Art
jtoney | March 3, 2011
Lady Gaga's new perfume - could it be an intersection of art, fashion, marketing, desire, pheromones, molecular biology? Perhaps.
From The New York Times interview posted today, "Lady Gaga at Paris Fashion Week":
Lady Gaga:
It's a smell of many different things, I don't want to give too much away. But I do want to say that I took a sample of my own blood and extracted the molecular structure and the scent of that, and injected it into the perfume so it would smell like and feel like me.
Fascinating - how does one "extract molecular structure" of blood and "inject" into the perfume? I am…
milhayser | March 2, 2011
On Universe, Claire L. Evans takes us all the way back to 1966, when an event called 9 Evenings happened in New York City. This "epic art salon" brought together ten artists with a bevy of engineers from Bell Laboratories, who "helped the artists with complex technical components to their pieces." FM transmitters, infrared cameras, amplifiers and photoelectric cells contributed to "performances, installations, and dances that blended technology with fine art to somewhat legendary effect." Claire has pictures and video of the event on Universe. And on Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer shows us…
cagapakis | March 2, 2011I recently learned that one of my advisors and mentors is not only a great scientist, but also a poet. This poem was written a few years ago for his biotech company's clean-up day poetry contest and won him a $5 gift certificate to Dunkin Donuts. I think it's actually quite good and deserves more attention than that so I'm reproducing it here, with permission from the author.
Squeal by Jeff Way (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg):
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cleanliness, crazed drooling wrapped in lab coats, dragging themselves through the late-night fluorescent…
jtoney | February 28, 2011
Source: Flickr user ppjumpping
I've been a fan of Natalie Portman since she was 12 years old, performing in an extraordinary, compelling film, "The Professional (1994)." In addition to being an Academy Award winning best actress, she's also a co-author on a Journal of Chemical Education article. Yes, even chemists can take on Hollywood.
When Natalie Portman was a High School student at Syosset High School in Long Island, then Natalie Hershlag, she co-authored this paper in The Journal of Chemical Education:
"A Simple Method To Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar"…
jtoney | February 27, 2011
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Lily Goldsmith from Valencia CC.
My posting, "Texting As Killer, As Savior" generated strong interest and I wanted to share some more compelling graphic designs from Dr. Robin Landa's Wiley Student Advertising Design Challenge, "Texting and Driving Don't Mix." Which one do you think conveys the message most clearly?
milhayser | February 23, 2011
If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, then what of the hand that rocks the world? Dr. Jeffrey Toney reports that Google recently showed its revolutionary colors with speak2tweet, a service that enabled netless Egyptians to access Twitter over the phone. After breaking with China over censorship issues last year, Google's political conscience is becoming clear. Their Android operating system powers smartphones around the world, their driverless cars turn heads in California, and the new information services just keep on coming. Jessica Palmer shares the Google Art Project,…
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2011
Here's another artisan taking inspiration from archaeology: Ted Bouck made the above arm ring out of brass sheet, punch-decorated and silver-plated it. Ted comments, "I left the perimeter wave from stamping because I liked the organic look. The diamond with dot inside is a period stamp, though not from the York armring. I did not want to make my armring an exact duplicate." He is currently working with new versions of the Small Punched type of domed oblong brooch that was common in south-east Sweden in the early 8th century.
Below is the original: a gold arm ring from the Vale of York hoard…
jtoney | February 16, 2011
© Reza Deghati courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards
Source.
This evening, I had the pleasure and honor to meet photographer Reza Deghati at one of his exhibits {The Human Rights Institute at Kean University}, "One World, One Tribe." His images convey a compelling story of the unity of the human race.
"The message of One World, One Tribe is we all have the same blood all over the world. The blood is the same color," said Reza. "We may have different colors, different languages, but the essence of humanity is the same for everybody."
Reza shared a story about a "lizard on a nail" with…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2011[More about archaeology, reenactment, darkages, shields; arkeologi, vendeltiden, Uppsala, sköld.]
David Huggins is a member of the Wulfheodenas Dark Ages re-enactment group. Among mid-1st millennium Scandies, a wulfheoden was a kind of berserker warrior, only one who identified with wolves rather than bears. David recently commissioned Polish master artisan Grzegorz Kulig to make a replica of a display shield from boat grave number 7 at Valsgärde near Uppsala, whose inhabitant was a 7th century petty king among the Swedes. I think this is a thing of astonishing beauty.
All archaeological…
cevans | February 14, 2011
In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within…
cagapakis | February 11, 2011Synthetic biologists work on designing living cells, but engineered bacteria don't usually come up when you think of "designer" things. This year however, a synthetic biology design is up for a Brit Insurance Design of the Year award, up against the Lanvin Spring collection, Angry Birds, and Rock Band 3! Designers Daisy Ginsberg and James King worked in collaboration with the 2009 Cambridge iGEM team (including awesome blogger Lab Rat) to imagine ways that people could use bacteria engineered to produce pigments in the future. Check out their video about the science and design of E. chromi:
cevans | February 8, 2011
To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!
First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy Klüver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.
Klüver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence…
jtoney | February 6, 2011
Source. Linkin Park's Chester Bennington / Photo by Ian Witlen.
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one... Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Bhagavad Gita
From the first moment of "Requiem" from A Thousand Suns, ripples of peripatetic paroxysms began to spread across the sold out Madison Square Garden arena the evening of February 4. Peripatetic, because the source of LP's music was dynamic, shifting from percussion to keyboards to the trading lead rapid-fire vocals of rapping Mike Shinoda to…
cagapakis | February 4, 2011The Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative Graduate Consortium hosted a fun workshop during the January term where students learned about microscopy by taking some amazing pictures of food microbes. The images taken with the scanning electron microscope of sauerkraut, kombucha, and some stinky cheeses show beautiful and complex landscapes made by and of microbes.
Sauerkraut is fermented by cute rod-shaped lactic acid bacteria:
Kombucha, a tea fermented by a combination of yeasts and bacteria, looks incredible under the microscope, where you can see the dense mesh of cellulose fibers that the…
jtoney | January 26, 2011
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"L" and alliterations thereof, turns out to have immense importance in literature and science. Science and art can co-exist. Surprised? Let me explain.
The creator of the infamous character "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov, turns out to have been not only one of the most influential writers of the past century, but to have been an amateur scientist with keen insight into evolution, recently validated by modern DNA technologies.
"Lolita" is a novel that has been revered, reviled as pornography, banned and studied by scholars since its publication in 1958. I am in no way qualified to…
cagapakis | January 23, 2011Industrial food production separates us from our food, increasing the distance from living thing to food product. As factories continue to import corn and export almost everything we eat, writers like Michael Pollan urge us to eat "real" food, and projects like the Slow Food movement have gained over 100,000 members who strive to preserve traditional and regional ways of growing and cooking food. At the same time, a growing number of young contemporary artists also explore the distance between us and what we eat by bringing secretions of the human body into food production.
Human secretions…
vlicata | January 22, 2011A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying, because liars know the truth, while bullshitters just yak away without regard for the truth or non-truth of what they are saying; and 3) that since a person cannot ever really know him/her self, any sincere expression of one's feelings is bullshit.
This…
cagapakis | January 15, 2011
With The Symbiotic Household, Elliott P. Montgomery seeks to find answers to problems caused by climate change. Low-cost, low energy solutions are proposed through complex genetic engineering of domesticated insects--"What better way to deal with a future need than with a future technology?"
The project is deliberatively provocative; "By offering a problematic answer, I want to encourage viewers to question the entire scenario and thereby take part in the discussion." What do you think?
via we make money not art
pharyngula | January 12, 2011…is an Octothrone.
This belongs in my house. Unfortunately, if you have to wonder how much it costs, you can't afford it.
(via Bioephemera)
cagapakis | December 7, 2010An incredible (if unscientific) look at the history of life:
The video has been around for a few months and has a gajillion hits so sorry if I'm late to the party, I just had to share!
By Blu, via Bio Fiction