Musician Uses His Cancer CT Scans to Create a Powerful Music Video

Musician Justin Wright created a powerfully beautiful music video for his song “Hellbrunn Automatons” that uses slices of CT scans the doctors had used to determine where his cancer spread. Wright enlisted 3D animator Max Kaplin to connect the scans into a cohesive display.

Composer, cellist, and recent cancer survivor Justin Wright presents a new music video for his track Hellbrunn Automatons, created entirely from CT scan slices of the musician’s body during his diagnostic process. While the images initially served a clinical role in letting doctors determine where his cancer had spread, they have now been sequenced into frames in an animation to produce beautiful abstract bursts.

Like many who have gone through cancer treatment, Wright used the time he spent getting chemotherapy to create something new to understand what was happening within his body.

I was really determined to make something beautiful out of this whole ordeal, and when I played around with my scans on medical imaging software, I knew immediately that this was how. These images – detailed, thorough, and repetitive – were the perfect representation of one of strongest feelings I had throughout my treatment: the relinquishment of my body to the multitude of experts examining every inch of it, a slightly morbid ego-death where I nearly stopped seeing my body as my own.

Luckily, the treatment worked and Wright was cured!

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

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