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CELL CITY LIGHTS : PROSTATE IN DISH & FISH

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.

+ Across scales – companion piece:
CITY-CELL SIRENS can also be experienced as a layered music-video duet with DENDRITIC STARBLOOM  (an immersive planetarium audiovisual translation of AstroColibri event data into the pulsing bloom of imaginary astro-floral-cytes!)…

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: for phones and tablets that only play one video at a time, here is a premixed vertical Short combining Cell City Lights with Dendritic Starbloom:

MATERIAL & PROCESS
CITY CELL LIGHTS is a short research-creation sketch staging an encounter between cancer research imaging and urban emergency footage, pulled into the same pulse by live synthesizer sound. It weaves models of cell death and clot-enabled metastasis with refracted fire-truck lights to exploring crises across body and city.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH VIDEOS

At its core is a quantitative phase contrast timelapse of DU145 human prostate cancer cells undergoing apoptosis (programmed cell death) in a culture dish. In the original HoloMonitor® sequence, DU145 cells exposed to the DNA-breaking chemotherapy drug etoposide gradually become more rounded, then shrink and fall apart into many small, membrane-wrapped pieces (“apoptotic bodies”) that neighbouring cells swallow and recycle; in the original video their changing optical thickness has been colour-coded from greys through yellow, red, purple to black—a heat-map of cell death and clearance.

Ghosted into this field, as a faint and more intermittent layer, are short inserts from zebrafish experiments that image microclots and cancer cell extravasation (tumour cells leaving the blood vessel to invade surrounding tissue) in the tiny vessels of transparent larvae: injected human and zebrafish cancer cells –specifically human PC3 prostate cancer cells in Movie 4–lodge on fibrin-rich clots, where platelets and innate immune cells cluster around them and help them squeeze through the vessel wall toward future metastasis. In the music-video sketch, this zebrafish imagery appears as rhythmic flashes or apparitions, its visibility gated by the amplitudes and frequencies of the synthesizers; this intermittent ghosting echoes the biology, where only some circulating tumour cells briefly manage to cross the vessel wall in rare, high-consequence events.

 

COMPOSITING w/ FIELD VIDEO
Across this evolving microscopic field I composite night-time footage of Berlin fire trucks, filmed through a reeded window of my B&B across the street from the station. As I drag my phone along the glass pane, the siren lights smear and diffract into shifting prismatic bands of red, green, cyan, purple and white. The refracted emergency lights, together with the microscopy layers, have all been remapped into a yellow–purple field and further modulated so that the high and low frequencies of the synths drive additional brightening and dimming, creating fluctuating flashes that belong at once to city, cells, and sound.

SYNTHETIC AUDIO MODULATION
The synthetic audio moves through three siren-tinged phases: first a rapidly fluttering harmonic texture whose speeding and slowing, and slight shifts in register, ride over an airy, harmonically rich pad with a distant, stretched-out, siren-like wail; then arpeggiated tones that rise and fall in stepped, siren-like contours over a second, equally airy but differently shaded pad that sustains another long, distant siren colour; and finally a more insistent, bell-like alarm riding above. Built from layered, sculpted fragments of breath, voice, winds, percussion and waveforms rather than any single “natural” siren, these synthesized textures directly modulate a composite of imaging shaped by chemotherapy, engineered clots and model organisms, echoing the synthetic interventions of the science itself and underscoring how constructed signals and tools are used to intervene in, model, and make sense of cellular life and its emergencies.

REFLECTING METAPHORS
Urban emergency lights, stretched and refracted by reeded glass then bruised from analytic colour scales into violets and cauterizing golds, rhyme with microscopic crises of protection and danger—some cells quietly dismantling themselves for the body’s sake while others exploit clots to escape into new tissue. A single sliding, kaleidoscoping alarm links urban arteries, bodily vessels, and screen, turning both scientific evidence and everyday emergency into a shared, unstable afterimage. The fact that these sirens are specifically Berlin fire station lights, and that both cell lines are models of prostate cancer, folds together two very different sites of intervention: the city’s visible, high-speed response to crisis and the less visible work of monitoring a small internal gland. Bringing prostate cells and fire-station lights into one flashing field asks how attention, delay, and care are shared across urban-municipal and bodily emergencies.

CREDITS
Video—Compositing—Music : Daniel Oore, ICI & IMéRA AMU

Sources:

• • • DU145 apoptosis video : Egelberg / Phase Holographic Imaging AB (2012), CC BY-SA 3.0
    • Microclot / extravasation video : Ward & Martin et al., J Cell Sci 136, jcs261225, Movie S4 (2023), CC BY 4.0
    • Refracting fire station lights video © 2024 Daniel Oore