ephemera

Origami is as ephemeral as art gets - delicate paper, with no more than creases and physics to maintain its shape. It's also the ideal art form for blurring the boundary between art and science, because it's all about geometry. You could argue that the origami medium is math, just as much as it's paper. That's why Between the Folds, a documentary film by Vanessa Gould about origami-happy artists, mathematicians and scientists "working in the shadows between art and math," is such a success: the connections between math, science, art and paper aren't strained at all, so you can sit back and…
The smallest orchid in the world (above) - only 2 mm across! (Thanks for the heads-up, Laura!) Cassette-tape skeletons at Designboom. Via Wired Science: Mini microbe portraits from the Micropolitan Museum Dude - there are spiny, venomous catfish? Who knew? Finally, an interview I did recently with Ava at Paw-Talk.
An intriguing new exhibition featuring work by herbert pfostl at the Observatory (next to Proteus Gowanus gallery in NYC): Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration-breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly - and the odd. Collected grand…
The best Lady Gaga parody yet? Judge for yourself: I lay it out like they do in magazines check out this typeface it's like smoking nicotine (I love it) using Adobe's not the same without a Mac if it was lead it would be lined up on a track Oh yeah! Via Jennifer Ouellette.
Thylacine Dingo ComparisonCarl Buell In Slate, Matt Gaffney explains how the constraints of a given system - in this case crossword puzzles - may lead to suspiciously similar yet independent solutions. Gaffney wrote a Poe-themed crossword with the elements BRAVE NEW WORLD, INTRAVENOUS DRIP, CONTRAVENE, COBRA VENOM, and VENTNOR AVENUE (all of which have "raven" embedded in them). He was very proud of his puzzle, but. . . I soon learned that I wasn't as clever as I thought. Over the next couple of days, I started getting e-mails from solvers telling me that my theme had been done before. In…
fog 10Steven Hight In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers - the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember. The November Harper's has a meandering, tragic paean to the lost city newspaper by Richard Rodriguez (quoted above). Unfortunately the full article is subscriber-only, but Marcus Banks links to two articles on the possible future of the…
There's a new humor presence on Twitter and Facebook: rejectedcards. The author says, "I'm a copywriter for a major greeting card company. I get bored and create cards I know we'll never print. These are those cards." Cards like. . . "Another Year, Same Birthday Question: (inside) Are you sure you don't want us to pull the plug?" or "So sorry you lost your job. Are there other professions that use poles?" I wish this writer would collaborate with the snarky letterpress outlet Blue Barnhouse. I'd totally buy their products. But FYI: some of them are pretty offensive, so don't say I didn't…
Pop quiz: this Google Trends chart represents searches for what word or phrase? the answer? a word that the vast majority of people never use - except on Thanksgiving. Go chemistry! :)
Talk about ephemera - Willy Chyr makes bioart out of balloons! Check out his installation Balluminescence: Balluminescence - Lights, Balloons, Jellyfish! was commissioned by Science Chicago and was created for the program's finale signature event - LabFest! Millennium Park. An interactive installation, Balluminescence engaged participants in the process of creating art inspired by science. A team of balloon artists taught LabFest! attendants how to create simple balloon shapes, which were then added to one of three balloon jellyfish costumes. Through the activity, participants learned about…
Macro Detail from a print from Press NY.via Blue Barnhouse Unfortunately the Press NY website appears to be defunct, but this image should be in the new letterpress book being compiled over at Blue Barnhouse. Check out their blog for more info on the book!
Townephemera? The hamlet of Argleton, UK apparently exists only on Google Maps. The Telegraph reports that Roy Bayfield actually went there to check: "A colleague of mine spotted the anomaly on Google Maps, and I thought 'I've got to go there'," he said."I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place, an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence." When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton - which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park - he…
In case you didn't see it, the latest xkcd is a visual shout-out to data visualization guru Edward Tufte's favorite map, this 1861 depiction of Napoleon's march on Moscow, by Charles Joseph Minard. Yay! Movie Narrative Charts Charles Minard's 1869 chart showing the losses in men, their movements, and the temperature of Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo. Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award: In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie. I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year: Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data…
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art: Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days Goodbye Poems Of Ophelia' were created in a laboratory at Surrey University UK with the help of microbiologist Dr. Simon Park. When displayed in 2010, this will be an outdoor video installation of Ophelia with poems submitted from the public. Composer Milton Mermikides will be producing a sound track…
One of the coolest, weirdest, worlds-colliding Day of the Dead artworks I've ever seen is this sculpture of a skeletal Teddy Kennedy. He's at a podium, open-jawed (no doubt haranguing other late Senators), accompanied by a skeletal dog. The paper in his hand says "Health Care: The Cause of My Life." I realize this is a terrible photo, but in person, I actually found it pretty moving. From the window of Nomad on Mass Ave in Cambridge, MA - they have an extensive Dia de los Muertos folk art collection. Happy Halloween!
From the wonderful blog Letters of Note: in 1957, schoolboy Denis Cox generously shared his rocket blueprints with "A Top Scientist" at Australia's Woomera Weapons Research Establishment. The important stuff (Rolls Royce jet engines, "Air Torpeados") is all there, although Denis explicitly gave the Top Scientists his permission to "put in other details" themselves, no doubt due to the lack of space for more detailed blueprints on his lined notebook paper ("I have discovered a truly marvelous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain. . . ") Denis says modestly, "I thought it would…
Heartbreaking photos of albatross chicks, by photographer Chris Jordan: These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible,…
"Mechanical heart" Bill McConkey Collage of a digitally enhanced pencil drawing of the human heart and photographs of different brass instruments. Digital artwork. From the Wellcome Image Awards 2009 - see the other winners here. Last week was Open Access Week, which meant I got to hear a great talk from John Wilbanks of the Science Commons (you should subscribe to their blog!) I've been thinking a lot this week about the legal challenges of data sharing, which is giving me a headache. But there's an easier way to celebrate Open Access Week: by visiting the Guardian's a multimedia show about…
From Inhabitat: Artist Brandon Jon Blommaert's recycled trash robots (yes, they're real sculptures) lay waste to Photoshopped landscapes. Check out his flickr page for more - and a "making of" series of photos showing how he built these steampunky robot overlords, who are destined for a Canadian recycling center. Their message is clear: RECYCLE, HUMANITY, OR BE EXTERMINATED! Thanks to reader Todd F. for the heads-up!
Kantor Set Kevin Van Aelst Several readers have suggested I blog about photographer Kevin Van Aelst in the past weeks. If you've missed out on his work, Kevin is the sort of artist who can portray cellular mitosis in the legendarily difficult medium of Krispy Kreme, or chromosomes in gummi worm, fingerprints in non-dairy creamer, or the Kantor Set in egg yolk. His work is clever, funny, and meticulous to a fault. Circulatory System (Heart On Your Sleeve), 2009 Kevin Van Aelst Here's what the artist has to say: While the depictions of information--such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or…