Keaton Armentrout
The hippocampus, among its many roles in the brain, maintains positional information and helps encode long-term memories. Position is partially encoded by “grid cells” that activate in response to physically moving through specific locations.
“Place Memory” is a multimedia series of five works, each featuring a different city I’ve lived in, seen through the lens of grid cell activation. Using open datasets of neural activity recorded from live rats, each video in this series follows the path of a rat as it explores its environment, visualizing its internal processing as a series of overlaid images that ground the rat's perception of its surroundings within my own experience. When an individual grid cell fires strongly during a session, a glimpse of an associated photograph is placed onto the canvas. Listening to an ensemble of these neurons creates a landscape of remembered locations, blending together and evolving by the subject moving through them. Sometimes the associations are strong and distinct, other times they are run over and obscured as multiple neurons clamor in recognition. The final frames stand as dynamic testaments to the messy internal representations of our lived environments, and the chaotic ways in which we move through and recall them.
Datasets from Trimper, John (2019): “RAW DATA: Spike Times and Positional Info.” https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7966679.v1 used under the Creative Commons 4.0 license.
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Bridget Sheridan
This walking art project began in March 2020 when the French government imposed a strict lockdown on the country. We were allowed out for an hour each day and we weren’t allowed to go any further than 1 kilometer from our homes.
During 48 days, I followed a protocol using a random point calculator. Each day, I walked to a random point situated inside my 1km radius circle, my lockdown zone. I registered all my walks via a GPS app on my phone and recorded each one using photography, video, and sound. Once I would reach the random point, I filmed a 360° panoramic video, noting down each thought and impression on the spot. Interestingly enough, whilst we were locked down in a confined space, my mind would wander extensively as my body explored the possibilities of an infinity of random points within the 1km imaginary borders. The artwork which resulted from the random walks, is a constellation of 48 panoramic videos which appear every ten seconds alongside with the random GPS coordinates. A layering of different sounds shapes my everyday lockdown soundscape. It also implies my daily movement along the paths and roads, across the gardens, over the walls and fences, and through the woods and fields of my lockdown territory. The random walk series not only questions our relationship to territory and to our environment, but also how we engage with limits. These walks entail a desire to push back restrictions through physical movement, specifically through walking, reprogramming my daily routine using a random point generator, geolocation, and satellite navigation.
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Martina Fröschl & Alfred Vendl
The importance of training our cognitive fitness is often underestimated. Regular exercise, a varied diet, stress reduction and an adequate supply of important nutrients can actively contribute to maintaining our mental health and performance. The “blood brain barrier” is moving more and more into the focus of research. The selective protective barrier between the body's circulation and the central nervous system regulates the uptake of nutrients into the brain and protects our nerve cells from the unhindered passage of degradable substances and pollutants. Good substances that are essential for our brain's survival must also be actively transported across this barrier. If the functions of the blood brain barrier diminish, the brain becomes insufficiently supplied and the brain cells gradually die off. In the video and the stills, the various locations of the blood brain barrier and the absorption of glucose are depicted. The computer-animated scientific visualization was created including a human GLUT pore complex and a mathematical glucose molecule model. The undisturbed movement of essential nutrients into our brain is key to human existence.
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Zuzana Zajková
Animal movement represents the continuous succession of locations of an individual over time. By changes in movement, animals react to both internal stimuli and the environment. State-of-the-art biologging technologies allow scientists to track animals at various spatial and temporal scales, including long-distance migratory species. In this art work, I highlight year-round movements of two closely related seabird species: the Cory’s and Scopoli’s shearwater. To create the visualization, I used data collected from birds tagged with light-level geolocators, tiny tracking devices that allow researchers to reveal daily geographic locations through light measurements and astronomical algorithms. Information collected through tracking can pinpoint important areas for seabirds as well as help to identify possible threats at sea. In this case, the pelagic way of life of these species clearly revels the continental margins. In October, when the breeding period is over, the shearwaters leave their breeding colonies in the Canary and the Balearic Islands (Spain) and migrate south. They winter in highly productive oceanic areas, where they stay until the onset of a new migratory journey in February to return to their colonies.
The visualization shows 100 animal movement trajectories, selected randomly from a bigger dataset included in the book “Migration and Spatial Ecology of the Spanish Populations of Scopoli's and Cory's shearwaters” (SEO/BirdLife, 2017), which I co-authored. I opted for a minimalistic design, and chose the open-source programming language R to create the visualization.
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Paul Evans
Harvesting Light is an extraordinary journey that follows the movement of photons from their origins in the heart of the sun, accompanying their passage through nearly 150 million kilometers of intervening, inner Solar System space, through the earth’s atmosphere and on into a new generation ‘quantum solar cell’. Created through a collaborative process of workshops, discussion and visualization with leading scientists from The University of Sheffield Department of Physics and Astronomy, Harvesting Light presented me with significant personal and artistic challenges as it moved from concept, through drawings and storyboards into the design and direction stage. As one of the researchers stated in an early production meeting, "there is some very complex physics here..." The project demanded considerable movement between fields of comprehension, pushing the boundaries of my capacity to visualize a ‘sympathetic’ understanding of vastly contrasting length scales, and the fluid counterintuitive versus intuitive complexities of the quantum realm. During the final stages of development I worked closely with Human design studio in Sheffield to create a spectacular 3D180 VR artwork. Harvesting Light was premiered at Festival of the Mind 2020, including an installation/screening in Millennium Gallery and a spectacular outdoor projection onto Weston Park Museum, Sheffield. Funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
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