we pride ourselves on being intelligent ingenious thoughtful most clever of All Creatures but it's not [Music] true my name is R Chata I'm an artist and a scientist and I do large scale projected light installations and Fine Art photographic work I was born in Owens Sound Ontario was a pretty idilic place to grow up my parents were both immigrants my mom from England and my father from Africa India originally my family is sort of divided one side on the Arts and the other on the Sciences I always knew that I wanted to sort of bring
the Arts and the Sciences together but I didn't know how I remember studying neuron anatomy and I had a professor Derek vandercoy I did well on my exams and he offered me a job I was the first person in the lab using human embryonic stem cells and at that time it was very contentious it was forbidden in the United States so that was my project but what really captivated me through this whole journey was just peering into this microscopic world that was so engaging and so inspiring and the trade off that I made for for
doing the research that we needed to publish our paper actually helped me to just exist in the lab so that was the deal I made I'll do this work but I'd like to have access to the laboratory as an artist we are in the basement of the medical Sciences Building at UV so we are preparing to coat the samples so that we can visualize them inside the scanning electron microscope now what happened inside the machine is fantastic first we create a vacuum in the chamber then we fill it full of Aron gas and then we
run a current through the chamber that charges the gas which now glows pink charged gas peels ions from a gold bar inside the chamber and that coats the samples in an ultra fine layer of 24 karat gold then we put the samples in a scanning electron microscope after that we bounce electrons off the gold coating and the pattern of the bounce creates creates an image that's how we get a picture so the aesthetic part of me and the Curious part of me just kept going so I would go into the microscope room with my samples
and I would come out 7 hours later and I had a set of amazing photographs and so that's when I really knew that that was my bridge back to the arts for me I always have this urge to make the microscopic real bigger and bigger the pandemic shut down all of our activities but as creators we felt the need to keep going I wondered about the shape of Co about the pathogen and how it gains entry to human cells and its life cycle in general I just decided One Night in the summer to fire up
my projector and blast these molecular models over the grass and this massive 200y old Cedar and see what it looked like and was this amazing depth and something right away that I could see was magical so I've been working on a project lately the piece is called em it means now and it's an immersive dance installation and so we use projected light to create a light stage that's about 80 ft wide and 50 ft high and 50 ft deep and I cast onto nature my favorite surface the piece tells the story of Co in four
material Realms going from the micro to the macro so it's really about how everything is interconnected and we cannot separate ourselves from this fabric of nature the story of the virus in the molecular realm is riveting it's fascinating it's moving because it's supposed to be what I saw was an interes cooperation between humans and viruses because the virus can't get into the cells by itself it's a human molecule that brings it in people when they watched it they said wow I feel like I have a new way to think about Co and that's one of
the reasons why I really love to take this microscopic work and blow it up as big as I can and invite humans to experience that reversal of scale because I think that it helps us reframe our thinking about our place maybe that way that can help us to be more contemplative and thoughtful and considerate and caring with nature
