Narrative

Researcher Maxfield Comstock looks into modeling both the healthy heart’s electrical signals and the unhealthy heart’s electrical signals. In this piece, on the left side of the painting, we understand that this is what a healthy model of the heart would appear to be, with a regular, repetitive EKG pattern. On the right side of the painting, we can see what a heart experiencing ventricular tachycardia would appear like in Maxfield’s model of the heart. The EKG of this heart would be “chaotic,” which would result in the
heart failing to pump blood efficiently. The piece is titled Ventricular Tie-dye-cardia because Max’s model simplifies complex electrical signals into repeating, visually satisfying geometric patterns, just like
tie-dye!