FEBRUARY2007
"Scan Loop
Symmetry" --> Jeremy Hight's audio track composed
of electronic
loops edited by symmetry and sound forms to variation of
brain scan data of W. Logan
Fry. Go to:
http://dmoma.org/lobby/movies/brain_scan/the_artists.html
Jeremy Hight is a new media/locative media artist/writer
and musician. His music is currently in an international
exhibition/broadcast of experimental music in Cologne,
Germany.
The Brain Scan Movies |
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CLICK HERE >> |
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| The "Brain Scan Movies" consist of a 120+ image sequence of an MRI brain scan conducted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA. The volunteer in this case was me. The movie is set to music contributed by world composers and musicians. If you create music; and if you would like to contribute to the project, please click here for brief guidelines. |
ABOUT THE
PROJECT
| When
I entered Oberlin College in 1962, I fully
intended to take up a career in neuroscience; but
was weaker than I would have wished in chemistry
and calculas (there was no neuroscience
department at the time). I switched majors to
poly sci, and became a lawyer instead. It was,
after all, a family profession shared with my
father, Federal Administrative Law Judge Walter
L. Fry, and uncle, Akron Attorney Elmer Fry. But
when I retired from the practice in 1987, and
took up weaving, I ultimately returned to the
study of neuroscience--if only to weave designs
based on the physical structures of the brain.
See The Woven
Brain in the collection galleries of
DMOMA. My original source of images was the web, especially The Human Brain found at the University of Iowa's Virtual Hospital. Later, my younger daughter Zibby, a chem grad from Oberlin (both daughters are highly-gifted in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology and quantum physics), told me about the collection in the neuroscience department, a gift of noted neuroanatomist Sanford Palay. I arranged to see the three complete series of Loyez-stained sections. An extraordinary collection, the sagittal series had been used by Yakovlev and Angevine in the text: The Human Cerebellum. An Atlas of Gross Topography in Serial Sections. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1961. More recently, when my mother, Frieda M. Fry, suffered a subdural hematoma, I obtained all of her CT scans, together with an earlier MRI; and purchased an American Medical Sales three panel viewbox to study them. Added to these resources were two reference books: Sptizer and Whitlock, Atlas of the Visible Human Male (National Library of Medicine). Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1998 and Duane E. Haines. Neuroanatomy: An Atlas of Structures, Sections and Systems. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2004. My ultimate goal was a new series for the woven brain with a full representation of the brain, bottom to top; and I wanted it to be my own brain--a neuroanatomical self-portrait, as it were! My dream was finally realized when I enrolled in a psychiatric study conducted at Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; using a 3.0 Tesla GE SIGNA MRI, recently upgraded to the EXCITE hardware platform. During the first half of 2005, I made four trips to Waisman Center--500 miles distant from Cleveland, Ohio --for the scans, each taking several, sometimes agonizing, hours. Four-thousand miles of interstate driving, punctuated by nearly 12 hours of rigid confinement in a clattering, banging tube, unable to scratch my nose or cough, just to obtain my treasured source material. The trips were well worth the nearly exhausting effort; and I now have a fair representaion of my own brain--and the movie which you are invited to view. It is set to "world music" used by my son for competitive, world-class jump rope. And for the future? A new set of weavings--all of the human, woven brain. W. Logan
Fry |