Archive for September, 2007
What lies behind our nose?
photography (CT scan rendering)
Kai-hung Fung, 2007
The 2007 Science Visualization Challenge winners have been announced. I love the two (tied) first place winners; although they are both photography, they look like watercolor. Above is Kai-hung Fung’s rainbow rendering of nasal sinuses:
Fung chose to use the patient’s CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because “[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful,” he says.
Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.
Fung digitally removed the bones, soft tissue, and fat from the rendering to create a solid “cast” of the sinuses’ air envelope. “The sinuses are hollows in the bone just like the central cavity in a papaya,” he says. One way to get a feel for the shape of such a cavity is to look at a cross section of it, but, he says, it’s much more readily apparent in a mold. (source)
Tied with Fung’s sinuses was an elegant botanical photo, “Irish Moss,” by Andrea Ottesen. The unfurled algae glows against deep black, like a golden mandala.
All the winners, including some remarkable videos, can be seen in this slideshow. The competition was jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science. Felice Frankel was one of the judges.
Notably, no awards were made in the category of illustration (defined as “Traditional or computer-assisted illustrations and drawings produced to conceptualize the unseen or recreate an object, process or phenomenon (technique). Illustrations and drawings rely primarily on the created image to convey meaning.”)
Also, none of the winners were in traditional media, like watercolor or ink. Does this represent a shift away from using traditional media to depict scientific concepts? I’m really not sure. I hope not. But I do know that traditional media can be a hard sell, both for the added time required to execute a piece, and perhaps because of an implied subjectivity/inaccuracy/”artistic license” when compared with photography. As scientific imaging techniques generate more and more intuitive, even “artistic” results, the need for an artist to reinterpret those results may be diminishing. It’s an interesting question.
September 29th, 2007
New York Movie
Edward Hopper, 1939
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
I went to the National Gallery’s Hopper exhibit last weekend - it was crowded, hot, and really long. I had no idea so many Hoppers could be concentrated in one space. It was too substantial a retrospective for a single visit - about halfway though, I hit my art appreciation saturation point. Which might be why I saw the luscious red-and-green theatre scene above and immediately thought, Ok, so she’s stepping out to talk on her cell phone.
Ack! Have cell phones gotten that ubiquitous? Has the classic pose of the pensive thinker, head in chin, become merely the crook-necked giveaway of the inappropriately chatty?
I hope I was just tired. Really, really tired.
If you can’t make it to the National Gallery for your surfeit of Hopper, try this excellent Smithsonian website for an overview of his art and context.
September 27th, 2007
La Belle Rosina (Two Young Girls)
Antoine Wiertz, 1847
Morbid Anatomy has some excellent posts lately - if it’s not on your blogroll already, you should go investigate! I was particularly taken with this painting. I suppose it’s memento mori, and I should be thinking about my own mortality and all. Or - wearing my former-anatomy-professor hat - admiring that nice skeleton. But my first impression was astonishment that the living girl - obviously meant to symbolize blooming health - is so Rubenesque. Scholar Peter Gay calls her “strapping,” and she is - strapping in the healthiest sense of the word. I wish I had as little cellulite as she does! The Belgium-born Wiertz, a somewhat controversial but popular painter in his own time, was clearly influenced by Rubens. Today, most Americans would probably consider Wiertz’s nude overweight - what is she, a 12? Egad!
Bless those Romantics, who would no doubt have found Britney Spears too bony in her recent VMA appearance, and would have fattened her up with some nice mutton and beer. (Or, alternatively, bled her. I didn’t say the last century was all good).
It’s also worth noting that in this picture, “beautiful Rosine” is the skeleton, not the living girl. So says the helpful label pasted to her skull.
September 26th, 2007
Apologies for the downtime. I had a bit of trouble getting it through to my web host that I needed to upgrade my bandwidth!
Thanks for the love, y’all, but you just loved me into a hosting package upgrade - for the second time in a year. Dang!
September 24th, 2007
Pecoxus Ferexus
ink and resin
Dustin Yellin , 2006
Resin blocks are commonly used to preserve medical specimens so they can be viewed from all angles without the prgressive fragmentation of a specimen suspended in solution. But in artist Dustin Yellin’s hands, resin is used to deceive: “specimens” such as the one above are not really solid objects, but illusions created using ink. And although the result is convincingly 3D, like a true biological specimen, it can defy classification. Consider the Pecoxus above - is it flora or fauna? Are those skeletonized leaves or the brittle wings of an insect?
According to Culture Catch,
The art of Dustin Yellin is a cross between painting and sculpture, science and science fiction. His magical objects, some taller than the viewer, are comprised of dozens of layers of resin that are meticulously painted with acrylic and inks - layer atop layer - until a sinuous “life form” appears that looks like it would be at home in sea, sand, or air.
Each object is a comment on nature, genetic experimentation, color and form, culminating, in this reviewer’s mind, in some of the freshest and most distinct art being made today. I was reminded, even before I saw the exhibition’s title, of suspended animation because these works are expressions frozen in time. And they have an otherworldly feel, like encapsulated specimens brought back from space exploration, that gives the entire installation a strange viral cast. (source)
It’s absolutely exhausting imagining the process that must go into Yellin’s work. My favorite is this one, which reminds me of some kind of transdimensional alien overlord from Dr. Who. . .or wait. . . is that the Eye of Sauron?
Xexus Knotilus
resin and ink
Dustin Yellin, 2007
Thanks to peacay for yet another heads-up on this one!
September 23rd, 2007
Fantasy author Robert Jordan died this week, without completing his 12-book Wheel of Time saga. His death is the sort of event I most feared as a lonely teenager, when I lived in books: that an author would die before tying up the loose ends, and their imagined world would be left suspended in ambiguity forever. Imagine if JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien hadn’t been given the time to finish their masterworks. Although I stopped following The Wheel of Time years ago, and almost never read fantasy anymore, I do feel a pang of regret that Jordan never got to see things through. But his wife and cousin say they have sufficient notes to publish the final book of the series according to his wishes.
Whatever you may think of Jordan as an author, as a man he earned the friendship of some remarkable people - among them the brilliant John M. (Mike) Ford, who died last year. I’ve had this poem of Ford’s knocking around in my head for a while, and given his friendship with Jordan, it seems like the right time to post it. I believe it has only appeared online, originally at Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog Electrolite. Ford seems to have written it in only a few hours, to meet a hypothetical challenge posed in a post earlier that day. If only we could all toss things like this out in casual conversation. . .
De Vermis
John M. Ford
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days –
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
More of John M. Ford’s occasional works (at Making Light)
September 22nd, 2007
Zeppelin
Digital
Mikel Robinson, 2007
Candles and Ghosts (blog); Galerie de Illuminata (etsy)
I’ve always loved antique patinas, rusty found objects, and vintage photographs, but these days it seems like EVERYONE has joined the mixed media bandwagon. Suddenly we’re saturated with sepia ancestors, butterfly wings, grungy fonts, and faux-scientific labels. I’m hesitant to work on the mixed media pieces I have on my back burner, because I’m afraid they’ll seem too trendy! My protests that I was doing collage before ephemeramania may sound disingenuous, but I really was. (I also routinely anticipate Pottery Barn trends by a year. And I was never a fan of New Kids on the Block or Milli Vanilli. See? You don’t believe me, do you?)
Although there are hundreds (thousands?) of creative people out there making lovely collages, I rarely find an ephemera artist who makes a strong impression on me with his or her body of work. Mikel Robinson is such an artist. I love his judicious use of illumination, which evokes the primitive technology of advertising lightboxes and magic lanterns, or the gentle fading of souvenirs abandoned under a perpetually sunstruck window. He understands the light-spirited whimsy-wrapped-in-history that is the heart of ephemeral art.
But at the same time, there’s a deeper tension in Robinson’s pieces. Zeppelin, the steampunky image above, is at first glance ridiculous. Check out those coke-bottle goggles! But it’s also a tragic juxtaposition: a humble, self-taught amateur inventor, whose aspirations to flight are embodied in a broken wing and a black machine of war. Sadly funny; damaged, yet stubbornly resourceful - it’s a quintessentially American take on Icarus.
Lullaby
Mixed Media
Mikel Robinson, 2003
Although there may be a lot going on under the surface, Robinson keeps his pieces refreshingly simple, resisting the insidious urge to layer and texture an image to death. He lets the artifacts speak for themselves, with minimal (or no) framing: in short, he knows when to stop! In his restraint, Robinson is more closely aligned with the intimate assemblage tradition of Joseph Cornell, than with current trends in altered books or scrapbooking - though the stray butterfly wing here and there does keep his work looking current.
Mikel Robinson’s work is available through his website and through his etsy gallery.
September 20th, 2007
Author and illustrator Peter Sis has written a beautiful book called The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin
which follows Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and re-creates the naturalist’s travel-stained maps and notebooks. The book was released in 2003, and got a gazillion awards, but I haven’t ever seen it in a bookstore. Of course, I’ve also been living in regions where children’s books on evolution are not, uh, the hot gift concept of the season (though such a gift would be a good way to get yourself disinvited from future juvenile birthday festivities).
Anyway, if you happen to need a present for a budding young naturalist, this is ideal. View the gorgeous animated excerpt here and see if you don’t agree!
A MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Sis has written many books, including Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei
, and illustrated still more, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. He has a quiet sense of absurdity, particularly about domestic life. Here’s his explanation of why he switched from pastel to watercolor:
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. There was a shortage of everything (freedom most of all) — and only one kind of paper, one kind of ink, one kind of paint. I was one happy artist when I became an illustrator in the U.S.A. So many materials! I settled on oil pastels, which I scratched into. That created lots of residue, tiny pieces of paint everywhere. It didn’t matter as long as I was single. It started to matter a bit when I met my wife-to-be and we lived in a loft. It mattered a lot when we had our first baby. It mattered even more when Madeleine began to crawl. We built a wall, but I had nightmares about her getting into my paint thinner and X-Acto blades. I switched to watercolors, but I still wasn’t sure how safe they were. On the other hand, I found out that baby formula dissolves aquarelle. Madeleine loved it. I had to look for a studio outside the house. No more paints at home. I found myself a studio — a little apartment, really — with a kitchen.
I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil). (Peter Sis, “Tiny Pieces of Paint“, in The Horn Book)
One of the most amusing illustrations in The Tree of Life depicts the young Darwin fleeing a nightmarish theatre of dissection (and, fortuitously, his career in medicine):
Poor Darwin! But what a good thing for biology that he was so squeamish. . .
September 16th, 2007
A model of female anatomy by an anonymous artist
Collection of Axel Vervoordt
Photo: David Yoder, NYT
Two anatomic models
Collections of Axel Vervoordt / Museo di Storia Naturale, Donazione Conte Querini Stampalia
Artempo exhibition in Venice, Italy; NYT review and slide show
via bookofjoe and le divan fumoir bohemien
Previously on bioephemera: Wombs, Waxes and Wonder Cabinets
September 13th, 2007
CONELRAD: Atomic Secrets | The girl, the men, and the atom
From the November 18, 1957 LIFE magazine, a full page ad sponsored by America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies.
CONELRAD is just too much fun.
September 12th, 2007
Bibliophiles: bookmark this link! Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries.
One of my favorite blogs, Curious Expeditions, has written what may be the definitive blog post for library lovers. I’ve only been to four of the libraries on the list, but I was at one of them just today, so it was a timely post.
There are definitely more beautiful libraries in Europe, but I’m excited to pop over to Georgetown and see the deliciously steampunky Captain Nemo Riggs Library. Can’t wait for a giant squid to swim past those portholes.
I posted previously on the Real Gabinete.
More good library stuff and links here.
September 10th, 2007
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended skeletons:
Illustrated London News, 1845
The Hunterian Gallery before the wars (source)
So I was shocked when I entered the grey, columned Royal College, climbed a graciously curving stairway, and found this extremely modern, two-story crystal-and-glass atrium:
The Crystal Gallery at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
Definitely not what I was expecting! But it grew on me. I love ornate curiosity cabinets, but there is something very elegant about unadorned bones, and simple glass jars. Biological structures are so rich with intrinsic beauty, there’s no real need to gild the lily (that means you, Damien Hirst).
Though the new Hunterian galleries are peaceful and refined, I felt a slight pang of regret for the railings and wood cabinetry Darwin would have touched, when he studied here in the 1830s and 40s. Unfortunately, many of the specimens Darwin saw were destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was bombed in 1941. Like the gallery housing it, John Hunter’s collection is no longer what it once was. But what remains is still pretty darn amazing.
Hunter, a renowned surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, worked tirelessly to collect medical anomalies like the 7′7″ skeleton of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne (for which Hunter paid 130 pounds). He also amassed thousands of less exotic teaching specimens: though he did not have access to formaldehyde, he took wet preservation in alcohol to its highest level. After Hunter’s death in 1793, his ~13,000 specimens were purchased by the British state. The collection would be maintained (and enlarged) by the Royal College of Surgeons for the next two hundred years.
Hunter’s collection is organized according to some rather unusual curatorial precepts. As a physician and early experimentalist, Hunter was less interested in taxonomy than in physiology. He grouped specimens not by family or type, but as exemplars of processes - mouthparts and digestion, reproduction, etc. From the Victorian perspective,
The design of Mr. Hunter, in making this collection, was to exhibit the gradations of nature, from the most simple state in which life is found to exist, up to the most perfect and most complex of the animal creation, man himself. By his art, he was able to expose and preserve in a dried state, or in spirits, the corresponding parts of animal bodies; so that the various links in the chain of a perfect being may be readily followed and clearly understood. (Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights, 1844)
But Hunter’s collection does not exemplify linear progression, so much as ramification: the incredible diversity of ways that animal forms have evolved to accomplish given functions. Most of the specimens displayed here are not human; the Hunterian is a shrine not to Man, but to our entire extended family.
I first heard of the Hunterian through the delightful book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture of Natural History Museums
, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
Without a grasp of Hunter’s underlying principles, the cases seemed slightly irrational. In one case, marked “Digestion,” I found various dissections of mammals, parasitic worms, a cicada, a locust, slugs, a squid, a vulture, a woodpecker, and a puffin. This hodgepodge arrangement follows no taxonomic grouping. . . Individual species, genera, and even families are displayed together to illustrate the unique ways that their structures fit the functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, and so forth. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 63)
My copy of Pickled Heads has been with in storage with the rest of my belongings for months, so I’d forgotten Asma’s words. But when I walked up to the first case of Hunter’s jars (mouthparts of squid, beaks, teeth, mouthparts of bees and cicadas), I immediately remembered Asma’s description, and recognized what he meant. The intestines of fish were right next to the stomachs of mammals, including a rat which substantially outweighed the tiny human fetus next to it. There is no mistaking the idiosyncratic style of this little museum, so different from the aggressively educational dioramas of the London Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Modern biology museums are full-color, multimedia entertainment factories - it’s a way to engage the audience, true, but it sometimes teeters toward the tawdry and didactic. Asma expresses the difference far better than I could:
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Hunterian Museum–besides the bleached and bloated “monsters”–is that it’s not intended for a lay audience. The Hunterian doesn’t really care whether the average person is “getting it.” This is unexpectedly unnerving, since most other museum encounters come complete with torrents of helpful information. Almost every museum specimen that you have ever encountered, be it a fossil, a jar, or a mount, is accompanied by a plaque, a chart, or a recording that announces to you–even before a question has been formulated in your head-”what you are seeing is so and so. . . .”
What was Hunter trying to communicate when he grouped his specimens? This question alone gives one a more interactive relationship with the museum than any computer gadgetry could. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 78-79)
It’s a little unfair to say the Hunterian doesn’t care if visitors “get it.” I saw a class of kids around twelve years old when I was there, moving in and out of a room set aside for teaching purposes, and they seemed to be “getting it” pretty well. The point is, they were being allowed to draw their own conclusions, and with a little guidance, to simply wander and wonder. Refreshing indeed.
What do I do when confronted with a mute collection of natural wonders? Why, break out the sketchbook. But I didn’t have one! It’s been so long since I felt peaceful enough to sketch in a museum - I’m normally buffeted by thousands of obnoxious children, and worse, tourists who act like children. I wasn’t prepared. I had to buy a little 5″x8″ Moleskine at a nearby bookshop, and sketch with a mechanical pencil while sitting on the floor. Since the museum does not allow photography, not even for earnest, sincere bloggers, these little doodles are all I have to represent Hunter’s myriad curiosities. I can’t believe I didn’t even get to the bound foot, or the lion with rickets, or the male and female ivory anatomical models. Argh.
Sepia officinalis (preparation showing the mouthparts of a cuttlefish)
Hunterian Museum
If you are active in the biomedical professions (and yes, they will ask for proof of this, like an ID card) you may also visit the Wellcome Anatomy and Pathology Museum upstairs.
At first glance, the Wellcome collection seems like the neglected younger sibling of the Hunterian prodigal son (or, if you prefer, the Harry-under-the-stairs to the spoiled Hunterian Dudley Dursley). It’s one outdated, drab room, filled with hundreds of specimen jars. No sexy lighting or pedagogical dioramas here - to figure out what you’re viewing you have to thumb through well-used, slightly sticky binders of notes. These binders are tucked in shelves or tables, wherever the last user left them; I couldn’t find one of the binders at all, so I’m still in the dark about some of the skeletal abnormalities I saw.
But the biggest difference is that the Wellcome specimens are all Homo sapiens, representing a variety of obscure, rare, or dramatic medical conditions - conditions, like keratin horns, that I never expected to personally see in the flesh! And they’re generally in better condition than the Hunterian specimens (most date from the 20th century). I could have spent five to ten minutes examining a single specimen, and there are hundreds of prosections in the Museum. I was completely overwhelmed, and didn’t sketch a single thing (sorry).
I wondered why the Hunterian and Wellcome collections were spatially isolated in this way, and the Wellcome closed to the public. It couldn’t be about shock value - some of the Hunterian exhibits were pretty gruesome. So I asked the head of conservation, who told me that it has to do with the legal status of the collection.
The UK has a long history of scandalous “body-snatching” (see this Curious Expeditions post for more on that nefarious activity). Since the 1832 Anatomy Act, enacted to discourage the illicit sale of body parts, specimens like those in the Wellcome collection have been more and more tightly restricted. Since 2006, the Human Tissues Authority has regulated the donation, disposal, and use of medical specimens and cadavers, and requires special licesning for the public display of remains from persons who died since 1906 (according to their FAQ, they also require licenses of plastination exhibits, such as Body Worlds). But since John Hunter lived, collected, and died years before the Anatomy Act, his collection can be displayed without the restrictions that impact the pathology collection.
Skull of 25-year-old man showing enlargement due to hydrocephalus
Liston collection at Hunterian Museum
I highly recommend both the Hunterian and Wellcome collections to any biologist, artist, kunstkammer fan, or interested layperson visiting London. The Hunterian is perfectly suitable for older children, and surprisingly peaceful for a (free!) museum so close to both the British Library and Inns of Court. There were tourists everywhere, but only a handful stopping by to see John Hunter’s life’s work. You might make a day of it and also visit the Wellcome Collection, around the corner near UCL, or Sir John Soanes Museum, which is literally across the street - but then, I still need to post about those, don’t I?
So much to see, so much to blog, so little time. What a wonderful world.
September 9th, 2007
The cephalofabulous Pink Tentacle Blog uncovers paper artist Taketori’s origami creations:
Kiri-origami artist Taketori cuts and folds paper to make realistic-looking insects. Each critter is crafted from a single sheet, without glue, and paint is often used to add to the realism.
The artist, like God, seems inordinately fond of beetles.
More here. Taketori’s homepage (cheesy midi music warning)
September 9th, 2007
“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
Writer Madeleine L’Engle died Thursday of natural causes. The NYT obituary is here.
I could say so much about her books, but every compliment seems inadequate. When I first read A Wrinkle in Time, and encountered Meg Murry’s mother cooking stew over a bunsen burner, I did not know what a bunsen burner was. I’d never met a scientist or a professor. And although I understood too well the isolation felt by strange little Charles Wallace, I’d have to wait until high school to realize that mitochondria and Saint Patrick’s Breastplate were real, too. And the first line of Wrinkle is a quote from Bulwer-Lytton! Such delight, when a children’s writer is unafraid to draw freely on her liberal-arts education, to fill her books with deep, rich, real things. She must have known her young readers would not encounter them again for years - if ever.
No other children’s author has so easily mixed science through her books, nor so successfully captured the very large and the very small, that dizzying leap between cosmology and cell biology. I still think of L’Engle every time I encounter the word tesseract, or mitochondria, or anandamide. Ananda is Sanskrit for bliss, but I prefer L’Engle’s lyrical definition: “the joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.” L’Engle’s books are all about joy - the joys of the mind and the joy of being loved. Somewhere along the way, the large, open, loving families of scientists and thinkers that she created became my ideal - a dream of the family I would like to have for myself.
A list of L’Engle’s books
Official announcement from L’Engle’s family (and where to send memorials). There will be a public memorial service TBA in New York City.
September 8th, 2007
I saw this at Bibliodyssey. The next day I had to go back and click the link again.
A few days later I went shopping at the always-inspiring Anthropologie, and on returning home, had to go back and browse again. Then I was putting up some of my antique prints on the walls of my new apartment and. . . you guessed it.
I cannot get over how beautiful this book is: the quintessential bibliocabinet of curiosities. And the images are HUGE. Enjoy.
BibliOdyssey: Museum Gottwaldianum
September 8th, 2007
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