The biggest thing I learned about radiolarians that I did not realize, is that they are small, single-celled organisms. A you must look through a microscope to see them. I imagined them as the size of a coral or starfish. I also thought of them as organisms that lived in the distant past, but some are still alive today. The aspect of Haeckel’s life and work that interested me the most was the fact that he went on sea voyages. It is hard to imagine in the modern day long sea voyages where the only form of calculating direction was with a map, a compass, and the stars, where the only communication home was through letters. I enjoyed his letters during that time period. You could really feel how much he was learning and enjoyed that learning. This film made me realize that often the line between art and science is often very blurry. Science is often an art, especially when drawing or modeling such complex forms. Art is a science. It is precise, and accurate when it represents something living or extinct. I relate to Haeckel in that he enjoyed art so much he almost quit science, but found a way to incorporate one passion into the other. An implication from sculpting based off of Haeckle’s drawings is the layers of unconscious subjectiveness- the viewer’s perspective. Haeckel drew based off of what he could see through the microscope. He may have taken some artist liberties or perhaps his perception of a specimen, due to bias etc, was not always 100% accurate. We are then taking our perspective based off of his and creating something. It is like a game of telephone, eventually the original message, or in this case a true skeleton of a radiolarian, gets distorted. Overall, the most thought provoking part of Proteus was when they were narrating Haeckle’s letters, they put the view of the film in his, so that you could be in his shoes, where he was, how he felt, and was thinking, while he was talking.