Flickering Hope

Documentation of the Flickering Hope Installation, currently in the Micrographia exhibtion at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, until January 2024.

This work follows the path of a 3 week-long expedition in the Arctic circle in April 2022. Using a kit, which included pocket genomic sequencing technology and an array of media art technologies, Safavi and his scientific collaborator collected samples related to the properties of glaciers, particularly the microbial communities of the glacial biome and then worked to analyze the samples from an artistic/ecological perspective, presented in this installation.

The iceberg candles in this work were fabricated from point cloud data from icebergs that Reza scanned in the Arctic.

The sculpture in the 34 x 44 picture on the museum wall in the background, titled Komagataeibacterberg, 2023, was created from point cloud data from icebergs using a custom biomaterial made from oceanic microbes and Kombucha.