{CA}

2015

I was looking for an interesting way to visualize what it means to do blood research, a way to engage and understand this concept as much as possible. I decided to start with blood, trying to reduce the data and amplify the senses. I chose as a starting point the unit of blood, a cubic millimeter of blood that contains about 5 million red and white blood cells. I built a tactile and visual experience around these figures. I used a variation of Conway's "Game of Life" to create a generative book containing all the cells in question. Square in shape, it was the result of a cubic matrix of 171 elements. In this way it is possible to hold and leaf through a unit of blood, feel its weight and visually understand the complexity and amount of data within a tiny unit of material. Based on the same algorithm, I made with my device a series of panels on which multiple layers of distributed Cellular Automaton use different, gradually more complex signs, from dot to line and surfaces so that this can mix the tactile sense with vision, a large installation that takes the viewer inside the same logic.

A cellular automaton (CA) is a discrete model studied in computational theory and other scientific fields, consisting of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as on and off. It is perhaps the simplest example of autonomy, and I decided to program a variant of it as a starting point for my NORAA project. The artist's book is a three-dimensional version in CA, and it was presented during my crossing-over show at HangarBicocca.