The life spans of invertebrate life, specifically of those specimens we consider zooplankton, are often what we would consider short, or fleeting. Yet, despite this, by our standards, hurried existence they become a tangible means of seeing how mutations and diversity evolve across generations. To examine the insectile over time is to see how life responds to change not only within a single life span but over many. Unveiling how we, together with our ancestors and descendants to come, are a single evolving interaction with the world around us.

A system of neural networks was used to generate images that capture the diversity of zooplanktonic shapes, not through direct observation, but through the distillation of historical archives of their early depictions. The resulting video consists of 298 frames, which were handprinted using the cyanotype technique and later digitized. ‘Unicellular Impressions’ is part of a series of works inspired by Anna Atkins and her book 'Photographs of British Algae’, from 1843.

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