The Topological Landscapes of a (free mind)

The Topological Landscapes of a (free mind) ""On the 5th of December in 2013 I went to visit the Blythe House in London. The Blythe House keeps the object archive of the Science Museum where the instrument made by Royal Rife in 1938 is conserved. This Instrument, a compound microscope made by Royal Rife, was given to the London Science Museum in 1990 by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which had received it from the formal owner, Dr. B.W. Gonin, who, in turn, had purchased it from Raymond Royal Rife more than sixty years earlier. In a coincidence that interested me, photographer Lucia Moholy-Nagy may have been working in the Science Museum's reprographics department during the period in which Rife was building the microscope. At the time when I was studying Rife's microscope, I just happened to also be reading Laszló Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes, both of whom worked with Lucia. The file that accompanied the object in the archive included a drawing Rife made to depict the optical system of the microscope. I used this drawing in the animation I made after my visit to the Museum -- a visit during which I spent approximately 35 hours studying and scanning the forms of individual components of the microscope. During this intensive period of ""investigating"" the object through a three-dimensional digital scanner, I felt compelled to take video through several of the microscope's lenses. The encounter between my camera and the microscope produced a number of video sequences in which the microscope appears to ""investigate"" and ""scan"" the room around it. After the London visit, I worked in a studio on the Southern California coast where the consistent sunshine allowed me to experiment with using prints from my digital scans to produce cyanotypes. I also worked with a consumer grade 3D printer to produce 3D prints of microscope components: in my work with the printer and 3D editing software, I retained the texture of the digitally degraded forms so that they would not be smoothed or filled in printing. This required a lot of strategic work with the printer which I had to surveil closely over the course of many continuous hours of printing.""