Jumpsuits & Teleporters

A visual timeline of STEM to STEAM incubation from 2003 onward...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0400

A visual timeline of STEM to STEAM incubation from 2003 onward (which is by no means all inclusive) accompanying “On Cultural Polymathy: How Visual Thinking, Culture, and Community Create a Platform for Progress” — an article I wrote for Claremont Graduate University’s The STEAM Journal. Unfortunately, the image wasn’t approved for use so I’m posting it here.

Read the full article.

Credit: Timeline created by Whitney Dail with images from The Institute For Figuring, MAKE Magazine, Science Gallery, John Wiseman, Whitney Dail, Stan Alcorn, World Science Festival, The Creators Project, Miwa Matreyek, and The STEAM Journal.

Art (& Science) Talk with Kerry Tribe Head on over to the...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:20:00 -0500

Art (& Science) Talk with Kerry Tribe

Head on over to the National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Works blog to read a brief interview with media artist Kerry Tribe — an email Q&A I originally conducted in June that just posted today. Tribe gives some insight into her next project The Language of Forgetting where she will work with healthcare professionals, scientists, and patients to explore the neurological disorder known as aphasia. The project is a continuation of her work from H.M. about Henry Molaison (1926-2008), a famous amnesiac who at the age of 27 underwent an experimental brain surgery to correct epilepsy that caused severe amnesia and inhibited his ability to create new memories. But she explains, “Primarily, I’m interested in developing formal strategies through this work that will allow viewers a more empathic, experiential understanding of what it might be like to live with these kinds of communicative disorders.”

Click here to read the full interview.

Credit: Video clip by Kerry Tribe. Original running time: 18:30 minutes. Excerpt: 1:48 minutes.

"Place has always been important for the emergence of new products and entire industries. They form..."

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 19:35:00 -0500

“Place has always been important for the emergence of new products and entire industries. They...

“Subjects regarded as making important...

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:12:00 -0500

“Subjects regarded as making important contributions to creative thinking include art and music, but science and mathematics also score highly.” —Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe has released Creativity and Education: Why it Matters, a new study that sheds light on the role of creativity in career success and the growing belief that creativity is not just a personality trait, but a learned skill.

Download the PDF.

(via Dexigner)

Greg Eltringham’s Dream Houses Greg is one of my favorite...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:21:56 -0500

Greg Eltringham’s Dream Houses

Greg is one of my favorite SCAD artists, a faculty member in the painting department. He began this series in 2010, which reminds me of old-timey cartoons and Jim Woodring comics mixed with a little bit of Wes Anderson a la Fantastic Mr. Fox and A Life Aquatic. Rightfully so because the Eltringham family is kind of like the Tenenbaums. His wife Angela is also an artist (they met while attending SCAD in the early 90s) and makes folky paintings and needlepoints of boats, underwear, and limbs. Granger is in high school, aspiring to be a Jacques Cousteau-esque marine biologist, filmmaker, and artist. Penelope, the youngest, is an actress and storyteller with the tiniest Italian greyhound in tow named Olive. We have four Eltringham pieces in our art collection — my love being an embroidery of Dusty Springfield. What does your dream house look like?

Credit: Greg Eltringham. L-R: Typhoon Class, Float, Glazed, The Blue Pretzel, Quick Snack, and Sherbert.

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave: ‘The Louvre of the...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 22:40:00 -0400

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave: ‘The Louvre of the Paleolithic Galleries’*

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the story of Chauvet Cave’s great art discovered only in December 1994. It’s a beautiful film offering a sensory experience into Paleolithic man’s paintings (and perhaps early attempts at animation) through music, storytelling, and images that you can only revisit through the DVD. With Herzog as the mediator and a small cast of archeologists and historians, we’re offered a rare glimpse into the human history of the cave and the search for meaning in the artwork as well as nearby landscapes and cultures.

What’s interesting is that even as Herzog follows the scientific investigation, its speculative nature is always present. As the unicyclist-juggler turned archeologist points out, the past cannot ever fully be known or reconstructed. There is just as much mysticism surrounding the people who decorated the caves and the panels upon panels of stunning depictions of horses, ibexes, lions, rhinoceroses, and bears. Two characters named Carole and Gilles have traced and analyzed the contours, layering, and compositions. They believe they can tell truths about the creators (down to one six-foot-tall person with a crooked pinky finger) and the creative process, all by reading line weight, shading, and human handprints.

What scientists DO know about Chauvet is that at approximately 31,000 years old, it’s the oldest known rock art — predating the art in Lascaux. The 1,300-foot cave has been spatially mapped (see above) in its entirety using laser scanners. (These digital images of the cave have stuck with me.) But for all of the scientific research that’s been conducted, we’re still fascinated by the earliest acts of artistic expression. The mysteries of modern human origins, especially early arts and culture, are what keep us searching for answers. Joe Morgenstern wrote in a Wall Street Journal review, “The unknowable or the mysteriously ambiguous in human behavior is what sets Mr. Herzog’s synapses to firing with singular intensity.”

I’ve seen Cave of Forgotten Dreams on four occasions. The first time was in a small, packed theater in Savannah, and it took my breath away. I felt especially moved because in 2007 I studied in the South of France and visited several nearby caves (including Lauscaux II, the recreation) during a Paleolithic rock art course. But the connection is more universal. Do yourself a favor and watch this film on Netflix streaming.

* According to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in “On the Origins of the Arts” for Harvard Magazine.

Credit: Photo by unknown source. Screencaps by Whitney Dail.

Farewell, Lebbeus Woods “Lebbeus Woods, an architect...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:10:17 -0400

Farewell, Lebbeus Woods

“Lebbeus Woods, an architect whose works were rarely built but who influenced colleagues and students with defiantly imaginative drawings and installations that questioned convention and commercialism, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 72.” —The New York Times

I’m deeply saddened to hear that Lebbeus Woods, American architect and founder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, has died. Woods’ dystopic, futurist work offered radical visions re-imagining the present, sometimes realized in buildings and other times in conceptual drawings or models. His influence on pop culture can be seen in the interrogation room of Terry Gilliam’s movie 12 Monkeys, although the adaptation resulted in a sizable lawsuit in Woods’ favor. I’ll remember and admire his ideas about reconstruction, reality, and culture always.

Read an interview with Lebbeus Woods on BLDGBLOG from 2007.

Credit: Manifesto by Lebbeus Woods via Harpreet-Khara.

Understanding Dark Matter and Dark Energy I’m currently...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 11:15:00 -0400

Understanding Dark Matter and Dark Energy

I’m currently reading Richard Panek’s The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality that tells the story of the standard cosmological model, starting in 1965 and leading up to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Panek’s anecdotes are informative and enjoyable, describing dark matter and dark energy’s reveal through the work of unusual physicists and astronomers. But being a visual learner, I needed to “see” the numbers. So… Voila! Behold the the Jelly Bean Universe, a visual representation explaining atoms (4% lightly-colored beans) and the rest of the universe (96% black beans, equaling 23% dark matter and 73% dark energy) — “dark” simply meaning unknown.

Bonus: Learn how to make your own universe on YouTube from Fermilab’s Kurt Riesselmann, the man who deconstructed John Updike’s Cosmic Gall poem.

Credit: Photo by Fermilab.

“There are thousands of da Vinci-likes that are out there...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:27:00 -0400

“There are thousands of da Vinci-likes that are out there in every field that are tying information together and growing beyond it.” —Todd Siler

Todd Siler’s talk on how ArtScience can save the world from January 2012. Siler is a respected visual artist with a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Interdisciplinary Studies in Psychology and Art. He coined the word ArtScience in 1990, stemming from his doctoral research on creativity during the eighties, which he defines as the process of “integrative thinking” that joins art with science and vice versa.

Credit: Video by TEDxTalks.

Reaching for the Stars, Aiming at Galaxies Vera Cooper Rubin...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:58:00 -0400

Reaching for the Stars, Aiming at Galaxies

Vera Cooper Rubin (b. 1928) is an American astronomer who pioneered research on galactic rotation and, according to Richard Panek, “discovered some of the most compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter,” although why her Wikipedia page is so sparse is beyond me.

Rubin never took advice to steer clear of science as a profession. She graduated from Vassar College with an undergraduate degree in astronomy — the only astronomy major in her class — and received her master’s from Cornell University in 1950 after not being allowed into Princeton’s astronomy program due to being a woman. That same year at twenty-two years old, Rubin presented her ill-received thesis challenging Hubble’s research to the American Astronomical Society in Haverford, Pennsylvania with newborn in tow (the first of four children, a geologist named David).

In 1954, she completed her doctorate at George Washington University in only two years with a dissertation titled “Fluctuations in the Space Distribution of the Galaxies.” Rubin became the first woman to be hired by Carnegie Institute’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) in 1965 where she still works today at the age of 84. Her entire body of work has been driven by sheer curiosity and questioning of the science before her time.

To graduates of American University’s Class of 2011, Rubin offered this advice: “If you really have something you want to do — and it surely doesn’t have to be astronomy — and you really think that it’s worth doing, you should go ahead and do it.” Pay no mind to naysayers. As Vera Rubin reminds us, only you are in charge of your destiny, and that’s why I love her story.

Credit: Photo by Archives and Special Collections of Vassar College.

Museum Mondays: Mapping Museum Experience On October 26, 2012,...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:07:00 -0400

Museum Mondays: Mapping Museum Experience

On October 26, 2012, The New York Times reported the results of a scientific study on the museum-going experience of 576 adults who visited Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum St. Gallen during June to August 2009. Martin Tröndle and his transdisciplinary team of researchers in sociology, psychology, art theory, curatorial practice, and museum visitor studies set out to understand the “art-affected state” — how the museum’s environment influences a visitor’s subconsciousness and emotional reactions to art as well as the psychological effects on their behavior. Dorothy Spears writes in the article:

Among Mr. Tröndle’s more surprising conclusions was that there appeared to be little difference in engagement between visitors with a proficient knowledge of art and “people who are engineers and dentists,” he said, adding that artists, critics and museum directors often walk into the middle of an exhibition space, scan it and then maybe look at one work before continuing on, while visitors with moderate curiosity and interest tend to move diligently from work to work and read text panels.

“We could almost say that knowledge is making you ignorant,” he said.

Interestingly, art perception and movement through the museum differs depending on a visitor’s educational background. An artistic (or aesthetic) result noted on the website is that “The more attention a work accumulates over the week, the more intense the representation becomes. The less a work is observed, the paler its field of influence.” Research on the museum experience is still fresh and ongoing as Tröndle et al. expect their publications to culminate by the end of this year. Learn more about the project here.

Online Article: Tröndle et al. (2011). The Entanglement of Arts and Sciences: On the Transaction Costs of Transdisciplinary Research Settings. Journal for Artistic Research, 1.

Credit: Video by France 24 Le Journal de la Culture via YouTube.

"This Hybrid Age, then, is the frontier of the Information Age. We will witness how humans co-evolve..."

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 13:01:00 -0400

“This Hybrid Age, then, is the frontier of the Information Age. We will witness how humans...

Hugh Aldersey-Williams on the impact of cadmium in art (from...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 10:43:09 -0400

Hugh Aldersey-Williams on the impact of cadmium in art (from Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc):

These superior colours made themselves indispensable to painters. A few had quibbles about their supposed artificiality — William Holman Hunt complained that cadmium yellow ‘at the best is very capricious’ — but most saw the bright, pure colours for what they were. The Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and above all the Fauvists made good use of cadmium — or, it would be more accurate to say, cadmium made possible these successive waves of artistic revolution. As each new tint became available, it powered in turn the yellow sunsets of Monet, the orange-soaked Arles interiors of van Gogh and Matisse’s Red Studio. People have romantically supposed that van Gogh was too hard up to buy the new pigments, while others believe the artist’s mental state may have been affected by his use of cadmium (although he was certainly also using more noxious pigments). What is sure is that he and his peers suddenly had access to a palette of colours of an intensity never seen before. (p. 289)

Credit: Henri Matisse, Red Studio, 1911 (via WikiPaintings).

NASA Langley Research Center’s Wind Tunnels These wind...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 18:41:00 -0400

NASA Langley Research Center’s Wind Tunnels

These wind tunnels are incredible — just look at the massive scale! The top image (taken in 1950) is of a 19-foot Pressure Wind Tunnel with a 35-feet high by 47-feet wide ellipse. The other photo (taken in 1990 -ed.) is of a 16-foot Transonic Tunnel built in 1939. The caption reads:

Operating transonically or across the speed of sound, the air in the test section travels from about 150 to 1,000 miles per hour. The tunnel is called the “16-Foot” because its test section is approximately 16 feet in diameter. The guide vanes, which form an ellipse 58-feet high and 82-feet wide, cut across each cylindrical tube at a 45 degree angle. Similar sets of vanes at the three other corners of the wind tunnel turn the air uniformly as it rushes through the 1000-foot race-track-like enclosed tube.

Another tidbit about the 16-foot tunnel describes how it was used during World War II to test cooling systems and high-speed propellers as well as some of the first builds of the atomic bomb. NASA Langley actually has dozens of wind tunnels. Today they’re used to test flight dynamics, transonic research, and subtle modifications in aircraft designs via computerized flight simulation.

Read more about NASA Langley’s wind tunnels here.

Credit: Photos courtesy of (top) NASA on The Commons and (bottom) NASA Langley Research Center.

“It’s always about captivating the impossible…...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 16:05:00 -0400

“It’s always about captivating the impossible… It’s what lives on the horizon of what we can think, and that’s where I feel this particular work of artists is exciting. It somehow deals with the edge of what is knowable.” —Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is last week’s guest on Modern Art Notes Podcast, talking a little about his recent exhibition Volcanoes and Shelters at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (on view from now until December 22nd). In July 2012, Eliasson traveled to Iceland three times to photograph fifty-six volcanic craters, documenting the geological age of Earth. The resulting photographs are breathtaking! Just take a look at the images above. Eliasson goes on to explain his interest in philosophy, perception, shared experiences, collaborating with scientists to solve creative problems, and the relationship between the aesthetic and the somatic. I’ve always loved his work and process as well as his creative drive. Click here to listen to an MP3 of Modern Art Notes Podcast: Olafur Eliasson (October 18, 2012).

Credit: All photos by Olafur Eliasson.

London Fieldworks’s Atmospheric Investigations at the...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 13:24:15 -0400

London Fieldworks’s Atmospheric Investigations at the North Pole

British artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson (known as London Fieldworks) use scientific research methods to translate natural phenomena for “poetic investigations into human consciousness and physiology.” For Polaria, Gilchrist and Joelson traveled to Hold With Hope peninsula on Northeast Greenland in August 2001 to investigate the region’s atmospheric phenomenon of continuous daylight lasting for several months as it transitioned into winter darkness. The purpose of the month-long expedition was to record the body’s responses to changing light using bio-monitoring equipment and a spectroradiometer to measure color variance at 6-hour intervals. London Fieldworks explain on their website:

In the field, the artist’s body was employed as a sensor evoking both the ethnographer Marcel Mauss’ notion that the body is our first technology, a set of instruments with which to generate knowing; and the Chilean biologist and cognitive scientist Francisco Varela’s idea of the body as a portable laboratory.

Gilchrist and Joelson used their data to design an installation for translating the arctic atmosphere into an interactive art experience. Polaria premiered in January 2002 at The Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Viewers were required to wear a white jacket and overshoes while sitting in a clear chair, placing their hands on electrically conductive bronze plates to trigger twenty-four different simulations of arctic daylight. Marcus Field reported his experience to The Independent, describing Polaria as “wonderful.” He writes:

This is how it works: you arrive in a dark and freezing boiler house to be confronted by a glowing cube the size of a domestic room. Around it, four giant photographs of barren landscapes are displayed on light boxes. These pictures taken in Greenland by Anthony Oliver during the summer months of 24-hour daylight are a clue to what you will experience inside.

Dressed in a padded white jacket and cloth shoes you enter the box, sit in a clear acrylic chair and place your hands on the two bronze panels on the arms. This is where the fun starts as a gentle electric currrent pulses through your body. When you make this connection the light in the room changes. With your hands flat on the bronze you get a bright white light. But as you wriggle your fingers and lift your hands the shade changes to blue-ish white, yellow and orange. It’s blinding at times, but also beautiful and strange. You might be happy not knowing what any of this is about. But if you’re the inquisitive or scientific type, artist Bruce Gilchrist and lighting designer Jo Joelson are on hand to tell you the exact nature of their research.

What you experience inside the room is a virtual representation of the summer light levels in Greenland, as measured by Joelson. And you trigger these as your own electronic skin resistance levels shift to match those of Gilchrist which were also measured during the pairs stay. It sounds complicated, but you can take or leave the data. And in any case, the artists themselves admit “there is as much shamanism as science going on”, which makes the experience of Polaria all the more delightful.

Polaria gave viewers a chance to transport their mind and body to the arctic through their senses using artistic simulation. The artists state in an interview with Verbeke Foundation, “It was our aim at the time to leave the ‘feeling’ and interpretation to the users of the installation once they had completed the (electrical) ‘circuit’ of Polaria.” London Fieldworks visited the North Pole on two other occasions, in 2004 and then to Svalbard in 2005 for Little Earth.

Credit: Photos by (top) Andy Paradise and (middle & bottom) Anthony Oliver. Video by London Fieldworks.

Bucky Balls in Madison Square Park, NYC Leo Villareal’s ...

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:32:00 -0400

Bucky Balls in Madison Square Park, NYC

Leo Villareal’s Bucky Balls sculpture is making a buzz on Instagram! Take a look at these photos (L-R) from @heybenhey, @alananews, @alisaq, @alizarcohen, @amanderz, @blaksquirrel, @iamsprung, @spressman, @steadyhand, and @thebushofghosts.

Paintings and lithographs by Joshua Lynn, a fellow SCAD graduate...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:52:00 -0400

Joshua Lynn, The Harbinger, lithograph with hand coloring, 2010.

Joshua Lynn, Tectonic, oil on canvas, 2010.

Joshua Lynn, Levee #2, oil on canvas, 2011.

Joshua Lynn, Aurora, lithography with hand coloring, 2010.

Paintings and lithographs by Joshua Lynn, a fellow SCAD graduate and recent faculty addition to the studio art department at College of Charleston. There’s definitely a bit of Buckminster Fuller influence in his work. He’s also a studiomate with Jonathan — both having similar interests in comic books, video games, art, and science.

Credit: All artwork by Joshua Lynn.

Mundus Subterraneus (2012) — a 28-foot long accordion-fold...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:00:26 -0400

Mundus Subterraneus (2012) — a 28-foot long accordion-fold book inspired by Athanasius Kircher’s work of the same title. Created by Los Angeles based artist Christopher Kardambikis.

Athanasius Kircher’s Subterranean World How we imagined...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:24:00 -0400

Athanasius Kircher’s Subterranean World

How we imagined the sun in the 17th century, as illustrated in Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665). I held this book in my hands this same time last year when installing a display of rare and antique books on selenography at College of Charleston.

Kircher (pronounced keersh-er), the German jesuit priest and scholar, is a celebrated polymath much like Leonardo da Vinci. Read about him, other polymaths, and the quest for knowledge in “Know it all,” a wonderful article by Larry Wolff in Boston College Magazine.