Logbook Entry
Studio as Membrane
Today a dental EVA plate became a laboratory.
It was designed to mold teeth — to register the architecture of the human mouth, the chamber where breath becomes language. I suspended it by a thin thread, turning an object of imprint into a surface of projection. The mouth leaves traces; this plate receives them. What was once a negative of speech now becomes a field of emergence.
The work is small, 13.6 by 14 centimeters, yet it behaves like a microclimate. Oil meets acrylic. Shoe polish touches architectural ceiling paint. A worn blue pastel stick fractures into dust. An anonymous tube of oil paint, circulating through the studio since 2015, releases color from its exhausted metal mouth. Nothing here is pristine. Everything carries time.
EVA dental plate, oil, acrylic, shoe polish, pastel sticks, dew of clove, vinegar, baking soda and alcohol
13.6 × 14 cm
2026
A spray mixture — clove, vinegar, baking soda, alcohol — activates the surface. It is part preservative, part catalyst. It does not illustrate anything. It encourages reactions. Pigments separate, coagulate, repel. A membrane forms.
I call it Petri Dish because the gesture resembles microbial culture. Conditions are set. Materials encounter each other. Something happens.
Recently, we investigated the viral account of a visible “code” perceived when a diffracted laser beam interacts with vision under altered states. The phenomenon sits at the intersection of optical materiality and cultural narrative. Light produces speckled textures; the nervous system reorganizes them into significance. Stability of the vision does not confirm an external script. It reveals how memory and symbol colonize perception.
Technique and myth intertwine. Neuroscience and spectacle coexist.
In the studio, I perform an analogous inquiry without substances, without spectacle. I expose heterogeneous materials to each other and observe what patterns surface. The code, if there is one, does not preexist. It emerges from interaction.
Shoe polish from London. Ceiling acrylic meant for domestic architecture. Pastel sticks aging in drawers. A tube of oil paint whose label has vanished. These elements meet inside what feels like a survival laboratory — a camp within a climate emergency, a last cry of persistence in a destabilized world.
The studio is not tidy. It is an ecosystem. Oxidation accumulates. Containers harden. Liquids separate. Objects circulate for years before finding their moment of contact.
Synchrony is not mystical coincidence. It is temporal alignment. Materials wait until they are ready to interact.
The dental plate matters.
It once molded a mouth — the organ of articulation, ingestion, emission. Language passes through teeth and tongue before it becomes sound. By relocating this device into painting, the work stages a translation: speech becomes stain, vibration becomes sediment.
When illuminated with different lights, the surface shifts. Under purple, the pigments vibrate differently than under warm yellow. The membrane responds. Vision changes the work as much as chemistry does.
The same is true in perceptual experiments. The eye does not scan a fixed reality; it co-produces it. A laser beam diffracts into granular fields; the brain completes the pattern. In my plate, droplets of vinegar push against oil; the viewer completes constellations.
We project. We read. We construct coherence.
Scientific discovery often emerges from contingency — a protein selected almost arbitrarily, an experiment pursued after stagnation. The plate echoes that method. There is no master plan for the final image. There is only an arrangement of conditions.
The work records a moment of convergence in space-time: February 25, 2026. It is not representation. It is residue of interaction.
The Petri Dish floats, suspended, translucent. It resembles a fragment of atmosphere captured mid-formation. A membrane between interior and exterior, between body and environment.
If the so-called visible code under laser and DMT is a dramatization of perception reorganizing noise, this plate is its sober sibling. No hallucination is required. Material alone generates complexity when allowed to coexist.
The code is not hidden behind the world.
It is enacted every time elements touch.
This piece belongs to an ongoing diary of material synchronies. Each plate is an imprint of a day’s alignments — chemical, emotional, climatic. In an era defined by instability, the act of composing a micro-ecology becomes both investigation and survival.
Petri Dish Reconfigured: Microclimate for Survival does not claim revelation.
It stages emergence.
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