Body Building: Infection
A 3D animated work that imagines immune response as office labour inside a high-rise body, translating microscopic data into a human-scale story of infection.
Body Building: Infection queries the nature of biological complexity through the visual metaphor of the human body as a multi-storey office building. The animated work portrays a systemic “body-building” dealing with an infection, personifying immune cells as office workers oblivious to the larger organization they serve. Using high-fidelity 3D animation, the piece translates microscopic informatics datasets into a human-scale narrative of specialized tasks and potential system failures.
This project builds on a historical continuum of systems art to examine how technology mediates our perception of the “hidden” internal processes of life. It reflects my ongoing interest in how we remember our own biological identity and how technological change affects what we think is real within ourselves. By manifesting digital data as architecture, the work explores the tension between individual agency and the vast, invisible systems of storage and preservation that define our existence.
Additional notes
- Duration: 4 minutes and 18 seconds
- Technical details: Entirely modeled and rendered using Blender; designed for 4K vertical 9:16 high-resolution display
- Sound: Electronic and ambient soundscape including street noise, electronic drones, synth pads, and processed guitar drones
- Collaborators: Created for the ENLIGHT-TEN+ project (European Network Linking Informatics and Genomics of Helper T cells in Tissues), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme
- Exhibition History: Untamed Complexity, Naughton Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (August 31 – September 2, 2024). Artists: Alex May, Margherita Pevere, Ionat Zurr & Oron Catts, Curated by Marta de Menezes