The paper of "The wall of cells"

The wall of cells

Peter Börjeson
Ludvig Elblaus
David Emilsson
Alexander Forsén
Olov Sundström

Ageing is a continuous process, it happens all the time to everyone and to everything. It’s a constant state of change. The process of human ageing is invisible; you can see the traces of ageing but not the change itself. Every cell is programmed to live a certain amount of time and every second, we lose 6500 skin cells.
How do you show ageing in numbers and in what ways is it measurable? We translated the number of cells that die in the human body to measures in meters, square meters, cubic meters and time. We built a clock that measures time in terms of cell loss, but we wanted to have a more comprehensible visual model for the figures.
The installation we made is a real-time visualization of the loss of skin cells. Every bright white dot on the screen represents the actual area of dead skin cells that the visitors produce during the exhibition in scale.
The music is controlled by the patterns produced by the animation. The factors that influence the sound are the coordinates where the pixels are drawn in the two-dimensional space and the amount of surface covered by the white pixels. The y-value of the coordinate determines the pitch of the notes sent to the synthesizer software and the x-value determines the timbre of the instruments used. The amount of pixels determines how many instruments will be used to
perform the music.
The music is then constructed by using the latest pitches and building phrases and chords of that material, so essentially the pixels that are being lit create the music.

You can download the PDF here.