Trajecten
A number of different departments are located on the 1st floor of the Erasmus Medical Centre: Anatomy (dissecting room), the Neuro Sciences and the Skills Lab, a modern training room for endoscopic surgery.
I was asked to develop an art piece that would draw a link between the three departments and which would include the Latin nomenclature, as in my earlier work, Names: The Brain, coronal and sagittal sections on the 12th floor.
The Skills Lab, in particular, is a centre of excellence with the state-of-the-art technology in use there; the common rooms within the new department are also contemporary in character compared with the modernistic architecture of the 1960s visible elsewhere in the building. For this reason, I chose to use electronic text displays for my art piece.
The site for the art piece, in common with the 12th floor, is the elevator lobby. The strong concrete building components above the elevator doors have remained partly visible following the renovations, and form a calming white upper space within the surrounding wood panelling.
In addition, the art piece in this rectangular space forms a counterpart to the work on the 12th floor.
The elevator lobby is also the place where all staff and visitors to the three departments congregate when waiting for the lifts.
Above the elevator doors, along the lower edge of the concrete building elements, led-displays with 5 cm high characters extend over the entire length of 22 metres (8 x 3 metres). The number of characters that can be accommodated here is 500
In consultation with various surgeons, I have developed a number of 'routes', my name for the way a surgeon makes during an operation.
I asked the surgeon to describe this course by referring to as many Latin terms as possible for each element encountered along the route.
A sentence of a route - over 22-metres - on the display.
After some time - the time it takes to read the sentence - the sentence gradually fades and the next sentence appears, and so on.
White Leds are used because I see these as best suited to the medical environment.
year | 2005 |
location | 1st floor elevator hall Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam NL |
brief description | elctronic text display which shows the anatomical route of a surgical intervention as described by the surgeant him- or herself. |
curator | Lydia Bogtstra (head of Art departement Eramus MC) Gert-Jan Kleinrensink |
photography | Piet Smaal Erasmus MC |
animation | Martin van Marion Holland Design |
materials | LED electronic text display |
size | display length 22 meters, height of characters 5 centimeters, 500 characters in one sentence. |
technical | Display developed and installed by Q-lite in Baerle Nassau.
New texts can be added via text program |