BloodArt #31
Description
Estrid Jakobsen, AmanPreet Badhwar, Sophie Adler
Additional Collaborators: Jonathan Lau, Ali Khan, Katie Bottenhorn, Andrew Doyle, Greg Kiar, Aki Nikolaidis, Julie Bates, David Kennedy
Scientific measurements are often proxies for the biological processes we want to investigate, and neuroscientific tools are no exception. In the field of functional neuroimaging, we often refer to changes in brain activity when what we’re actually measuring are changes in the magnetic properties of blood flowing through the brain. While there is certainly value in the use of this particular proxy, it is important not to lose sight of the source of the signal. The discovery of how blood circulates throughout the body was perhaps the most significant medical breakthrough of the seventeenth century. Blood is what gives us life by connecting our hearts and our brains and is a common denominator for all humanity.
The artwork entitled "Deep Blood" is the result of a collaborative science and art project that took place during the OHBM Hackathon. It was created using the Deep Style algorithm, a more advanced version of the original Deep Dream approach that uses its own knowledge to interpret an image’s style and transfer it to another image. Initially Deep Dream was invented to help scientists and engineers to see what a deep neural network is seeing when it is looking in a given image, but it has recently been adopted as a method for generating psychedelic and abstract art.
Deep Blood presents an artistic interpretation of brain vasculature by displaying macro-level susceptibility-weighted imaging in the style of micro-level immunohistochemistry.