Showcasing the "invisible": Micropia, Amsterdam

Glowing display of microbes in Micropia (photo: Ed Yong; source: NewYorker.com)

A recent New Yorker article raises an interesting question of display: How can you fill a whole museum with exhibits exclusively about something microscopic? This is the task of Amsterdam's Micropia, a museum devoted to "invisible life"—that is, microbes. Among Micropia's solutions to this challenge are (as reported by the New Yorker, although the author does not focus on the display challenge in particular):

• an exhibit of the materials used by the first scientist to discover microbes
• a video that zooms in on visitors and seamlessly continues into animations of microbes that would be found on their bodies
• a row of microscopes (perhaps the most obvious solution to this display challenge!)
• a "heart-shaped red platform, the Kiss-o-Meter, which told [a kissing couple] how many bacteria they had just exchanged" (its clever tag line: "Kissing is never just between the two of you")
• and, perhaps my favorite of all, "a wall of backlit agar plates, some of them with mold or bacteria colonies that traced the contours of the places where they had first begun to grow: keys, phones, computer mice, remote controls, toothbrushes, doorknobs, a euro bill. There were orange dots of Klebsiella, blue mats of Enterococcus, and gray pencil shadings of Staphylococcus—contamination made beautiful."

This is a creative series of exhibits to solve the "scale problem" of showcasing microbes. I hope to see it in person some day!