"Objects of Beauty"
Why do we often consider "ugliness" (and decay) to be beautiful? Is it romantic, profound, avant-garde, elitist, morally problematic?
-Aric Chen
The image accompanied The British Metrological Record for September, Bermuda, by Lieut. Colonel Alexander, Royal Engineer
I see beauty in its simplicity and clarity, but especially in its use of very entirely different visual attributes to help distinguish and bring character to the different categories of information displayed; *much* more engaging than color-coding.
-Bradford Paley
This map was created by compiling the GPS data of five geologists that walked around the site of a meteor crater in Lonar, India during 3 weeks of field research. The beauty of this map lies in its confluence of traces - the coordinates of the duration of mapping and the figure that emerges from this documentation.
-Bradley Samuels
ElectraRatFink: Is a bicycle I have designed to GET STOLEN. It is ostentatious in appearance, with enormous wheels and motorcycle handlebars, brightly painted pink with green accents. But the best part is that it is bait for the fellows on Fire Island that keep stealing my bikes. Inside ElectraRatFink is a GPS homing device that sends messages to my cellphone and to a web based application when the bicycle is moved outside a predetermined radius. I have a high-def nightvision camera and other technology to be used in the pursuit of the miscreant. Not just a pretty bike: a performance piece celebrating justice, revenge, surprise, and technological obsession in pursuit of a solution to a deeply trivial problem.
-Dan Dubno
Cube blast eyal: This is a simulation of an explosion (not of a cube but a metallic sphere) done by an amazing conceptual and technology artist Eyal Gever... who designs these animations then FABRICATES them (using 3d printer technology) based upon his algorithms.
-Dan Dubno
Banana Gunshot: This is an example of the work of Dr. Gary Settles, who runs the gas dynamics laboratory at Penn State University, using Schlieren and Shadowgraph Techniques.
-Dan Dubno
Beetle Jet: This is a tour de force (tour de thrust, actually) of a crazy engineer Ron Patrick, who added a jet engine to his Volkswagon Beetle to make it more zippy. Street legal... and nuts.
-Dan Dubno
This is not because it is aesthetically pleasing (though you might consider it to be), but because it tells us that climate is in some sense predictable, that the factors that regulate it are biological, oceanic and atmospheric, and that, to a significant (but not complete) extent, we understand much of what is going on.
PS. the figure shows a composite set of records from two deep ice cores in Antarctica that show the isotopic composition of the ice (related to temperature) and the amount of methane and carbon dioxide (greenhouse gases) in tiny bubbles trapped within the ice itself. It goes back 650,000 years before present (time going right to left).The oscillations are tied very closely to known wobbles in the Earths' orbit.
-Gavin Schmidt
Andy Goldsworthy British, 1956-
Storm King Wall, 1997-98
Field stone
Approximately 5' x 2,278' overall
I find Goldsworthy's site specific Storm King Wall beautiful, since it takes a robust assembly of material (fieldstone) and directs it into the framework of temporality in a very clear way. In the process, the wall also creates an intimate and engaging dance with the surrounding trees.
Created over a two-year period, the 2,278-foot-long site-specific sculpture was made using stones gathered from the Art Center property. The first part of the wall weaves in and out of trees, following and extending the path of an old stone wall that had existed previously on the site, meandering downhill to a nearby pond. The wall's second section emerges out from the other
side of the pond, continuing its westward "walk" uphill. According to historical maps, another wall originally existed in this vicinity, but its remnants are gone.
-Gregory Weithman
Chalkboard Equations / Grand Street 37 / Curated by Walter Hopps
Photograph of Michell Feigenbaum on the right, mathematical physicist. c. 1984 formulas for iterative processes, used in dynamic systems & chaos theory. Photograph by Diego Goldberg / Sygma
A discussion (a nod to the science & imaging conference produced by felice, starring
susan sontag): why has the mathetician / scientist at the blackboard now entered the popular
imagination to such an extent (I will list all the ads for you). but the documentary
aspect & the passion, I love, even though it's old school.
-Jane Nisselson
Above is my favorite riff from a book by simon patterson called rex reason / solid gaseous liquid / synthetic from 1994.
The snapshot externalizes the process of thought of the scientist which is beautiful to me. To quote ben fry's thesis quoting overbye quoting brian greene in the ny times.
"the idea of externalizing ideas too difficult to understand is carried out in many disciplines... As an example, this passage in the New York Times'... So in some ways the men and women seen here scrutinizing makrs on their blackboards collectively represent a kind of particle accelerator of the mind. Overbye, 2003'
-Jane Nisselson
The periodic table is a scientific visual that has crossed over into popular culture. Unlike feynman diagrams, It has successful represented a snapshot of a scientific tool for classification (and more!)
-Jane Nisselson
This is a dynamically created montage from the "We Feel Fine" project, combining a photo and sentence found in the same blog post
It was automatically composed by a computer program using found data, yet it's very human
-Jonathan Harris
It's a beer can on an internal flight in Argentina.
As a photographer everything that I see can be considered to be
within my field of work, I find this beautiful because of the shadows
and sunlight and the random placement of man made objects.
-Julian Dufort
I find the symmetry of the device beautiful, as well as the physics it demonstrated.
-Keith Schwab
Artist: Mark Kessell
Title: "Continuing To Act"
Series: "Perfect Specimens"
Date: 2002
Medium: Pigment print made from original daguerreotype
Dimensions: 50" x 40"
Edition: 5
This image shows partially dissescted arms used to teach medical students about the structure and function of the human hand.
The immensely complex and beautiful architecture of the human hand is often cited among the evolutionary forces driving development of the human brain. The functional perfection of the hand is a consequence of the evolutionary interplay between the developing hand and brain - each stimulating the other to greater sophistication. This is a feedback loop breathtaking efficiency and simplicity. What could be more beautiful?
-Mark Kessell
You've already seen my candidate for a thing of beauty from my "field of action": the earliest model of a piston-valve cornet; Paris ca. 1830. A circular horn successfully fitted with two functional valves (made possible by metallurgical advances) for playing chromatic music--itself a beautiful thing. I consider the horn beautiful because the designer managed to modify the ancestral, valveless original circle in a novel, pleasingly symmetrical, way. I could as well have sent a picture of a beautiful snail, ammonite or trilobite. But the real inner beauty of all these objects from my domain is that information systems evolve--whether designed by Nature or by humans. Beneath the beauty of the objects lie the beautiful secrets of the evolutionary process. To me, it is the ideas that are the most beautiful of all.
-Niles Eldredge
Depicting an architectural project of absurd simplicity, this drawing by Sigurd Lewerentz from approximately 1930 achieves a beauty that seems almost unintentional, and in its rendition, relies on a notational language that encourages imaginative engagement.
-Pablo Castro, OBRA
A weak full view and good detail of Petra Blaisse's curtain for the Hackney Empire Theatre in London, chosen for its remarkable use of smocking as a way to resolve a mandate for a 'red velvet' theater curtain. The presence of beauty is both feminine form and masculine in its monumental scale. The conflation of the two is a true achievement, typical of most of Petra's work.
-Susan Yelavich
The second image is a detail of Sint Lucas -- an art school in the Netherlands by the London architectural firm F.A.T. The ambiguity as to whether it's Dutch lace writ large or English Gothic on steroids is part of its beauty.
In both cases, I would say that Gianni Vattimo's thinking colors my own here, when he writes in his book Transparent Society that "Beauty is ornament, in the sense that its essential significance, the interest to which it responds is the extension of life's world through a process of referrals to other possible life worlds."
-Susan Yelavich
Few things are as beautiful as infrastructure, such as this image of the tracks under Penn Station.? Not only is such infrastructure our last best hope in the fight against climate change ? it is a testament to what we achieve when we achieve together, which ultimately is the history of the city.
-Vishaan Chakrabati
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