Project Description

Micromondo (Microworld) is a biohacking project by Gaia Leandra.

It sprouts from the desire to share scientific/biological concepts and images through performance art. Using DIY techniques, a microscope was developed by hacking a webcam, thus enabling to watch a lively microworld so hidden to our eyes. This grants an innovative view of microrganisms, algae and histological section to set you on a journey from science to bioart.

The basic idea of the installation is to achieve a process of “sonification” through the dynamics emerging from a sample of microorganisms, analyzed under the hacked electronic microscope.

It was written a simple sketch, based on the great <<blob detection library>> in Processing, that makes the “motion capture” of video frames detcted by the webcam of the microscope, through the traking of bright pixel areas.


These data are mapped onto parameters of a granular sound processing algorithm. In particular are the x,y values, and number of “blob detection” processed, mapped onto parameters of density and statistical distribution (random interonset and duration) of the “quanta” of sound, obtained in real-time from the audio input of the converter.

For the Musical Signal Processing part I used the BEADS project library.