Producing an archive?

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Building an interdisciplinary community on the 3D study of coral skeletons



Jeudi du vivant
18 mars 2021 - LAAS-CNRS [on line]
Where I am?

I am situated into a technological research laboratory, (that you all know well) inside a team of science engineers, the ELiA team (Engineering for Life Sciences)
My designer background and my integration in the team made me at first an observer. What do I see?

Salle Blanche Zone de fabrication, Nanoscribe, LAAS-CNRS
Photographie : Elise Rigot

MultiFab LAAS-CNRS
Photographie : Elise Rigot

C211 Paillasse de laboratoire, LAAS-CNRS
Photographie : Elise Rigot

3D Scaffolds fabricated by 2 photon lithography nanoscribe® GmbH IpDip
MEB, Angelo Accardo, LAAS-CNRS

Prototype, technologie LAMP
Photographie : Elise Rigot

Travail de Justine Cerff & Laurent Malaquin sur l'intestin

" La biologie c'est le départ, la biologie doit être la question. "

What I observe: The technological lab as a place to produce technical objects.

What I'm wondering: What's the place of design is thoses forms of production? in this production of forms? Is it "form of science" itself?

Then: How to conduct this deviation, these bifurcations?
« Sans prétendre que ces designers se positionnent comme ethnographes, nous constaterons que leurs productions visent des objectifs comparables : décrire les systèmes techniques, saisir les chaînes opératoires, appréhender les gestes et le langage propres aux usages des objets techniques.»

Nicolas Nova et Lysianne Léchot Hirt, « Ethnographier avec le design », Techniques & Culture [En ligne], Suppléments au n°71

Nicolas Nova et Lysianne Léchot Hirt, « Ethnographier avec le design », Techniques & Culture [En ligne], Suppléments au n°71

What's coral?

Corals are small animals of the cnidarian family, that live in colonies, mostly in warm seas. They have the property to build their exoskeleton, calcareous and hard, thus forming reefs.

Illustration : Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, Histoire naturelle du corail: organisation, reproduction, pêche en Algérie, industrie et commerce, J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1864, on line

Coral reefs occupy barely 0.1% of the ocean's surface (or 1.2% of the continental shelves), and are home to an exceptional biodiversity with essential ecological functions. More than 25% of the world's marine biodiversity evolves in them; many species depend on them.

The ocean absorbs carbon from the atmosphere and contributes to the decrease of the CO2 level; nearly 50% of the CO2 absorption is assimilated via plankton, fish and corals.

From David Enon, « Mineral Accretion Factory ou la mer comme usine nouvelle », Techniques & Culture. Revue semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques, no 67, 2017, p. 240‑257, personal translation

Différence entre +1,5°C (accord de Paris, 2015) et +2°C

The case of coral is symbolic, exemplary, and formidable: 40% of the reefs have disappeared and by 2050, according to IPCC forecasts, almost all of this form of life will have left the surface of our oceans.

Source : Groupe d'experts intergouvernemental sur l'évolution du climat (IPCC)

Coral is a marker of global warming.

Source : Flickr

Symbiosis collapse
Is a Coral a Predator, a Producer, or Both? by California Academy of Sciences

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Interdisciplinary approach


What should be produced? [and should we (still) produce?]

This is the question we wanted to ask ourselves collectively during a workshop that I organized thanks to the Axis Santé/Environnement of the lab on 20th january 2020 inbetween design, engineering and biology around coral organisms.

Engineering sciences and design practices have indeed this common trait of conceiving technical objects and thinking about their production.

An idea that has been coming back since the Italian radicals architects and designers groups of the 1970s is that of "de-projet", of making place ("Faire place"Pierre-Damien Huyghe), of eliminating by design (Tony Fry), to delete (de Noblet).

Source : Élise Rigot et Jonathan Justin Strayer, « Retour vers 1972 : rouvrir les possibles pour le design et l’économie face aux effondrements », Sciences du Design, vol. n° 11, no 1, 2020, p. 32-41

Compte-rendu JE Corail

Compte-rendu dessiné des différentes idées partagées durant la JE Corail

We then define what we did not want to contribute to, what we did not want to be part of: (as feminists should say: "not in our name!")

1/ A techno-solutionist vision of scientific practices and aims
2/ Participate in the production of bio-artificial reefs
3/ "Educate" the "general public"

“ Design is a powerful analysis and repair tool. “

Paola Antonelli et Ala Tannir, Broken Nature, XII Triennale di Milano, 2019, p. 18

Photo : Elise Rigot
The injunction to repair itself is not obvious. If it is important for designers (and engineers) to question their practices, methods and postures facing erosion of biodiversity ; repairing would mean rectifying, re-establishing or restoring.

Applied to the living, repair no longer makes sense, it would rather become the search for a new dimension of life and not a return to a previous state of balance.
From the observation of the the ELiA team know-how, The Atlas-Archive of corals uses X-ray micro-tomography to archive a part of our biological heritage whose diversity decreases sharply as a result of global warming and climate changes.

To construct a common tool shared between scientists and citizens, a hybrid between an archive and a tool for "science in the making" (Latour).

We have a funding from the Dassault Foundation to take care of this project.

We also beneficiate from the Pi² technical support to produce the plateform and the database.

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Technical developments of 3D views


IMFT, salle du tomographe à rayon X

IMFT, salle du tomographe à rayon X, source à rayon X

Quelques corallites extraits de Porites alveolata

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Scientific construction of the Atlas/Archive (name complicated to found!)


Visite des collections de scléractinaires au MNHN
Photo : Elise Rigot

Visite des collections scléractinaire au MNHN auprès de Magalie Caselin et Isabelle Domart-Coulon
Vidéo : Elise Rigot

Recherche des échantillons à faire rentrer dans la collection
Photo : Elise Rigot

Recherche des échantillons à faire rentrer dans la collection
Photo : Elise Rigot

Porites alveolata Milne Edwards, 1860, type
Photo : Elise Rigot

Porites alveolata Milne Edwards, 1860, fragment du type
Photo : Elise Rigot

Phylogeny Scleractinia
Source : Stolarski et al, 2011 ,BMCE vol Biol

Début de la collection établie avec le muséum d'histoire naturelle de la ville Paris - 15 échantillons

Different entry points for the Archive/Atlas to be found in the digital platform :

-1-historical expeditions

-2-critically endangered species

-3-contemporary expeditions

-4-Fossils

-5-Gorgonians (alcool)

-6-Deep / cold water corals

-5-Red corals

IUCN RED LIST OF THREATENED SPECIES

"A taxon is Critically Endangered (CR) when the best available evidence indicates that it meets any of the criteria A to E for Critially Endangered, and it is therefore considered to be facing and extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.""
Source : iucnredlist.org

Critically Endangered (CR) species of corals
Source : coraltraits database

Deltocyathus crassiseptum Cairns, 1999, WALLIS ET FUTUNA, 1992, MUSOSTORM 7
Collection du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, Paratype
Press the "palette" tool to see the coral skeleton in transparency

Deltocyathus crassiseptum Cairns, 1999
Expédition Musorstom 7, Collection du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, Paratype

-Prof 325-400m

-12°30' S 176°41' W

-Ordre : Scleractinia

-Famille : Caryophylliidae

-Genre : Deltocyathus

The species name crassiseptum (Latin crassus, thick -H septum, partition) refers to the thick Si-2. The name is treated as a noun in apposition.

Informations for webapp

The 3D Coral Library is organized around 3 main objectives:

1.An open access digital platform for the scientific community and citizens

2.3D visualization of coral structures

3.Scientific mediation of the library through exhibitions

Map of actors / partners

Following the online meeting with project stakeholders, 3 working groups are emerging

--> Culture
--> Growth
--> Perception

Each of these working groups contributes to the more global project of the Atlas/Archive and becomes a place of exchange, listening and mutual share of methods, know-how, tools and resources.

Compte-rendu de la réunion (in french and not to publish around) : here
Culture aims to study how the coral, and particularly the larvae, behave according to the microenvironment in which they are cultured.


Growth aims to study growth models mathematically or experimentally using 3D scanning tools.

Perception
aims to study how we can make visible and perceptible, the coral and its current issues.
For Morizot, the environmental crisis is a crisis of the sensitive. Interesting fact: the scientific knowledge is built on an evinction of the sensitive.

We are going through a cultural crisis.

It is necessary, in my opinion, to place scientific practices in a cultural approach. Putting science into culture (Levy Leblond) ; or putting scientific practices into cultural issues.

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Time / scale perceptions


A paradox: we need time, we need slow down (Stengers) and yet: the disappearance is imminent, immediate, already there..
-600 million years / +40 years
Primitive corals appeared during the Paleozoic era, followed by the first forms of scleractinians from -240 million years ago. The history of corals is marked by successive extinctions over time. If these organisms with great resilience have managed to survive, it is on long time transformations and not in the particular time we are going through today. Anthropocene is the name of the geological time marked by the appearance in the earth's crust of specifically human markers. We are living in a sort of acceleration of geological time, very far from the time of biology.

How to show the different perceptions of time?

Reconstruction 3D d'un corail par Tomography 3D à rayon X Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, IMFT, tout droit réservé

Reconstruction 3D d'un corail par Tomography 3D à rayon X

Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse, IMFT, tout droit réservé

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

It is a field of ruins, of fragments: a collection of structures of the complex architectures that corals make with the help of biomineralization. The time of writing the material, by 3D printing process layer by layer, replay the increments of growth of corals. This slow mineralization of the skeletons allows to build the base of the reefs which shelter the marine biodiversity. Emptied of all life, only the fragments remain.

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

The enlargement of fragments of coral skeletons by additive manufacturing process in clay makes perceptible what is usually invisible to the human eye: microstructural information on the scale of a few microns, enlarged dozens of times to approach a sensitive experience. Reproduced as witnesses of their own extinction, sort of archive-sculptures, their petrifications proceed from a form of anticipated paleontology.

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

Fragments de squelettes de Lophelia
Impression 3D en argile réalisée au 8FabLab par Guillaume Barbareau (dir. artistique : Elise Rigot)

Exposition Bi-centenaire Lacaze-Duthiers
Dates : 28-29-30 mai 2021
Lieu : Biodiversarium, Banyuls-sur-mer

Préparation de l'exposition Bi-centenaire Lacaze-Duthiers
Dans la bibliothèque du laboratoire Arago, Banyuls-sur-mer
dessins originaux et épreuves de Lacaze-Duthiers

Exposition Le Petit Festival - organisé par Razerka Lavant
Dates : 23-24-25-26 juin 2021
Lieu : Gymnase et ancienne piscine de Cerbère

How to name what in substance already has the voice of the dead? Should we, like the neo-pagan witch Starhawk (1990), cry and lament the dismemberment of the world? To practice a vital memory.

Photo : Elise Rigot

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Perception of inter-species relationships: what ties us together?


Merci beaucoup de votre écoute !
For those interested you can test the experience of perception in virtual reality (Occulus Quest headset) with Denis Tribouillois at the open space of ELiA team (bat. C first floor)


more infos : erigot [at] laas [.] fr
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Présentation conçue avec Reveal.js, MIT License
Crédits Images/PDF : Tout droit réservé (aucune réutilisation possible sans accord de l'auteur)
Propriété intellectuelle de cette présentation : Tout droit réservé à Elise Rigot
Crédits typo : IBM Plex, Mike Abbink / Bold Monday, 2018
Crédits graphisme CSS : Elise Rigot d'après un CSS d'Anthony Masure