Artists & Art
bioephemera | January 3, 2010
Street artist Banksy thumbs his spraycan at global warming skeptics.
Via Londonist, via the ESPP blog.
bioephemera | January 1, 2010
I went to see Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, a few weeks ago at MIT. Unfortunately the line to get him to sign books was about fifty frenzied geeks long, so I didn't stay for that. But I did enjoy his dialogue with the audience, which mainly consisted of answering questions ranging from obsessive fanboy minutia (why is xkcd published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday?) to vast and metaphysical (what is the true difference between geeks, nerds and dorks?) The latter question led to Munroe doodling and tinkering with a ridiculously convoluted Venn diagram, the details of which I can't remember…
bioephemera | December 30, 2009
the Hallelujah Mountains
film stills from Avatar by James Cameron
The Messengers
Christophe Vacher
Fantasy artist Christophe Vacher was doing the floating mountain thing for years before Avatar.
Update: apparently, for those of you who remember the 1970s, Roger Dean was doing it too:
Jason R suggests this link for more images. (None of them look even remotely familiar to me).
bioephemera | December 28, 2009
scarobeus cornepleura
Mauricio Ortiz
The technically gifted Mauricio Ortiz is originally from Costa Rica, but now lives in London, where his artistic star is on the rise. His octo-beetle, above, was recently selected to appear in a deck of playing cards as part of a high-profile British charity fundraiser, alongside a card by British bad boy Damien Hirst.
The octo-beetle is one of a number of painstaking drawings in the style of scientific illustrations, and inspired by Wunderkammern, the "wonder cabinets" of the Renaissance. Rather than starting with completely unfamiliar wonders, though,…
bioephemera | December 26, 2009
Orchis Nodulosa
Kate Street
The delicacy of Kate Street's pencil drawings belie their sinister undertones: a garden of chimeric orchids flowering with skulls, intricate skeletons of birds perching on leaves, tuberous roots that are half heart and half honeycomb. Her installations, on the other hand, pull no punches. In Bird in the Hand II, disembodied hands clinically display the fragments of a dissected bird.
Street told London's Timeout.com,
My interest in nature is how we like to classify it and manicure it and make it perfect. I like Dutch still lifes of flowers and animals because…
bioephemera | December 20, 2009
artwork by Ryan Abblegen, via iO9.
(Since he was BoingBoinged, his etsy shop is all out of mechanized murder cards, so bookmark him for after the holidays).
bioephemera | December 19, 2009
Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / The Chronicle
SFGate has a great interview with Raven Hanna of madewithmolecules! I love Raven's stuff an am thrilled to see her getting recognition.
bioephemera | December 18, 2009
"Insectopedia"
Kiff Slemmons
Self-taught metal artist Kiff Slemmons' classic series "Insectopedia" is a collection of metal pins fusing insects with typography. She's also known for working with found objects like shells, stones and bones, as in the following pieces from her recent show with Kay Sekimachi at Velvet da Vinci in NYC:
"Corallary 2 & 3" Brooches
Kiff Slemmons
"Atoll" Necklace
Kiff Slemmons
View a complete set of photos from the Velvet da Vinci show here.
More:Article on Kiff Slemmons at Ornament Magazine
bioephemera | December 6, 2009
Origami is as ephemeral as art gets - delicate paper, with no more than creases and physics to maintain its shape. It's also the ideal art form for blurring the boundary between art and science, because it's all about geometry. You could argue that the origami medium is math, just as much as it's paper.
That's why Between the Folds, a documentary film by Vanessa Gould about origami-happy artists, mathematicians and scientists "working in the shadows between art and math," is such a success: the connections between math, science, art and paper aren't strained at all, so you can sit back and…
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
Voss-Andreae is therefore either brave or foolhardy to try to represent quantum phenomena tangibly. Perhaps his greatest asset as a former physicist is that he realizes how much we don't know. In some of his works, the inverted commas of analogy are explicit to the knowing eye. Quantum Corral (pictured) materializes something that could hardly be less material: the wave-like properties of electrons, first reported in Nature in 1927. Here, they are represented in a block of wood that has been milled to the contours of electron density seen in 1993 around a ring of iron atoms on the surface…
bioephemera | December 4, 2009
An intriguing new exhibition featuring work by herbert pfostl at the Observatory (next to Proteus Gowanus gallery in NYC):
Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration-breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly - and the odd. Collected grand…
bioephemera | December 3, 2009Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck!
If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo.
Yes, that was a . . .
music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued."
It turns out the video is just part of…
bioephemera | November 29, 2009
The beautiful 2009 Burning Man poster, by artists Corey and Catska Ench, portrays evolution as a fantasia of related patterns.
bioephemera | November 11, 2009
Talk about ephemera - Willy Chyr makes bioart out of balloons! Check out his installation Balluminescence:
Balluminescence - Lights, Balloons, Jellyfish! was commissioned by Science Chicago and was created for the program's finale signature event - LabFest! Millennium Park. An interactive installation, Balluminescence engaged participants in the process of creating art inspired by science. A team of balloon artists taught LabFest! attendants how to create simple balloon shapes, which were then added to one of three balloon jellyfish costumes. Through the activity, participants learned about…
bioephemera | November 9, 2009
Macro Detail from a print from Press NY.via Blue Barnhouse
Unfortunately the Press NY website appears to be defunct, but this image should be in the new letterpress book being compiled over at Blue Barnhouse. Check out their blog for more info on the book!
bioephemera | November 8, 2009I'm currently attending the Grand Opening of the new Laboratory at Harvard University, "an exhibition and meeting space for student idea development within and between the arts and sciences," for a special colloquium on Art, Science, and Creativity featuring David Edwards (author of ArtScience), Lisa Randall, and others. This is awesome. Stay tuned for a report tomorrow.
bioephemera | November 5, 2009In case you didn't see it, the latest xkcd is a visual shout-out to data visualization guru Edward Tufte's favorite map, this 1861 depiction of Napoleon's march on Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. Yay!
Movie Narrative Charts
Charles Minard's 1869 chart showing the losses in men, their movements, and the temperature of Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign.
bioephemera | November 5, 2009Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.
I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:
Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor
Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data…
bioephemera | November 2, 2009
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art:
Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days Goodbye Poems Of Ophelia' were created in a laboratory at Surrey University UK with the help of microbiologist Dr. Simon Park. When displayed in 2010, this will be an outdoor video installation of Ophelia with poems submitted from the public. Composer Milton Mermikides will be producing a sound track…
bioephemera | October 30, 2009One of the coolest, weirdest, worlds-colliding Day of the Dead artworks I've ever seen is this sculpture of a skeletal Teddy Kennedy. He's at a podium, open-jawed (no doubt haranguing other late Senators), accompanied by a skeletal dog.
The paper in his hand says "Health Care: The Cause of My Life." I realize this is a terrible photo, but in person, I actually found it pretty moving.
From the window of Nomad on Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA - they have an extensive Dia de los Muertos folk art collection.
Happy Halloween!