One of the things that I miss most about the Bay Area is the intensive culture of geekery and delightful playfulness that goes with the unabashed celebration of membership in the pocket protector set.  I invited Alan Rorie — an artist and a scientist at the Exploratorium (who happens to hold my old job) — to present to our seminar group at the University of Colorado.  He gave a wonderful presentation about how the science/art connection in the Bay Area has shaped his transition from scientist to artist.

Here is a link to his presentation (which was made with a wonderful new tool called Prezi — I have to try this out).

In the Bay Area there are many venues where you can express your creative scientific side:

Maker Faire “Burning Man for science geeks”

Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset.  The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

The Crucible and the Fire Arts Festival

The Crucible is a non-profit educational facility that fosters a collaboration of Arts, Industry and Community. Through training in the fine and industrial arts, The Crucible promotes creative expression, reuse of materials and innovative design while serving as an accessible arts venue for the general public.

And of course Burning Man.   It’s more than just a party in the desert, it’s a huge community-driven art installation, many with tech/science aesthetic and aspects.

And then a bunch of small art/science endeavors and workshops, such as

False Profit Labs

The mission of False Pro?t Labs is to create better art through science. We are art engineers who fabricate, machine, weld, and construct sculptural, larger-than-life art installations designed to create inspiring experiences for spectators and participants.

Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is an online resource for art, culture & technology

NIMBY

A place to create the impossible, the new, the ridiculous, the exiting and most importantly, the never seen before. It is the largest do-it-yourself industrial art space in the Bay Area with over 40 different art groups and craftsmen in the shop.

Dorkbot

People doing strange things with electricity

What I think that all these environments have in common is that it democratizes science and art.  These become something that everyone can participate in.  Alan made the point that these are inclusive communities.  I think this is important in terms of people’s empowerment to both create and to understand science, technology, and aesthetics.  It creates a culture of geek chic, an inventor/DIY culture and garage science that attracts and involves people who might never go to a science museum or a university — the culturally accepted bastions of science education.  It also engages the mind and brings us wonder in a way that we might not experience through more didactic and authoritarian presentations of science and technology.

Alan really emphasized this inclusive nature of these communities, where we are encouraged to participate and share, and collaboration between artists and scientists is encouraged through openness and communication.  His art particularly focuses on creating fake, fantastical machines that are made to look real (such as the Neuron Chamber and the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator).  His works have a heavy physical presence, with mechanical bolts, fasteners, and welding.  His website is at almostscientific.com.

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I’m not a big art fan. I mean, I have nothing against it.  I guess it’s like pot — fine for other people, but it just doesn’t move me.  Though art, at least, doesn’t (usually) make me keep looking back over my shoulder and laugh nervously.

Anyway.  But I do have an aesthetic drug of choice — a certain kind of playful art having to do with stuff. That illuminates, or plays with, some aspect of the world.  Here is an example — one of Arthur Ganson’s machines.

One of the things that I find so delightful about this is both (a) the visual aesthetics of the objects and their movement (what a beautiful chair!), and (b) the self-referential nature of the thing itself.  Here is a massive machine whose sole purpose is to pick up a chair and return it, gracefully, from whence it came.  How ticklish.

And yes, of course, Ganson has worked with the Exploratorium as an art fellow, notably creating the Chain Reaction exhibit.

Here’s another thing I like — Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures that walk in the wind.

Again, I feel delighted.  This is a technological marvel, but in this case the complicated structure is intended to play with, and iluminate, the natural forces of the wind.  The way that it is powered, rather than its intention, is what causes me to feel a fuzzy brain smile.  He gave a TED Talk that I hear is pretty neat.

Here’s another.  I’ve blogged about this one before. This guy does x-rays of everyday objects.  In this case, technology is giving us a literal window into something we can’t usually see… and there is a ghostly aesthetic to these shapes. I feel a certain calmness in these images (perhaps because they’re static, not kinetic as the previous examples). It’s almost zen.

And one last one — I’ve written about Ned Kahn’s work several times. Here’s one example of his work, which generally uses some simple mechanism to illuminate the natural world, generally to show something that is usually unseen.  He is painting with simpler materials than any of the other artists, and the results are much more fluid.  The aesthetics are not shapes, or function, but rather the curious and ever-changing dynamics and patterns that arise.  His installations are deceptively easy, but they are fine tuned to a very delicate point to get just the effect that he wants.  He got a genius award, after all.

So, what am I trying to say through showing these works?  I think that was makes me feel joy in these works is that there is some illumination, or utilization, of something real.  Paintings, in general, reflect the perspective and talent of that particular artist.  I have an abstract appreciation of that.  But I’m not moved by it.  And I think that is the essential thing – that these artistic works make me FEEL something.  And if science and technologically oriented art can make people feel some positive emotion — like awe, wonder, delight, joy, or amusement — that is very powerful.

And good.  Think of the type of emotion that we feel, instead, in response to images of disaster, suffering, poverty, and war.   The stuff of everyday journalism.  In fact, the new psychology of positive emotions suggests that (duh) positive emotions help us flourish and add a lot to our lives.

So, this art adds a lot to my life. So did my experience at the Exploratorium, where I experienced, daily, wonder and delight.

What delights you?

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I was recently reminded of this wonderful visualization of the processes inside the cell.  As a physicist, I found this quite powerful in imagining this mysterious (and usually, to me, boring) microscopic world.  It was created by a Harvard professor in conjunction with a scientific animation company.  Here’s the video:

In my art and science visualization seminar we had quite an energetic discussion about this video, however.  There seemed to be a lot of skepticism in the room about this visualization.  “It’s not art,” claimed the artists in the room, and the scientists (who were not biologists) were suspicious of its scientific content.  I’m here thinking this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they’re tearing it apart.  What gives?  Are we distrustful of something that looks slick and expensive, as opposed to something homegrown?  I haven’t seen such resistance to people’s aesthetic garage experiments.  Perhaps because the garage experiments are simply celebrating aesthetics, not trying to convey scientific content.

One aspect of this video, of course, is its emotional content, which can serve to motivate people to learn biology.  It uses different camera angles, an movement, and music, to make the viewer feel that they are zooming around these dynamic views of the inside of the cell.  In terms of how people learn information cognitively, this is also useful. Multiple representations of a phenomenon are very useful in helping people make sense of information.  Most science content is presented quite abstractly.  As our guest speaker Martin Kemp said, this isn’t the science lesson, it’s the teaser.

Certainly, this video doesn’t stand on its own — it needs verbal support.  Presumably an instructor would use it before or after instruction where the content is more explicitly explained.

There is an emotional narrative here, said the seminar participants.  How does that relate to the intellectual narrative.  Does this compromise the science?  One claimed that there is incredible intentionality depicted here.  The processes we see aren’t random, it’s very cooperative, like a small city.  These little things are working very hard to accomplish what they do.  They’re not self-conscious, but still are active agents.

This is dangerous, several people argued.  We don’t know if these objects have intentionality.  It turns out that the Discovery Institute co-opted part of this video to illustrate that God exists in the cell.

But, I argued against this.  The “intentionality” that people saw in this video, I think, was their own anthropomorphizing.  There was no intentionality inherent in the video — only motion.  Any intentionality is just a metaphor, just like the “selfish gene” is just a metaphor. It can help us to imagine these ideas by ascribing intentionality, perhaps, but we need to be very aware that it is just a metaphor.

So, I think that this video is great — it helps us imagine something we can’t usually see and relate to scientific content in a new way.  Phooey on the naysayers.  Does anyone agree with me?

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Image from http://www.colorado.edu/MCEN/flowvis/

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to do.  So, Jean Herzberg in the Mechanical Engineering teaches a flow visualization course here at CU.  She does it in a fairly novel way, as a hands-on art and science course.

There’s a lot here.  Some of the things she covers are photographic techniques, flow visualization techniques, some of the physics and phenomenology of fluids such as fluid rotation.  She spends a lot of time on cloud physics.  “I’ll never be able to ignore the sky again,” says one participant.   But interestingly she also spends some time on the history of photography, which has evolved from a science to an art.

This is the only course in existence on flow visualization!  (and it shows up first in Google searches for “flow visualization”.) She gets some envy from colleagues when she presents her results at conferences, whose courses tend to be highly mathematical. It’s unusual to mix art and science in quite this way, in which art students are expected to document and experiment, whereas the engineering students are expected to create expressive images with impact.  The idea that engineers could learn something by creating something themselves is unheard of, and this enrages her.  And in the end, the engineers create images that are just as compelling and indistinguishable from those of the artists.

In the experiments that students develop at home, they use everyday household fluids, which are environmentally benign.  Usually toxic materials are used in laboratory courses, which is really unnecessary.  She finds that she can’t explain the unusual physics of some of their observations.  It’s also challenging because the exact properties of many of the materials used, such as food coloring and WD40.  Combustion and fluorescence, she says, are always popular (natch). For example, one group wanted to make green flame, so poured flaming methanol in boric acid.  Another made a negative image of smoke changing from laminar to turbulent flow as it exited the mouth.  The images she showed us were from her 2009 class which will be on the web shortly, but in the meantime you can see many amazing student images in their galleries.  The artistry of these images is astounding — the play of light and color, the use of humans as backdrops but using fluid flow as the main focus of the image.  The science of the images is also compelling.  One group of students discharged a fire extinguisher underwater, and saw three phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas) within that image.  A Tesla coil arcing through the air shows interesting patterns, showing discontinuities in the breakdown of air.

Students also take many images of clouds as part of their assignments, which are also on the gallery page.  Anyone who lives in Boulder knows that it’s an amazing spot for clouds — with the Rockies nearby and some interesting atmospheric conditions we get some curious clouds that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

What is the impact of this course on her students?  She finds, anecdotally, that students experience life-altering changes after the course, and her surveys show that students’ beliefs and attitudes change to be more enthusiastic about fluid flow and they notice fluid flow in everyday life.  (Why doesn’t she see this kind of change in her traditional engineering courses?)  She sees changes in students perceptions of the discipline and the physics.  Students feel better about the material — they see fluids as beautiful, interesting, useful, and fun.  Traditional fluid mechanics course students have negative responses on most of these — they see fluids as not beautiful, useful, and it’s not something they feel able to do.  This reminds me of my time at the Exploratorium, where I was first exposed to the incredible aesthetics of science, and the intersection between art and science.  I began to notice all sorts of little, beautiful things — the cracks in the sidewalk, light on a puddle, swirls of milk in my coffee.  I still do.  Life-altering experiences?  You betcha.

This is another kind of way of knowing fluid mechanics.  These students could probably point to the sky and explain things about fluid mechanics that those who learned to do the calculations can’t.  Note, however, that the engineering students in this flow visualization course have already taken the calculational fluid mechanics course.  I wonder, how would students in the traditional fluid mechanics course see that course differently if they took this visualization course first?

Note that this is not unrelated to my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen and Flow Visualization Video.

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Wow, check out this beautiful video of visualizing fluid flow with a special tracer fluid (courtesy of Sebastien at the Exploratorium).  Stunning!

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A (sort of) recent story in the NY Times highlighted the wonderful work of Satre Stuelke, a medical student and former art professor who co-opted the CT scanner for his own aesthetic purposes.  Below is just one of the images that resulted — a wind-up toy bunny:

Photo: Satre Stuelke

This is a tin wind-up drumming bunny toy. I was amazed with the complexity and ingeniousness of the internal mechanism. .

Also surprisingly beautiful is the Big Mac:

Photo: Satre Stuelke

Says Stuelke:

It was bought at the lunch rush hour and it is apparent from the placement of pickles, sauce and lettuce that the chef was under pressure.

Check out the whole slideshow and article in the Times.

What I love about this work is the revealing of the previously hidden (see my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen for the work of Ned Kahn, an artist who reveals the invisible through completely different techniques).  All these aspects of these objects are there, but we aren’t normally privy to them.  There is a ghostly aesthetic, even in the curvature of the box holding the Big Mac.  One of my favorite exhibits at the Chicago Museum of Art was that of objects from the art deco period — a chair with graceful lines, a perfect plate, a table with ornate legs.

Image: Kent Wang

It’s easy to lose sight of the wonder of the ordinary, especially since everyday items aren’t made with the sleek lines of a Swingline stapler, for the most part, anymore. But I love getting a look at these items from a different point of view. I’ve always loved factories for the same reason, and tour one any chance I get. Modern industry is so curious in its intricate workings. Stuelke’s images just give us one glimpse of that wonder.

For that reason, I’ve always been curious to read the book The Design of Everyday Things
, but never got around to it.

The review on Amazon says it all — I’ve got to read this book sometime!

Anybody who has ever complained that “they don’t make things like they used to” will immediately connect with this book. Norman’s thesis is that when designers fail to understand the processes by which devices work, they create unworkable technology. Director of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences at University of California, San Diego, the author examines the psychological processes needed in operating and comprehending devices. Examples include doors you don’t know whether to push or pull and VCRs you can’t figure out how to program. Written in a readable, anecdotal, sometimes breezy style, the book’s scholarly sophistication is almost transparent.

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Wow, I just stumbled upon this and it was so beautiful I had to share:

Thanks to Tibchris on Flickr for posting this (and making it available with Creative Commons).

If you’re looking for freely available images for presentations or in-class use, there are two great places to look:

1. Wikimedia Commons images are all licensed under Creative Commons, and some (typically those taken under the auspices of the federal government) are public domain.  Lots of search capabilities.
2. Flickr also has a lot of images, but not all are Creative Commons.  Go to the Advanced Search screen and select “Creative Commons” at the bottom.

Lots of beautiful shots on both these sites — I use them all the time for this blog and professional presentations.

Here are some more because they’re so pretty.  Click on the link to see the license and original.

The Lena River Delta (Public Domain image by NASA)

And an image of snow crystals, also in the public domain (from the US Agricultural Service)

And a red-headed rock Agama (GNU license by Chris Huh).

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I wrote a post a week or so ago about a study that showed what Monet’s and Degas’ artwork would have looked like through their respectively failing eyesights, which may account for particular deteriorations of their art in later years.

I just managed to get a copy of the original paper, and have just updated that post with the actual images of how their art would have looked through their eyes. So, go check out the updated post!

Money - Woman with a Parasol - 1875

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[CASW New Horizons: Michael Marmor, Professor of Opthamology, Stanford]

This was a very interesting little talk by an opthamologist and art collector about what happened to two particular artists as they lost their vision — Degas and Monet.  Here is a link to the original article, with pictures.

Degas suffered from maculopathy, where his vision gradually deteriorated over a period of years. The fine detail of his work disappeared, the shading lines grew coarse and far apart instead of fine and close together, and features (like faces) because poorly delineated. Early work shows a lot of fine detail, but the later work is expressive only in its general posture.  Click here to see pictures of the evolution of Degas’ work over time.

Degas - The Tub - 1886

Degas - After the Bath - 1896

He showed us examples from early, middle, and late work, and you can clearly see the degeneration in his work. Below are examples, but his later work (which I couldn’t find examples of) is almost grotesque. Faces look frightening and postures are awkward. His friends and colleagues also told him that his work was not quite, shall we say, up to snuff. Dr. Marmor simulated for us what the paintings probably looked like to Degas, considering the state of his vision, and you can see that the course shading lines and awkward expressions disappear. He probably couldn’t appreciate how others saw his work in those years, because his poor vision erased the flaws in his own work in his eyes. Dr. Marmor looked at a variety of data (his handwriting, comments of friends, the spacing of shading lines) and reconstructed a relatively linear pattern of the decline of Degas’ vision over time. He eventually stopped producting work shortly before he died.

Monet suffered from cataracts, in which the lens hardens and yellows. The lens in our eye naturally gets more dense and yellow as we get old, but cataracts are an extreme example of this natural aging process. In about 1912 Monet complained of vision loss, and by 1922 he was legally blind.

Money - Woman with a Parasol - 1875

As an impressionist, Monet dealt with light and shadow, not detail, and so he was able to continue to produce work for quite some time despite his declining sight. However, cataracts affect your color vision, and this affected the quality of his work. He usually produced work with delicate colors and light, but examples of his later work showed almost garish use of orange and green, which was most likely his attempt to actually see the color on the canvas. In the years before he finally submitted to cataract surgery, he was painting almost entirely from memory, because he could no longer distinguish blues and greens, or reds and purples. Again, Dr. Marmor showed us simulations of what Monet’s work probably looked like to him, and the strong colors faded into muddiness. Click here to see images showing how Monet’s later water lily paintings would have appeared through a moderate cataract. The forms also became indistinguishable. Dr. Marmor showed us a late Monet painting and asked us to identify it. To me, it was a mass of blobs of color with a few blurry lines. It turned out that it was the bridge in Monet’s japanese garden. It was completely unrecognizeable to me.  Take a look at that picture here, as well as how it would have appeared to Monet through his now-severe cataracts.

Monet - Water Lily Pond and Weeping Willow - 1916-1918

He argued that the change in style wasn’t due to artistic changes, because Monet’s work returned to its former style after he underwent surgery.

One interesting tidbit that I liked, since I think perception is just so cool, was that in Soleil Levant, below, the reason that the rising sun against the blue sky is so striking is because the blue and the orange are of the same intensity. This makes it hard for our brain to place the sun clearly in space because we don’t have the contrast we usually rely upon to make boundaries between objects.

It turns out that there is a Society of Blind Artists nowadays. Many of them, not surprisingly, are photographers, since the film will faithfully capture what they are unable to see clearly.

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I was just listening to one of Robert Krulwich’s many delightful podcasts on science (Krulwich on Science — if you haven’t listened to it you must) and he was explaining how the “umami” taste was discovered. It turns out that for years and years scientists accepted the mantra that there are four basic tastes — sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. These are the ones that we learned in school (or at least I did, but maybe I’m dating myself here). Then this French chef came along — Auguste Escoffier — and turned it all on its head. He made this delicious soup stock by boiling veal bones for hours. He created a revolution in french cooking, concocting recipes which were, essentially, delicious. But the problem was that the deliciousness of much of his cooking, in particularly his veal stock, didn’t adhere to any of those four flavors. He revolutionized cooking, but not chemistry.

However, a Japanese chemist noticed the same thing, but with respect to the flavors of a traditional japanese soup. He had the means at his disposal to analyze this flavor, however. It turns out that the key ingredient of the veal stock and of the japanese soup (and of asparagus, tomatoes, cheese, and meat) is glutamate. That’s what makes MSG (monosodium glutamate) taste so good too. He called it “umami” or “yummy” in japanese.

One thing that’s really interesting to me about this story is how difficult it can be for us to describe our experience until we have the verbal categorization to attack it with. I guess this would go in the same category as ye olde “eskimoes have umpteen-million words for snow” argument (which I hear is somewhat of a myth). Are people so tied to organizational schemas that we can’t even recognize an experience until we’ve put words to it?

The other thing that struck me is something that Krulwich mentions in the podcast, which is that this is yet another example of art leading science. A master chef is an artist, yes, and he recognized our true experience more honestly than the scientists of the day, who accepted the commonly held view without too much question. This harkens back to my previous post, Why art?

Krulwich writes:

But because artists are so good at describing what it’s like to experience the world, so intent on delivering the truth of what it feels like to be alive, so intuitive, in each of these eight cases, the artists learn something that the scientists don’t discover until years later.

Art, Jonah reminds us, describes the same world that science does; art just does it by a different route. And sometimes, more often than you would suppose, the artists get there first.

Here’s the link to Krulwich’s story on NPR.

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