Once mounted the layers can be seen and the original shape has been warped.
     

However i am very pleased with the out come. It is different and shifting and works within the space. It is very contained. frail but striking to see from every angle. Next i like the idea of taking the human form through the same process. If i can get the Laser printer to cut the MRI stills into the same slices. It will be rigid and angular but will also be very interesting. We shall see how it goes.

  As it turns out the world of art to do with MRI scans is so small that my own blog has shown us as a result... however, i have done a thing.

i bought myself a Styrofoam ball to play with as an early stage of experimentation. the idea is that it can be sliced up easily to give a small idea about how things like a human head might look if it was turned and separated into stackable slices.

Easily however, it was not. I decided to use a band saw however to avoid the ball bouncing around or making the lines wonky, thus cutting pieces that were narrower at one end than the other, i had to build a frame that would support the ball without destroying it, that would keep the ball in place as i was cutting segments. What i came up with was this!

      The ball being supported in the bottom by a nail to stop it moving around when the first segment was being taken away and so on.

    
The band saw was a success thank god and the slices reminded me a lot of sliced fruit, probably because most fruit is round-ish and can be sliced. But it was a success to have a piece that had changed and become some how more uniform crisp having been sliced.

Having come across a set of MRI scans online (not weird i promise) and it gave me an idea. i don't know why but the idea of taking the human form and sort of making it a relief or contoured like a map is interesting to me. Its the starting point for this project so i better get to it.

For now this will be a sculpture project but we shall see how it develops. I am using K'nex (toys yes but they are like Lego and can be useful) to rapidly prototype ideas which can be photographed and then taken apart to try something new.

To get a better understanding of what i am starting to look at, lets have a look at Eugene-Louis Doyen. His work is morbid and horrifying but weirdly fascinating. I found him in a video by Vsauce wich asked why we are morbidly curious, why we cannot look away from war and gore. Car crashes and car chases. but his work looked at chopping up real bodies into well... stackable slices. Its amazingly macabre but also very interesting.
showing us what we are literally made of.

So i want to try and recreate that (Not with actualy people obviously) but with this stackable thing, it is interesting. and that is enough for now.


                                                                         

Ikon Ikon Ikon...
Oliver Beer was oh exhibition when i stopped by with no inkling as to what to expect as Ikon is always rather hit and miss. Frankly when i go there i always feel like an OAP in an O2 shop. Staring unblinking at walls covered in stuff that i am unmoved by and don't care about. This walk through was no different. Beer's work for me was well... boring and did nothing for me. whilst it might have moved others mountains, for me it did little to stretch my face muscles around.

His work included a large amount of ready-mades and vessels like his grandmothers chamber pot with microphones in them whilst the 'Tristan Chord' played to an almost ear bleeding volume. but in that room of white walls and wooden floors. it did nothing. it sat there, a large mass of wood and ceramics piled in a room, carefully, but not in any many i deemed captivating. Getting a kick out of flicking the pot and hearing a loud 'ding' before reading a signed marked 'do not touch the exhibit. For me this was a let down. Honestly this would have worked better if it had incorporated an interactive element.

his best work of the day was his reanimation of 'I Wanna Be Like You' from the Jungle Book. But where each of the 2,500 frames that go into that film had been split frame by frame, and been coloured in by 2,500 school children from around Birmingham. with the first frame starting with the youngest children to take part through to the oldest students colouring in the frames at the end. Leading to a natural growth and progression to the piece.

There was also an old cathode ray TV on the wall playing a Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech but where each word had been placed in alphabetical order... for literally no reason at all.

Personally given the genius and iconography of that speech. I looked at that as more of a vandalism of art than anything else.