Surface Tension — optical tweezers and ComfyUI depth layers on living cells

to very manually physically manipulate these neon cells as my little actors. And what they end up doing is spelling out thought. And how that was constructed was this tool called the optical tweezers, which is essentially just a laser light just has this property where the edges are faster than the centers. So it creates this little pocket and you can aim that pocket at a really tiny thing and it'll just kind of suck it up. And you can use that to move things when your things are really tiny. And so I was using this device to manipulate these neurons. And obviously I had my bioengineering friend from MIT smuggled these neurons for me. They're neuroblasts, which are cancer cells. So they're lab-grown. He grew them for me and put them in a falcon tube with a little bit of formaldehyde and just handed them to me at Penn Station. So obviously I took it and used it for art. And I thought it was just incredibly fascinating that you can animate matter with light. This trusted medium that we used to observe the world. That was how this kernel of truth came about. And the rest of this installation was kind of building all these layers of mediation on top of this original footage, kind of making a depth map, using diffusion to kind of create these layers of skin on top of the original footage, playing with these metaphors for layers. And they would kind of morph in and out. And all this was done in comfy, which I also love. And one of the things that I really love about comfy is that…