Documentation from Last Breaths installation at ISEA 2022

We have completed the work on the Heart Project for 2021, although our collaboration with the UTS Cardiovascular Regeneration Group is continuing and we’ll continue to update this blog. At this point we want to again acknowledge the support of Dr Carmine Gentile and his laboratory team at UTS, as well as the generous financial […]

Towards the end of 2021 we were able to go with Dr. Carmine Gentile into the lab a few times, where he printed the different forms and at different sizes, in hydrogel. These experiments will enable us to work out which form, at what size and what printer settings to print with live cells. We […]

Pleased to be able to undertake more experiments in the lab, after lockdown restrictions eased. We aim to produce a series of sculptures, to contain live cells embedded in hydrogel (alginate gelatin). We are documenting the lab work, aiming to produce short time-lapse films of the process. Here is a trial run…  

Our next steps might be to print one or more of these forms with cells. We are interested in finding out: what it looks like with cells how it changes over time in the incubator what it looks like as cells grow how we might monitor what is going on how much light a bioprinted […]

Carmine Gentile set up the LumenX bioprinter and did some trial prints of our shape. The LumenX uses crossbeams of light to harden a light sensitive gel. The printer starts at the bottom and does a thin layer (100 microns) then lifts up and does the next layer and so on. The non-hardened gel drops […]

We have been working with the audio recording of George’s last breaths. – translating the audio in different ways, with javascript, to generate animated imagery – taking that animation as a sequence of still frames ( just as an MRI scan is a series of still frames) into 3D slicer – using 3D Slicer to […]

Linda’s friend and mentor, the artist George Schwarz, departed this life 28/5/2021. He had heart failure. Linda recorded some of his last breaths. We are working with this recording to produce 3D form to be bio-printed with live, beating, cardiac spheroids – cardiac growth on the shape and structure of cardiac failure – new life […]

This week we have been much inspired by artist Melissa Coote’s  heart paintings and bronze hearts. “This arresting painting presents as its subject the most vital of all our organs, the heart. How strange and wonderful to behold the heart as if it were some kind of topographical landscape. We look down upon it as […]

Artist Horst Kiechle works with intricate accurate folded paper forms Horst Kiechle ✿ Digital weaving inspired by a Thai basket He has also made a full paper folded torso with all organs, including the heart. Patterns are available online and have been downloaded and built by many. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/papertorsobyothers/ Paper hearts by Horst Kiechle

Example of immaterial data being translated to 3D form – Artist Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt – cast from a 3D print of a visualisation of human thought as interpreted by neural net AI. Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt (Deep Image Reconstruction) “… a set of elementary components, building blocks of ideas, were selected for a speculative situation. … […]

We are still trying out ways of translating audio into sequences of frames of greyscale information, which can then be interpreted (like slices of MRI & CT scans are in 3D Slicer) into 3D form that could be bioprinted. For the audio, we are staying close to the human experience of heart troubles – the […]

Inspired by the pared back, stylised woodblock prints in the Kaishi Hen I’ve been drawing cardiac spheroids. drawn from 3D rendering analysis of a cardiac spheroid, that has an endothelial cell network that extends from the bioprinted cardiac spheroid into the hydrogel. drawn from video recording of beating cardiac spheroids Based on images in: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1758-5090/ac14ca/meta

Don’t hold us to this, but…. In cultivation of heart tissue three types of cells are needed : Muscle cells Blood vessel cells Extracellular matrix – macromolecules that provide support to the cells including communication and adhesion  (collagen, enzymes, other things in a 3d network)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracellular_matrix These need to be in a certain ratio in […]

We’ve continued our online meetings with Dr. Carmine Gentile and the team. Today we were able to speak with a cardio thoracic surgeon for his perspective on this new research into cultivation and 3D printing of heart tissue. He showed us a Russian copy of History of the Heart – a book with imagery of […]

Trying out the open source 3D Slicer software that Niina showed us. It’s for generating 3D models from MRI or CT scans. The software allows us to define areas from greyscale imagery to be turned into 3D forms. Today we’ve tried it out on non-medical images, experimenting with giving 3D form to other kinds of […]

Our lab adventure has been cut short by lockdown. We have changed tack & are having a series of one to one zoom meetings with each member of the team to find out more about their research projects. Each discussion so far has opened out whole worlds of fascinating detail and complexity: surgical considerations and […]

This morning we had an introduction to one of the labs– bio-printers, freezers, incubators etc with Dr. Carmine Gentile.  

Cell Cultivation Art Artist Cynthia Verspaget, back in  2004 created the Anarchy Cell Line (TAnCL). This is a line of cells based on Cynthia’s own blood and HeLa cells. HeLa cells are commonly purchased for experimentation and used in labs, their originary cells were taken without consent from African American Henrietta Lacks in the 1950s. […]

This week, we’ve been focused on research, and gathering ideas – our own and inspiration from others. For example…. Jorg Glaescher, photographer, has been piling up sticks in the forest to produce forms. — One of the aspects of our heart project is also the re assembly and creation of new form, from biological single […]

Our research has also led us to… MIT Mediated Matter Finding inspiration in the work of Neri Oxman of the Mediated Matter group at MIT who invent and fabricate material structures using biological processes – a silk pavillion spun by over 17,000 silk worms; an architectural surface with melanin that darkens in sunlight and clears […]

We’re meeting at UTS – a week for setting things up, ironing out admin and devising a schedule for the next 4 months We’ve begun consultation with a couple of the researchers in the Cardiovascular Regeneration lab, tuning into the activities of the team. Their research for a paper is underway looking at the challenges […]

We are starting our Synapse residency with the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group  at the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering. Dr Carmine Gentile and team, cultivate heart cells that are used in 3D live tissue printing to research and test the repair of damaged hearts. https://www.gentilelab.com/