Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.
Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers with Their Spider Silk Cape
Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”
1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.
Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”
Golden Orbweaver Spiders from Madagascar
Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.
Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.
According to Wired.com in 2009,
Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.
Science News tells a slightly different tale.
At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.
It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.
At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.
Textile expert Simon Peers and Fashion Designer Nicholas Godley Flank Model Bianca Gavrilas Wearing a Hand-Embroidered Spider Silk Cape
Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.
Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.
Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.
Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.
For many, 2011 was the year of Steve Jobs. His bright, creative light went dark. His legacy of innovation and creativity lives on in the products of Apple and the people who work there. But his reach extends much further. Political scientists, business gurus and pop culture junkies are still calculating exactly how big of an impact Jobs had on shaping modern society. And despite his death, I don’t think he’s quite done yet.
Certainly, no one would argue that Steve Jobs made personal computing much more personal. The cold, hard, immutable technology became warm, brightly colored and comforting under the watchful eye of Jobs and his creative team.
Perhaps the greatest gift Steve Jobs left us all was the ability to recognize how important art and creativity is to fostering innovation and solving technological challenges.
No one agrees with that more than Harvey White, the cofounder of QUALCOMM and former CEO of Leap Wireless International, a cellphone company on the cutting edge of technology development. Familiar with the education jargon Science, Technology, Engineering, Math or STEM he felt compelled to add an A for Arts.
At a San Diego economic development meeting last year, White said, “We simply cannot compete in the new economy unless we do something now about creativity and innovation.”
He and many others view an infusion of art as a means to preserve America’s advantage in the future.
"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning unexpected findings of science." - Carl Sagan. Painting by Pat Linse
After all, Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated that infusing sleek art and design elements into technology is the formula for great success and untold riches.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley predicts that the jobs in greatest demand in the future don’t yet exist. In fact, he says they will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don’t yet even know are problems.
After all, Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
In addition to technical know-how, many of these challenges will require fresh, creative and artistic solutions.
Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have called for strong investment in our nation’s education system, especially when it comes to STEM fields. But art is conspicuously absent from the discussion.
President Bush authorized the STEM initiative for Science Technology Engineering and Math. And with it came a $151 million infusion of federal dollars to help students earn a bachelor’s degree, math and science teachers to get teaching credentials. It also provides additional money to help push Kindergarten through 12th Grade math and science curricula to better prepare students for college.
President Obama reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in 2010 and added his own initiatives including Educate to Innovate and Race to the Top, calling for a renewed focus on STEM education. As a result, STEM centers are popping up all over the country. STEM seems to be on everyone’s lips and a future without proper STEM preparation is viewed as a dark time, perhaps even the death knell of the U.S. leadership.
However, many global economists recognize that a more well-rounded education that includes STEM plus art and music is the direction the U.S. should head. Most analysts agree that growing a “creative and innovative” economy represents America’s best chance to stay competitive in the global knowledge economy.
Journalist Jonah Lehrer says that science needs to find a place for the arts. A STEAM advocate himself, he believes that the best science begins with a scientist imagining something — an idea, a universal truth — long before it can be experimentally proven. He says science often relies on metaphor.
STEM to STEAM
In the 1920s physicist Niels Bohr was studying the radiation given off by electrons. At this point in history, the classical model held that atoms were like miniature solar systems with the nucleus acting as the sun while electron planets whirred around it in orbit.
While analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, Bohr realized that the mini solar system idea didn’t hold up. In fact, what he learned about electron behavior seemed to defy every conventional explanation. At the time he said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” In this case as in many others ordinary words couldn’t accurately capture the data.
Lehrer says, “Science needed a new metaphor.” Bohr was an avid fan of Picasso and loved the the deconstructed cubist art of the time. He was quickly learning that the atomic world was much more abstract than science would admit at the time. Lehrer says, “For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object.”
Within the same time period, Louis de Broglie discovered that electrons could be either particles or waves. Thinking like a subjective artist, Bohr thought that which form they took depended how you looked at them.
Lehrer says, “This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.”
The students and instructors at the Rhode Island School of Design understand this principle all too well. In January the National Science Foundation and the renowned art school brought together over 60 leaders in science, creative information technology, engineering, art & design, math and education research to examine and develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of art and design.
With creative energy and structure, this collaboration is turning STEM to STEAM.
John Maeda, the president of RISD says, “When policymakers today talk about education and reform, it’s all about the STEM subjects. It’s about convergent thinking – problem solving by breaking it down. Instead, a divergent thinker takes an idea and looks to expand it, and to find new diverse ways to connect it.”
In June, Representative James Langevin (D-RI) heard those words as he submitted a House Resolution to add Art to existing STEM initiatives in federal agencies. In part the bill says, “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that adding art and design into Federal programs that target the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields encourages innovation and economic growth in the United States.”
Stephen Lane is the CEO of Ximedica, a company that develops medical products and services. But the company began at RISD with a base in fine arts and industrial design. Lane says many major companies started as art companies but became design-driven enterprises.
Lane believes that STEM enables but that design is what really drives innovation. He says, “My kids didn’t grow up in grade school saying I want to become a technical sound engineer. They grew up saying, I want to be a rock star.” He believes art and design are the capture points and where students must be engaged.
Invoking the memory of Steve Jobs, Lane says, “Those are the people who are truly changing the dynamic, meaningfully, impatiently and consistently over time.”
Steve Jobs Shows Apple's Sweet Spot at iPad Launch, 2010.
Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs, “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.”
Lehrer says at first glimpse science, in particular, physics may seem far removed from the subjective nature of the arts. But he says, “This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses.”
It’s true that physics theories are extracted from rather arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. But Lehrer suggests that just as artists rely on the imagination physics actually exceeds the imagination. He paraphrases Shakespear’s Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.”
Richard Feynman, the father of nanotechnology famously said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
To find the ingenious within us all as Jobs did, we must focus our strength and energy on the critical intersection point of the arts and sciences. Science is art. Art is science. And both are interdependently woven into the fabric of human existence. They are inextricably linked and for that reason, Steve Jobs’ legacy will likely be that of one of the most visible visionaries to embrace the STEM to STEAM movement and without ever realizing it.
]]>Tattoos are a time-honored yet painful way to mark a significant moment in one’s life. They can capture the essence of who you are and permanently etch that onto your skin. Scientists are one tribe that shows their passion for their work by marking it on their bodies.
For years, science writer Carl Zimmer has been collecting the body art of scientists and science enthusiasts. Now he’s turned the collection from the Science Tattoo Emporium on his blog The Loom into a book.
It all started with an innocent question to his blog readers in 2007: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science? Zimmer found out that many of them were, and they were willing to share their ink with him and the world.
But in true Zimmer fashion, you can’t read the book without learning something. Even he admits that he learned a lot during the research phase.
Zimmer says one woman sent a picture of her tattoo, depicting a neuron in the eye that helps regulate sleep. He’d never heard of this before so he did some research.
He discovered that the neuron allows light into the eye, even when closed and even when a person is blind.
Those are the types of aha moments that Zimmer hopes his new book will inspire.
The seed of this science tattoo idea came to him at a pool party where a friend and neuroscientist had a DNA tattoo on his shoulder. Zimmer thought that was pretty neat. And then when he learned the significance — that the tattoo actually encoded the initials of the man’s wife — he saw the idea of science ink at a much deeper level.
He says he wrote the book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed to show how passionate scientists are about their work and about science in general.
Darwins finches and chemical structures of specific molecules seem to be the predominate tattoo of many people. But some of the tattoos in the book feature obscure yet visually striking pieces of science.
Zimmer recently told the PBS NewsHour that if he ever got a tattoo it would be the double helix of DNA encoded for his wife’s name. He says, “I think that’s the way to go.”
If you were to get a tattoo related to science what would it be and why?
]]>Right now Steve Jobs is being remembered as the man who made technology personal and pleasing. But as time passes the iPod, iPhone and iPad will become part of our lives, no longer remarkable. This is the same journey that other inventions took, from bright, new concept to items in everyday use.
iPad, by Apple Computer
The London Science Museum is taking a close look at ordinary items like pencils, paperclips and zippers to highlight the geniuses behind their invention. In the exhibit, Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things visitors get the story behind the items in life we take for granted, like rubber bands.
The companion online exhibit includes 44 common objects like light bulbs and clothespins and is a great way to learn the history and innovation of things we see all the time.
Sheep Marked with Graphite
Graphite Pencil
In the 1950s a couple of engineers were monkeying around with a new type of wallpaper with a textured plastic surface. On a plane trip, Al Fielding and Marc Chavannes noticed that the clouds around them seemed to cushion the plane as it descended. That’s how they got the idea for sealing air into plastic to use in packing. That’s the story of the birth of Bubble Wrap.
Bubble Wrap
Paper Clips, from W.M. Welch Co. Catalog, 1912
Martin Keyes was fascinated by what he could do with left over wood chips. He learned how to make pulp by adding steam. Then he figured out he could mold the fibrous material into any shape. That’s how the egg carton hatched.
Waste Paper Used to Make Egg Cartons
Zipper
By mixing caoutchouc with sulfur, Charles Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber. About the same time British Rubber baron Thomas Hancock began licensing the process and one of his licensees created the rubber band. Stephen Perry’s invention has demonstrated the combined the elasticity of rubber with simple, elegant appeal that has remained largely unchanged for over 150 years.
Rubber Band Ball, courtesy of Sam Hunt
Not every bright idea has remained the same over time.
Building off the innovation of the zipper Robert Vergobbi applied the mechanism to plastic bags using heat or adhesive in 1954 and not to store food but to carry pencils. Then a clever 5th Grade student named Robert LeJeune discovered that sealed plastic bags can store food and slow the spoiling process. Nine years later Dow Chemical patented the Ziploc bags and the rest is history.
Just because the complexity of products and technology is increasing rapidly doesn’t mean that the simpler things all around us don’t have stories to tell.
The things we marvel at today will be forgotten in the future or relegated to the same footing as the tin can, tea bag or bar code.
Photo: Rubber Band Ball, by Sam Hunt.
]]>For artist Ap Verheggen there is a fine line between art and experiment. Last year the Dutch artist placed two sculptures on icebergs and intends for them to float off the coast of Greenland, sending a message about how climate change is also changing culture. That was a project he called cool(E)motion.
cool(E)motion, iceberg sculpture off Greenland, 2010
He believes climate change will also equal cultural change.
During his cool(E)motion installation he saw that first hand as native Greenlanders struggled to travel over treacherous sea ice when the winter freeze didn’t come. The Inuit depend on dogsleds to get around but the year he did the iceberg sculpture the ice was too thin to cross.
Inspired by his Greenland experience, he wants people to be able to break off icicles in the hot desert sun. In a new digital rendering of a planned project he calls SunGlacier, Verheggen is taking two seemingly incompatible elements — ice and deserts — and merging them into one thought-provoking installation.
SunGlacier, ice-making sculpture in the desert, anticipated date, 2013
With the help of a refrigeration company, Verheggen is planning to build gigantic elm-leaf-shaped sculptures outfitted with solar panels to collect sunlight in the desert. These giant water collectors will then absorb moisture from the air, freeze it on the back of the ridges in the leaves and in essence create glaciers in the desert.
The jury is still out on whether this is truly art or merely a way to solve an impending global water crisis. Either way, Verheggen is hoping to make people think.
He tells the Associated Press, “I give inspiration. What you can do with it is up to you.”
Verheggen takes the idea of art being in the eye of the beholder one step further by inspiring the audience to take his art and make something of it. In this case, create a way to produce water in the desert using solar energy to power cooling condensers that soak up humidity from the desert air.
Concerned about rapid global warming, he believes smart and innovative people need to be spurred to find creative responses to the changing climate. He says, “You have to open the borders of your thinking. To make ice in the desert is breaking down the border, and that is opening a new world.”
But his SunGlacier project is merely a philosophical statement, meant to demonstrate that the seemingly impossible is indeed possible. He says the piece is not meant to solve the world’s impending water crisis.
But if it has that effect, I’m sure he wouldn’t object.
So far the desert glacier is just a digital sketch. But Cofely, a Dutch refrigeration company that makes ice rinks and large walk-in refrigerators for food storage, is helping Verheggen test his theory for creating ice in desert conditions.
An unidentified African country has apparently volunteered to house the sculpture once the concept testing is finished next year.
SunGlacier, digital sketch of proposed desert installation
According to plans for the project, engineers have already produced a 4-inch-thick layer of ice on a slab of aluminum inside a shipping container-sized box that simulates desert conditions. With the air temperature set at 86 Fahrenheit and plans to crank it up to 122 a humidifier provides the moisture, and a fan is directed at the ice like a desert breeze. The end of the process results in a pool of water dripping off the surface of the ice sheet even as it thickens.
The refrigeration company is using only off-the-shelf technology. Erik Hoogendoorn, the project manager says, “Everybody thinks it’s dry in the desert, but it’s roughly the same amount of moisture in the air as here.”
The head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Water Education says, “The project demonstrates that in a totally hopeless environment you can still generate hope. The message is that what many call the looming water crisis is not inevitable. There are solutions, and it all depends on human ingenuity. It all depends on us.”
András Szöllösi-Nagy runs the UNESCO water institute. The engineer and hydrologist says Verheggen’s art piece will carry symbolic importance. He adds, “We are not good at conveying simple messages in a powerful way. Science has its own limits, beyond which art can go.”
]]>Nature has been doing things for billions of years without issue. Over time plants and animals have refined the way they live to reflect the optimal situation given the conditions they have to endure. This is the nature of evolution. The fittest survive but what fit means to nature may be different than our definition. Why is it that when humans came along we thought we could do it better? We forgot that nature has been doing this longer and better than we have.
In her TED Talk on biomimicry, Janine Benyus tells a story of her young neighbor in Montana who is very connected with nature. She says he sees life from his back looking up as he watches the sky, the grass and on one particular day, a wasp nest. Most people knock down the nests before they get very big but Benyus let nature take its course and let the wasps build a big one.
Her young and curious friend asked her, “How did you build that?” referring to the wasp nest. Even at such a young age Benyus says the neighbor boy assumed that she had built this feat of nature. She was saddened by the realization that the boy — like many of us — sees something elegant, artful and highly efficient and jumps to the conclusion that it is man-made.
She says, “Nature’s been doing just fine for 3.8 billion years.”
We just need to remember that and use nature as a point of inspiration to solve our biggest societal problems. And we must learn to crack the natural code.
So far great mathematical minds have discovered a few of nature’s mysteries by observing the repetition of patterns. Spanish artist Cristóbal Vila created this video featuring 3D animation to show a glimpse of what man has learned about the geometry of the natural world. In nature, numbers create beauty, reinforce structure, maximize efficiency and minimize resources. They combine form with function and infuse wonder and a little bit of awe.
Some even see the hand of God in the exquisite creations that nature concocts.
We can and will learn a lot of nature’s secrets if we just stop to take the time to look and listen. Perhaps whenever undertaking a big civic project city planners should begin by asking the question “How would nature do this?”
The Ask Nature project grew out of that notion. Guided by Benyus and her Biomimicry Institute, Ask Nature takes information gathered from E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life and filters out one question that every scientist answers, “What can we learn from this organism?”
The answer? A lot. More than we can even fathom. Just look around and behold the natural solutions to the man-made problems we face.
Benyus says, “What we are doing in a TED-esque way is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function.”
We see the magic of nature through a series of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence.
Fibonacci Numbers
Leonardo Bigollo is a 12th Century mathematician who is also known as Fibonacci. He introduced the concept to western math even though something similar dates back to ancient India.
Fibonacci created the following scenario to demonstrate his idea. Though biologically unrealistic, he used rabbits to explain the system.
He envisions the growth of an idealized rabbit population, assuming that: a newly born pair of rabbits, one male, one female, are put in a field; rabbits are able to mate at the age of one month so that at the end of its second month a female can produce another pair of rabbits; rabbits never die and a mating pair always produces one new pair (one male, one female) every month from the second month on. The puzzle that Fibonacci posed was: how many pairs will there be in one year?
At the end of the first month, they mate, but there is still only 1 pair.
At the end of the second month the female produces a new pair, so now there are 2 pairs of rabbits in the field.
At the end of the third month, the original female produces a second pair, making 3 pairs in all in the field.
At the end of the fourth month, the original female has produced yet another new pair, the female born two months ago produces her first pair also, making 5 pairs.At the end of the nth month, the number of pairs of rabbits is equal to the number of new pairs (which is the number of pairs in month n − 2) plus the number of pairs alive last month (n − 1). This is the nth Fibonacci number.
Fibonacci Sequence, courtesy of Wikipedia
Fibonacci Blocks, where the squares are successive Fibonacci numbers in length
Fibonacci Spiral, created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling using squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34.
In modern math Fibonacci numbers can be found in Pascal’s triangle, in the sequence of binary strings in computer science, and in a Pythagorean triple.
And the number, similar to the Golden Ratio, can be found widely in nature. It can be seen in the branching of trees or blood vessels in the lungs, in the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern. Fibonacci sequences can be found in pine cones, the spirals of shells, the curve of waves and the head of a sunflower.
Fibonacci Plants, the rose, the pinecone and the sunflower
We just have to remember.
]]>Behold, the NanoArt.
He says, “I consider NanoArt to be a more appealing and effective way to communicate with the general public and to inform people about the new technologies of the 21st Century.”
Nanotechnology itself is not artistic. Sure, cancer patients can appreciate a new drug treatment delivered by nanotechnology. And messy men appreciate stain-resistant pants. But neither appreciates nanotechnology as an art form. After all, it is science.
Nanotechnology is a scientific discipline that describes a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale. It is incredibly multidisciplinary and includes the fields of applied physics, materials science, interface and colloid science, device physics, supramolecular chemistry (which refers to the area of chemistry that focuses on the noncovalent bonding interactions of molecules), self-replicating machines and robotics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and electrical engineering.
But some researchers are finding the beauty in their exploration of the atomic world and have created works of art by merely showing the sublime world that exists at the scale of molecules.
This is where Daniel Shechtman discovered quasicrystals, a new form of matter for which he won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week. The quasicrystal is a partially symmetrical pattern that exists in nature and in industrial products. But in addition to be being a utilitarian breakthrough, quasicrystal formations are also beautiful.
Video of Daniel Shectman, talking about his discovery of quasicrystals and explaining periodic order.
Cris Orfescu has a much broader definition of NanoArt. He says, “[It is] a new art discipline related to micro/nanosculptures created by artists/scientists through chemical/physical processes and/or natural micro/nanostructures that are visualized with powerful research tools like Scanning Electron Microscope and Atomic Force Microscope.”
Since 2006 he has been curating NanoArt exhibits all over the world, showing the aesthetic side of the science.
A NanoArt Poem:
]]>What is the NanoArt?
By: Johnson Gao, January 25, 2008
A friend of mine once asked me –
What is the NanoArt?
To which I could not explain.
Maybe I can make a metaphor for that, then.
The NanoArt is as good as a golden key.
It opens the gate to the other end of universe.
That belongs to the boundless micro-kingdom.
Where scenery is peculiar and unique;
Where everything looks still but is constantly in motion.
It is a down-to-earth realm of Utopia.
There are no noise, no pollution and no war.
Peace, tranquil, calm and beauty are in prevailing.
The gate of micro-kingdom is too tiny for human being.
Our bodies are obviously too large to squeeze in.
Only advanced scientific equipments make things possible,
That leads human souls to soar in that Kingdom freely
Science and art collide (sometimes literally) in Group Intelligence, a new flash mob performance art piece that asks the question, “How did life begin?”
Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta combined forces with the NASA/NSF Center for Chemical Evolution to explore the formation of molecules. But rather than confining it to a petri dish, the group decided to scale it up so that individual people can represent individual atoms.
Group Intelligence requires a lot of space, a lot of people and an MP3 player. Each participant becomes part of the moving pieces that make up the cell, molecules and other microscopic phenomena. Together all the participants synchronize their audio players and begin at the same time, following instructions to guide them through the exercise.
Adam Fristoe, the founder of Out of Hand Theater says, “Once they become public knowledge, once these ideas spread out into the public mind are going to transform the way we think about ourselves as human beings.”
According to the website, Group Intelligence, “While the audience follows the narration, their movements mimic the self-assembly patterns of molecules that created life. The event draws parallels between a mob of people and a pool of molecules: in both, individual behaviors of selfishness or cooperation create a collective intelligence, the very properties that allowed the molecules of early Earth to self assemble to form life.”
]]>WARNING: this video is 41 minutes, so grab a cup of coffee and settle in for an inspiring talk.
Generally modern art exhibits have provocative and pithy titles that don’t say much. Arthur Miller decided his new GV Gallery exhibit in London would take the opposite approach. He wanted to be explicit and challenging as well. After all, he is introducing a new art movement.
The Art & Science: Merging Art & Science to Make a Revolutionary New Art Movement exhibition (running through the end of the month) seeks to raise awareness of an emerging art form called biology inspired art. As a subset of science inspired art, Miller says the goal is to take this movement “into the stratosphere, so to speak.” And, not just in artistic circles, either.
Works by over a dozen different artists draw upon the connection between mind, body and soul. And to do so they collaborated closely with scientists to showcase the beauty of biology and to take advantage of the artistic byproducts that biotechnology has created.
Science and art are often seen as opposite ends of the spectrum but they have a closely enmeshed past.
Leonardo da Vinci told his students to study the art of science and the science of art. Andy Warhol used x-rays in his art portraits. Now new forms of artistic expression such as bioart, biotech art, nano art, net art and fract art are hanging in galleries, dotting office hallways and filling online image galleries.
In this exhibit artist Susan Aldworth has created an neuro-autoportrait using her own MRI images. While these images, which she has reworked by drawing, texturizing and coloring them, only show the artist’s physical brain, she jokes, “You can look INTO my brain but you will never find me.”
Artist duo Ken and Julia Yonetani recognize that watching grass grow is not very much fun. They put a creative spin on this idea with their video installation, Imagine Tree. They took pictures of the cells involved in plant respiration and photosynthesis, called stomata cells, under an electron microscope. They leave their viewers with a simple message–”Imagine no trees breathing.”
A reviewer at The Independent newspaper summarizes the art and science show. She says, “The exhibition forces us to imagine, via our fantasies and fears, the artistic and scientific.”
Arthur I. Miller is an emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. He is also the author of Einstein, Picasso among other books, and is working on a new book, tentatively titled The Creative Revolution, investigating the new field of science inspired art.
In the catalog for the exhibition Art & Science, he outlines how science and art are being integrated from both perspectives and what is emerging is nothing shy of a cultural movement.
MERGING ART & SCIENCE
By: Arthur I. Miller, May 2011
Science is changing our world and our lives at an ever-increasing rate. But today artists are bringing science out of the laboratory. Nowhere is this more evident than in biology-inspired art which, by its very nature, necessitates collaboration between an artist and a scientist. This is the theme of the exhibition Merging Art & Science.
Once art and science seemed diametrically opposite; but these days some of the most innovative artists are fusing art and science to create a brand new art movement inspired by science. Striving to visualize the invisible and what it will mean to be human in the future, they create images and objects of stunning beauty, redefining the notion of “aesthetic” and of what is meant by art.
Artists and scientists have always tried to fathom the reality beyond appearances, but it was really only with Isaac Newton, and the onset of the Age of Rationalism in the 17th century, that a distinction was made between the two. In the centuries that followed, science and technology were seen as the real pursuit of truth, while art — which had the role of representing people and landscape — seemed like mere entertainment. With the onset of the avant-garde, and of modernity, the two began to merge with greater and greater intensity.
Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso — inventors of the 20th century – were the catalysts. In the very first sentence of his 1905 relativity paper, Einstein wrote that physicists interpreted certain equations in ways that led to “asymmetries that [were] not inherent in nature.” The relativity theory was in response to his aesthetic discontents. Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which contains the seeds of Cubism, was strongly influenced by his interest in science (X-rays), technology (photography and cinematography) and mathematics (four-dimensional geometry).
As the century progressed, artists continued to look to breakthroughs in science for inspiration. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 was central to Kandinsky’s creation of Abstract Expressionism; while in Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp reflected Einstein’s notions of movements in space and time. Relativity also influenced the Futurists, a group of dapper young Italians who rejected the static nature of Picasso’s Cubism, and evoked speed, violence and technology of modernity. Dali was inspired by relativity and then by quantum physics in his efforts to represent the passage of time. Mondrian reduced the world to lines at right angles, capturing what he saw as the dynamic nature of the cosmos in equilibrium, while Malevich concentrated on the end of the material world, as represented by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe will eventually run down. In Malevich’s white-on-white paintings, everything disappears.
Merging Art & Science focuses on biology-inspired art, an ancient art form. An early 20th century example, Picasso’s Standing Female Nude (1910) was inspired by the power of X-rays to glimpse beyond the visible: what you see is not what you get. In this case, the inspiration was X-ray photographs taken to diagnose the illness of Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier. Superimposed on a background of planes, her body lies open to reveal pelvic hip bones made up of geometrical shapes: forms reduced to geometry, the aesthetic of Cubism – inspired by modern science.
For some years, the wonders of the physical sciences enthralled artists, particularly relativity theory, with its spellbinding consequences for space and time, and quantum physics with ambiguities that shock the imagination, such as the wave and particle duality of light and matter. And then there was Jungian analysis, couched in mysterious archetypes, with more than a whiff of alchemy.
The 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, with its potential to alter life forms through genetic engineering and to cure diseases, piqued everyone’s attention. It was the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century and more accessible than relativity theory and quantum physics. Metaphors abound for making the new biology understandable and biology is, of course, of more immediate relevance than exotic objects such as black holes, supernovae and Schrodinger’s both dead and alive cat. Artists found they could work in a biological laboratory.
Biology-inspired artists have at their disposal objects that can actually be glimpsed by opening the body or using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or with microscopes. This contrasts with physics, which depends on a visual imagery generated by mathematical models to provide a glimpse of objects such as black holes, whereas observing the heavens with the naked eye reveals only tiny dots of light twinkling as if on a heavenly canopy, a quiescent scene. In biology-inspired art, the object of study can actually be altered by artists who, along with scientists, explore the boundaries between humans, animals and robots. Artists genetically engineer new forms of life, creating them in bioreactors. Their startling experiments on objects that straddle the border between living and nonliving remind us that, in the long course of our evolutionary history, we come from, and are possessed of, organisms other than human.
These days the term “art and science”is on everyone’s lips – but no-one quite knows what it is or where it is going. Does it mark the rise of a new culture in which science and technology will be the driving forces and will even, perhaps, determine the future of culture? Are there similarities in the creative processes of artists and scientists? Can science benefit from art? And can considering these questions bring us any closer to understanding creativity? This exhibit is a step towards exploring these key issues of the 21st century.
The artists in this show collaborate with scientists, and the benefits run in both directions. Thus their creations have that sharp edge, the tension that accompanies creativity.
Susan Aldworth works on the border between philosophy of mind and neurophysiology. She studies the relationship of The Self to the physical brain: “How to define one’s personality and whether it can be physically located.” Among her tools is fMRI.
Artists explore, interpret and reinterpret forms in nature, attempting to discern forms that are successful and find out why. Davide Angheleddu describes his investigations thus: “My artistic production gets inspiration from nature, particularly from nature sublimely described in the book Kunstformen der Nature (Art Forms in Nature) of the German philosopher and biologist Ernst Haekel.”
To investigate further the essence of natural forms he turns to sculpture using digital technologies.
Whereas work in physics-inspired art often tends to be decorative, this is less the case in biology-inspired art. Artists in the laboratory can produce works of interest to scientists. Andrew Carnie states this emphatically: “Art is too important to be left to artists. Science too important to be left to scientists.” Carnie tracks the changing organization of the brain, how it develops and how it is capable of holding memories.Annie Cattrell attempts to make tangible seemingly intangible neurological experiences, such as pain and pleasure. Using what is essentially a sculptural photocopying, she examines “subtle shifts and rhythms which ceaselessly occur in the natural world and within the body.”
Katharine Dowson has always been inspired by how science and technology can further inform us about the hidden world within the human body, even beyond what we see in anatomy museums. Among the transparent materials she employs in conjunction with laser technology, glass plays a major role because it “is also a major component in scientific discovery, from test tubes to lens, revealing the microcosmic and macrocosmic universe and their visual similarities.”
David Marron has a different take on biology-inspired art. As a paramedic, he ponders the body in death resulting from violence, accident, or natural causes, sometimes in the loneliest of circumstances: “Each work is approached differently but a generalized underlying subject is humanity. Scratching at our fragility and durability, violence and emotion.” Our habit he explains.
Helen Pynor studies flora and fauna with a unique visual language linked sometimes with text. She writes: “I’m fascinated by the mystery of our status as biological beings whose bodies are the repository for experience, language, and a consciousness in and beyond the central nervous system.”
Nina Sellars’ artwork utilizes drawing, photography, installation and state-of-the-art technologies. “In the 21st century, we have become increasingly captivated by technologies for realms that exist beyond what is normally visible,” she writes.
For Stelarc the body is obsolete. His aim is to “deconstruct our evolutionary architecture and to integrate microminiaturized electronics inside the body. [The body is] an extended operational system.” He extends the concept of art onto his own body.
Ken and Julia Yonetani look to the environment for inspiration towards sculptures using ground water salt or sugar. “Our work tries to retrace lines of connections that have been broken or lost, particularly between acts of consumption and the environment,” they explain.
As Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts write: “Wet biology art practices are engaged in manipulation of living systems. [We are] exploring the manipulation of living tissues as a medium for artistic expression.” The Pig Wings project , part of their study of the production of semi-living organisms in which they muse that if pigs could be designed to fly, then what shape would their wings take – goes further. In growing cells for the purpose of exploring the shape of wings on pigs, they explore the aesthetic as well, because purpose-built forms in nature seem necessarily to be aesthetic. Forms having pleasing properties are naturally preferred, just as are beautiful theories in physics.
May we not say that these artists represent the extremes of science-inspired art, like in extreme sports, pushing the envelope of the possible?
Of this exhibition Miller says, “Like cubism, science inspired art is a highly intellectualized art movement in that it draws from many different disciplines as well as exploring the mind and that enigmatic concept, creativity.”
GV Art is a contemporary art gallery which aims to explore and acknowledge the inter-relationship between art and science, and how the areas cross over and inform one another. The gallery produces exhibitions and events that create a dialogue focused on how modern man interprets and understands the advances in both areas and how an overlap in the technological and the creative, the medical and the historical are paving the way for new aesthetic sensibilities to develop.
]]>Artist John Quigley is known for his big creations. He likes the scale of decorating a field by scattering people to form shapes. He first gained notoriety during the World Trade Organization meetings and protests in Seattle where he photographed demonstrators marching between skyscrapers hand in hand. From the air the contingent spelled the word “Democracy.”
Since then he has worked with Native American groups, environmentalists and school children to bring attention to ocean preservation, solar energy and other social issues.
He collaborated with the team aboard a Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise to create Melting Vitruvian Man, his latest piece of art to draw attention to climate change. The artwork measures the equivalent of four Olympic-size swimming pools and is made from copper sheets normally used in solar panels. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s original Vitruvian Man, Quigley’s man’s two arms and one leg have been cut off, symbolically melting into the sea to illustrate the disappearing ice.
Quigley is no scientist but his placement of this familiar art symbol 500 miles from the North Pole shows how much the ice cap there is melting. Once an area that was covered in ice year-round, permanent sea ice is melting away and annual ice is forming an melting each year.
According to the most recent data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the sea ice retreat in August this year was almost to the same record-breaking low extent as it was in 2007. According to the September 6 report, “Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea route appear to be open.”
Quigley is hoping his art will send a strong visual message to politicians and decision-makers around the world to embrace the need to address climate change in a direct and deliberate way. Before we all melt away.
]]>“We came here and created the Melting Vitruvian Man, Davinci’s famous sketch of the human body, because literally climate change is eating into the body of our civilization.” — John Quigley
Wyllie O Hagan is a pair of visual artists working in different media, from silkscreen paintings to film. They became fascinated by Rosalind Franklin, the woman who captured the first x-ray image of DNA, which immediately led to James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA and their Nobel Prize in 1962.
In 2007, the pair of European artists Denise Wyllie and Clare O’Hagan were inspired by Franklin’s unfinished work and also wanted raise awareness of the disease that took her life.
At the age of 37, the British chemist Franklin died of ovarian cancer and was relegated to a footnote in Watson and Crick’s momentous achievement. Though without her crystallographic x-ray image, they would have struggled to figure out the exact double helix structure of the the genetic code.
While artist O’Hagan was deeply involved in their Rosalind Franklin: Discoveries in DNA project she was also diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Unlike Franklin, she beat the disease and still continues to paint and create art today.
She says, “When diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I really wanted to act out in anger, to make a big noise, to shout and scream and say, ‘This disease is just awful, it kills women, listen to what I am saying.’”
Since then the artists have continued to explore the intersection of art and science through additional collections, including a permanent exhibit called Transformations in Science and Art in the Royal Mint building in London. It is a large floor to ceiling banner that stretches 120 feet long and celebrates the life and work of the scientists in the Department of Oncology at University College London and the patients they’ve helped.
They also went on to further explore DNA through art with a series called Art Science DNA.
Wyllie O Hagan told a South Carolina newspaper, “Even without a deep knowledge of science, people respond to the aesthetics of the work.”
Beginning with their discovery of Rosalind Franklin’s forgotten place in science history, these two women stumbled into the world of science and expressed themselves through their artwork. They began by representating Franklin’s famous Photo 51 in vibrant colors, unlike the fuzzy x-ray original she took in 1952. Since that experiment Wyllie O Hagan has continued to demonstrate a keen ability to capture the beauty and magnificence of science.
]]>“In my view all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims; the improvement of mankind.” — Rosalind Franklin
Ferrofluid Morpho Towers from Jason Peters on Vimeo.
Morpho Towers–Two Standing Spirals is a 2007 installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music.
The two iron spiral towers stand on a large plate holding ferrofluid, also known as liquid magnets. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are formed at the bottom of the plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral, forming a constantly musically-driven sculpture.
Do It Yourself
To make your own ferrofluid there are several different ways to do it. You can use any of the following techniques.
1. Toner Ink Ferrofluid
You need: toner ink (from an office supply store), olive oil and a rare earth magnet
2. Steel Wool Ferrofluid
You need: steel wool cleaning pad, 9-volt battery, scrap metal (or old cheese grater), olive oil and a magnet
3. Magnaflux Ferrofluid
You need: Magnaflux iron powder, olive oil and a magnet
Steps to make ferrofluid (same for all techniques)
Take your iron powder and mix with oil until it reaches a thin consistency. Use a rare earth magnet to move the liquid and watch the forms you can create just by activating magnetic fields and watching the black liquid respond.
When you’ve made your ferroliquid, shoot the video of your liquid iron sculpture, set it to music and then send it to REALscience. We’ll post your creations on the site.
]]>In 1978, Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife duo who are known for their mid 20th Century furniture, movie making and other design projects, decided to map the visible world.
Their film, Powers of Ten showed the perspective of moving one order of magnitude every ten seconds. Beginning with a picnic in a park in Chicago, the clever team shows the vastness of the universe, reaching toward the furthest point of our understanding at 10 to the 24th meters.
Then a quick two-second per power return to the picnic before plunging into the microworld beneath the skin of a picnicker and into the subatomic world of electrons and their component parts.
Eames Demetrios, the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, is the curator of the Eames Office and has recently launched the Powers of Ten website where he placed an interactive journey of each step shown in the film.
In 2007, to mark the 100th Birthday of his grandfather, Charles, Eames paid a loving tribute to the creative genius of his grandparents.
Most movies have a beginning, middle and an end. But how can a movie maker portray the vast scope of a story when it starts at the beginning of the universe and proceeds out of order to the present and then to an unknowable future? That’s the difficult task that acclaimed director Terrence Malik undertook in the making of Tree of Life.
Critics were evenly split between loving and hating the film. It was perhaps the most expensive art house film, spending two years on special effects in post-production alone.
And part of that was due to the nature of the movie. Images from the Hubble Telescope were animated and put in 3D to convey the ability to travel through both space and time. The story within the movie begins with the birth of the universe, though it centers around a 1950s Texas family. The interplay between the natural world and the relationships of the characters opened a wide door for science to creep into an emotional context, giving depth and heart to the high resolution images from space.
Chris Lee reviewed the film for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and says, the “eye-popping visuals” set the scene for “trippy sequences that wrangle with themes of cosmic oneness—visuals such as the formation of Earth from the accretion of solar nebulae 4.5 billion years ago, imagery of the universe’s roiling primordial soup and what amounts to a sub-plot concerning a couple of soulful dinosaurs.”
Tree of Life began as a movie Malik conceived in 1978 called Q. After letting it incubate for 20 years, he returned to the film in 1998, which involved shooting microscopic jellyfish on the Great Barrier Reef, solar eclipses and even ice floes in Antarctica.
As Lee says, for Malik Q was supposed to be “a film encompassing his childhood, the creation of the universe, and what it all means.”
After 21 years orbiting in space, the Hubble Telescope sent back its one millionth science observation earlier this month. In sync with the space telescope Malik included some of the most recognizable images in a movie that has been orbiting him almost as long.
Critics argue over why he included these universal images. Perhaps they were used to punctuate a Bible verse mentioned at the beginning of the movie: Job 38, to spur the audience to think about where God is in human suffering. Or maybe the images are used to juxtapose the forces of brute nature and spiritual grace as the film examines two possible life paths and how they neither has to be mutually exclusive.
The style of the film allows the audience to draw its own conclusions and make individual connections. And it gives these beautiful images of distant galaxies a real place in our lives.
Tree of Life (movie trailer)
NASA | ART 50 Years of Exploration – SpacePod 2011.06.20 from Spacevidcast on Vimeo.
From Rockwell to Rauschenberg, NASA has had a long tradition of inviting artists to give their perspective on the agency’s work through different forms of art.
Painting, textile, sculpture, music and poetry fill a traveling exhibit called NASA Art | 50 Years of Exploration. NASA art program curator Bert Ulrich takes visitors through an artistic tour-de-force of rocket launches, space shuttle explosions, missions to Mars and Mercury as well as key moments in the agency’s history.
For a brief time, NASA even had an artist-in-residence program. Laurie Anderson has the distinction of being the first and only NASA artist-in-residence after the program was cut following her two-year experience in 2003-2004.
The artists who have graced NASA with their work reads like a who’s who of modern art. It features nearly five decades of creations by artists as diverse as Annie Leibovitz, Nam June Paik, Norman Rockwell, Doug and Mike Starn, Andy Warhol and William Wegman.
Fashion Designer Stephen Sprouse has a 3-D dress with images of the Mars Rover on it that was featured in a New York fashion week show in 2000.
Ulrich says, “Artists have been given a different perspective in how NASA works and they’ve been able to document the agency and the different chapters of NASA’s history through the media of art.”
NASA founding art program director Founding director James Dean once said, “At the core, both art and aerospace exploration search for a meaning to life.”
Seventy-three of nearly 3,000 works in its collection are in a traveling exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C through mid September.
]]>Common, everyday things, from construction material to household items or even insects, look remarkably different up close. And the up close that a new art exhibition has in mind is mind-boggling.
Using a high-powered scanning electron microscope a scientist and a graphic designer combined forces to show the microworld in a new exhibit, called Science + Art: Bridging the Gap. By magnifying concrete, sandpaper, bugs and other familiar items in our environment 300,000 times, abstract images emerge, showing magnificent and naturally beautiful works of art.
Center for Applied Science and Engineering senior scientist Rishi Patel and designer Jeff Rawson created an 18-piece exhibit which is on display now through early August in Springfield, Missouri. Patel, a microscopy expert created the images, which start out as black and white. Then Rawson overlayed them with color, giving them an artistic flair and greater depth. He also mounted them on canvases to complete the aesthetic picture.
Patel says, “As part of our outreach program to the community this seemed to be a good way to show people a new perspective of ordinary objects that they would not have seen before.”
Rawson Told the Springfield News Leader, “In our work at JVIC, we’re committed to tying the arts and sciences together.” He says, “This is something I’ve always kind of played with in my spare time.”
But the project started as a simple way to add a few images to the JVIC website and grew into a community-wide exhibition, which opened last week.
Patel says, “The interactive nature of the exhibit where people had to guess what they thought the object was, I think made it a more enjoyable experience.”
And, judging by the opening night response, he says the duo will make more artsy science images using a scanning electron microscope. Now they just have to decide what to scan. Post your suggestions below.
Etched Stainless Steel under a Scanning Electron Microscope, all images courtesy of Jeff Rawson's Science + Art: Bridging the Gap
All images are also for sale, from $200-$500. For more information visit Springfield Arts Council.
]]>When Alex de Voogt couldn’t get a crumbling sheath to release an early 20th Century Egyptian knife, he turned to a cutting-edge, high resolution, computed tomography (CT) scanner for help. Using the advanced x-ray technology he was able to see inside the knife covering and reveal writing on the knife blade without disturbing the artifact.
Museum scientists around the world are continually studying parasites, people, or planets. And to learn more about their subject of choice, they routinely use cutting-edge imaging technologies such as infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, and CT scanners to make it possible to examine details that were previously unobservable.
Now the American Natural History Museum in New York City is offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science as told through the pictures scientists capture in pursuit of their science.
This exhibition, called Picturing Science was the brain child of Mark Siddall, curator in the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. He gathered more than 20 sets of large-format images that showcase the wide range of research across many different scientific disciplines being conducted at the Museum. The exhibit also showcases how various optical tools are used in scientific studies.
Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies is on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History from June 25, 2011 – June 24, 2012 and is free with Museum admission.
]]>“Very rarely do you find a scientific paper that doesn’t have a picture in it, a scientific figure of some sort. But there’s this wonderful aesthetic that goes with some of these pictures that are just beautiful to look at.” — Mark Siddall, Invertebrate Zoology Division Curator, American Natural History Museum.
Now that we’ve been living in the Information Age for over 50 years, it’s safe to say we’ve become quite proficient at gathering data. We’ve built elaborate systems to collect and transmit data. We’ve also built elaborate systems to protect and encrypt personal information so it can’t be misused.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of the people in gathering, processing and analyzing huge amounts of data. Peer to peer computing networks and citizen scientists are helping the scientific world gather an entire world of data. But automated systems are churning out more data than we know what to do.
Some clever artists are sensing that within each piece of data there is a single artifact of humanity. When pooled together, those data points become a catalog, documenting human moments. The patterns that can be derived from the information clearly document our culture.
It turns highly impersonal data into a very intimate portrait of humanity.
Artist Aaron Koblin gave a TED Talk at this year’s technology, art and design demonstration. The video is 18 minutes but is very powerful. Here’s some background on what he mentions during his talk.
“The 19th Century culture was defined by the novel.
The 20th Century culture was defined by the cinema.
The culture of the 21st Century will be defined by the interface.” — Lev Manovich, media theory professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
He sets the scene by saying, “Interface can be a powerful narrative device.” Marshaling the power of the Internet, powerful home computers running on a protocol that showcase the power of audio and video, Koblin puts an artsy twist on the hustle and bustle of modern life while leveraging the latest technology to help refine the information, tranforming it into art.
First he visually represents one statistic – there are 140,000 airplanes flying at any given time – and turns it into an art project called Flight Patterns. Then he creates a map with routing information, makes it come alive by color-coding different aspects. The overall image is a dynamic system that could just as easily be a snapshot of our brains in action as the U.S. flight system.
Working with the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT he maps international communication in a way that could easily appear to be a giant solar flare erupting on the sun. By visualizing tiny bits of information a story emerges and it is one where the digital world looks like a mirror image of the natural world, an idea that should comfort some.
Drawing on a computer program developed by Amazon.com called Mechanical Turk, Koblin exploited the system for his own artistic pleasure. Mechanical Turk creates human intelligence tasks that allows access tens of thousands of people to perform simple jobs, like rating an item, drawing a simple picture or just giving an opinion. The idea is that there are some things people can do better, faster and more accurately than a computer. For their small effort they are given a small reward. Each task takes just a minute and participants are paid in pennies.
For his digital sheep project, The Sheep Market, Koblin asked for people to give him their two cents by drawing a sheep. For that, he would in turn pay them two cents. He collected 10,000 sheep for his project and then sold the sheep as stamps on an open sheep market in blocks of 20. He did similar projects with asking people to draw portions of a $100 bill as part of his Ten Thousand Cents project. This was to measure accuracy rather than creativity. Then he built an audio task to collect voice recordings which he turned into a crowdsourced version of “Bicycle Built for Two.”
He also decided to demonstrate the power of the modern web browser by challenging people to create music videos without using a digital camera, or any camera for that matter. He again had people draw images which he then stitched together into 24 frames per second. And the result was a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, honoring the last song he ever recorded before he died.
In another music video project, he personalized the video for the individual viewers by having them enter their street address before playing the song, We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire. In this ongoing project, Google Earth and advanced web browser features help serve up personal childhood information in the context of the music, giving the video a more intimate feel.
Through all of his artistic exploration with technology, Koblin’s message is clear. The data that is out there is not to be feared. He says, “I think data can actually make us more human.”
Koblin works for Google, where he is currently directing the Data Arts team.
]]>“As we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.” — Aaron Koblin, media artist
Sydney’s iconic Customs House, Museum of Contemporary Art and Opera House are being given a psychedelic makeovers as part of the city’s annual festival of light, music and ideas. To weather the winter doldrums of the Southern Hemisphere, Sydney, Australia came up with a bright idea — The Vivid Festival.
Spectacular 3-D lighting installations and art sculptures across the city highlight the creative center of Australia during the three-week festival. Over 40 different illuminated art installations, musical performances and creative discussions shine a spotlight on creativity and ideas.
And what better way to spark creativity than by turning icons into art. The famous Sydney Opera House becomes the largest canvas electronic projection artists can digitally paint. The former gateway to Sydney also becomes a digital canvas as passers by can watch the Customs House melt, regrow and get pelted with virtual graffiti right before their eyes.
Using powerful computers, laser mapping of the famous buildings and some state-of-the-art projection equipment, the team of artists and engineers can project any image onto any structure and even coordinate it with music. The company hired to produce the light festival was responsible for the other worldly closing ceremonies for the Vancouver Olympic Games last year.
]]>Students at the California Institute of the Arts have built an orchestra of interactive musical robots. Musicians use specialized computer programs to play the robotic instruments. The Associated Press sat in on a rehearsal for the group’s May 12 concert.
Tammy, BreakBot, NotomotoN, GlockenBot and a handful of other kinetic music machines round out the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra. Made from old furniture, scraps from electronic junkyards and other found objects, this robot orchestra combines synthesized music with programmed machines. When you put together you get beautiful music.
Four years ago Ajay Kapur decided that he wanted to create a full orchestra composed equally of humans and robots. He also wanted trained musicians and programmers to work together to program and instruct the robots.
He worked with Michael Darling, the CalArts’ theater program director to recruit musicians from their classes and to build robots from broken furniture and other discarded theater props.
After several months of collaboration, KarmetiK was born.
Kapur, who holds a doctorate in electronic engineering, says, “It’s like a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.”
And the machines in the orchestra can do things humans can’t, including playing every note perfectly and faster than humanly possible.
This is not the first group of music-loving robots ever to perform. A few years ago a solo bot at Japan’s Waseda University played Flight of the Bumblebee flawlessly and faster than any human could. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny also took a robot orchestra on the road with him last year. But like the Japanese robot, his bots played pre-programmed compositions.
]]>Seattle marketing director Nick Risinger quit his job to travel the world in search of the perfect picture of the night sky. The 29-year-old amateur astronomer took a year and traveled from the southwestern U.S. to South Africa, taking thousands of digital color photos of all billions of stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
After months of painstaking work to stitch them all together, he released his work of art online a few weeks ago. Photopic Sky Survey is the largest true color composite image of the entire night sky as viewed from Earth.
His purpose is to get kids to look up in the sky more and wonder what’s out there. He admits that this giant 5,000 megapixel image can’t be used for scientific purposes but that wasn’t his goal.
Now the astrophotographer has built a website where you can see the photo and even interact and zoom in on particular stars at skysurvey.org.
]]>A new membership-based, do-it-yourself fabrication and manufacturing space allows engineers and inventors to work on their gadgets using the latest in high-tech equipment. Tech Shop has opened facilities in California with plans to expand across the country.
It’s like your father’s workshop but better. The two shops–in San Jose and in San Francisco–have all the latest in technological assistance combined with typical fabrication equipment.
Tech Shop allows inventors, entrepreneurs and curious dabblers to try their hand at creating something without having to invest in all the equipment.
Community science labs, creative craft studios and now tech shops are dotting the landscape of major cities, filling a gap that opens when curious dreamers run headlong into reality.
Tech Shop is spreading to Detroit where it is advertising itself as a hands on way to fix the auto industry.
]]>Call them operabots. In a marriage of music and media, a team at the MIT Media Lab has infused an opera with robotic technology.
In Death and the Powers, a new opera by Media Lab professor Tod Machover, the main character wishes to leave the physical world, but remain there digitally. He downloads himself into The System and continues to interact with the audience and other characters through robots using a technique Machover invented, called disembodied performance.
On stage the operabots appear more like podiums (podia?) than humans as they roll across the stage. But their movement and artificial emotion is controlled by sensors attached to the main actor who spends most of the show in a concealed booth in the orchestra pit.
His movement, heart rate, and other information is sent on stage to the robots who convey what he is experiencing below.
Known as America’s most wired composer, Machover has been trying to get audiences to see and feel sound for over 30 years.
]]>Call it the astronomer helper. Since 1998, the giant digital camera that has been the heart of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has done many things. It has helped identify over half a billion new astronomical objects to study. Now the camera that captured the largest color image of sky is ready to retire.
That image, which would require 500,000 high-definition television sets to see at full resolution, only accounts for one-third of the sky. Yet the archiving and study of the images will keep scientists going for years.
A sampling of the largest color photo of the universe ever made
And the camera leaves a legacy in the form of an interactive website where professional and amateur stargazers can study the billions of images the camera snapped during its many years of service.
Now it’s heading to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. where it will become a museum attraction after making astronomy history. For 12 years scientists lugged the three-foot tall, 1,200-pound camera every night and attached it to a telescope that was scanning the night sky.
It will be replaced by an infrared camera to help scientists get a better picture of what’s going on in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
“It’s done a tremendous job for us and for the astronomy community as a whole.” — Mark Kleane, director of the project at Apache Point Observatory in Sun Spot, New Mexico.
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Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX from Maureen McKeague on Vimeo.
About 50 recent doctors of philosophy decided to make their often obscure doctoral dissertations a little more hip and lively so they entered Science magazine’s Dance Your Ph. D. contest. Making Her research on a chemistry method called Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) come alive through an interpretive dance, scientist and dancer Maureen McKeague from Carelton Unviersity in Ottawa, Canada took home the top prize last fall.
Her dance, titled “Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment” doesn’t sound like something that could be easily translated for a non-scientist let alone set to the music of Lady Gaga, among others.
The target is a small molecule called homocysteine, the main dancer with a target painted on her shirt. (That’s Maureen McKeague.) SELEX is a chemical technique that creates short RNA and DNA segments called aptamers (the other dancers). Aptamers are nucleic acids that can be designed to stick to any molecule–in this case the amino acid homocysteine. Watch for the Taq Polymerase scene in the middle of the dance. High levels of homocysteine in blood is associated with heart disease.
Dr. McKeague’s work aims to use the SELEX process to make aptamers to easily and cheaply measure homocysteine levels in blood samples. She and the 12 students in Maria DeRosa’s bionanotechnology research group helped give McKeague her win, which was announced in a special event in New York in October.
45 Ph.D. students entered the 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. contest. McKeague won with 69 percent of the online vote. You can view all the finalists here.
]]>If someone said the word “physicist” you are likely to think of Albert Einstein with his finger-in-a-light-socket hairstyle. A few savvy science enthusiasts will think of Brian Greene. But none will think of any of the 38 physicists working in the subterranean world at the Large Hadron Collider at the European research facility CERN.
At least not yet. Now that the atom-colliding and inspired tunes are coming out on a double disc album called Resonance – just in time for a Holiday gift — some new names may join the short list of phsycists…who can jam.
Scientists working on the ATLAS project are trying to show how physics and music are closely related. And after capturing particle collisions and putting them to sound, they are discovering a natural music in the universe.
]]>NASA is holding a contest to pick the wake up songs for astronauts on the space shuttle’s last two missions. Usually, this honor is reserved for the shuttle crew family and friends.
Visit the Wakeup Song Contest website to select songs from a list of the top 40 previous wakeup calls or to submit original tunes for consideration. The NASA Top 40 includes U2′s Beautiful Day, Train’s Drops of Jupiter, Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon and Elton John’s Rocket Man.
The space agency is also allowing original songs or tunes that didn’t crack the NASA Top 40 to be included for consideration. But the selected wake up songs will still be chosen based on the most votes.
STS-133 is scheduled for launch on November 1 and it will be the second to last shuttle launch before the U.S. manned space program ends. It will also mark the 35th mission to the International Space Station.
STS-134 is scheduled for launch on February 26, 2011 and will be the final time a space shuttle flies.
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Music is a powerful medium to convey big messages. But few have successfully spun science-themed songs into big hits.
John Boswell has created a new art form, merging the spoken word from superstar scientists with his own original music. And his Symphony of Science has become a big hit on YouTube.
We Are All Connected
A Glorious Dawn
Our Place in the Cosmos
The Unbroken Thread
2009 has been declared the Year of Science. A group of scientific organizations has formed a network to promote science to the public. With many milestones being celebrated next year, Year of Science 2009 will celebrate the people, the process and procedures of science.
To find out more visit:
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