Seed Media Group: Blog
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
A spider web as man would build it
With the help from astrophysicists, spider researchers, architects, engineers, and a lot of elastic black rope, Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno has constructed a gigantic version of a Black Widow’s web in Bonniers Konsthall (Bonnier’s Hall of Art) in Stockholm. (The hall is about 400 cubic meters.) The project, called ‘14 Billions’ is inspired by how scientists use the spider web to model the structure and origin of the universe. Along with the exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall is publishing a book with texts from the artist and the involved scientists as well as producing a lecture series with physicists and mathematicians.
Saraceno is Inspired by architects and theoreticians such as Richard Buckminster Fuller, Peter Cook, and Yona Friedman. His main interests as an artist is to explore how scientific innovations can develop new ideas for a more sustainable society and how art may build dreams for the future.
14 Billions is up until June 20.
Tomás Saraceno in front of his web.
Friday, February 26, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Science news in review
Every Thursday, Seedmagazine.com’s home page editor Evan Lerner comments on the course of science reporting and publishing. Week in Review is an ongoing analyses of how changes in media, publishing, technology, and science policy affect the scientific conversation; why science news are being reported the way they are, who is talking under which agenda, and whose point of view seems to be the most accurate.
In this week’s column, Lerner looks at the entertainment industry to ponder the role of movies as vehicles for scientific ideas.
Illustration: Mike Pick
Saturday, February 20, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Transdisciplinary design & and its friends
Parsons The New School for Design is launching a Masters of Fine Arts program in Transdisciplinary Design in the fall. Jamer Hunt, chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons who is directing the program, recently took to the streets of New York to ask people if they could explain what transdisciplinary design actually means. In the end, he happens upon a certain someone at the Museum of Modern Art who can tell us exactly…
Leading up to the launch of the new program, Parson’s is arranging a lecture series that’s exploring the increasingly expanded role of the designer:
From Hunt’s Transdisciplinary blog:
“Designers are rethinking their practices as they increasingly confront a world in which the complexity and interconnectedness of its people, infrastructures, networks, and economies challenges traditional, disciplinary responses. Designers are increasingly designing businesses, services, experiences, policies, and even emergent social forms; and along the way they are inventing new methods, new tools, and new ways of conceiving design.”
This is the line-up of speakers:
Tuesday, February 23, 6-8 pm
Yochai Benkler, professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and Anna Valtonen, rector of the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden on:
How are networks—global, immediate, and decentralized—changing the way we live, work and design? What are the possibilities and challenges of working and living in an always on, always connected global marketplace? And how can we leverage the power of these networks to transform lives for the better?
Thursday, March 25, 6-8 pm
March 25, Andrew Blauvelt, design director and curator at the Walker Art Center in conversation with eating designer Marije Vogelzang, Principal, Proef and Studio Marije Vogelzang in Amsterdam on:
What are the pressures on design consultancies and businesses as the rules of the game are shifting in unpredictable ways? How are design-led businesses succeeding at defining new territories to work in and new ways of operating?
April 6, Natalie Jeremijenko, Professor of Visual Arts at New York University and Nigel Snoad, Lead Researcher, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems on
Can design play a role in governmental and non-governmental delivery of things like infrastructure, education, and health care? What kinds of alliances and collaborations are forming to bring design-led practices into large scale social and technological services?
Venue: Theresa Lang Student & Community Center, Arnhold Hall, The New School 55 West 13th Street, New York
The event is free and open to the public
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Mood architecture
We wish we were in Paris for this… Earlier today, architect François Roche and Le Laboratoire held their SYNAPSES SPEECHES, a symposium on science and architecture. They discussed ideas like how the insights from contemporary science and philosophy is inspiring architecture that could react to the mood of its future inhabitants - structures that responds to the dopamine, hydrocortisone, melatonin, adrenaline and other molecules secreted by human bodies…
The speakers included: Mark Burry, François Jouve, Rupert Soar, Antonio Negri, Judith Revel, Behrokh Khoshnevis, Jean-Didier Vincent, Jeanette Zwingenberger, Chris Younes, Stephan Henrich, Winston Hampel, Natanel Elfassy and François Roche. Moderated by Giovanni Corbellini.
Read an interview with Roche here.
Friday, February 12, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Shadow play from Olafur Eliasson
For his new show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, NY, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson set up rooms of screens and lit them with different-colored spotlights to create shadows of all visitors. Sometimes it was one, sometimes many, sometimes it was you, sometimes someone else…
Upstairs, he played again with the phenomenon of the afterimage: what we see after staring at a shape for long enough.
From February 11 - March 20.
Read more about Olafur Eliasson on ScienceBlogs.
Thursday, February 11, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
30 Seconds of Aluminum Cans
Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan continues his reflections on American consumption. Jordan is trying to make us actually understand and feel the numbing numbers that are constantly tossed around: The pounds of plastic dumped in the ocean each day (2.4 million); the number of cell phones discarded in the US every 24 hours (426.000).
Watch the Seedmagazine.com Slideshow “The Age of Impossible Numbers” here:
Below: The number of aluminum cans consumed in the US every 30 seconds.
Jordan used the colored dot that is each can to digitally reinterpret Georges-Pierre Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with the same technique, pointillism (the creation of an image by using small dots of pure color) that Seurat used for the original painting.
Copyright Chris Jordan
Courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles
Thursday, January 21, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Into the unknown
In the Space Project, French photographer Vincent Fournier, has visited The Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre of the Russian Federation, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the Guiana Space Centre, the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile… all the remote, austere places where dreams of space feel a little closer.
Read the story on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah on Seedmagazine.com:
Monday, January 18, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Anthill realism
In Trailhead, which is an excerpt from biologist and - we are thrilled to see - debut novelist E.O. Wilson’s novel Anthill, Wilson offers us a perspective that few, if any, people in the world could provide in such detail.
Wilson evokes the entirely connected, scent-driven, and beautiful but brutal world of an ant colony. The more you read, the more insights unfold that may very well apply for a species even more familiar to us than ants…
“She had become an extreme specialist: she laid eggs, while the workers performed all the labor necessary to raise her offspring, their sisters. They were the Queen’s hands and feet and jaws, and increasingly they replaced her brain. They functioned together as a well-organized whole, dividing up the tasks without regard to their own welfare. The Trailhead Colony began to resemble a large, diffuse organism. In a word, it became a superorganism…..
“Even as her body began to decay, the pheromones she had manufactured in life persisted in the minds and bodies of her colony. Her visual appearance, her stillness, meant nothing. The Queen could have lain on her back with her legs held rigidly up in the air. She could have turned red, black, metallic gold, or any other hue or shade—it would not have mattered. The Queen had to smell dead in order to be classified as dead.”
Read Trailhead here:
Monday, January 11, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Carol Browner on Whitehouse.gov
At 3.30PM (EST) Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate, will discuss the President’s plan for a clean energy economy.
This is part of the Obama Administration’s initiative to allow Americans to communicate directly with some of the President’s senior advisors. Every morning this week, a senior advisor will give an update on the Administration’s work in their field; every afternoon the advisor will answer questions from the public via video chat on Whitehouse.gov.
Watch the chat here:
Wednesday, January 06, 2010 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
The evolution song
A new video from Symphony of Science with David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Carl Sagan: “The unbroken thread”
Thursday, December 10, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Postcard from the McMurdo Base
Jeff Hoffman and Jeff McQuaid from the J. Craig Venter Institute collect samples to determine the microbial diversity of the Ross Sea.
While sampling on the sea ice they were joined by groups of emperor penguins.
(Picture was taken on ice edge 21 miles from the NSF run McMurdo Base, Antarctica)
Monday, November 23, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Tomorrow’s Weather in Copenhagen
Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström just completed Tomorrow’s Weather, a double helix-shaped glass sculpture, inside of media company Aller’s headquarters in Copenhagen.
The sculpture is fed by the digital representations of forecasts from the Danish Meteorological Institute, and in cue with tomorrow’s weather forecast, the light of the globes shifts it hues…
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
A (faded) Postcard from Antarctica
Judit Hersko, an associate professor at California State University San Marcos, went to McMurdo Station in Antarctica on a grant from NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She just sent us a little greeting.
“Five years ago I initiated the “art and science” project at California State University San Marcos by inviting scientist colleagues to work with me on visualizing science through art. The impetus for this venture arose from my interest in the transformation of matter and my desire to place my artistic process more directly in the service of science and education. My vision was to create an interdisciplinary project that extends in several directions including exhibitions and the development of creative teaching tools for science.
The purpose is to visualize biological, chemical, and physical principles through artistic processes and make them accessible to students of all ages as well as to the general public. My UV project “Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer” is part of this venture. It visualizes the “action” of UV rays in Antarctica by using them to fade images onto surfaces sensitive to UV radiation. The dyes applied to the papers (such as PH dyes as well as DNA, RNA and protein indicators) are metaphorically linked to the biological processes I investigate in my current work such as the effects of ocean acidification. This projects layers Antarctic science, the history of polar exploration, and personal experience into one narrative.
The images on the papers treated with Bromocresol green 1, Bromocresol green 2 and Bromocresol green plus turmeric 2 are portraits of the “unknown explorer” Anna Schwartz based on a photograph of my mother from the 1930s.”
See more of Judit’s work here.
Monday, November 09, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Three happy things…
Three happy things that we’ve seen lately:
A new piece of generative architecture from experimental collective The Very Many (Marc Fornes, Skylar Tibbits, Mat Staudt, Jared Laucks, Jon Proto, and Brandon Kruysman). This sharp-edged metal structure is based on the Voronoi diagram. The piece is on display on Material Connexion on Madison and 27th Street in Manhattan.
A campaign from Volkswagen injecting an element of play into walking the stairs, recycling, and tossing ice cream paper in the bin. By Swedish ad agency Tribal DDB.
And the happiest thing of them all: Brooklyn street artist Katie Sokoler - Color Me Katie - shows what a specialist at working with strangers does for a living:
Thursday, October 15, 2009 • Noted • by Eva Wisten • #
Irresistible sculptures
First thought: It’s the infinite monkey theorem. If a monkey randomly hits a keyboard for an infinite amount of time – eventually a work of Shakespeare will emerge. Replace the letters with driftwood and watch how the wind, blowing blindly for billions of year, finally has arranged thousands of pieces into a building-like structure!
But this is the real story:
In the Kullaberg nature reserve in Southern Sweden, there’s a stretch of beach that’s so inaccessible, someone could spend two years here unnoticed.
There are no signs. A few yellow “Ns”, painted on trees, marks the trail through the woods that takes you here. When you arrive, it’s just the ocean, a rocky beach, and this structure that has the feel of generative architecture but is obviously painstakingly man-made: foundling planks, pieced together with basic carpentry. One is called Nimis (Latin for too much) and is built out of 75 tons of wood. The other, Arx, (latin for fortress) is made of stone.
In 1980, Lars Vilks, an artist and art history professor, brought his hammer to the beach and began the construction of Nimis. Two years into the project, Swedish authorities found out about the permit-less sculpture and a long legal battle began. The government’s quest to have the sculpture removed came to a pause when German artist Joseph Beuys stepped in and bought Nimis for $1500, but resumed again upon the construction of Arx. (In the 90’s, Vilks began to wander to the beach again, this time with concrete in his backpack.)
When Beuys died in 1986, Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the current owners) bought the sculptures. The controversy continued, and a decade later Vilks tried to simplify the whole ordeal by declaring the one square kilometer of land that holds his work an independent nation - a “micronation” - called Ladonia.
Ladonia is not acknowledged as a nation by any other states, but has 14,000 (nomadic) citizens, mostly artists. The little piece of land has become a destination for many curious visitors. In Ladonia, where no ordinary rules apply, you can experience a piece of art that you have to get inside of, and climb. And the higher you go, the broader it sways - you test each step for weakness - and the more adrenaline you feel, the more spectacular becomes the view…
