Arnaud Martin

In this astonishing twelve-part project for and about television — the title of which refers to a 19th-century French primer Le tour de la France par deux enfants — Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France.

Shot at two cutting-edge research labs which specialize in the evolution of butterflies and moths, BIopixels is an animated short film exploring the world of evolutionary biology on the microscopic scale. The images - rendered from collections containing over 50,000 specimens - were take by microscopists over three years to create the animated shorts Nanoscapes and Biopixels. Both the animation and the score play with concepts of pattern, time, density and other means of development common to biological evolution.

Making the invisible, visible! Images of butterfly wings at the microscopic scale are stunning, and at the nanoscopic scale they become otherworldly. The colorful images in the animated short Nanoscapes were taken with light and electron microscopes at magnifications up to 50,000x. From iridescent blues to vivid greens, butterflies produce colors by modulating how light is reflected from their wings. In other words, pigments are not the whole color story. Some color comes from intricate nano structures, and different organisms have evolved unique approaches to this phenomenon, called structural coloration. So a blue butterfly wing is not blue, but appears blue when tiny ridges bounce light in a way that adds together the amplitudes that make the wing appear blue.