MICRO TO MACRO is a bio-art and robotics installation built around found and bred microorganisms called ostracods. A video microscopy and tracking system reads the organisms’ movement in real time and uses that data to trigger a set of robots and lights. Magnified live video of the creatures is projected throughout the space, so visitors watch barely visible biological activity drive a room-scale mechanical response, a ballet-like, audible choreography (from the robotic machinations) staged at roughly a thousand times the scale of the organisms performing it.
Thursday November 19, 2026 A live interactive Performance
at Grey Area in San Francisco, Ca.
Address: 2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Phone: (415) 843-1423
Concept: The piece asks: who is in charge when micro-organisms are wired up to trigger machines? Is the relationship parasitic or symbiotic? What happens when the thing being amplified is smaller, older, and stranger than us?
We’re using the scale gap, organisms invisible to the naked eye driving robots hundreds of times their size, as a metaphor for a feeling a lot of us carry: unseen, faceless, removed from the systems we’re actually part of. As goes the micro, so goes the macro. These organisms are foundational to their ecosystem in the same way that any one person is foundational to a mass of humanity, easy to overlook, but not without effect. The installation tries to make that effect visible and audible: every action produces a reaction, and even the smallest interaction sends a ripple through the pond.
Background: These creatures bloomed on my rooftop about ten years ago, after a rare summer rainstorm followed by an unusually warm week. Looking closely at the standing water, I saw a lot of tiny things wiggling in the puddle. I remember standing there, fifty feet over the middle of San Francisco, wondering where they’d come from. There’s maybe a thirty-second of an inch of blown-in city dirt up there, plus some gravel. By the next day the roof had dried out and they were gone. I never forgot it.
Ten years later, I was hacking together a small microscope to attach to a video projector, micro to macro, if you will, and wondered if there were eggs still dormant in that dry roof dust. I swept some up with a bit of gravel, brought it to the studio, boiled and aerated some water, added the dust and gravel, and kept it warm for a week. They came back. I’ve been keeping and feeding them ever since. They react when you nudge the jar, diving and burying into the muck. They’re basically pets at this point, and I’m fairly convinced they’re some hybrid, hardy enough to eventually work their way into the Bay and beyond.
Research Context: Dr. Jake Robinson has written about how excessive sanitization and modern urban environments threaten what he calls our “invisible allies,” the microbial life we depend on without noticing. Researchers describe microbes as essential to how ecosystems recycle nutrients: “decomposer microbes convert the concentrated pools of nutrient-rich organic molecules from our bodies into smaller, more bioavailable forms that other organisms can use to support new life.”
sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260103155032.htm
More broadly, the smallest organisms on Earth, bacteria, viruses, and phytoplankton among them, produce the majority of our oxygen, drive global food chains, and form the biological foundation of our immune and digestive systems. Without them, Earth’s biogeochemical systems, and human life along with them, would collapse quickly.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12478101
The Organisms & Demo VideosThe organisms: Ostracods (Wikipedia)
Demo video 1: youtube.com/watch?v=Sh7re62wIEk
Demo video 2: vimeo.com/882731405
Scott Kildall & Kal Spelletich
kildall.com
kaltek.wordpress.com
Kal Spelletich's Art 