offers a blending of online and organic systems, inviting viewers to consider how their personal experiences, histories and digital traces intertwine.
