Conspicuous consumption
bioephemera | September 4, 2011
Etsy seller bullseyebeads makes glass acorns and tops them with real acorn caps. I think they're adorable.
sb admin | August 26, 2011
Gold Cortex
16 x 20, 2010
Greg Dunn
I used to have a beautiful gold Japanese folding screen, which was purchased by my great-grandmother's feisty sister on a trip in the 1920s. I loved the gold patina and the surprisingly modern impact it had on my wall. At the moment, it's loaned to a friend, but looking at Greg Dunn's artwork, I couldn't help but be reminded of the best aspects of my screen: the gold leaf, crisp black patterns, and way that the scene seemed half natural, half abstract.
The biggest twist Greg, a 6th year graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania,…
bioephemera | August 6, 2011This little video from Abebooks is the closest I've ever gotten to flipping through a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus. What a truly weird book.
I particularly love it when the staid narrator reveals his "favorite" illustration - a roller skater murdered by a monstrous pen. What?!
The Codex reminds me of If You're Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow by Cooper Edens. My mom had a copy and I used to flip through it as a child, confused and not a little disturbed. I still took things too literally to appreciate the visual non sequiturs, combined with the nonsensical text ("If you…
bioephemera | May 21, 2011One of the much-hyped benefits of social networking is that it provides a way to get personalized recommendations about businesses from a wider network. If I want to tell the world that the coffee place in my neighborhood has the best cappuccino this side of Seattle, I can do that (and it does)! That's what Yelp is for - right?
Well, not quite. I realized a while ago that my reviews don't show up on Yelp anymore. They've been "filtered" from the site, like thousands of other users' reviews. Yelp won't explain why (they say if they did explain the algorithm, it would allow merchants to game…
bioephemera | May 20, 2011
Cell Division IV
Michele Banks
DC area artist Michele Banks has donated one of her cell division watercolors to raise funds for art outreach. Check out the online auction - the painting is matted and framed and currently going for only $52.
Michele is not a biologist, but she's been on a sci-art kick for a while, inspired by the fortuitous resemblance of watercolor patterns to cellular structures. To see more of her work, visit her etsy shop, artologica.
bioephemera | May 17, 2011. . . let the table settings do the talking (and the grossing out) for you! These Consumption Dinnerware plates by Leah Piepgras "are a map of the digestive tract, from mouth to anus:"
I'm trying to decide if these plates have a future as a diet aid.* Visualizing the eventual chyme-ish fate of a bolus of taco salad might just induce me to eat less. . . on the other hand, the dreamy blue watercolor palette makes me think of snowflakes, not chyme and gall. And I think I've done too many dissections for a medical illustration to have much of an effect.
Via the design blog CollabCubed.
*you…
bioephemera | May 13, 2011
Yes, I cry at everything -- Love Actually, holiday commercials, abandoned furniture on curbs -- so what could I do to resist this little guy? Is he not adorable?
He is also a letterpress card on sale at Blue Barnhouse. I just ordered several of him because I CAN'T HELP IT, he needs to be cuddled! (Fortunately envelopes can do that.)
bioephemera | April 29, 2011Thanks to Coilhouse, I just learned that artist Theo Jansen is producing 3D printed baby versions of his amazing strandbeests - wind-powered kinetic sculptures that "walk" on their own.
If you don't remember Jansen, here he is with his eerie, lifelike beests, which he calls "new forms of life:"
Of course you want one, right? Well, now you can get one! A small 3D printed version, at least, without all the wings and propellers. Here's a video of a little strandbeest running around on a string. Give it five seconds, and you won't believe this little guy isn't actually alive:
Squee! (Yes, I'…
bioephemera | April 8, 2011While we're on the bioanimation topic, I recently heard from Jess at Nervous System, who sent me links to some animations of their new jewelry line, hyphae, "growing" in virtual space. Check it out:
Hyphae - growth of the Vessel Pendant from Nervous System on Vimeo.
They explain,
Hyphae is a collection of 3D printed artifacts constructed of rhizome-like networks. Inspired by the vein structures that carry fluids through organisms from the leaves of plants to our own circulatory systems, we created a simulation which uses physical growth principles to build sculptural, organic structures.…
bioephemera | March 26, 2011I can think of a few answers, but the Name Inspector points out that naming food is one: apparently the Corn Refiners Association is trying to rename "high fructose corn syrup" "corn sugar."
it's gotten an especially bad rap lately, partly because it has a name so long and scientific sounding that it has to be abbreviated.
First off, I don't think "high fructose corn syrup" is all that "scientific sounding"; try "monosodium glutamate" on for size and get back to me. It's also not that long: six syllables, people! But the interesting issue is that the aura of high-tech innovation and space-…
bioephemera | March 18, 2011Louis Vuitton, the high-end accessory company, is suing a Dutch artist, Nadia Plesner, for painting a likeness of one of their handbags in a work of art publicizing the conflict in Darfur. According to the artist's attorneys, the painting, "Darfurnica,"
is modeled after Picasso's Guernica and expresses the artist's surprise at the attention that is paid to nondescript celebrities like Paris Hilton, while humanitarian disasters like those in Darfur remain rather unnoticed. In the middle of the painting an African child is depicted, holding a bag. (source)
The artwork also includes portraits of…
bioephemera | February 13, 2011We've been buried under ice, snow, and slush up here in Massachusetts for months, and the chlorophyll deprivation is brutal. The other day I was chatting with someone, and he suddenly tuned out of our conversation, gazing into the distance wistfully. "Oh, sorry," he said, "I just noticed I can see some grass over there."
If only I'd known months ago about Colleen Jordan. Her tiny plant necklaces are little green reliquaries of summer, so you can always look down and see leaves - even in February in Boston.
Sadly, the necklaces (which are 3D-printed polymer and start at $55) don't come with…
bioephemera | February 7, 2011I think the Haptica, by David Chavez, is pretty awesome:
I've seen some criticisms that this watch is misguided, because you can already get affordable watches that speaks the time aloud. As far as I'm concerned, those criticisms miss the point (as does the Kickstarter video, somewhat, with its emphasis on the potential embarrassment factor of audible watches). This project acknowledges that to a blind person, reading Braille is not only less embarrassing, it's also faster, easier, and (for some) more dignified than being read to. It assumes the blind, like the sighted, deserve access to…
bioephemera | January 30, 2011Is it advanced physics? biotech? fashion? Heck if I know.
"The Theory of Everything Disguised as a Handbag," from RandomIntent's etsy shop.
bioephemera | January 25, 2011
I think DNA is amazing. I think biotech inspires great design. And if you've read this blog at all, you know I love sciart. But I just cannot understand the new infogenetics product from DNA 11 - the company behind that trendy gel electrophoresis wall art. While I'd normally just say "I don't get it" and move on, DNA 11 claims that their "augmented art" is "the ultimate intersection of biology, art and technology." I don't know how that could get more squarely in the BioE wheelhouse. So let's take a closer look at how, exactly, biology and art intersect in the "Ancestry Portrait" (pictured…
bioephemera | January 17, 2011
TurningArt is a startup that lets you make a queue of prints by various independent artists, try the prints out in your home or office, and exchange them as often as you like. After you've lived with the print long enough, you can trade it in for the original canvas, watercolor or collage; you just pay the balance of the original's cost (and your subscription fees count as credit toward the purchase price).
Check out how it works, below the fold. . .
Easy, right? (As an artist, my anxieties are greatly allayed by the fact that they're shipping prints around in those tubes, not the…
bioephemera | January 16, 2011
Caption for non-PhDs: aren't these sciencepunk brain ice cubes awesome? BRAIN FREEZE!
Caption for PhDs: Still hoping against hope to celebrate your thesis defense in style? Try cocktails with roughly anatomically accurate cortical ice cubes. [Look at it this way: even after six years of beating your bruised cerebrum against intransigent experiments and unsympathetic advisors, you can still out-think and out-publish a chunk of solidified H2O! Take comfort in that, have a stiff drink, be liberal with the bitters - and good luck with those postdoc applications.]
P.S.: They're on sale here, or…
bioephemera | January 13, 2011Isis the Laboratory Goddess sent me a Buzzfeed link featuring this incredible anatomical gown:
The artist/seamstress deserves credit for what appears to be an incredibly elaborate embroidered stiff satin gown that, on different panels, depicts circulatory, skeletal, muscular and pulmonary systems. Wow. I can't figure out who made it, so if you know the original source, please email me the link so I can update the post with the creator's information Mystery solved! The photo is by miyake juin, from a Fashion Week event at Shih Chien University. The gown's designer is Chinese; I direct you to…
bioephemera | January 3, 2011
Classes start today for some of us. Are you ready for spring semester? Remember high school, when a spanking new, funky bookbag could recharge your entire dreary January outlook? CraftieRobot has a collection of functional canvas bookbags emblazoned with vintage anatomical art, like the ones above and below. These are fun and surprisingly affordable - I might get one for myself!