Artists & Art
bioephemera | December 16, 2008FYI, to those in the DC area, tomorrow Dr. Bulent Atalay will be giving the monthly history of medicine talk at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda.
"Leonardo and the Unity of Art and Science"
Dr. Bulent Atalay, University of Mary Washington
The speaker examines science through art, and art through science, and approaches the larger goal of achieving a synthesis of the two fields. The qualities of timelessness and universality in Leonardo's miraculous works speak eloquently for themselves. With Leonardo's model providing the unifying thread, however, it becomes possible, first, to…
bioephemera | December 14, 2008"Remains Benches"Elyse Marks
@Behance Network
The inlay design on these wood benches depicts skeletal animals crawling among bare trees - with, according to the artist, "a noose thrown in for good measure." It's kind of a memento mori thing, I guess. What an unusual Christmas gift these would be!
Via designmilk; thanks to kattyface for the tip
bioephemera | December 10, 2008
"Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons? That is the challenge I decided to put my application up to. . ."
Art lovers & coders, get thee to Roger Alsing's weblog to see how he "evolved" an approximation of Leonardo da Vinci's iconic painting using a polygon rendering program. Very cool stuff.
bioephemera | December 9, 2008Colonial Intelligence 3/4 (detail)
Eshel Ben-Jacob
One of the things I love about SEED Magazine is its incredible design (and no, they are not paying me to say this - in fact, my respect for SEED was one of the reasons I moved to Scienceblogs last February!)
SEED's editors have collected the "portfolios" of beautiful science from each issue on the website, so you can browse them at your leisure. Be sure to check out Eshel Ben-Jacob's swirling bacterial colonies and Robert Hodgin's renderings of the Mandelbrot set:
Fractals Revisited 1/4
Robert Hodgin
You enter to win an image from one of six…
bioephemera | December 7, 2008UK Reef (detail) - with candy striped anemone by Ildiko Szabo (foreground) and anemone grove by Beverly Griffiths (background). Photo by George Walker.source
This afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, physicist Margaret Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring will be giving a lecture and workshop on crocheting coral reefs with the "hyperbolic crochet" technique. While her creations can't replace the real reefs that are rapidly disappearing, they are purdy, and some of the forms are remarkably similar to real species of coral, diatoms, and anemones.
More about the crochet…
bioephemera | December 4, 2008Body Swallows World
Aurel Schmidt
Aurel Schmidt's ethereal drawings depict green-man like figures whose visages dissolve at a closer glance into writhing snakes, larvae, and beetles, disturbed landscapes, and birds. Haunting work.
Via IBL3D
Untitled
Aurel Schmidt
bioephemera | November 21, 2008
TarantulaElizabeth Goluch
sterling silver, gold, tourmaline
Canadian artist Elizabeth Goluch's precious metal insects double as treasure-boxes. From her website:
My fascination with nature in general and with insects in particular began while I was a child growing up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. The work that I do reflects the influence of that environment -- the wildlife and the insects, as well the intricacy, the complexity and the order inherent in nature. I am drawn to the beauty, but also to the danger in nature. I relish the visible, yet can imagine much more; which gives rise…
bioephemera | November 20, 2008
From Wired comes this rather odd interview with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, who advocates turning the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain into a universe nursery.
Keats has already built a $20 "do-it-yourself universe creation kit" (pictured above). The Yucca Mountain project would simply scale it up. What exactly this would look like is a little unclear, since by Keats' own account the mini-univernursery is not terribly exciting to watch:
From the standpoint of being in the universe, making a new universe is very mundane. If you could stand outside it and see the universes cleave, I…
bioephemera | November 20, 2008Chesterfields ad, 1952
Today, November 20, is the American Cancer Society's 33rd Great American Smokeout. Now, be honest: did you even know?
The Smokeout doesn't seem to get as much attention as it used to, perhaps because the link between cigarette smoke and cancer is no longer surprising or controversial. After decades of anti-tobacco campaigns hammering the research home, no media-conscious American could plausibly believe that cigarettes are actually good for his or her health. Yet this is a sea change from attitudes in the first half of the 20th century, when cigarettes' health benefits…
bioephemera | November 16, 2008
Next week, PBA galleries in San Francisco will be auctioning rare books, prints, and ephemera from the medical library of Gerald I. Sugarman, MD. Joanna at Morbid Anatomy has distilled some of the best medical illustrations from this collection into two posts here and here. Thanks, Joanna!
This is wonderful stuff. I think Dr. Sugarman must have been an interesting character. . . the kind of guy I wish lived down the hall from me so I could borrow his books.
From "A System of Anatomy" by Samuel Collins, 1685
From "Anatomia Corporum Humanorum" by Joannem Arnoldum Langerak, 1739
bioephemera | November 12, 2008It Looks Like a Landscape
Liu Wei, 2004 digital B/W photography
Liu Wei's "landscape" is an homage to traditional black and white Chinese brush paintings - created by digitally collaging photos of nude bodies. It's a surprisingly beautiful scene composed of parts we usually consider unbeautiful, including buttocks, knees, and body hair.
Unless you're familiar with Chinese brush painting, you may not think these look much like mountains at all. But the rounded, doubled forms of thighs and buttocks are very similar to the mountain shapes depicted in Song dynasty paintings, like this one, by…
bioephemera | November 12, 2008
Dutch artisan Gewoon Guus is selflessly striving to meet consumer demand for. . . radiators shaped like sport animals.
They even have pelts. Why? Why?
Via designvagabond.
bioephemera | November 5, 2008
"Each face is made of approximately 150 million tiny carbon nanotubes; that's about how many Americans voted on November 4."
Carbon nanotube/silicon sculptures by MIT mechanical engineer Anastasios John Hart. More at nanobama and nanobliss.
In late 2005, Hart started experimenting with sculpting carbon nanotubes, one-atom-thick sheets of graphite (called graphene) rolled up into a seamless cylinder with a diameter of 1 nanometer. Because carbon nanotubes grow on a silicon substrate, he says, he began to sculpt them by altering the shape or thickness of the substrate. Hart also has learned…
bioephemera | November 2, 2008
This is for all those people who wonder why I rave endlessly about Portland, Oregon.
From ahp_ibanez' flickr stream via signal vs. noise (they have some good stuff over there!).
Note: Yes, you purists, I am aware the Pound reference is Chinese. ;)
bioephemera | November 2, 2008Very cool:
These rock sculptures are pure ephemera, lasting only hours or days before the surf knocks them down. But sculptor Kent Avery doesn't see it as futile - even when the nascent sculptures fall on him, or onlookers object to their "unnatural" state.
Via signal vs. noise.
bioephemera | October 30, 2008stag beetle
Albrecht Durersource
... But life in nature manifests the truth of these things.... Therefore observe it diligently, go by it and do not depart from nature arbitrarily, imagining to find the better by thyself, for thou wouldst be misled. For, verily, "art" is embedded in nature; he who can extract it has it. -- Albrecht Durer
Thanks to your generosity, yet another of my DonorsChoose projects has been funded! Woot! And several very generous donors who have given in the three digits, with the leader at $300. That means to have a shot at the original watercolor, you'd have to give…
bioephemera | October 29, 2008
De prospectiva pingendi, Book 3, figure lxivPiero della Francesca (c 1412-92)
This month's Lancet has an interesting article by G.D. Schott, linking Piero della Francesca's pioneering orthographic projections to technologies like fMRI:
In the neurosciences today, images of the brain and its constituent structures are typically presented in the triadic orthogonal format, comprising coronal, sagittal, and axial projections. Less commonly, rotated or tilted projections are used. But our forebears are easily forgotten, and here I suggest that the contemporary way in which brain images are…
bioephemera | October 27, 2008Amazingly, it's already the last week of the DonorsChoose fundraising drive! SEED has generously kicked in matching funds for each blogger, which enabled me to contribute to several more projects - but we only have a total of $1,026 so far. That's much less than Chad is getting for promising to dance like a monkey.
Honestly, I'd dance like a monkey too, but none of you wants to see that, I promise you. I have no rhythm whatsoever.
So here it is, readers: I'm going to do something to persuade you to donate, too. I'm going to give away a painting. A new, original, watercolor painting that I am…
bioephemera | October 27, 2008
Tentacles with Synthetic FlowersLiz Wolfe, 2004
Liz Wolfe mixes sugar, spice, and everything nice with snakes, snails, and lots of raw meat. Her gallery is like a garden party from twisted suburbia, where cupcakes are topped with screws, cakes bleed, and floors are paved with ham. You may never eat candy again.
Thanks to Rhett for this one!
bioephemera | October 23, 2008
Artist Julian Voss-Andrae created this metal sculpture, Angel of the West, which evokes da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The molecule is probably instantly recognizable to many of you as an antibody:
The sculpture plays on the striking similarity of both proportion and function of the antibody molecule and the human body. A representation of the antibody molecule, in a style developed by the artist, is surrounded by a ring evocative of Leonardo's Renaissance icon Vitruvian Man (1490). Where man's arms reach up to touch the circle with his hands, the molecule's flexible 'arms' ending in highly…