In Villefranche-sur-Mer, analyst engineering assistants spend their days “making” the data that plankton ecology needs. They prepare samples for quantitative imaging instruments, then validate thousands of thumbnails of planktonic organisms according to what they call “the PIQv method”. These repeated gestures provide the data on which ocean models, and part of the decisions taken about the ocean, rest.
What happens when a laboratory gesture, taken out of its place, is performed again by the body of the person who usually does it, in front of others? Replaying gestures on stage, and searching together for words that point out what they leave implicit, denaturalises the gesture on both sides. For the analyst, what went without saying could become a decision again. For the audience, a knowledge of which they only receive the results (maps, curves, biomass figures) could appear as a sequence of operations made of hands, fatigue and debatable criteria.
The form is twofold: a printed, transmissible score describing the gestures and their variations, and a transmission piece performed with analysts from the PIQv platform and students from Sorbonne Université.
