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Artist Nell Breyer was captivated by state of the art images and visualizations of the heart shown to her by Chief Medical Officer Andy Whittemore, MD, and Frank Rybicki, MD, PhD, director of Cardiac CT, as she listened to them describe the work of BWH cardiovascular teams.
“I was impressed by these images, and how information about flow is scaled and made visible,” said Breyer, a research affiliate at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.
Those images inspired her in forming the concept for a unique video installation to be on permanent display in the Shapiro Cardiovascular Center. “The way Nell has created this art to parallel the movement of the heart and anatomy is incredible,” Whittemore said.
Breyer’s interactive displays by the Shapiro Center information desk capture the flow of passers-by in real-time and near real-time. Stand still: You disappear. Move: You see the differences between now, and just now. Individual paths are visualized over varying time scales. Software that Breyer and her team have written to process movement characteristics generates an abstraction of movement patterns on LCD screens.
“Your steps and actions interweave in an intricate thread of dances that reflect the complex traffic patterns running through the lobby every day,” said Breyer, who studied painting at Yale University and received a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience from Oxford University.
No individual person or group will be recognizable on the screens.
The piece runs into the hallway of Amory 2 leading onto the bridge of the Shapiro Center. Here, processed video of Boston hub locations uses translational, rotational and scaling functions to enable different depictions and imaginative visualizations of human movement. The pre-recorded video includes footage of high-traffic areas throughout Boston, including Fenway Park, the Longwood Medical Area and Copley Square.
The lobby of Shapiro also includes a frieze, or a long wrap, with hand drawings of an individual in motion overlaid onto images of crowd flow. “The light boxes act like a traditional frieze, creating a visual rhythm,” Breyer said. “When do an individual’s actions fuse with communal activity and when do they appear distinct?”
Breyer added, “When people come into the Shapiro Center and see this work, I hope they become interested in re-considering their own movements and their impact upon the surroundings.”