Through photographs taken using various camera-equipped high resolution microscopes from a laboratory in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History at the Australian National University in 2006, I created the visual source material for several pieces of software that I wrote, of which Pollen Soup is one.

These images used were taken from both archival slides and recent material collected by palynologists and palaeoecologists from such regions as the Galapagos islands, south east Asia, and northern Australia. Photographs of the slides were edited to isolate particular micro-organisms or fossils, many of which consisted of pollen, diatoms, testate amoebae and other small specimens.

Generative processes seem to be particularly good at creating morphologies and narratives from large quantities of data and this proved to be a useful tool to navigate the data-sets I collected while working in the laboratory.

The animation can be viewed in a java-capable web browser here.