Art
grrlscientist | February 1, 2006Today, Chris Landau sent me a link to his Master's Thesis entitled The Flocking Party. Chris is in the MFA department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This a fascinating online production that describes one week in the life of two fictional young scientists, Frank, and his brother, Calvin, as presented in Frank's online journal. This very basic science fiction story takes place in the near future in the lab of the shadowy Doctor Harp: in the year 2035, Frank is studying invasive bird species that have been infected by the mysterious Hebbets virus. Hebbets virus is an innovative…
grrlscientist | January 31, 2006
Magnolia Warbler, Dendroica magnolia (Wilson)
(Detail) By Tony Henneberg.
This birdday card was sent to me last year by my friend, Tony, who is a very talented artist (click on the image to be magically transported to his beautiful webpage). This card is a detail from a larger painting of his. Tony is currently wandering through the jungles of Suriname, where he will be for approximately six weeks, "looking at birds, big trees and giant otters" as he told me before he left. He promises to share any interesting photographs of birds with me upon his return in February, which of course means…
grrlscientist | January 26, 2006
The Cry (or The Scream)
By Edvard Munch (1893)
(click on image for a larger version in its own window)
Many people think this painting depicts a man experiencing an existential crisis, but I disagree. I think it depicts a man whose computer just crashed and ate all his $#@%&@!! work!
Why am I posting this here? Let me sum it up in one word:
Blogger
Need I say more?
This evening, I was putting the finishing touches on the text file that was supposed to be this week's installment of Birds in the News when Blogger crashed and ATE IT! It destroyed the document, all those beautiful links…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2006
Sun in an Empty Room by Edward Hopper (1963).
(click image for desktop wallpaper).
no loneliness, space
Morris to New York City
no space, loneliness
tags: haiku, Edward Hopper, Empty room
dmunger | February 14, 2005Today's reading is "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition," by Aaron Kozbelt of the University of Chicago (Visual Cognition, 2001).
We need to incorporate many skills in order to make visual sense of the world. We must be able to discern objects even when we have incomplete visual information, pick out shapes from complex environments, and mentally rotate images to compare them with other images. All these phenomena have been measured by psychologists, and they have found that different individuals have varying degrees of skill at them.
What kind of people are best at these visual skills?…