Keaton Armentrout

Still from "Place Memory: London, UK" Image courtesy of the artist.

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. 

Keaton Armentrout is an engineer, artist, and musician based out of Seattle, Washington. His creative practice in new media art explores how we relate to and navigate physical and online spaces. He holds an M.Sc. in Neural Engineering from Duke University.

Still from "Place Memory: St. Louis, MO" Image courtesy of the artist.

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.  
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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.  

Bridget Sheridan is a lecturer in visual arts at the University of Toulouse, where she teaches theory of art and contemporary art  practices. She belongs to the LLA CREATIS research lab. She completed her PhD in 2016 at Toulouse University, France. She has published various articles including, “Pratiques déambulatoires et musique : ornementations sonores en milieu urbain,”  in Habiter l’ornement (Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2020), “Manifestations psychogéographiques - creuser l’espace,” in  Chimères, n°93, Marcher contre le marché (Editions Erès, 2109), “Hollow images: How artists recall collective memory through  images of absence,” in Memory: Forgetting and Creating (Gdansk University Press, 2017), and “Following Footprints,” in Pedestrian  Mobility in Litterature, Philosophy and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). As an artist, she has exhibited her work in various art centers and galleries across France and England. In 2013, she received an  award for the Nîmes Contemporary Art Biennale.  
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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. 

Martina R. Fröschl is a digital artist and scientist with a focus on computer-generated imagery that incorporates the immediate inputs of non-virtual reality. She holds a PhD from the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she currently works as a senior scientist at the Science Visualization Lab. She studied media technique and design and gained her PhD with research on computer-animated scientific visualizations. Since that time, the depiction of realities and biological phenomena has driven her creations. She has worked on various documentary and fiction productions for TV and cinema as a visual effects and computer graphics artist. Martina is on the core team of PIXELvienna Society, the NOISE AQUARIUM collective and was guest lecturer and artist in residency at the Art|Sci Center UCLA.
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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.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Zuzana Zajková is an ecologist and holds a PhD in Movement ecology from the University of Barcelona. She is currently a Postdoctoral researcher in the Netherlands. Zuzana is interested in uncovering spectacular movements and behaviors of animals through biologging. She discovered her interest in data visualization through pursuing her doctoral degree, when she realized that programming in R language can be used not only for data analysis but also for creating breath-taking visualizations. Zuzana firmly believes that data visualization can promote public engagement in science and nature conservation.
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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.
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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.

​Based at Yorkshire Artspace in Sheffield, Paul Evans has a passion for Sci-Art co-creation and collaboration. His 14 track record of producing award-winning creative public engagement, throughout the U.K. and in continental Europe, includes collaborations with many leading institutions including the BBC, Wellcome Trust and six leading universities: University of Aberdeen, University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, University of Lincoln, The University of Manchester and The University of Sheffield. His work for the Cardiff University CAER Heritage Project was awarded NCCPE Engage Award (2014) and Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Contribution to Community (2017). 

Evans is also renowned as a painter and he is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Eyestorm Gallery Award. His work has featured in a number of publications including 'Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition' by Michael Petry, published by Thames and Hudson 2013.

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