When I was a kid and colour television was rare, people would shrug away the need for it saying that the only good reason for having a colour set would be marine documentaries.
But it’s not only the colours and optics that are different, also form and movement are part of the experience. Life in water is different in shape, structure and kinetics. Evolution in a marine environment makes creatures that are very different from ground- or air-bound life. Wentworth D’Arcy Thompson, a Victorian scientist, set out to demonstrate the mathematical and physical aspects of under water biological processes in his book “On Growth and Form” (1917). For marine life that would be gravity, pressure, scale, osmosis, and buoyancy.
I mention the book here because it is very readable, even for the layman, and even after more than 90 years. Without reading it I probably would not have realized why it is such a smart idea for the artist/filmmaker Saskia Olde Wolbers to use liquids. Olde Wolbers’ stories are told in voice-over while showing seemingly unrelated going-ons in submersed sets that are smaller than life-size. She fills these with – next to more recognizable props – fluids of different densities . And that definitely makes for an uncanny visual experience.
But even without knowing the precise techniques used, you feel somehow that those are the particular optics and physics at work in this shot from her 2003 film “Interloper”.
Reading on Saskia Olde Wolbers can be found in Tyler Green’s art blog. An interview about a video that relates to the Three Gorges dam. Olde Wolbers’ images at Maureen Paley Gallery. The image shown courtesy of Maureen Paley Gallery.
This is the fourth of four contributions from undergraduates in Casey Dunn’s Bio0041 Invertebrate Zoology class. This episode is inspired by the fascinating behavior of the flamingo tongue snail, Cyphoma gibbosum, which is described in further detail in Casey Dunn’s earlier post.
We have managed to create a huge memorial to human waste at a location that is remote from everyday human activity. In 2008 the predicted existence of a floating mass of pelagic plastic, a giant Garbage Patch, was confirmed in the stable waters of the North Atlantic gyre where plastic debris is accumulating over an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
Anna Hepler is a sculptor based in Portland, Maine. The subject of Hepler’s work is often the way a multitude of interlocked entities form a shape or a flock, spreading through space. On learning about the Garbage Patch, she incorporated it in a project for one of her first large scale installations. In January 2009 she spent a week together with eight assistants sowing together discarded plastic from a Portland recycling center. Once stitched together, the plastic nets formed a giant boat hull hanging from the walls and ceiling of the Center of Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport.
An extended article about the project can be found here. Also, Hepler will be recreating this piece in the Portland Museum of Art in 2010 under the title ‘The Great Haul’.
Many people are familiar with the dazzling plates of Haeckel’s “Kunstformen der Natur” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur). Haeckel set a standard for further similar undertakings, and at the same time stood firmly in a long tradition of documenting the abundance of strange creatures in the natural world. From a spectator’s point of view,it was and still is not easy to know or to see which creatures are real and which are imaginary, for the layman to decide which details are observed and which are made up fromstereotypes,preconceptions or simply for reasons of symmetry or convenience.
Marnix Everaert’s (http://www.marnix-everaert.be) is a Belgian artist, a European expert on non-toxic printing techniques. His drawings remind the viewer of Haeckels pages. Of course this is not the same encyclopaedic undertaking. There are differences of composition, for instance Everaert’s creatures are sometimes drawn on a common backdrop in a way that suggests that they share an imaginary space, while Haeckel’s items are often laid out on an empty page. Obviously Everaert is a contemporary artist and his style is looser than the standards that were set for 19th century illustrations, scientific or otherwise. Also, there seems to be more attention to structure than to detail, as if Everaert is taking elements from a repertory of geometric shapes that together constitute a generic type of creature. But for the viewer the question can be raised again: without more investigation or sound prior knowledge it is not possible to know what is real and what is imagined.
Eric Roettinger and Mattias Ormestad have launched kahikai.org to showcase some of their beautiful animal photographs. Both are postdocs in Mark Martindale’s lab at the University of Hawaii, where I also spent a couple years. In addition to presenting their photos, kahikai (which means “one ocean” in Hawaiian) will be serving as a repository for primary developmental biology data, such as in situ hybridization images. Eric also curates a set of photos he has taken of other subjects at livingonabeach.org.
We are pleased to present Episode 1 of CreatureCast, by Sophia Tintori. In this first video, Alison Sweeney talks about work that has been done in the Morse lab on Squid iridescence. Audio production and animations are by Sophia, who normally studies siphonophores in the Dunn lab. Music by Lucky Dragons (here, and slowed down versions of this and this) and Sophia on the musical saw.
(Episode 1 was replaced with a new slightly different cut on August 18, 2009. It is now higher resolution and includes a couple different musical tracks.)
Erwin Keustermans wrote me a couple years ago with some questions about symmetry in animals, and how it relates to his beautiful illustrations. Since then I’ve regularly checked in on his work, and visitors to the lab often admire his postcards.
His illustrations remind me of the science I work on in a couple different ways. There is the tie-in to modular growth in colonial animals, like siphonophores. There is also the abstract likeness to graphs of gene similarity used to cluster genes in phylogenomic analyses.
