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DENDRITIC STARBLOOM

An immersive planetarium audiovisual translation of AstroColibri event data into the pulsing bloom of imaginary astro-floral-cytes!

Through dialogue and data shared thanks to Lionel Ruiz (Observatoire / Planétarium de Marseille)

Imagining flaring and fading as a pattern shared across cosmos and tissue, the piece listens to bursts of data events as if they were the activation and settling of a fragile organism.

+ COMPANION ACROSS SCALES:
DENDRITIC STARBLOOM can also be experienced as a layered music-video duet with CELL CITY LIGHTS (an immersive audio-reactive collage where DU145 cell death, PC3-in-zebrafish microclots, and Berlin fire station lights resonate as a shared siren between city and cell)…

Press play on both videos (the one above and below, in any order, with any small offset) to let nano-, micro-, and macro-cosmic scales interact in a brief overlapping sketch.

Mobile-friendly duet version: to hear this astrofloracyte sketch overlapped with Cell City Lights on phones and tablets, you can use this premixed Short:

MAPPING

Dendritic Starbloom is an immersive audiovisual sketch translating astrophysical alerts into the pulsing bloom of an imaginary “Astroflorocytes & Florastrocytes” dendritic floral-like cell bridging cosmic, floral, and cellular scales. Developed through dialogue with astronomer Lionel Ruiz and the Observatoire / Planétarium de Marseille, the work uses time-compressed alerts from a heterogeneous stream of astrophysical events (supernovae, gamma ray bursts, etc., as aggregated by AstroColibri) to drive the evolution and blooming of a dendritic, cell-like form. A month of astrophysical observations is condensed into an audible stream of percussive impulses, which articulate the growth and pulsation of this hybrid starganism. In this way the piece treats flaring and fading—clusters of alerts and the silences between—as a dynamic pattern  across both cosmic and tissue -like forms.

Technically, the piece begins from .sts timeline files derived from AstroColibri-related datasets for January 2024. Each logged “wait duration” is accumulated into a precise event time and mapped one-to-one into simple sonic ticks. Throughout the process I experimented with different temporal compressions and offsets, testing how small discrepancies and drift break perceptual trust between sound and image. Even in its ultimately compressed form, the resulting audiovisual sketch you see is paced by the event sequence itself: the rhythm, clustering, and silence between the ticks arise directly from the data’s irregular temporal density rather than from a pre-imposed musical grid.

SCALE & INSPIRATIONS

Conceptually, the work explores what I might call a miacroscopic or nanacro scale — a hinge between macrocosmic structures (supernovae, galaxies) and micro- and nanoscopic ones (immune cells, dendritic branching, perilymphatic flows). It imagines an intermediate mesoscale that appears when space–time scales are folded together, where “fractal” relation is not strict mathematical self-similarity but a felt resonance between patterns across orders of magnitude.

This work also draws inspiration from modified telescopic and microscopic imaging techniques, including adaptive optics used to track immune-cell motion (as in pioneering visualizations of immune cells moving in zebrafish perilymphatic cavity, which are sonified/haptified in the dilatant vibroacoustic cell installation in the same event), and the longstanding scientific and vernacular convention of connecting biological and astrophysical phenomena through floral and astral cross-naming: “flower-like” lymphocytes, rosettes, starflowers, asters, astrocytes.

On an elemental level, the work keeps in view that both the astrophysical events feeding AstroColibri data and the immune cells and tumours in this project are made from the same heavy elements forged in stars and dispersed by supernovae and related explosive deaths. In that literal sense “we are stardust”: billion-year-old carbon, oxygen, iron and calcium forged in stellar explosions and, over time, into tissues that fall ill, heal, and harm, so the astrofloracyte’s bloom quietly folds stellar debris and cellular matter into the same body and asks what it means to think about damage, repair, and responsibility across those entangled scales.

Recent neuroscience, in turn, reframes astrocytes not as passive support cells but as slow, state-setting regulators of brain activity in model organisms from flies and zebrafish to mice, capable of integrating neuromodulatory signals and helping to shift whole circuits between heightened arousal, quiescence, or futility-induced passivity (Chen et al., 2025; Lefton et al., 2025; Guttenplan et al., 2025). In the context of immunology, a core strand of my chair, this slow accumulation of effort and eventual switch into passivity quietly rhymes, at a distance, with immunological questions about when responses are escalated, sustained, or allowed to exhaust themselves in the face of chronic, partly futile challenges. In the context of cancer, another focus of my chair across different scales, the project also echoes the polyscales of Cancer as constellation, disease, animal, and a set of traits — hardness, armor, grasping limbs — that migrate into descriptions of personality. As such, the piece lingers on the tension between hardness and softness, protection and invasion, folded into the same symbolic body.

This sketch is itself an extension of the visual symbol developed for Serenade Serpentine Cytotoxique, an interactive green-space sound installation in which a “lymphoflower” figure emerged to connect the installation’s floral and immunological dimensions in plant-cancer cytotoxicity. In Dendritic Starbloom, that figure is displaced into astronomical time, suspended under a dome and driven directly by event data. The work is designed for immersive spatial audio and hemispheric projection, inviting listeners to inhabit a shared space where stellar events and cellular life unfold on the same perceptual — if speculative — plane.

Process & Materials

Data source – Astrophysical alert streams (January 2024) provided through collaboration with Lionel Ruiz (Planetarium of Marseille) and AstroColibri-related datasets, converted to .sts files with millisecond-scale timing.

Timeline construction – Sequential “wait duration” values are accumulated into a continuous month-long timeline, with a fixed 3.55 s start offset. Multiple test passes explored different time-compression factors and comparisons with rendered video durations, foregrounding how even sub-second drift can destabilize the sense of a coherent audio–visual field.

Sonification – Each event is rendered as a single percussive tick; the sonification is deliberately minimal and structural, emphasizing the raw rhythm, clustering, and silence of the data stream rather than encoding event type or intensity (even though I experimented with a range of additional mappings). No extra events are invented or smoothed — the piece listens to the data “as it arrives,” only faster, and is then layered on top of an anchoring drum groove.

The following clip shows the month of data accelerated to ~40 seconds, where the astro events progressively appear in their respective region of the planetarium dome map projection, accompanied by sonification ticks:

Visual language – A symbolic dendritic “floral cell” whose pulsing and blooming behaviour is driven by the timing of the sonic events. Its morphology is informed primarily by immune-cell imaging and botanical growth metaphors, treated as a single responsive organism rather than a literal simulation.

Conceptual frame – A “miacroscopic” or “nanacro” register that collapses macrocosmic (astral) and nano/microcosmic (cellular/lymphatic) domains, and reflects on the shared naming and imagery that link constellations, cancers, flowers, and defensive tissues. The work stays with the tension between hardness and softness, flaring activation and fading de-activation, protection and invasion, as they echo across star fields and bodies.

Context – Early-stage, immersive, music-video–style sketch developed within a broader project for planetarium dome presentation as part of Soin Cellules – Signal, Souffle, Sillage : Sonde, Son, Sens.