By Lauren Sheffer, News correspondent

For new Bostonians, a T stop is a T stop is a T stop. That is, until their individual quirks are discovered. In Ruggles, enormous paddles hang overhead. At Government Center, ‘The Candy Man’ can nearly always be heard. And then there’s The Axiom Gallery, hiding in a small corner room of Jamaica Plain’s Green Street station.
The non-profit gallery sprouted up in the Harrison District five years ago, from the hands of Heidi Kayser. When it later moved to the Green Street station, Kayser remained the director and curator. She also’ maintained the gallery’s original focus:’ new media work, or the integration of art with technology.
The latest exhibit, ‘PARSE:’ Visualizing Data That Makes Us Human,’ contains pieces that attempt to convey findings from research about topics like the REM sleep cycle, human sexuality and vertebrates’ genetic sequences in atypical ways. And they succeed.
The most striking of these pieces come from a series called ‘Fleshmap’ by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. The screaming-loud reds, yellows and oranges of one installment, called ‘TOUCH,’ immediately draw viewers in ‘- though it doesn’t hurt that the painting also features a faceless, naked man and woman looking directly at the audience. The colors are distributed like those in a heat map, but rather than representing body temperature, the colors morph from coolest (purple) to warmest (neon yellow) depending on how much the average human enjoys touching that spot of the body. The results were largely predictable ‘- without getting too crude, the ‘heat’ generally lay between the chins and knees.
The counterpart to the painting is an animation that depicts a photograph of a naked woman, facing front, accompanied by the words ‘Lover wants to touch.’ Her body separates into cubes, and the cubes change sizes, depending on how ‘desired’ those body parts are. Next, the cubes fly in all different directions, and arrange themselves in order from most to least coveted. The process is repeated with her back facing the audience, and the words. Lastly, the animation goes through the process with a man, before starting the cycle again.
Last in the ‘Fleshmap’ series is ‘SONG MATRIX,’ which lists musical genres in a column down the left side of a print, and then shows rows of increasingly smaller circles streaming to their right. The larger the circle, the more often that piece of anatomy is referred to in the genre.
According to the placard, Viegas and Wattenberg listened to more than 10,000 songs to retrieve this data. The findings are not entirely surprising:’ eyes, hands, faces, arms and cheeks fell into the top five for the vast majority of song genres, from alternative rock to country to blues. However, jazz and hip-hop differentiated themselves from the pack by featuring the lips and bottom in their top five, respectively.
Despite the series’ flashiness. the comparatively quiet and small works in the ‘Consciousness as a Property of Matter’ series, by Jennifer Hall, are memorable in their own right. By Hall’s own description, the pieces are visual representations of waves shown by scans of her own brain when she was in REM, the deepest part of the sleep cycle, where dreaming usually occurs. Hall swapped typical 2D wave drawings for sculpted rings by using ‘rapid phototyping.’
The last exhibit, the ‘100 Special Moments’ series, by Jason Salavon, is both ironically sobering and strangely unifying.
The two pieces, ‘Newlyweds’ and ‘Kids with Santa,’ were created by taking 100 images from Google Image Searches and ‘averaging’ the colors at corresponding points in all the photos. The results are still recognizable, but blurry, indistinct, and anonymous. The pieces arouse sobering feelings because they remind observers how few of our experiences are truly unique.
Yet others may find the message uplifting ‘- nearly all of us can identify with the childhood feelings of faith, excitement and the couples’ feelings of love, tenderness and hope.