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.

wall of cells + programming is fun

every second we loose hundreds of thousands of cells. we decided to collect every single dead cell from every visitor of the exhibition. by projecting the cells on the wall (scale 1:1) as the visitors loose them we can see the collective loss of cells during the whole day. 

we are currently in the deep process of writing code to make a cool projection. this is a wonderful step and being nerdy is a lot of fun. we are using flash wich is fast and easy and all by all a supergreat tool for designing interavtice visualisations. flash can also nowadays work with cameras in a great way, the "dorian gray mirror" and "traces of time" people might be interested in this, check www.setpixel.com for nice examples.

when we searched for a good programming language to use we also found processing. this is something that might be interesting for many of you. a programing language for designers and artists. a sweet little helper for you who want to create fancy visual representations without computer-engineer skills. Have a look at the processing online exhibition for some wonderful creations.

Antonio thought that we had some conceptual problem after our second presentation. We showed the ageing process with the hearing and a simplification of how the brain synapses disappears in time.

So we discussed about which step we should take further as a group. The first thing we decided was that the group should focus on one project at the time.

Then we discussed about the information loss when you get older, in the terms of that the actual hearing start to worsen the perception of some pronunciation. We decided a manifest of how our projects should look like:

• Concentrate about the information loss
• Highlight the loss in transmission
• Avoid exaggeration
• Emphasize the change
• To make it simple with some more functions if the users want to

We made also some pros and cons:

Pros: It is impressive and easy to implement.

Cons: Maybe too superficially, hard to clarify (how do we show more concrete about the loss?), maybe the visitors would not affected (it should contain more drama?) and could we finish the project.

During break an idea came up with an fictive checking-in card that a visitor get when they get in to the exhibition. When they check out they get a recipe and information about how much older they got since they checked in and other various “ageing” facts.

The concept was further developed, a black screen would be set up and the user has to press a button and white text pop up along with stressing sound. The text shows increasing data for example ageing in milliseconds and the number of lost brain cells. We made a prototype and showed Antonio. We told him that we wanted to show that the ageing process happens all the time and is not because of high age. He liked the idea but told us that it has not a clear connection to ageing.

For several days we were thinking about how to take a step further. We are interested in the constant process and want to highlight the mind blowing process that has high numbers. It is a challenge to make those figures more specific.

We are now focusing on the cell death process, if we would for example line up all the cells in a row they would die 7 metres per second, or 30 kilometres per hour.

And as I write this we are trying to think of a way to be even more concrete.

• Look at our visulisation of the synapses
• Look at our black screen (click on the middle of the screen and press blank space)
  

Group 3: Hearing and the synapse destruction

At first we reviewed the presentation we had the other day. We concluded that we were not concrete about our analogy with the Moog and the view on the ageing employees.

So today, we discussed about how to be concrete and how to do a specific presentation that looks at the subject on the biological ageing of human.

The first topic that was brought up was about the five senses and our competences to realize the presentation. The touch and taste is the hardest senses to do any concrete presentation about. The first suggestion was to do a program that created a filter that simulates a human hearing that deteriorate because of age. The program would play a soundclip and the user could change the parameters in the GUI so they could hear how the hearing changes because of the age. We actually went to TMH to talk about how the hearing changed when aging.

We tried to come up with alternative ideas. The next topic was to do a graphic visualisation of synapses losing contact to the nerve cells when the human gets old. We tried to do a research so the facts would be correct. After researching we found out that the course of events was not as dramatic as we hoped.

We finally asked Antonio Scarponi about how realistic our presentations should be. He answered that we are storytellers that can make up diagrams and stories. So we agreed that we could present both the synapses visualisation-project and the sound-simulation.