Output details

Bloodlines:

Lecture-performance and supporting AHRC-funded research network

Performance / Lecture

Role: Composer, sound-design and research network co-investigator.

BloodLines is a development of a similarly named composition from my Hidden Music album (2011) – a set of works which employ data sonification in the conversion of biological processes into music. In BloodLines (2011), daily blood results during my leukaemia treatment are translated into an electronic composition with each second of music representing a day of treatment. Thus the blood cells (and their progress through various states of health) are delegated compositional responsibility to form an autobiological work, making audible the complex progression of the disease. The 2013 BloodLines project uses this as a foundation on which to build a lecture-performance work exploring the dramaturgy of bone marrow transplant. Through collaboration with my sister (and bone-marrow donor) writer Dr. Alex Mermikides, haemotologist Dr. Van De Velde (Belgium), choreographer Dr. Caroline Loftus and digital animator/artist Dr. Anna Tanczos - a lecture presentation/performance is created which aims to:

i)Explain to a wider audience the biological mechanisms of leukaemia, treatment and transplant.

ii)Adopt these biological mechanisms in script-devising, composition, visualisation and choreography.

iii)Reflect upon the Mermikides’ personal experience, and provide a voice for other people’s experience of leukaemia and transplant.

BloodLines is supported by our AHRC-funded Chimera Network, an international research group which provides a forum for knowledge exchange and discussion among a multi-disciplinary network of academics, practitioners, doctors, patients and the public, and disseminates this and other Sci/Art projects. BloodLines has been performed at the Science Museum, Rose Theatre (Kingston), and has scheduled performances at Antwerp University (Belgium), Central School of Speech and Drama, Natural History Museum and St. Guys hospital. It has been disseminated in Nature Immunology, at the 2013 European Bone Marrow Conference and among an international cohort of eminent Sci/Art practitioners and theorists at the Splice Symposium (2013).