Microscope was produced for Criterium 74 at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito. A single optical microscope stands in the gallery, and the viewer is invited to lean over it and look into the eyepiece. The posture and the gestures the work demands are precisely those of examining a specimen; there is no other way to see it.
Where the slide would ordinarily sit, a miniature high-resolution OLED display has been installed. The image shown there is magnified by the objective lens and delivered to the eye optically, as light that has passed through glass, rather than being scaled up by electronic means. What appears is therefore less a moving image than something minute and genuinely present beneath the lens.
At first, only a faint blemish can be made out at the center of the field of view, and it resists identification. The image gradually enlarges, and as its details resolve, the viewer realizes that it is a figure dancing — a single body performing ballet. This shift in recognition, the instant at which one reading gives way to another, is the event at the heart of the work.
The microscope is an instrument of the gaze that modern science has trained upon the world, and it presupposes an unshakable asymmetry between the one who observes and the thing observed. Microscope leaves that asymmetry intact while placing the human being itself in the position of the observed. With gestures indistinguishable from those used to inspect a micro-organism, the viewer comes to examine the very species to which they belong.
Even ballet — arguably the most highly stylized discipline the human body has devised — becomes, at this magnification, difficult to tell apart from the writhing of a ciliate. The boundary presumed to separate culture from bare life dissolves under a simple change of scale. Looking into the microscope, here, is not a gesture that holds its object at a distance; it is a device that folds the gaze back upon itself, returning the observer to the interior of the field of view.