Art
grrlscientist | March 28, 2008tags: LBJ Journal, avian life: literary arts, nature, poetry, birds, birding
I have no connection whatsoever to this new journal, but my friend, professor of poetry at KSU, Elizabeth Dodd, told me about it last night, and I am very very excited about it.
There is a new biannual journal that is dedicated to birds and creative writing, The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts. Those of you who are birders will recognize the title of this new journal, LBJ, as the birders' acronym for "little brown job" -- a name applied to that group of small brown birds that move quickly and are difficult to…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Virginia Postrel has this fascinating piece in the Atlantic about why hospitals should be designed to be more attractive -- not just the drab taupe to which we have become accustomed:
Thank God for intravenous Benadryl, which knocks me out in just a few minutes. The cancer treatment is state-of-the-art, but the decor is decidedly behind the times.
Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your…
bleimanb | March 18, 2008A new exhibition of nature drawings, paintings and renderings has just opened at Buckingham Palace. The event focuses around four artists and a collector (Leonardo da Vinci, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby) who lived from the mid 15th century to the late 18th. As an added bonus the exhibit, Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery, was a collaboration by curators of the Royal Collection and Sir David "Superfly" Attenborough.
The subjects of the works tend to be then-newly discovered species, many from the New World…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2008tags: Swan Lake, acrobats, ballet, streaming video
I love ballet, especially Swan Lake, but this rendition with Chinese ballet dancers who are also very accomplished acrobats is simply beyond description. Perhaps the most impressive moment is when the prima ballerina is on pointe on her partner's head! [7:21].
grrlscientist | March 15, 2008tags: John James Audubon, Bird Art, ornithology, birds, avian, New York Historical Society, endangered species
Carolina Parakeet (Carolina Parrot), Conuropsis carolinensis,
by John James Audubon (American, born Santo Domingo [now Haiti], 1785-1851).
Havell plate no. 26.
Watercolor, graphite, pastel, gouache, and black ink with scratching out and selective glazing on paper, laid on thin board.
The Carolina parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, now extinct,
was the only native species of parrot in the United States. The last
known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Florida in 1904 [larger size…
vhughes | March 13, 2008
Prismatic Soap Bubble
ScienceBlogs fans will have surely noticed the stunning images featured on our Life Science, Physical Science (above), Environment, Humanities and Technology channels. They're taken from On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, by Harvard organic chemist George Whitesides and photographer Felice Frankel.
Frankel, who heads the Envisioning Science program at Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing, recently chatted with me about the role of design in scientific communication.
Why do you call your work design, but not art?
This is my…
zooillogix | March 10, 2008"Hunting Trophies" is an art project designed as a sort-of protest against hunting while also raising "questionings on the relation between Human and Animal and Human and Non-Human." The aptly named French artist, France Cadet, states that she is also trying to "grant them back for a moment the right to life, to free expression and to judgment."
Well whatever she's doing, we want one for the mantle. Cyberdoll via We-Make-Money-Not-Art
French Cadet clearly never saw the hunting lodge scene from Evil Dead 2...
More below the fold...
From Cyberdoll: The robots are able to eye the nearby…
pharyngula | March 10, 2008I am reminded of the whole host of intellectual failings of creationists: it's not just that they reject modern science, but many of them tend to be brain-damaged peckerwoods who are also incapable of viewing literature and art without squawking in horror, unless maybe it's a tasteless photorealistic airbrushed Aryan Jesus, or perhaps some cookie-cutter landscape from a hack like Kincade. For a truly sickening example, just look at Ray Comfort's latest blog entry. He's reacting to a documentary of Gustav Klimt, which describes his work as "sensuous" and "obsessed with women", which are all…
purepedantry | March 4, 2008The NYTimes has a slide show of "migraine" art provided by Oliver Sacks from his book Migraine. They attempt to illustrate what a migraine aura looks like.
Neat. I would put one up on my wall if I didn't feel so horrible that it was the pictorial prelude to someone's intense pain.
grrlscientist | March 4, 2008tags: Performance Art, streaming video
Wow, this is a really amazing video of an artist at work on the stage -- redefining the phrase "performance art"! [5:29]
pontiff | February 29, 2008Happy Leap Friday! For your enjoyment, some ferromagnetic fluids jiving to a piano piece:
pharyngula | February 27, 2008Wouldn't some variant of this image make for a most excellent tattoo?
(I expect the Trophy Wife will come screeching into the parking lot any minute now, to tell me no, no, no while hitting me with a rolled up newspaper.)
laelaps | February 23, 2008
Henry de la Beche's "Duria Antiquior," an image of the carnage that must have taken place on the shores of the ancient Dorset.
Years ago, when touring dino-mation exhibits were all the rage, my parents took me to "see the dinosaurs" at the Morris Museum. I was terrified. I had seen dinosaur skeletons before, but the moving, roaring beasts sent me scurrying around the corner, peeking around it as if from a blind. My father walked up to a Triceratops and touched it to show me I was safe, but even though I was so excited about seeing dinosaurs I could not contain my fear when confronted with…
laelaps | February 21, 2008
I cringed when one of the video captions used the phrase "missing link," but other than that the clip is a good summary of what it took to reconstruct Tiktaalik. I wish I had some degree of artistic talent; I've always admired the reconstructions, restorations, and mounts on display at the AMNH and elsewhere. Arranging bones in a "true-to-life" position might not be considered art to some aficionados, but then again the Tyrannosaurus on display in New York is still inspiring awe in scores of children that stand in the shadow of the skeleton's massive frame.
Update: Paleo-artist and friend…
vhughes | February 12, 2008(This is a guest post written by Mo, the Neurophilosopher.)
I'm very pleased to announce that the fantastic Bioephemera has been "acquired" by ScienceBlogs. When I first started reading it, I knew that I had found a unique blog, and it soon became one of my favourites.
(More below the fold...)
Bioephemera is a curiosity box filled with weird and wonderful things from the intersection of art and biology. Take, for example, this wax anatomical figure of a pregnant woman, attributed to Stephan Zick, and dated to around 1700.
Jessica Palmer, the author of Bioephemera, is not a biologist with an…
sciencetolife | February 6, 2008
Scientists are using T-Ray technology in a new way-to help uncover murals that have been hidden under layers of plaster or paint in old buildings.
T-Rays (which are pulses of terahertz radiation that were previously used in space shuttle devices) have now been applied to this new technology by a team of researchers that includes scientists at the University of Michigan and the Louvre Museum.
Their findings are published in a paper entitled "Terahertz imaging for non-destructive evaluation of mural paintings," in the February 2008 edition of Optics Communications.
"Terahertz is a…
omnibrain | January 25, 2008If I only had a brain:
According to this highly intelligible comment from YouTube this song was featured on Beavis and Butthead - surprise surprise!
DaDrizzL31214 (2 weeks ago)
On Beavis and Butthead, they were waatching this vid and Beavis started going with the tune for the whole song. He wouldn't shut the hell up even after Butthead smacked him upside his head a couple of times. Lol then Butthead started doing the same at the end. XD
neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in 1925, Kahlo was involved in a horrific traffic accident: the school bus she was travelling on collided with a streetcar, and a steel handrail penetrated Kahlo's lower torso, leaving her with a fractured pelvis and collarbone, two broken ribs, a broken leg and a crushed foot. Her spinal column was also broken in three places.
Following the accident, the medics who arrived on the scene…