The human body contains somewhere around 30 trillion cells. There are different types of cells in our body. A group of cells that function together is called tissue. Here at the university, at the JKU, my specialization is I'm a researcher in digital pathology. I found a paper from a different group, research group. They published an open source protocol for generating three-dimensional images from those pathology tissues that we usually also use. And I thought, hey, this is really cool and I would also like to do this. The scientists and artists, they developed the project, I think, over a weekend or during one week and they said, we have a plan and just, can we do this? And since I knew the people and they are also open people that try to cross borders. I said yes. Out of a sudden many people came and populated our research lab. From time to time I had a glimpse to the computer and said wow this is really this is very cool. Sometimes I was not so sure. In the end, it was really great. We do research on tissue. And this tissue that we use for our scientific research, it's usually cut into very thin slices so that we can view it under the microscope. And this time, we slice the tissue with a laser, we could actually image this tissue without cutting it, without destroying it, leaving it intact. And we could then reconstruct it on our computers, of course, to view it in three dimensions. And we also work with 3D morphological samples and 3D data of human brains for a while now. You can see some of our samples and some real brains also over there in this little glass box that you see. And our idea and input was also to use our volumetric 3D data of real human neurons, of real human brain samples, and share them with the artists, share what we do with the artists and give them free space and creativity to explore these samples and create their own view on them and their interpretation of the data that we have. Our job in this project was to invite a few artists to work with the data provided by the scientists and think about various ways of presenting it to the audience. Reforming the question into a question of dimensions, projections, axes, rotations. Making visible becomes a recursive simulation. These files, I had to take them out of the science space and put them in my art space and I had to find a real way to do that. So through photogrammetry and other way, I had to find a way back and really make them usable 3D for me. Everybody was there to help me and to make my process easier. I'm based in Linz, so I could come here a lot of times and that's what I did actually. It was really nice to stay in this environment and to work with them. I felt myself very connected to the technicians, trying to understand what is actually the display possibilities. And this is like technical but also very curatorial, trying to understand what are the possibilities of what we can do in the display that we have, the med space for example, I found the scientists very open to help out and to find solutions for the artists in terms of technology. And from the artistic part it was really funny to see the scientist might read the paper, the artist might throw inside random data and see what happens. Simon Sinikil is a Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam and Simone's work was very important to actually start and create this bridge between the artist and the scientist and actually describe what is actually being done. It's a video essay that she made out of interviews with the scientists. Because it was really important to have everyone's piece of the puzzle to sort of understand what everyone's role was, but also what their intentions were and what their interests were in actually being able to produce these new images of human cells, right? So originally, there were three separate conversations where like, you know, first having one, I still was left with some questions that then were perhaps answered by another conversation. And so I realized by doing that sort of, you know, puzzle, fitting it back together, almost weaving these three conversations, that that will probably also translate quite well to an audience that perhaps would also be left with these questions in between. We're not working with images. We're working with real people and their own narratives, which, you know, to some extent we don't know. But it doesn't sort of give you the license to do whatever you want with them simply because it's anonymous. So it feels like I'm in a really wrong place to sort of aesthetically transform and render this data because it's not meant to be transformed in such a way. And I definitely have some doubts in doing that. So again, I think that's why for me, it was really important to first understand, wait, what are the intentions here and why? The image in the textbook is a very idealistic representation. Reality expands in a lot of different dimensions. Once you cut through tissue and only have one section of it to look at, you lose a lot of information. That's why I am especially interested in capturing a three-dimensional image of a cell. I have no idea what it would look like if you could rotate a cell and move through it in three dimensions. We can better look at the interaction of the cells, better understand how they assemble and connect to each other and if and how they touch. Without the third dimension it is very hard to judge if something is touching or just really close to each other. Our focus for this project was the choreography of the sample throughout the lab. We were just impressed by all these procedures, like to make the sample become a sample, you know? Where a lot of different hands and instruments go to touch the samples. Touch the screen and receive the sample. Bring your awareness not only to the noticeable traits, the soft vibration of each cell. Be attentive to how it colors the surface of your body, of the other's body. I realized that all of these activities have one thing in common, which is that a lot of times this evokes intimacy. There was a moment where we were talking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, are we making a documentary in the form of a performance? By taking the format of interactive audio visual setup but instead of like projecting something why not we use this device that we all have which is our smartphone it receives sounds it plays sound and it receives visual and it also like can send a visual and people are very used to having different gestures around this device. Because it's something that you handle every day and we try to build on that. How can we work with this network of connected instruments or devices? Not to have this kind of universal external point of view, but instead to be one of the connected actors in this whole ecology of connected smartphones. Everything had to go really fast, but then we started to have these very small discussions about my field, about their field, about the tissues, about the techniques and the processes, and it opened up a lot of new perspectives for me and that's what I really really love about this project. The material that we use for research we can only use it if the people that it's from, that gave it, if they agree. We are not allowed to publish any personal data, of course, that is behind these tissues, and we are very strict about this. It's important that it's anonymous, because otherwise we cannot play around, which is something that both scientists and artists have to do. We have to imagine that there is a body part that is taken from somebody and then is cut. It's kind of a violent, bit uncomfortable feeling. And it is very important that we don't forget all the people behind the data, behind the visualization. And being able to create the distance of like, okay, I don't think about the personal history because otherwise we will be blocked. Tissue samples are colored for imaging, then scanned by a plane of light. Once turned into data, depths and densities can be cut into slices, false-colored, navigated, enlarged, rotated, stacked. This stacking makes a body, an organ or a tissue become time-based micro-moments, serves as a template, takes in density value to simulate operable flesh. My current project is about the data and the flesh and I try to look at it from micro and macro levels, like from a tissue and the whole body, because even though they are like in volume wise, they're very different, but the way to make them visible is very similar, which is by slicing. For the body, it's like physical slicing, the Visible Human Project, and then for the tissue, they are trying to do the scanning and then slice it digitally. If you watch my video, you can see that cut and slice are all in quotation mark because it's really, it's not a real cut and it's not a real slice. It is also not surprising that this process is very, is basically the logic of computer story and the processing and the visualizing data. So this is also how our body gets sliced and stored and visualized in computational space. And this video takes the perspective of interstitial fluid, which is fluid between cells. I have no eyes, no head, no part of the body that differs from any other. I leak out of hair like tubes. Here it comes. The Visible Human Project, run by the US National Library of Medicine in the mid-90s. The data was digitized, registered. Each slice can be viewed individually. By reworking the body's materiality according to the logics of computer storage and computer vision, all the slices can be aligned in ray stack. For this project, actually I focus on the experimental setting up and also optimizing the procedure, I mean the lab protocol, and make sure everything was ready for the 3D imaging process. To be honest, at the very first time I wasn't sure how our scientific works actually connected within artistic way, but I was so curious to see how is it everything has come together. Now I can see how is it everything has come together. Now I can see how our scientific research also can see in a different perspective. My work is an audiovisual journey. It was inspired by the insight how smaller cells develop into complex organisms through self-organization and how this metaphor can also be used to explain how social systems, politics and how humans organize themselves. It's kind of like, let's say inspired by the physical phenomena of the diffraction, where different waves meet together and they create diffraction patterns, the latent force of the living forms is pretty much a multi-layer work but with a central theme of morphogenesis. Morphogenesis is a concept that kind of very nicely embodies this idea of the diffractive reading and interdisciplinary understanding of things. Philosophy very often gets inspired by mathematics, but also other disciplines where certain contexts transplanted to another field start to bear different meanings. So this is always for me the most exciting part of working in an interdisciplinary context to kind of challenge my understanding of the microscope or the screen the whole day. And we enjoy looking at these pictures because even cancer, or particularly cancer, can have beautiful patterns. So this is something that I think makes us also open for visual expressions or taking visual expressions to ourselves. We don't have to think about what was the patient, how did he suffer, because this would distract us from our work. We are making the diagnosis. We say it's cancer, for example. At the same time, you have to feel very responsible in terms of showing humanity because it belongs to humans. And what you are doing is that you make a diagnosis for the human. So you're serving your patients and your clinical colleagues. Emotionally I feel sad because you know the cancer, some cancers are like curable some cancers are not as the research team we always make sure to find some new findings to help into the days people it totally affects me when for example I spend a lot of time with a specific research question and I have these many many cases that are contained in these cohorts of people that we study. I work a lot on a computer and of course there's a lot of abstraction layers in between these real cases and my daily work so sometimes real cases and my daily work so sometimes I just focus on my data and I just see colors, images and patterns. When I got these samples basically I wanted to create a new creature out of it that was the kind of intersection of technology and of flesh so I give a new life through 3D animation of this cyborg and angel and I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Dante and from the Divine Comedy and regarding the visuals exactly Gustave Doré engravings were really like the main inspiration for this 3d animation so this cyborg angel is gonna go around these three phases which are gonna make them leaving all of the preconception that people have about us behind and make them flower in a new whole creature. The point for me to make a work about illnesses is to let it free in some way because it's not more related to the flesh but okay now it's artwork itself and it just belongs to everyone i guess when it's a sample inside a computer and it's just visualization i don't't think that that person, when he's lying in their bed because they're sick, they think about that. Maybe that can change their life in a way because of research, that's for sure. But I don't think they are connected anymore in some way. If you've never been able to see a cell with your own eyes, how do you know that what you're seeing on the microscope is actually the real thing? You don't press a button and an image is taken, but you press a button and you launch a bunch of processes. With an iPhone, it's I think one trillion processes that take place before you see an image on the screen. And we're talking about a very advanced sort of laser-based microscope. We're sort of having an insight into what computational optics means for the medical field. This is incredibly valuable and interesting. Especially that they are dealing with cancerous cells and cancer is a real thing and it's a real suffering and it is not something we can relativize so much. The process that leads to the acquisition of the images is like a human design process. Maybe it helps us grasp something about the reality but I think it is not sufficient to really experience the reality. But it was really nice in the project to see that also the medical staff and the technicians were finding their way through. It was like a research process and this somehow was really similar to the kind of artistic research we do. I think we can continue using the different fields of techniques in the future. But right now, honestly, I don't have any idea how we can continue with this 3d imaging now we have a protocol and then everything every resource and i think we are set to go if we have some funds and then yes i'm happy that it's not only art but it's really also it brings us some ideas for research projects and also enhances the understanding of tissue. I think something new came out of this idea and I think right now this was even more important than just this maybe cool technical thing that I was thinking of initially. Thank you.