Aqua Vita

︎︎︎ Project developed in collaboration w/ Mike Thompson, The Netherlands Metabolomics Centre + The Sino-Dutch Centre for Preventive and Personalised Medicine — Developed within the Bio Art & Design Award, NL (winner 2011)

“Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health? and that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of a structure, is disease?”
— Arnold Mandell

Aqua Vita is a project inspired by the archival properties of urine that addresses the idea of health as a changing state.

The work is composed of a series of “measuring” elements: Glass urine flasks reference those used within medieval uroscopy; A urine wheel struggles with the modern (re)interpretation of Ullrich Pinder’s “Epiphanie Medicorum” urine wheel, from 1506; An interactive visualisation integrates methods from non-linear dynamics, to combine 6 weeks’ of daily urine metabolic profiles with insights from a processual examination, in response to a traditional chinese medicine personalised questionnaire; a series of speculative images exploring the future of personalised medicine.

These elements reflect on chronobiological metabolic portraits, in displaying how changes in one parameter can push a system into a qualitatively new behaviour; the body as a place of motion.

︎︎︎  Urine wheel (2011)

︎︎︎  Screengrabs from the interactive visualisation (2011)