Anarchy in the Organism

Anarchy, Live!

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:33:00 -0400

Anarchy in the Organism, live performance at the John Lill Centre, University of Hertfordshire, 15 May 2012

Rob Godman has created a new composition for Eb Clarinet and Live & Algorithmic Sound Projection and Responsive Video. This work was premiered at the University of Hertfordshire on Tuesday 15 May 2012 featuring the clarinettist Kate Romano. Central to the concept of the music is the idea of interruption, interference and disturbance. It uses a rhythmic technique of shifting accelerando/rallentando effects that mimic the cycles of life. Breathing, tension and relaxation, physical and psychological time all come under the auspices of the technique. Definitive pulses quickly become perceptually complex and/or chaotic.

The music is an evolving algorithmic composition that is layered with four simultaneous video projections. The sound is projected using ‘whispering windows’ audio diffusion. Eight Feonic transducer speaker drivers are attached to the glass of the windows - the windows then function as loudspeakers transmitting the sound of the installation directly into the street.

The music creates rhythmic and tonal dissonances that mirror the tumours growing in human tissue out of synch with the body’s control systems. In addition, it attempts to mimic the pace of breathing (but very very slowly…). Inhalation being when the sound is moving quicker and exhalation when the sounds are slower (peak/trough). But the rate of pace slows too. In essence, the composition modulates both pulse and time whereby a series of accelerandos and rallentandos are layered over a fixed pulse.

AITO Symposium 15th June

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:46:00 -0400

ANARCHY IN THE ORGANISM
(Cancer as a Complex System)

April 1 2012 - March 31 2013

Symposium Friday 15th June at the Wellcome Trust

Franks / Steel Room, Wellcome Collection Conference Centre

183 Euston Road

NW1 2BE

The symposium will take the form of a series of talks followed by open discussion.
Confirmed Speakers:
Simeon Nelson, the artist
Monia Brizzi, a chartered counselling psychologist
Gilly Angell, patient
Simon Walker-Samuel, Senior Research Associate, UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging
Jorge Castillo Sepúlveda, Group of Social Studies of Science and Technology, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Booking is essential for this event and places are limited.
Bookings to be made directly with guy.noble@uclh.nhs.uk

Commissioned by UCLH Arts

The organisms on the screens demonstrate growth, mutation and decay as normal aspects of being alive.
Is cancer an aberration or is it an embedded aspect of being a complex organism?
By situating cancer within a wider context of complex evolving systems from cities to trees to
landscapes, this work attempts a reconciliation of cancer as a normative part of being in the world.
The computer generated organisms develop cancer to varying degrees.
Coded within the parameters of complexity theory, their survival rate is similar to that of the general population.
They are ambiguous, they could be street-scapes of evolving cities disrupted by the successive impositions of changing social imaginaries.
Music generated from the same code and played through window-mounted transducers haunts the streetscape.

Huffington Post Interview

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:43:00 -0400

Interview with the Huffington Post

Anarchy in the Organism is now open

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:55:01 -0400

Anarchy in the Organism is now installed a is now installed at the University College Hospital Macmillan Cancer Centre, London

Capper St, London, WC1E 6AG
http://www.uclh.org/OurServices/OurHospitals/CC/Pages/Home.aspx

Anarchy video

Photo

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:28:13 -0400

Installing…

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:22:00 -0400

Installing…

Rendering of Anarchy in the Organsm sited in the Capper Street...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:18:00 -0400

Rendering of Anarchy in the Organsm sited in the Capper Street display windows of the UCH Cancer Centre opening next week.

Screen grabs of Nick Rothwell’s latest Voronoi cell...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:59:00 -0500

Screen grabs of Nick Rothwell’s latest Voronoi cell systems with tumours growing amidst the organisms and causing systemic collapse

The Voronoi cell system based on venous network geometries supplied by Simon Walker-Samuel, senior research associate at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging at UCH. This is being developed for the video component of the installation in the Capper Street windows at the UCH Cancer Centre.

the cut vinyl pattern for each window with 55” led video...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:16:22 -0500

the cut vinyl pattern for each window with 55” led video monitor in place

Video

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:15:05 -0500

Rob Godman is working on the sound component for Anarchy in the...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:24:00 -0500

Rob Godman is working on the sound component for Anarchy in the Organism that will accompany the unfolding visual imagery.

He has composed a series of prototype compositions that will be adapted to the specifics of the visual imagery over the next months.

The sound will be played through Feonic transducer speaker drivers which attach to the glass of the windows where Anarchy in the Organism will be displayed and turn them into speakers transmitting the sound of the installation directly into the street.

Oncoburg 2.0 Applying an urban street map skin to the network...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:48:00 -0500

Oncoburg 2.0

Applying an urban street map skin to the network topology of a Kidney vascular network being disrupted by a tumour. The geometry was supplied by Simon Walker-Samuel at CABI. The challenge now is to code this into an iterative real-time animation where an infinite range of outcomes could eventuate from the pre-cancerous state to cancers of various degrees of severity from lethal to full recovery.

Rendering the particularities of the urban grain will be the biggest challenge for Nick Rothwell, the artist and computer scientist who is working with me on this.

Cancer...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:41:00 -0500

Cancer Trees

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTKKtiDhXY8&feature=youtu.be

I have been collaborating with Simon Walker-Samuel, senior research scientist at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI) UCL.

Our collaboration comes out of a shared conception of cancer as a complex system comprehensible and visualisable through mathematical algorythms and sharing certain analogical relations to other mathematically describable processes in nature . Simon’s research is currently visualising angiogenesis and modelling the venous networks within tumours and the effect of experimental therapies on them. He is showing me the 3D of his scans of mouse tumours that are central to his current research into how drugs can be delivered most effectively to tumours to destroy them.

I am bringing my thinking of cancer as being analogous in some ways to wider growth patterns in the natural world We are discussing some of the wider implications of this way of thinking about cancer both as an artistic process and also possible implications for scientific understandings of cancer.

Simon generated these vein network trees based on the network topology of the venous network within a healthy human kidney. Each image is a vascular tree with a tumour in; the severity of the growth is defined by a mutation level given by the ratio of the number of levels in the tree to the level at which the mutation occurs. The higher the number, the more severe the tumour. Also, some trees have more than one tumour, in which case the overall mutation level is the sum of each individual mutation level.
The worst case scenario is first where a tumorous venous network has overtaken the entire tree. Subsequent trees have tumours at lower and lower levels on the branching hierarchy and are more and more devastated.

The trees are formed by a dynamic growth algorithm in which, once a complete ‘normal’ network is constructed, a mutation is induced at a random point and a ‘tumour’ network forms. This is accompanied by a localised atrophy of the normal network. This is then followed by the reverse process - the tumour is atrophied and a normal branch forms in its place, mirroring growth and regression of the tumour and normalisation of the blood vessel network. Ultimately a criterion could be defined to determine whether a network either ‘survives’ the tumour and completely renormalises or is completely overcome by the tumour.

Photo

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:56:47 -0400

The Cartography of Cancer as a Complex System I am doing a short presentation in the Chairs Plenary...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:25:00 -0400

The Cartography of Cancer as a Complex System

I am doing a short presentation in the Chairs Plenary of the Cartographic Imagination session of the Annual Royal Geographical Society Conference, London

http://conference.rgs.org/conference/sessions/View.aspx?heading=Y&session=25657631-5560-4029-b9f3-667acf564560

http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Programme/Plenaries+and+Special+Sessions.htm

Video of me discussing the early work for and the thinking behind Anarchy in the Organism University...

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:47:00 -0400

Video of me discussing the early work for and the thinking behind Anarchy in the Organism

University of Hertfordshire Research Blog

You Tube Video

Some initial thoughts on the nature of cancer

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:18:00 -0400

Some initial thoughts on the nature of cancer

Sequence of drawings based on illustrations of tumour growth and...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:03:00 -0400

Oncoburg 0

Oncoburg 1

Angiogenesis 1

Oncoburg 2

Angiogenesis 2

Oncoburg 3

Angiogenesis 3

Oncoburg 4

Sequence of drawings based on illustrations of tumour growth and the way they co-opt the body’s blood supply, generating new veins to supply their exponential growth. I am making an explicit analogy here between tumour growth and the growth of a town into the surrounding country side.

I am also working on drawings that show the healing effect of therapies on cancer which depict the city being reabsorbed into the natural world.

The cartographic aesthetic I have used is from maps of London’s suburban growth before the age of mass transit in the 17th and 18th centuries.

These are my first response to the theme, they are speculative...

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:04:00 -0400

Oncopolis, a hypothetical London

Metastapolis

Lymphopolis

Oncurbia

Lung tumor drawing

Metastatic Landscape

Rift in the Tissue

These are my first response to the theme, they are speculative and highly preliminary pen and pencil drawings of imaginary urban areas and tumors. I am interested in the analogies between landscape, geography and anatomy. From a systems point of view, the body system can be conflated with a geographical system.

Complexity theory is an inherently integrative way of looking at apparently disparate phenomena, from the stock market to social change, from cancer to population dynamics and epidemiology. By generating the art work through the visual patterns of complexity theory, cancer’s analogical aspects may be linked to social and cultural systems. I seek isomorphisms between the growth patterns and interactions of cities, vegetation cover, animal populations etc and cancer. It is a primary aim of the art work to draw out comparisons between these patterns.