Art
bioephemera | May 4, 2009
The Lady of Broken Hearts
Natalie Shau
Lithuanian artist Natalie Shau works in digital media, mostly using Photoshop. You can see more of Shau's work at her website and at the website of jewelery designer Lydia Courteille, for whom she illustrated a cabinet-of-curiosities themed ad campaign. hat-tip: Haute Macabre.
bioephemera | May 3, 2009
Following up on my previous post about visual illusions, reader Jake alerted me to this story from the BBC:
A design student made a battered old Skoda "disappear" by painting it to merge with the surrounding car park. Sara Watson, who is studying drawing at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), took three weeks to transform the car's appearance.
Note that like a trompe l'oeil painting in a building, or an anamorphic projection, the perspective work on the car will only allow it to "blend in" seamlessly when seen from a specific vantage point - which might be why we only have one…
bioephemera | May 2, 2009
The Ambassadors, 1533
Hans Holbein the Younger
In the artistic technique called anamorphosis, an object is depicted in distorted perspective, so that the viewer has to take special action, like looking from a specific angle, to see the "correct" image.
The most famous example of anamorphic painting is Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait in which the illusion of highly detailed reality is fractured by a blurred grey streak superimposed across the painting's bottom third. If one stands at an acute angle, close to the painting, the blurred streak resolves itself into a…
bioephemera | April 29, 2009Let etsy seller foliage help you fight swine flu with this bagful of handmade soaps in "skin-ish colors"!
I vascillate between finding them cute, and thinking they resemble a crowd of damned souls reaching out for help from my soap dish. Weird.
Dedicated to John O., who truly appreciates disembodied hands. Via DailyArtMuse.
bioephemera | April 29, 2009
Check out Brian's new review of A History of Paleontology Illustration (Life of the Past) by Jane Davidson, in Palaeontologia Electronica:
It is rare for fossils to be featured in fine art, but in the 15th century painting A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius by the Flemish master Petrus Christus there is, if you look carefully, a fossil shark tooth among the objects scattered on the shop's table. The fossil plays a nearly insignificant role in the painting, but it reflects the general interpretation of such natural curiosities at the time. From this modest starting point,…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses:
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses.
Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.)
Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.
The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project.
His book, called Emotional…
bioephemera | April 27, 2009Simple, but surprisingly charming - and somewhat reminiscent of an ant colony or other biological collective:
Fluid Sculpture (click for larger video) from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.
bioephemera | April 19, 2009C.P. Snow fans, prepare to head over to the Intersection to partake in an upcoming online discussion of Snow's famous "Two Cultures" address. In their new article, "The Culture Crosser," Sheril and Chris portray Snow as a sort of science policy prophet:
It helps to think of Snow as an early theorist on a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical? At best that's a…
bioephemera | April 18, 2009
In her recent TED talk, JoAnne Kuchera-Morin described UCSB's AlloSphere, a new project that enables scientists to literally stand inside a three-story projection of their data:
The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. (source)
Scientists and artists can stand on a bridge through the center of this…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2009tags: Antwerp, The Sound of Music, public stunt, streaming video
This video shows more than 200 dancers who performed "Do Re Mi" in the Central Station of Antwerp on 23 of March 2009, 8:00 AM. It was a promotion stunt for a Belgian television program, where they are looking for someone to play the leading role, in the musical of "The Sound of Music" [4:01]
sciencepunk | April 17, 2009Has the head of the Catholic Church been meddling in your politics? Perhaps you'd like to be the one pulling his strings? Live out your God fantasies with your own Pope Benedict XVI puppet, courtesy of artist Rob Nance.
ddobbs | April 13, 2009Kew Gardens (that is, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) is trying to collect and bank the seeds and pollen from 10% of the world's plants -- a nice 21st-century continuation of the stunning collecting effort that started in the 1700s and helped supply evidence, via Joseph Dalton Hooker, that proved crucial to Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. The Guardian has put up a nice photo gallery of some of the seeds they've collected so far. A few:
Seed of wild spider flower (or spider wisp) Photo: Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley
Himalayan iris pollen. Photo: Rob Kesseler…
sciencepunk | April 12, 2009What if you found yourself thrown back in time to a pre-technological age? Could you stand on the shoulders of giants not-yet-born and bring your 21st century science to these ancient times, like Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness? Or would you wish you'd spent less time watching Battlestar Galactica and more time learning the fundamentals of science? If it's the latter, worry not! TopatoCo.com has just the thing you need: a cheat sheet of every bit of important science you need to know! Just keep this folded in your pocket or worn under your sweater and you'll never have to worry about…
grrlscientist | April 11, 2009tags: Chambers Street, Park Place, World Trade Center, Oculus, Andrew Ginzel, Kristin Jones, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC
Oculus #36, 1998.
Stone mosaic on walls throughout Chambers Street station complex (A & C trains); also, there is a stone and glass floor mosaic at Park Place entrance, which connects to this station via a tunnel.
Artists: Andrew Ginzel & Kristin Jones.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 January 2009 [larger view].
Oculus is located in passageways under the World Trade Center and was largely untouched by the events of 9/11. Oculus will also be…
grrlscientist | April 10, 2009tags: Chambers Street, Park Place, World Trade Center, Oculus, Andrew Ginzel, Kristin Jones, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC
Oculus #35, 1998.
Stone mosaic on walls throughout Chambers Street station complex (A & C trains); also, there is a stone and glass floor mosaic at Park Place entrance, which connects to this station via a tunnel.
Artists: Andrew Ginzel & Kristin Jones.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 January 2009 [larger view].
The green that you see is a "gift" from a random agent of destruction. I think it is chalk, but am not sure.
Oculus is located in…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2009tags: Chambers Street, Park Place, World Trade Center, Oculus, Andrew Ginzel, Kristin Jones, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC
Oculus #34, 1998.
Stone mosaic on walls throughout Chambers Street station complex (A & C trains); also, there is a stone and glass floor mosaic at Park Place entrance, which connects to this station via a tunnel.
Artists: Andrew Ginzel & Kristin Jones.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 January 2009 [larger view].
Oculus is located in passageways under the World Trade Center and was largely untouched by the events of 9/11. Oculus will also be…
bioephemera | April 9, 2009
Algae filament necklace
Pam at Phantasmaphile alerted me to Nervous System, a jewelry company founded by MIT grads Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg. Nervous System "creates experimental jewelry, combining nontraditional materials like silicone rubber and stainless steel with rapid prototyping methods. We find inspiration in complex patterns generated by computation and nature."
While their various lines don't look quite as I expected - I was anticipating something Haeckel-like for "radiolaria" and neuronal for "dendrite" - they are intriguing and definitely "feel" organic.…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2009tags: Chambers Street, Park Place, World Trade Center, Oculus, Andrew Ginzel, Kristin Jones, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC
Oculus #33, 1998.
Stone mosaic on walls throughout Chambers Street station complex (A & C trains); also, there is a stone and glass floor mosaic at Park Place entrance, which connects to this station via a tunnel.
Artists: Andrew Ginzel & Kristin Jones.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 January 2009 [larger view].
Oculus is located in passageways under the World Trade Center and was largely untouched by the events of 9/11. Oculus will also be…