HIV

Immersive audiovisual (remix of media for dance performance & scientific research)  

sample excerpt…

A new work in which I rhythmically and visually remix:

1. Visuals and musical score from a 2005 dance-performance exploring HIV serodiversity, commissioned by the Newfoundland Festival of New Dance, and created in collaboration with Matthew DeGumbia, and…
2. time-lapse fluorescence microscopy (showing MDMs sequentially engulfing HIV-1-infected Jurkat T cells in Baxter et al., 2014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2014.1…).
   

Sound design and video are rhythmically reprocessed to link kinesthetic touch (human gesture, feather, skin) with microscopic touch (cellular engulfment, immunological recognition). Integrated into this remix are new geometric abstractions… grids of circles and 3D graph overlays.

The piece I created entangles macro and micro scales of intimacy and defense, reflecting on the porous, oscillating boundaries between self and other, health and illness, visibility and invisibility. Drawing on somesthetics and microscopy, lived experience and health data, this remix bridges affective movement languages with cellular choreography, forming an audiovisual meditation on vulnerability, memory, and intercellular dynamics.

Still frames of immersive projection on planetarium dome…

Shortly after completing the piece, my wife and I travelled to nearby Figueres to visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum. Dalí’s work had been familiar from reproductions at home when I was growing up, and the hotel was also lined with prints of his paintings and letters. Being surrounded by them again pushed me to finally ask what was going on beneath all this imagery. In reading before going to the museum, we learned accounts of his father making him look at photographs of venereal disease as a child — something never mentioned in the museum itself (which Dalí curated). With this in mind, his obsessions, eccentric behaviours, and compositional choices took on a new and painfully legible clarity.

Throughout his work, I also noted his intense fascination with science and technology and, often, with trying to understand recent discoveries in relation to the human body, feeling, and memory. In works such as Galatea of the Spheres we see the atomisation of his wife’s portrait into a three dimensional structure of spheres, and in The Structure of DNA. Stereoscopic Work, the double helix is given hands and arms in a stereo image— an example of his interest in juxtaposition and multi-perspective images that unsettle our perception of reality. Such work seemed to ask less “How can art serve or communicate science?” and more “How can science serve art?” —repeatedly exploring scientific concepts in order to achieve emotional and spiritual ends.