In the thick of film and radio editing, plus about to head to the library to do some reading. Normally, I avoid the library on account of the way it either irritates me with its incessant noise, or sucks the soul from me with the cloistered grey tones and sound of silent despair. (All right, I suppose it just can’t win… never thought I’d miss the leather and bookish smells of the RSL at Ox, but there you go…).

Participated in Artsfest, filmed a bit of it, still looking to get my video of International Night up. I may be addicted to video cameras now, and am always looking for the next Imperial event to film (free, if anyone wants to contact me…).  Not a lot to post about otherwise, until I feel freer to watch my writing and not just vent grumbles in the stream-of-consciousness style writing of a grumpy student.

Here’s something I did over the summer. It took a few days- it’s surprising how much you can do, if you have all day to dedicate to painting whilst amiably watching interesting programmes off the internet with one eye. I can’t seem to find anywhere to put it, though, it’s currently in storage in a dodgy section of Imperial. Even the Humanities Department didn’t want it on any nearby walls. Oddly, no one seems to want to commission me even though I’m not charging anything, except for Imperial Sci Fi Society. I guess no one likes a passive artist. I was thinking of doing a series of artworks in order to have something to exhibit, perhaps making them in the evening whilst I’m in the period of studying for the exams at the beginning of next term. I’m just saying that up here so I’m more likely to get around to doing it.

Excellent, positive publicity for the Large Hadron Collider.

Incidentally, last Sunday’s email was with a researcher who had pointed out that risks for the LHC could theoretically be higher than previously presumed. With this in mind, I went to ask probing questions about risk and responsibility… actually, he was a very interesting, amiable person, and fully in favour of the LHC.

[ Got one interview. Two more to find. More on that later- I've basically been sucked into a vortex of getting stuff done. Have scarcely broken a sweat for two weeks, let alone managed to get to the gym to start my Intensive Weights Workout (Everything Sounds Better With Capitals, Don't You Think?). Back to the post, my account of Body Worlds...]

The title is a line from the introductory poem at the start of the Body Worlds exhibition, describing, yes, the human body. I finally got myself to the exhibition, albeit at one of the least convenient times for me, with an impending hectic two days and essay deadline.

I first encountered plastinated pieces of the human body when at an open day for Sheffield University; in the Biomedical part, a professor gave general outlines of the courses available whilst absently toying with a quarter of a human head in his hands, and nearby a piece of plastinated hand lay on the table. I was struck by the dehumanising nature of anatomical studies, of dissection, of plastination. The body was reduced to a thing to be observed, studied, dissected. No trace of human personality or anything connected to the being of a human being, nothing but matter arranged into physical shape. The professor held a chunk of man’s head, its eyes closed as though sleeping, and what was the history of that man? How many people had looked on his face while he was alive? What had he thought, felt, done?

I have also dissected small animals as part of my biology undergrad, and I remember usually feeling both a sense of studious curiosity while digging about with sticky metal tools and prodders, followed by my standing back at the end with a tool and knife in either hand, viewing the splattered-over-the-board results at the end with a kind of resigned remorse. I kind of enjoyed the dissections, I am a biology-geek down to the genes, really, yet you have to forget the life of the thing you’re dissecting in order to learn. Meanwhile, I have only read news articles on Gunther von Hagens and idly discussed him with others.

The exhibition is hosted inside the 02 arena / former Millennium Dome, of which I was unaware that it is now a collection of restaurants and exhibition spaces.

The exhibition began with a quick explanation of its intentions. There would be no personal information about any of the body donors, this was not about individual histories or tragedies. The bodies were purely universal, and intended for scientific understanding. While it’s the juxtaposition of these two themes that has disturbed me before, certain explanations like these in the exhibition were extremely helpful in clarifying the nature of the exhibition. One very good one was at the very end… but first, the start.

Entering the black walled space, a poem of the human body (the title is a line from it) speaks stoically in the background while you see the first exhibit, a long line of human embryos at different stages of development. The pulpy tadpoles become tiny figures, which then progress into the unreal-looking, thin bodied but large headed foetuses of later weeks and months. A reclining pregnant woman is the centrepiece of the second room, with the unborn baby exposed inside.

Image taken from http://www.drkashani.com/photo.html

The next room had collections of many parts. Tiny, tiny ear bone ossicles the size of fingernail clippings. A walking man, divided into his musculature, and his skeleton, so that he seemed split into two people from one. The bodies retained pieces of eyebrows, lips and eyelids, presumably to make them appear more like people, to make it easier to imagine them as once being living humans. Another man held his skin draped over his arm, like thin, flimsy white leather, lightly furred and twitching slightly in the room’s air conditioning. Pieces of bone, joints, cross sections, arrangements.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=1942&print=1

At first I found I was nearly holding my breath, but there were no perturbing smells waiting to assail me in the exhibition- just the smell of plastic and resin. I felt only creeped out by the fingernails remaining on the bodies… I guess I don’t like other people’s fingernails.

A feature displaying the stringy, flimsy looking white nerve network gave comparisons to the painters of Degas and Monet, of their degenerating eyesight which led to the characteristic blur of their paintings. Degas, apparently, had a visual acuity of 6/133 for his 1905 painting, ‘Woman Drying Hair’, which meant he couldn’t have identified the top letter on an optician’s chart. Neither can I. I have to try not to spoil the surprise for myself when walking into the room by keeping my eyes averted from the chart.

Much of the exhibition and the billboards discussed the problems of aging, the effects on the body. I couldn’t help feeling terribly past-it at 23, and it was only going to get worse. Happily, information was also given on how to maintain the self- healthy eating… exercise… continuing mental stimulation… One room was dedicated to featuring centenarians, those who have reached the 100 year old mark, what features of their life might have helped, and where they seem most concentrated in the globe.

A very interesting technique draws liquid plastic into the blood vessels of the body, even, it seems, the tiny capillaries, makng a hairy and dense plastic representation of the network. This was used to show the remarkable delicacy and concentration of blood vessels in a human arm, in small animals, and the human head.

http://www.mnartists.org/uploads/news/4e95b5629e97f68902aecdef29d4bbd1/4e95b5629e97f68902aecdef29d4bbd1.jpg

Bodies were arranged in artistic kinds of poses, which I had heard criticism of before. One skeleton emerged from the ground, to represent the Middle Ages belief that corpses left their graves at nightfall.

Diseased organs were pretty graphic. A liver with cirrhosis is a bubbly, shrivelled little thing compared to the fat smooth weight of a healthy one. Smoker’s lungs are typically overcast in black and grey, or featured with dense fleshy tumours in cross-sections. A brain with Alzheimer’s is amazingly reduced, with reduced and skinnier wiggles instead of the normal, healthy fat close packed swirls of cerebral matter. (I’m currently watching the Terry Pratchett documentary, ‘Living with Alzheimers’ as I write this too… my favourite and iconic childhood / older author… oddly my other iconic pre-teens author was Brian Jacques, another venerable and bearded man. Hey, Dad! Grow a beard!).

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EFDS34c1rpA/R-lz6aS8qEI/AAAAAAAAALk/Nxmiw8wSkoM/s400/body_worlds_02.jpg

The finale was a huge, partly split giraffe, which exposed the huge inner organs and was at least three times my height. (BTW, I think Professor von Hagens should stop allowing gothic / creepy / ghoulish photos to be taken of him…)

http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/m4/oct2008/8/9/29CDC338-BAAE-4F7E-606AAFBF11966DFD.jpg

Final quotes from the exhibition- ‘For our size, humans should die of old age by 25, but the fact we don’t signals the survival advantage of our brains and memory storage.’

‘The plastinated post-mortal body illuminates the soul by its very absence.’

‘Plastination transforms the deceased body, an individual object of mourning into an object of reverance, learning, enlightenment, and appreciation.

The exhibition even provided a ‘Life Certificate’ which you could take away with you, filling in details about when you had visited the exhibition, and vows for healthy living and body appreciation in the future. I found it a very nice touch. I’m really glad I went.

International Night took place on Friday night and went wonderfully, with some fabulous shows. Not just dances and martial arts performances; the Japanese Society put on a surreal and weird tribute to old gaming icons like Zelda, Super Mario and Godzilla, and Arabic Society performed comedic parody skits which I’m looking forward to watching in full.

Being a media student, I obligingly dragged a camera and tripod from the department and filmed as much of the show as I could, save the bit where I and the Wushu society did our martial arts performance. I perfected the slow smooth pan, the gratuitous zoom, the lurking camera eye, and I hope I’ll be able to edit it into something good to send to the societies and post up here. To capture the show properly needed two cameras- one for the steady panoramic, the other for the close-ups. But the end result with one camera will at least be an interesting mix of the two.

My bit of the show went okay, though I heavily bruised my knee on one landing and thought my heart might leap out of my chest with the amount of adrenaline pumping through me- I’m just not used to being on stage. Forget caffeine stimulants or sugar hits, the strongest wake-up call there is has to be standing on a stage with the smoke machine going wild, sonorous Chinese music playing around you, watching another member perform their own rapid, perfect form in front of you and knowing that as soon as he stops- any moment now, any moment now any moment- you have to step forward and do your form. Happily, I didn’t drop my stick, and the whole thing was over too quickly…

Am generally blogging as it’s the end of Valentines Day (pretty limp- morning was spent helping my boyfriend go shopping, then me having to do reading / errands for tomorrow…) and yes, tomorrow I’m going to Oxford to record my first interview for a radio documentary. I’m immensely nervous, as it’s on the topics, broadly, of particle physics, risk probabilities, and philosophy of science- all things which are very interesting, but highly unfamiliar to me. On the plus side, the documentary is supposed to be for the layperson; on the downside, I may sound like a dunce. A Dunce.

Next week is Arts Week and there shall probably be all kinds of fun things happening, of which I don’t know the details yet… there is going to be a closing night performance on Friday, where IC Wushu will again be performing in our slinky shiny blue suits. Maybe I’ll pluck up the nerve to bully two people into manning cameras this time…

Absolutely nothing to do with this post...

Been so busy these last 7 days. Average amount of sleep a night, 5 hours, drank lots of Tescos Kick and horribly thick instant coffee. I hate being sleepless and forced to function, briefly became a slightly different person- Crap-tired n’ Caffeinated Annabel was capable of focusing on only one thing at at time, or holding a single thought at a time with a maximum memory recall of about six seconds. As for going to sleep, you know how it is when you lie down in bed at some horrible hour and your mind is still ticking over with wild thoughts, and you think, ‘I’ve had too much caffeine got too much to do not feeling tired not sleepy at all maybe I should get up and-’ WHACK. A cosh of exhaustion blacks you out. I feared it might start getting like that while I was awake, but more extreme, that I would be walking and talking and the next minute taking an abrupt facedown nap in my lunch.

I grew immune to the taste of instant coffee- I’ve numbed myself so far to Nescafe original, Kenco Rappor, and have nearly banished the taste of Kenco gold- which began tasting like hot water. I would get in the shower and think, ‘This coffee’s bloody weak…’ . Ha, ha. Yesterday evening, I decided I could finally take the evening off, so spent a happy couple of hours sipping alcohol and painting away in the Union’s art room (the two things, alcohol and creativity, are actually mutually complementary), then last night finally could let myself just sleep till I woke up. Which is why I’m sitting here now amidst the ruins of a huge breakfast and feeling pretty amiable with the world again.

Anyway, the 2000 word+ essay was turned in, I got my twitchy self to a session of wushu so they’ll let me perform with them at International Night tonight, articles were written, conferences covered, prospective documentary interviewees found, and other matters not worth mentioning were done. Hey, here are some pretty rain pictures I took sometime Tuesday morning.

With floods of rain hosing the streets outside, I went out to find the side gate locked and so took 20 minute walk around Imperial to get to where I might have left my bike.

Passing the gate opposite the Union, I found it was actually open so I didn’t actually have to walk for 20 minutes in the rain.

Since the film I was analysing for the essay (yeah, I know. Film analysis. Sounds easy, hey- it’s not like I had to write an essay on the concept of speciation or how organelles move round cells… but at least Biology essays had a firm basis of facts to draw on) was a film noir film, something about the dark rain washed streets, and my lone clacking footsteps, seemed particularly fitting to me.

If you live around Imperial and you looked out to see a figure stalking about at 1am in a flapping leather coat getting soaked and bedraggled, it was me, being noir-ish.

Oh yeah, and as I walked nearly the whole way in the rain, I realised as reached Queens Gate road that I was holding my folded umbrella in my hand.

Still plenty to do today, but working from home. Before hitting the books again, I’m going to enjoy folding laundry and listening to the radio… Yeah, you read that right. I look forward to these things now, they’re a break from having to continually rub my brain cells together to produce some kind of cerebral thought. Also, I’m going to put up a review of my visit to Body Worlds last Sunday, and perhaps write about other stuff that happened that weekend. I’m not sure why, but I got pretty depressed over the weekend, and there had been little hints of it in the weeks before, even though this week I felt doggone tired but emotionally fine.

Check out the events of International Night tonight…

Co-presented a radio show today and all very good fun. This term we SMP’ers are split into two groups who present the science news show ‘Brain Food’ in alternate weeks, and today’s show features me, heavily sleep deprived and hepped up on Tescos own-brand Red Bull, with my magnificent co-presenter bailing me out whenever I wander off topic and fall off the radar. Have a listen to today’s and all the past shows here!

http://www.icradio.com/show.php?id=554

It came spiralling down on the 31st January, 2009… something we rarely see in the south…

Well, as the snow continued to fall and the inches piled up outside my window, Imperial declared a Snow day, which meant most classes being cancelled on Monday, and then Tuesday, on the grounds that it was fairly impossible to reach the university for most. A few trains crept from the local station at Clapham Junction early in the morning, to be met with wildly fighting passengers waving briefcases, foaming at the mouth, and all trying to board at once with spectacular visual comedy.

Buses weren’t running, the Tube was a patchwork of suspensions… I did try to take my bike out in the afternoon but found I was just pulling my bike through snowdrifts for the first third of the journey. Our housemate managed to get one of the few trains and arrived at his office to find shadowy darkness and empty desks, but his boss told him on the phone, over the sound of a crackling fire and early morning TV, that it was good that he was there as now he could answer the office phones.

Well, the papers are now having a ball complaining about unnecessary school closures, the mounting cost of two days of snow on our poorly economy, and sad sledging accidents. Still, we don’t really have a wholesome target to be outraged *at*- I mean, who are you really going to blame, the clouds? That darn sweeping cold front? The government for failing to protect us from our two annual days of snowfall? It’s more appropriate to kind of rail at our own helplessness of infrastructure in the face of intense natural forces.

Personally, I couldn’t help willing the snow to go higher, and higher… I know the snow’s not fun for all, but once I saw we were having a blizzard, I found myself wishing for the mother of all blizzards. The full spectacle. Hemmed in, eating tinned food and updating facebook statuses with banal regularity… mmm hmm.

The official Imperial Queens Lawn Snowbenchman.

I think I also went to sleep on Sunday in a general feeling of unreasonable stress. I don’t get to be quite as sunny as I was last term, as now I’m really feeling the stress of student life in second term. Having failed to obtain Bill Bailey for a radio documentary on Alfred Russel Wallace, the less tortured fellow original theoretician of natural selection, I will now have to make a documentary on something far more serious and difficult. It’s going to involve a hefty fieldtrip and it’s going to be about protons, bosons and the end of the world, except not really the end of the world because I’m meant to be clarifying the issue, not feeding the fire. I slumped into bed, with my ‘to do list’ depressingly close by, covered in scribbles demanding lists of tasks to be completed as soon as I got out of bed.

Then it snowed.

Nice ^_^

But work-related whispers in my head remain.

I bid ye all also to pick up a copy of I, Science. There’s some interesting articles, whether about Darwin’s polymath grandfather, or the debate about hard vs. soft surfaces for joggers. Some floozy has also written an article about disappearing bees in the US and Europe. I don’t know, it might be worth reading. Also take a look at the pictures on the article ‘Science Pornography’ and measure your level of social reserve / prudishness by your own personal reaction. Maybe… maybe the x-rayed woman is licking a novelty shaped lollipop, it’s possible right? Personally, I’m… pretty surprised.

Oh, and one more thing for my own personal sado-masochism. Being a student at Imperial means you get to use the gym facilities, which you invariably do quite infrequently, unless you live on campus / very close to the aforementioned gym building. Why? Because having to travel into college, I tend to come in when I need to in the morning and leave the gymming for the evening, by which time I’m too hammered with instant coffee caffeine or generally dwelling in ennui to bother going. So here it is- I vow to carry out these exercise plans in an attempt to build some definition on my twiggy arms. That’s right! I’m doing weights, stand back!

Expect to see a hulking she-woman walking around campus some time in the summer, and please refrain from staring.