Meeresleuchten (2007) – Waldlicht (2009)
The mysterious structures that can be seen in the cycles Waldlicht (wood light) and Meeresleuchten (sea luminescence) do not come from an artifical light source but are the traces of "living" light that Tim Otto Roth has captured on slide film. In Meeresleuchten the dots of light come from the seaweed cell culture of Pyrocystis elegans, which along with other bioluminescent marine organisms is responsible for the legendary phosphorescence visible in the ocean. In complete obscurity, these one-cell organisms are mounted on light-sensitive color film. This stress situation, which in the sea might be caused by a ship's propeller, triggers the blue luminescence you see on the film. In Waldlicht the occasional psychedelic-like light originates from an organism that is neither animal nor plant and whose network runs invisibly through the Black Forest. They are filaments of the mycellium of some few bioluminscent fungi that, assumably based on metabolic processes, exude 'cold' light. Meeresleuchten was produced in 2007 in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Hardeland at the Institute of Zoology and Anthropology in Göttingen University.