bioephemera | June 30, 2009
Theatre
Ben Tolman
Like Hieronymus Bosch paintings, Ben Tolman's intricate, epic drawings can hold your attention for a long, long time. Although the poor lighting at Artomatic makes poring over the minute detail a little frustrating, it's impressive to see the scale of Tolman's works in person. Alternatively, view the high-res version here, or watch video of Theatre's creation (it took over a year) here, at Ben's blog. I think he may be single-handedly supporting the whole Micron pen industry, at least in the DC Metro area! Awesome work.
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Today is the last day of the Silence is the Enemy fundraising drive here at BioE - when I get my proceeds I'll send them along to Doctors Without Borders, probably along with a little extra, since I don't usually make an appreciable amount here at BioE. But I did notice a slight uptick in traffic this month, so thank you for the clicks! And don't forget about the issue of rape - these "awareness months" are supposed to raise awareness year-round, not make it seem like we've done our duty and don't need to think about it for the other 11/12 of the year (which I admit, I often do).
bioephemera | June 29, 2009
Mark Mawson's Aqueous series consists of amazing fluid artworks created by dropping paint into water. I wasn't going to blog about them, because everyone else is already, but I found it remarkable how similar they are to jellyfish - not the one above necessarily, but some of the others. Go to his website and click on "series" to view them all.
Via Behance, via today and tomorrow and lots of other places.
bioephemera | June 29, 2009John Timmer at Ars Technica discusses the results of a survey of bloggers which seems to suggest that, while most bloggers hold themselves to a reasonably high ethical standard, they don't necessarily expect other bloggers to do so.
I think it's kind of a weird idea to have a code of ethics for all bloggers, but that's because blogs are so diverse, not because I can imagine a situation in which I'd be deliberately violating such a code. My blog is a sort of mashup of art review, musings on communications and policies, and science coverage, and they're all different sorts of posts. When I blog…
bioephemera | June 29, 2009
The Age of the Drowning of Sorrows and the miracle of Soju and Etha
oil on canvas
Tracey Clarke
Tracey Clarke has taken nearly every little girl's habit of doodling horses, turned it into startlingly realistic animal portraiture, and then added a frisson of creepiness. Her wild horses, blank-eyed and leaking stuffing, remind me of the Skin Horse from Margery Williams' The Velveteen Rabbit:
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.""Does…
bioephemera | June 28, 2009
nmohan of the collaborative artists group Robot Disorder just contacted me to let me know they've launched the Robot Disorder 2.0 website, with more robot hordes (and easier navigation). He says they have literally thousands of robot drawings to clean up and post in the coming weeks, so if you haven't yet seen your personal robot, never fear - it's on its way.
And it's not too late to contribute your own robot to the project - just visit the top floor at Artomatic in Washington DC before July 5!
bioephemera | June 28, 2009
Her Dark Satanic Mills
Paul Taylor
When I saw Paul Taylor's massive paintings at Artomatic, I immediately thought of two things: fire and Blake's etchings. So I was tickled that the title, "Her Dark Satanic Mills," refers to a poem by Blake, and that Taylor's creative process is all about fire:
The medium is essentially highly flammable furniture stripper gel - set on fire of course. They are canvas pieces mounted on Luan, covered in Polyurethane to protect the canvas. The gel is applied, somewhat in a Pollock-like manner, lit, and then the process takes on a John Cageian-like "chance…
bioephemera | June 27, 2009If this story is to be believed, Body Worlds creator Gunther von Hagens is going to plastinate Michael Jackson.
I have no objection to plastination per se, but I think it would be uniquely tragic for Michael Jackson to remain an object of invasive voyeurism after death. That's exactly what he was from his earliest childhood, and it seems to have affected his mental health so profoundly. Andrew Sullivan may have put it best: "He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell."
bioephemera | June 27, 2009
Nápoles #2
acrylic
Fabian H Rios Rubino
It's the last two weeks for DC's Artomatic, which runs through July 5. If you haven't had a chance to go, in addition to losing your chance to Draw A Robot, you're missing a lot of wonderful artwork. For the next week, I'm going to highlight some of the Artomatic artists that especially impressed me, starting with Fabian Rios Rubino. Napoles #2, his only contribution to this year's show, is kind of like what you'd get if Gustav Klimt painted a circuit board: this painting simply glows. View a high-res image here.
bioephemera | June 26, 2009
. . . at least according to a Japanese researcher, who trained them to differentiate "bad" and "good" children's art.
According to New Scientist,
This isn't Watanabe's first efforts to teach art appreciation to pigeons. In 1995, he and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to discriminate Picasso paintings from Monets - work that earned him that year's Ig Nobel prize. New Scientist plays no role in selecting winners, but Watanabe's latest study make a strong case for another award.
Zing.
Of course, Watanabe first had to determine what was "good" or "bad" art.…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009
a ten year old rape victim from the Congo
photo by Endre Vestvik
Almost a month ago, a number of bloggers launched Silence is the Enemy, a blog initiative against sexual violence. Since then, we've seen a number of thoughtful and provocative conversations throughout the blogosphere, trying to pinpoint the factors, like war, that can create a social climate where, tragically, rape is considered normal.
For example, consider this interview with Dumisani Rebombo, a South African man who sought forgiveness from the woman he gang-raped as a teenager:
A friend and my cousin pressured me to prove…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009This may be the best BBC story EVER. Seriously:
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said."We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."
I have nothing to add. At a complete loss here. I can't even come up with a bad pun.
PS - Oops, I forgot to say this was courtesy of reader Jake! Thanks Jake…
bioephemera | June 25, 2009Nature has gone science journalism crazy, with no less than six new articles on the subject! My favorite is "Science Journalism: Toppling the Priesthood," by Toby Murcott, who argues that coverage of peer review is a necessary component of truly investigative, accurate science journalism.
I don't agree with everything Murcott says, but he makes some really good points:
Journalism is often described as history's first draft. Much contemporary science journalism, however, can be seen as a second, or even a third draft. Unlike reporters covering other fields of public life, science journalists…
bioephemera | June 24, 2009
The "gastronomical cocktail" called "sex on a drip" is just one reason to hop a plane to Singapore and visit The Clinic, a theme restaurant that's probably not for the squeamish.
Their website boasts, "Clinic's unique alfresco is easily identified by its hospital whites, colourful pills, syringes, drips, test-tubes, and paraphernalia in all manner of the clinical, all in tribute to the tongue in cheek pop art of Damien Hirst." I don't know about Hirst - rotting, half-preserved sharks don't make me hungry - but their website is definitely fun in a trippy, pharma-chic way, complete with…
bioephemera | June 24, 2009According to Boing Boing, two homeless men got in a brawl over quantum physics, which ended with a skateboard to the face:
At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about "quantum physics and the splitting of atoms," according to prosecutors. Keller joined in the conversation and, for reasons unknown, got upset, authorities said. He picked up his skateboard and hit Fava in the face with it, splitting his lip, prosecutors said.
Of course he did. The moral: don't (en)tangle with a homeless physicist!
bioephemera | June 24, 2009"Assessing the Impact of Science Funding," by Julia Lane, from the June 5 Science, ends with a gratifying shout-out to visualization as an essential part of the scientific process:
A related intellectual investment is to advance understanding of how to convey complex answers about the impact of science investments to the public. Emerging visualization techniques seem to be more effective than tables and digital slide presentations at communicating the ways in which science investments bear fruit across a range of topics and disciplines. However, although visual representations are intuitively…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details.
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…
bioephemera | June 22, 2009
Red Line crash, June 22, 2009, between Takoma Park and Fort Totten stations
Photo from Fox5 News, via DCist
As many of you already know, DC's Red Line suffered a fatal crash this evening during rush hour. One train had stopped. A second train behind it failed to stop, overtook the first train, and ran up on top of it, shearing off the front end of the first car and crushing the last car of the first train underneath. It is still totally unclear how or why this happened.
The second train's driver is deceased, as are at least five others (the situation is being updated as I write this). About…
bioephemera | June 22, 2009
Artomatic is one of my favorite things about DC: a cooperative unjuried art gallery in a vacant high-rise, staffed by artists, with live performances and mini-bars on every other floor. It's free (except for the bars). What's not to like? The icing on the top (floor) this year is Draw A Robot - a collective crowdsourced fundraising experiment by the team at RobotDisorder.com.
Draw A Robot is a deliciously haphazard mashup of new tech and low tech. Starting at the low tech end of the process, you sit down with the pens and paper provided at the Draw A Robot booth, and you - wait for it - draw…