Moore, S., 2016.

Animating Invisibilia

Animating invisibilia is a common practice when working with scientific subjects. The invisible can be conceptual (animating science theory), idiopathic (animating subjective perspectives) or just temporarily masked (waiting for the camera technology to improve in order to show what is known through outcome evidence).

Working on the short film Loop, about the little understood process of septin assembly in cells using a zebrafish model, the author and Serge Mostowy have worked together to describe through animation what cannot be seen. Lab members describe the intricate sub-cellular septin dynamics and structure, and their explanatory drawings are incorporated into the animation.

Each person's unique and idiosyncratic vision of the process brings a different facet to the complex and secret world of septin cytoskeleton dynamics; as Czerwiec (2015: 147) asserts, 'every person already has a visual language of his or her own, whether it has been developed for years or whether it stopped in fourth grade'. Perry (2015) points out that both scientists and artists working in science are tuned into visual nuance but that scientists collapse all their information into bald documentation, 'beating all the soulful and expressive detail out' (p193).

Swogger (2000) suggests that scientists and visual artists alike should use visualisation to facilitate communication as part of an on-going practice, and that participation in the process of visually representing their research helps to explain the complexities of the work. In Loop, the scientists' subjectively expressed visual theories of assembly have been developed and shared over the past two years of their research, and by exposing that in the film the invisible and often unacknowledged creative and discursive nature of science is revealed.