Aqua Vita

2011 — 2012

Aqua Vita is a project inspired by the archival properties of urine.

“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

In collaboration with: 
Mike Thompson, The Netherlands Metabolomics Centre, and The Sino-Dutch Centre for Preventive and Personalised Medicine.

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, displaying how changes in one parameter can push a system into a qualitatively new behaviour.

Bio Art & Design Award, winner 2011 (NL)