ABSTRACT
This chapter details an interview with Alex May. In this interview, Alex May explores how his work as a creative technologist can open up a very human engagement with the human condition. In both ‘Sequence’ and ‘The Human Super Organism’, the interactive element encourages visitors to explore, in an engaging and educational way, aspects of the complex relationship we as humans have with our bacterial ecosystem; in this way, they bring new knowledge from cutting edge research and bioinformatic techniques out of the lab and into the gallery. The ‘Human Super Organism’ is an interactive digital installation that reveals the abundance and diversity of our commensal bacterial ecosystem. The scientific process of visualisation consists of preparing an optimised selection of information that is reliably reproducible across a particular type of source data sets.
