John Metcalfe
John Metcalfe was CityLab’s Bay Area bureau chief, covering climate change and the science of cities.
Want an e-card for that special art lover or med student in your life? Hop on over to the Instagram page of street artist Lonac, who’s just completed a painstaking graffiti animation of a gory, throbbing heart.
The disembodied organ seemingly hangs from ventilation-shaft “blood vessels” somewhere on a wall in Zagreb, Croatia. Crimson corpuscles flow in one side and are pumped out in a big gout from the other. Lonac calls the artwork “HeArtbeats,” writing it’s an “early Valentine’s GIF(T) I’ve been working on for all of you this past few weeks.”
For the anatomy buffs out there yelling the heart isn’t pumping the correct direction, the artist says “there’s a reason why it doesn’t” and that “in time you’ll see” why. Fun fact: Watch this GIF cycle 50,000 times for a total count of 100,000 beats, and you’ll have reached the daily workload of your average ticker.
H/t Urbanshit