Artists & Art
bioephemera | February 11, 2010Year of the Tiger, 2010
Chris Jordan
Depicts 3200 toy tigers, equal to the estimated number of tigers remaining on Earth. The space in the middle would hold 40,000 of these tigers, equal to the global tiger population in 1970.
SEED has put together a slideshow of works by Chris Jordan, an artist I mentioned in last week's review of Visual Language (he did the Barbie doll breast image), and also in an October post on his photos of the tragic birds of Midway.
"I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger…
bioephemera | February 6, 2010
Those of you who like to play with color may be interested in the newColoRotate interface, designed to make editing color palettes more intuitive. This tool was produced by the same team that made the useful educational website Causes of Color, which I've blogged about before. It explains the differences between iridescence, interference, luminescence, etc. in simple language easy for nonscientists to understand.
There's a quick demo video of the ColoRotate Photoshop plugin below the fold.
bioephemera | February 4, 2010Seaweed Picture No. 31
Alyson Denny
Photographer Alyson Denny's closeups of seaweed and jellyfish couldn't be less like your usual natural science documentation. Often, very little of her subject is in focus; she's more concerned with how the forms and colors blur and overlap as the field recedes. From a distance, her photographs are dazzling abstractions; the jellyfish photos are reminiscent of jewel-encrusted sets for high-end, artsy diamond ads. But when you realize what the subjects are, you also realize that her photos are just what you'd see if, like a child, you were lying on the beach…
bioephemera | February 3, 2010
Modeling the flight of a bat (click to enlarge)
Dave Willis et. al., Brown University and MIT
Visual complexity is a paradox. On the one hand, complexity is a compelling feature known to capture a viewer's attention and stimulate interest. . . . On the other hand, complexity only arouses curiosity up to a point. When a visual is extremely complex, viewers may tend to avoid it altogether. -- Connie Malamed
I had a great time this weekend devouring Connie Malamed's oversized treasury of data visualization, Visual Language for Designers. The book couldn't be more appealing: it's like someone…
bioephemera | February 2, 2010Why time goes slower when we get olderRhonald Blommestijn
for Douwe Draaisma interview, Audi Magazine
Dutch graphic designer Rhonald Blommestijn's illustrations play with medical and technical themes in unexpected ways. Check out his blog, and his series of concept illustrations for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
The Effect of Playstation on the Human Body
Rhonald Blommestijn
For Playstation Belgium
Rhonald Blommestijn
For the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
bioephemera | February 1, 2010Matthew Albanese makes miniature dioramas out of everyday materials and photographs them, producing Uncanny Valley landscapes that seem almost, but not quite, real. His Paprika Mars, above, is made of 12 pounds of charcoal and spices (paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder). Fields, After the Storm, below, is mostly faux fur and cotton.
Albanese's scenes are convincing precisely because they're so paradigmatic - the standard desolate planetary surface, Western grassland, etc. His work exploits our cognitive tendencies to interpret stimuli against the backdrop of our experience, especially…
bioephemera | January 28, 2010
Via my friend Sylvia, here's an old (2008) but interesting post arguing that over time, the quality of medical illustrations have declined. From Artemy Lebedev.
bioephemera | January 25, 2010
Yoda Borguereau
Mandrak
An old link, but still a good one - the "Star Wars in classic art" digital fx (advanced) contest from Worth1000.com. And the sequel contest (not as good). And the third contest. (Let's hope they're more prudent than George Lucas, and stop at three!)
bioephemera | January 24, 2010"There is no rest, really, there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing."
poet Derek Walcott, 1982
excerpted in Harper's Magazine, February 2010
bioephemera | January 23, 2010Peacock Backpiece
Paul RoeBritish Ink DC
From the files: one unfortunate consequence of trying to cover all of last year's Artomatic event in a single visit was that I didn't get to explore British Ink's faux-Victorian tattoo parlor. I don't do tats myself, but how awesome is this?
PS. This was not intended to coincide with Conan's last day on the Peacock network, but since it did: I'm with Coco.
bioephemera | January 19, 2010Madonna and Child with Angels, AKA "Madonna with the Long Neck"
Parmigianino, c. 1534/40
From Edward Winkleman's blog, a good post about yet another art historian with convenient medical explanations for the artistic idiosyncrasies of the old masters. In addition to arguing that the Mona Lisa had high cholesterol, the historian has an even more timely link to current events:
Among his other findings are that two of the most iconic figures in Renaissance art had a rare condition that may also afflict Osama Bin Laden. One is the young man with a red cap and distinctly sardonic expression who…
bioephemera | January 16, 2010
Back in October, there was an interesting article by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker about Chinese painters who make a living painting western scenes (Venice is popular) that they neither recognize nor are particularly interested in. Unfortunately the article is subscription-only, but if you have access it's worth a read. If not, you can check out a brief audio slideshow here.
The article raises some discomfiting questions about how America is perceived by the outside world, and how concepts we view as central to our culture are utterly meaningless when seen from outside. First, our small-…
bioephemera | January 15, 2010
"A Love Aquatic"
letterpress notecards and posters by Sarah Adler on etsy.
bioephemera | January 12, 2010Attention all art/science web-collaborative types! Dave Ng has just formally announced the Phylomon Project. Here's the hook: a paper published in 2000 determined that an 8 year old could identify and characterize 120 different Pokemon characters, but when it comes to animals in their own backyard, kids have no clue.
There's nothing wrong with kids having rich fantasy worlds - far from it. But why not give them the chance to discover that real biology is also incredibly cool - not to mention complex, beautiful, and for many kids, right outside their back door? Maybe I'm showing my age, but…
bioephemera | January 11, 2010
A Cruel and Beautiful Far Away Place
Christopher Reiger
Vision Quest, "A Group Show of Neo-Shamanic Art," is opening at the Observatory in NYC this Saturday, January 16, at 7pm:
While the role of the shaman has traditionally been fulfilled by experienced elders in indigenous groups spanning culture and time, VISION QUEST posits that our artists fit the bill as well. Today, with more of us living in an urban jungle rather than a real one, it has become all the more important to figure out ways to internalize the lessons of nature: its growth, its brilliant bloom, its death. And in an age of…
bioephemera | January 10, 2010
The Endangered Species Print Project has a clever approach to conservation: a series of limited-edition prints depicting endangered species, with the number of prints correlating with the number of individuals left in the wild. For this sunlight-saturated Panamanian Golden Frog by Jenny Kendler, that's a wild population/print run of only 100. All the proceeds from print sales go to Project Golden Frog. (For other species, proceeds go to a conservation group helping that particular species).
Artists Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer created the project, and maintain a detailed blog on…
bioephemera | January 9, 2010
Wonderful! Artist Chris Berens has a new show in NYC at the Sloan Gallery. Visit their website for much eerie eye candy. The show runs through Jan. 23.
bioephemera | January 5, 2010Call to artists: ALCHEMY: Art and Science
Call to Artists at the Schiltkamp Gallery, Traina Center for the Arts, Clark University. This show will explore the intersections of art and science; art that is inspired by science or scientific images/models that are transcendent. The concept of "science" is open and may include new technology as well as the traditional sciences.
Application Instructions: 10-20 images in slides or as jpegs on a CD (no power point or slide shows). List of art work or other materials submitted, including titles, date, media, dimensions. C.V. or bio and a brief (one…
bioephemera | January 5, 2010
Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator at a U.S. Air Force base in Southwest Asia, builds robots and vehicles from the base's trashed hard drives:
"The overall concept was to make something out of just hard drive parts and pieces," says Rivera. "I wanted it to look solid and heavy so I leaned towards just using metal -- no plastic or gluing things together."
Via Wired. Thanks to John O for the heads up.
bioephemera | January 4, 2010
Beggar
Joao Ruas
Starting January 8, Thinkspace in Los Angeles is hosting a group exhibition to benefit wildlife conservation efforts:
Though we live in the city, animals exist all around us - they sleep in our beds, creep past our windows at night and visit us in our dreams. Symbolizing all that is free, unspoiled and elemental in the world, they also comfort us with guileless affection, amuse us with their playful abandon, and represent us metaphorically in a million works of art and literature. In every niche of the new contemporary scene, artists have employed animals to envisage…