the body electric + crystal transmission

Recently, I was lent a book which has brought my entire project together for me: The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life (Robert Becker, MD and Gary Selden), 1985. It's an older, now fairly obscure text, which you can download in its entirety as a PDF by clicking the hyperlink above. This book not only addresses hydroxyapatite crystal formation in osteogenesis but also the function of electrical impulses which are conducted by the crystals, in the process of bone formation. FASCINATING stuff, and it's hard to believe that it has seemingly fallen out of collective memory as a significant work, since it is an early text on tissue engineering as far as I can tell - specifically tissue regeneration and healing, or regrowing tissue and in particular, bone. It gets much deeper, too - in the next post, I'll summarize the relevant parts and explain how this brings my project together in a way I didn't anticipate.

I get ahead of myself. As I develop more and more intuitive techniques around how I think I can construct a 'fake' bone (mock ossification) through my artistic creative process, I find more and more medical and scholarly research that informs me that these are actually the components of the biological processes I'm trying to mimic! For me, process is generative and informative, not the other way around (e.g. theory first). This organic process is one that many artists follow - the practice informs the research first, and then the bibliographical research circles back to further inform the practice. This is my baseline understanding of what we call "research-creation" and artistic ingenuity. I'll explain some of my random discoveries in a minute.

I need to first share the basic crystal growing and polyhedron construction work I've been doing as part of my project. The crystal growing is something I've been doing on my own, experimenting so far with copper sulfate, borax, epsom salts and monosodium glutamate. The polyhedron construction is something that I've recruited both a collaborator and a technician to help me with. My collaborator is a fellow grad student in Applied Mathematics here at Concordia named Alexandra Lemus Rodriguez. Alexandra is working to help me figure out the dihedral angles (interior angles) of the various geometric forms I'm constructing. The drawing to the left is a drawing of a triangular dipyramid I did, incorporating the dihedral angles that Alexandra calculated for me (you can click to enlarge the drawing). 

Geometric form of a hydroxyapatite crystal.

I'm designing at least six geometric crystalline forms and constructing them out of 3mm thick plexiglass. So far, I have the triangular dipyramid almost completely constructed and will begin working on a square trapezohedron next. The reason I need to calculate the dihedral angles, which are the interior angles between each plane, is because I then need to divide those angles in half in order to determine the exact angle of the bevel I need to cut the edges of the plexi at, in order to properly fit the planes all together to make the form.

My technical help in cutting the angles comes from a fantastic man named Antoliano Nieto who works here at Concordia in the prototyping lab (where they do all sorts of amazing things, including vacuum packaging and various kinds of 3-D printing, but I'll elaborate on that later as it relates to my project). Tony (as he is called) is a sweetheart, an artist in his own right and a genius problem-solver with constructing forms. So, I take Alexandra's angles to Tony and work with him to cut the shapes on a CNC (computer numerical control) machine and then bevel all the edges on a table saw according to spec. Then we join the bevels (which form the seams) with a solvent that melts the pieces together permanently. Voila - we have a plexi form. I'm not going to post any photos of my form until it's completely assembled.

I've also been laser etching pattern onto the interior planes of the plexi forms to make it more interesting. So far, my patterns are derived from a knit pattern called fish bone, which I've altered in Photoshop. 

The original fish bone knit pattern swatch.

My adaptations of the pattern, which resemble a cellular structure (above and below). These are the exact patterns I used for etching into the plexi for the top and bottom sections of the triangular dipyramid.

Here is a test example of the laser etching:

These plexi forms are to be the reliquaries/incubators for the mock ossified objects I'm creating with hog gut and mineral crystals. I will explain the reliquary/incubator aspect in a later post, and what I plan to do with them. In the meantime, here are some of my crystal growths on gut so far:

Epsom salts crystals on knit hog gut. Note that the top of the structure is white while the crystals appear like clear quartz points. When epsom crystals are exposed to air long enough, they turn white. All of the crystals on this piece will turn milky white after left out to dry for a few days.

Also an epsom salts solution on corked gut, but this gut was put into the solution wet. The results? All of the corked gut that sits above the water is hardened into a solid crystal form, yet still appears wet and smooth. Parts of it have begun to whiten.

This is a really overexposed photo but you can still see and understand the crystal growth. This is copper sulfate on woven gut, which was dried before putting it in the copper solution. Copper sulfate definitely makes the most beautiful crystals.

Another badly exposed photo but this is the same sculpture from a different angle.

Borax crystals growing on loosely knit gut, which was dried before being put in the solution. However, borax softened the gut back to its original wet state (the other solutions did not do this). I discovered that the reason for this is that when borax is mixed with water, some of its molecules convert water to hydrogen peroxide (H202).

None of the above crystal growths are yet complete - all are in process, except for maybe the copper sulfate one. My next experiments will be with mixing different types of growth together. For example, I may put the copper sulfate crystal into a borax solution and see what happens. I've just randomly chosen minerals to work with, without any previous research into what relationship they may have to bone. I wanted to try everything I could to see what different types of crystals I could grow. I ended with borax. However, after doing some more research tonight, I discovered that borax is very much linked to bone growth, formation and health. Boron, which is the mineral element in borax, is necessary in the body for regulating calcium absorption. A deficiency in boron leads to osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and even fibromyalgia. Taking borax or boron capsules can be used in the treatment of these conditions. WHO KNEW? Not me, but now we all do. I have more sources for this information other than the US National Library of Medicine but they are less reputable so I won't include them here. Further to all this, borax/boron is linked to estrogen/testosterone levels and thyroid function, correlating bone health to hormonal balance. I don't want to go on too much about this because I'm not giving medical advice and I'm not a medical doctor - I'm making no claims here beyond what is useful for my bio-art research and practice. I'm just pointing to the fact that borax is directly linked to maintaining or building the structure of bone in the body, which is my research interest. Perhaps one day I'll win a Nobel Prize for curing osteo-conditions with my art and tissue engineering projects, but until then...

... this research could fall within the context of transhumanism for its fantastical potential to somehow extend or enhance human life. For now, it's a research-creation project. In the next post, I'll follow up with more thoughts on this as well as how The Body Electric fits in with what I'm doing (the electronic aspect I haven't mentioned yet) and finishes the concept nicely.

VectorWorks is the program we use to design for the CNC machine. This shows a visual, geometrical way of calculating dihedral angles.