Imagine you’re in biology class. Björk is your instructor. She rises from behind the desk, in a lab coat made out of feathers. She twirls around in a kind of polymerase dance, flings paper streamer mitochondria, breathes. The lights go down. Behind her, this video plays. She says:It’s just the feeling when you start thinking about your ancestors and DNA that the grounds open below you and you can feel your mother and her mother, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother 30,000 years back. So suddenly you’re this kinda tunnel, or trunk of DNA … All these ghosts come up so it ended up begin a Halloween song and quite gothic in a way … It’s like being part of this everlasting necklace when you’re just a bead on a chain and you sort of want to belong and be a part of it and it’s just like a miracle.Over the haunted gameleste, Drew Berry, the great Australian biomedical animator who made the film, shouts from the back of the classroom:The “Hollow” music video is a powers-of-10 exploration of the microscopic and and molecular landscapes inside Björk’s body. The animation was constructed from molecular models of DNA and proteins derived from various forms of scientific data such as x-ray crystallography.
My work is usually defined by goals of didactic science education and accuracy, so this is the first time that I’ve strayed fully into the world of art, with the opportunity to mess around with the scientific data to create a whimsical and playful journey.
Inside a cell nucleus the audience encounters Björk’s ancestral spirit — her ghost in the machine — that watches over her genes as they flow from one generation to the next. The spirit manifests as a large molecular complex which was modeled from a three-dimensional head scan of Björk. The inspiration for the face came from the ‘fruit face’ paintings by the 16th century italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo who took objects such as fruits, vegetables, or books, and arranged them in such a way that they formed a portrait.Via NPR
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