12 posts tagged “science & art”
You know, I have a particular soft spot in my heart for Nepenthes pitcher plants.
Now, to be perfectly clear, I think Diment and Prall are both amazing artists, and I find their portfolios both inspiring and intimidating. It's just that I think my friend was missing the point when she said that these other artists were better than Harper. It's cool if she prefers more realistic paintings, but that doesn't make the work she likes better than the work she doesn't like.
When I was in grade school, the "How to Draw" series of books was really popular. In theory, you would start by sketching a bunch of boxes and ovals, add details and end up with a perfectly realistic cat or racecar or horse or dinosaur. In practice, most of us ended up with a beautifully-detailed horse that looked like a sway-backed dachshund.
Just because something looks simple doesn't mean it's trivial or easy to do.
Earlier in the month, my husband and I received a flier for the Cape May Bird Observatory's Spring Weekend, and a poster went up in the ornithology department at work. That was how I connected Charley Harper's name to the wildlife art I had been inspired by for a long time. Seriously, look at this!
There are some prints of his available at theframeworkshop.com, along with a coffee table book. The water strider lithograph just blew me away. I spent a good bit of my childhood trying to catch these bugs - they're speedy little things - and I'm impressed not only by Harper's design sense, but also by his choice of detail. He really looks at the animals he paints.
There is a great selection of his prints from the 1950's at the Treadway Gallery. I think I know what my husband is getting for a present, once he defends his thesis!
Harper's bird art is featured on the packaging of Coffee for the Birds, which sells fair trade, shade grown varietals and blends. That's a great thing to support, in case you were wondering - good for birds and people, too. We used to have a bag of their Guatemalan blend in the office - it is a step up from Starbucks and a world away from the big blue tub of Folgers.
Mike Libby's work at InsectLab is really incredible. He combines the carapaces of dead insects and arachnids with antique watch parts, capacitors and LEDs. Seriously, these are beautiful.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
"In claiming these tools for teaching trigonometric functions as artworks, Sugimoto follows in the footsteps of artist Marcel Duchamp...who removed everyday objects from their functional context and used them in his work, inviting questions about the definitions, boundaries, and processes of art."
-Hirshhorn Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 2006
I love Sugimoto's aesthetic - both in his own work and in his personal collections of art, antiquities and fossil specimens - but this sort of thing makes me tired.
Seriously, can anyone really believe that these models were devoid of "artistic intentions" before Mr. Sugimoto turned his lens upon them? Also, in what world are these "everyday objects?" They were specifically designed to engage the student's attention with their strikingly elegant forms.
A minimal surface is one whose area becomes greater whenever it is
distorted. At any given point, a minimal surface either is flat or has a
saddle shape, and the mean curvature of such a surface is zero. When fabricated, minimal surfaces are quite strong; thus, these objects have many potential applications in design.
The form pictured to the right was expressed in 1864 by Alfred Enneper, a
mathematician at the University of Göttingen. This highly
symmetric surface that bears Enneper's name is defined by a simple equation, and its shape is complex and lovely. It is essentially a disk warped into a saddle shape until it self-intersects; here, its edge has been arrested just prior to self-intersection.
If you were to take a piece of wire and twist it around the edge of the sculpture, then dip the resulting loop in soapy water, the resulting form would echo the topology of the carved wood.
There is a rich history to using mathematical forms in works of art, and Robert Longhurst is one of many sculptors engaging this tradition. I am interested in how he uses organic material to achieve organic shapes, mediated by formulae and analyses often perceived as abstruse or dry. His work reveals a creative and elegant approach to critical thinking, giving lie to common misconceptions about the field of mathematics.
Strange attractors are attracting sets with fractal dimension and zero measure in the embedding phase space. Trajectories within a strange attractor appear to skip around randomly, but often generate images that are quite striking. In dynamic systems theory, chaotic oscillations of physical systems may be characterized by strange attractors; adding a time-delayed feedback perturbation to a static magnetic field can produce these intriguingly-named phenomena.
Georgi Tushev's series of oil paintings are not figurative depictions of strange attractors, but are instead a play on the concept. He applies pigments containing iron or cobalt to canvas in the presence of a magnetic field. The resulting three-dimensional structures reflect the contours of the field lines. In his artist statement, Tushev writes,
The build-up of iron standing out like a punk haircut in my work is the result of chance. In other words, exact outcomes of experiments cannot be predicted, the best we can do is to predict the probability that any given outcome may occur.
Ambiguously resembling petals, tentacles, blast marks or craters, Tushev's work evokes the statistical self-similarity that characterizes so many things in the natural world, as well as the engimas of chance.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987 ... Fibonacci numbers are amazing. Most of us make their acquaintance in grade school, and some of us have the pleasure of re-encountering them again years later, in the context of discrete dynamical systems. I daresay there are all sorts of peculiarly botanical images sketched in the margins of thousands of math notebooks, all over the world.
Susan Happersett's work transcends the spirals and flowers and branching patterns that endear the Fibonacci sequence to so many. In a series of exquisite pieces, she arranges strokes of ink within space-spanning grids. The number of strokes in each box reflects the Fibonacci sequence encoded in the growth patterns of different plants.
Although the arrangement of these ink marks conveys no significant mathematical information, they are clearly not placed at random. Close examination reveals a calligraphic precision that serves to tether Happersett's abstract aesthetic to its organic roots.
In addition to Fibonnaci numbers, Happersett is also concerned with self-similarity, fractals and chaos. Her work captures the delicate, meditative quality of new knowledge, an opening door, a different perception.
For more on the mathematical descriptions of plant growth, this phyllotaxis page from Smith University is an excellent resource.
For this reason, it strikes me that Laura Moriarty's work is about time, more than anything else.
An annually laminated sequence whose beginning and end dates are unknown is called a floating chronology. This evocation is appropriate to Moriarty’s oeuvre. She is interested in the kinds of phenomena that occur at boundaries, and she deliberately blurs the border between the figurative and the abstract. In an article posted on her website, she states, "I intentionally make the work less clean, less tied to the ideas I may have started from, so I can retain the amount of fun I have just making things."
The same article provides a brief, tantalizing glimpse into the big questions that keep Moriarty engaged and involved with her works during their production. In addition to suggesting a variety of natural forms, their multilayered nature reveals the time she has invested in their creation. Moriarty's work conveys the sufficiency of a job that someone took pleasure in doing up right.
Protein molecule visualization is one of those things that is surprisingly accessible to the non-specialist. With a visit to the Protein Data Bank, some free software downloads and a little time, anyone can generate very beautiful three-dimensional models.
Exploring the art and craft of these visualization techniques yields insight into the nature of Mara G. Haseltine's work. Her permanent installation at Biopolis in Singapore depicts an active cleft in the SARS protease, which is a potential target for antiviral drugs.
Haseltine's work is interesting, because it is not immediately obvious that it is figurative. This intent is made very clear in a series of inflatable chandeliers entitled Those Could Be Anything! Representing pluripotent stem cells - which, of course, can eventually specialize in any body tissue - these objects appear simultaneously strange and familiar. While the casual viewer may be less likely to discern the right answer than someone with a background in biotechnology, both audiences experience the same interrobang of recognition and query that also characterizes scientific discovery.
Making 3-dimensional computer models can be great fun, but generating the data archived in the Protein Data Bank is a time-consuming and laborious process. Haseltine's work evokes the "Eureka!" moment that sustains researchers through late nights at the computer, changing all the spaces to underscores in thousands of file names.
