Nature of Neptune

The OneTrees Project

Genetics research in the past half century has unquestionably revolutionized the field of biology, as well as humanity's concepts of life and individuality.  Years of research have led to remarkable scientific achievements, such as genetic engineering, cloning, and the Human Genome Project.  The discovery of genes that "cause" many physical and mental attributes, ranging from height and eye color to intelligence and sexuality, has had a dramatic impact on our views of individuality.  There seem to be genes for everything; patterns of chemicals that determine who we are and how we act.

However, as many biologists will tell you, environmental factors also play an extremely important role in determining the attributes of a living creature.  This is a fact that seems to be largely overlooked or underrated by many people today, scientists and non-scientists alike. 

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko's OneTrees project cleverly undermines the idea that genes and DNA solely determine individuality.  The OneTrees project consists of dozens of cloned walnut trees planted in different locations around the San Francisco Bay Area.  The trees are all planted in public places, allowing anyone with knowledge of the project to make their own observations about why each of these genetically identical trees have grown to look far different from one another.  How do the trees vary in terms of their physical locations?  In terms of the cultural and economic differences between the people who care for them?  The metaphor for human lives is thinly veiled.

The OneTrees project is clearly a huge logistical undertaking, but is based on an incredibly simple idea.  It brings the concepts of genetics and cloning into the public space (literally), and shows viewers a simplified context to see for themselves the complex interplay between genetics and external environments that shape all living creatures, including our own bodies and minds.

Watch a feature on Jeremijenko and the project on Spark, and read Seed Magazine's recent interview with Jeremijenko and physicist Lawrence Krauss.  The photo of the cloned seedlings is from the MIT Press, the picture of the tree in front of a Bay Area factory is from a San Francisco Chronicle article and was taken by Lea Suzuki, and the last photo is from a OneTrees exhibit at the Pond gallery, showing striking differences between the leaves of four different clones.

Andy Goldsworthy and his use of time scale

Andy Goldsworthy was that kid who loved to play in streams and forests for hours and hours.  Lucky for us, the world-renowned British artist never grew out of it.

Much has been written about Goldsworthy's breathtaking nature-based sculptures and outdoor installations, but I would like to draw specific attention to the temporal aspects of his work.  I discussed the notion of "time scale" in artwork in reference to Arthur Ganson's sculptures, and Goldsworthy puts this concept to use better than anyone I have ever seen.  With his outdoor installations, Goldsworthy builds structures out of natural local materials and then gives them up to the environment.  This method allows him to explore the transience of both natural materials and environmental cycles at the same time.  The pieces are created specifically to "decay" in a way that will expose underlying features of the local environment.

The clip above, from the essential film documentary of Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides, provides a perfect example of this transience.  Ever so slowly, the log structure he builds becomes surrounded and then lifted by the rising tide of the ocean.  The structure spins according to the water flow around it, and slowly loses its logs as it is carried out into open water. 

Everybody knows what tides are, and it is no mystery as to when they occur.  What Goldsworthy has done here is draw attention to the time scale it takes for the tide to act on the environment.  It is a slow, meditative pace, but steady and inevitable.  This piece, and others, make you aware of the intrinsic cycles in our environments, such as ebbs and flows, sunlight and darkness, freezing and melting, etc.  Many of these cycles occur in extremely quick or imperceptibly slow time scales, that we, as humans, rarely notice.  Goldsworthy brings them to our attention, subjectively.  Cycles between order and entropy, and life and death, are absolutely intrinsic not only to the environment, but to each of our lives.

The videos below show more film clips of his creations.  In his profound curiosity of the natural world, Goldsworthy speaks for both artists and scientists at the same time:

“You feel as if you’ve touched the heart of a place.  That’s a way of understanding; seeing something you never saw before, that was always there, but you were blind to it.”

Bubble Machines

Artist James Ossi builds ceiling-high machines, powered by numerous motors, hundreds of circuits, and a system of pipes, for one single purpose: to make bubbles. 

His bubble machines consist of two huge planes of glass set a few inches apart, with soap bubbles traveling slowly upward between them.  The bubbles are big enough that you can only see their edges, which form a beautiful honeycomb pattern that most efficiently fills the space (the photos here were taken by .Leili, where you can find more excellent soap film shots).

The honeycomb pattern of close-packed spheres is not the only scientific principle on display in these sculptures.  As the bubbles rise, they slowly lose liquid to the panes of glass and become thinner.  As they thin, their thickness reaches a point that causes interference among reflected light waves, creating the effect called iridescence.  This interference can favor wavelengths of visible light, creating vibrant sheens of color which swirl and mix on the edges of the soap bubbles.  This is the same principle that causes color in butterfly wings and opals.

The network of slowly changing slices of vivid swirling colors is quite a sight to behold.  It is one thing to explain the principle of interference, it is quite another the show it, especially in such a beautifully simple way.  Rather than just showing you a bubble, Ossi's machines show you the life of a bubble, and how its form and color come to be.  Like Arthur Ganson's sculptures, the bubble machines are pieces that anyone can enjoy and learn from, from young to old.

Below is a segment from The Smithsonian Institution's show "Inventions", where Ossi talks about his machines.  He has made several of them, which are on display around the world.  The photos here are from the machine at MIT's Physics Department, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Create your own NASA space photos!

Part of me always hates telling people this, because so many people find the space photos taken by Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and other space telescopes to be so inspiring.  But here goes...

The beautiful colors in NASA space photos are not real.  They are not what the telescope sees, nor are they what the objects would look like if you could somehow get closer to them.  The photos are created by overlaying images taken at several different wavelengths and applying color filters to each image.  The resulting mix of colors creates the beautiful results we see in the newspaper, on the front of National Geographic, etc.  Chandra, for instance, does not even record light at wavelengths that human eyes can see, so these photos are especially arbitrary.

HOWEVER, this does in no way take away from their power!  The real beauty of these images is that they allow us to visualize objects whose size and scale otherwise boggle our minds.  They serve as stunning visuals that our little planet is by no means the only interesting object floating around in outer space.  When these images are taken by the telescopes, they are done so in a way that interesting features are made prominent, so that they can be studied further.  The images are made to show the science behind them.

Now to the best part...  The image masters at the Space Telescope Science Institute (where they run the Hubble space telescope) have developed a Photoshop plug-in that allows anyone to create their own NASA space photos!  All you need is a copy of Photoshop and some patience.  The plug-in, called FITS Liberator, allows you to import astronomy image files (FITS files) into Photoshop so that they can be edited.  FITS files can be download from several rather hard to find sites, and I have compiled a list of some good ones at the end of this post.  Just follow the directions here (or here) to get started.  As the creators describe, there are several methods to choosing the color filters for each exposure.  You can order them from blue to red in a natural way that would try to mimic what the objects may actually look like if we could see them up close, or you can choose hues arbitrarily.  The FITS Liberator site even includes a Photoshop action to make the process simpler.  I find that the real trick is fiddling with the hues of each layer so that all layers combine to give pleasing colors.

The images here are some that I've made with public astronomy data files.   The first one, supernova remnant N49, is a composite of data from Chandra x-ray data (red/purple), Hubble optical data (blue), and Spitzer infrared data (yellow).  The next one is the heart of galaxy M82, with the spewing red filaments showing the H-alpha emission.  Below are two versions of Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  And finally, at the bottom is a landscape-looking crop of Jupiter's cloud system.

Here's a list of sites where you can download clean FITS files of pretty astronomical objects:

ESO Education Datasets (a good place to start)

Hubble M82

Hubble M51

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Hubble Helix

Hubble NGC 2440

Hubble Jupiter

Hubble - four planetary nebulae

Kinetic Sculptures of Arthur Ganson

Another artist who combines sculpture with mechanical subtleties is Arthur Ganson.  Ganson, who lives right here in Somerville, Massachusetts (so I've been told), creates sculptures that combine complex gear and pulley systems with mundane everyday objects, and are driven by a single motor.  This great little video shows a couple of them:

There are a lot of things going on in each of Ganson's sculptures, both literally and figuratively.  By using simple mechanical techniques in surprising ways, Ganson's work hides nothing from the viewer, much like the construction of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests.  Ganson's sculptures compound these simple operations into a complex chain that can be followed, with some concentration, by the eye.  He draws attention to the beautiful simplicity of these mechanical motions by linking the system to a simple object, such as a wishbone, artichoke leaf, or plastic cocktail sword.  The system causes the object to move in an interesting and often anthropomorphic manner, forcing the viewer to compare these mechanical motions to those of a real living object. 

The wry philosophical implications of several of his sculptures are amusing, but what I like best about these pieces are their exquisite use of time scale.  I say "time scale" rather than simply "timing", because there is more to the rhythm of the sculptures than the fact that all the motion is coordinated.  Note in the first part of the video above, Cory's Yellow Chair, how the chair pieces break away quickly, slow down at the apex of the turn, and then accelerate back into place.  Also of note is the perfectly trudging pace of the wishbone in the video below.  By perfectly manipulating the pace of the mechanical movements, Ganson makes the viewer look for the exact mechanical subtleties that produce these movements.  He makes you especially curious about what is causing these elegant movements.  Unfortunately, to get a really good sense of how these movements are being created by all the gears and pulleys, you need to see the sculptures in person and take your time with each.  But by using elegant rhythms and the anthropomorphized objects, Ganson allows the viewer to understand these mechanical movements in a way that he or she can relate to on a personal level.

A number of Ganson's sculptures are on permanent exhibit in the fantastic MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In this exhibit, all sculptures are activated by a museum visitor stepping on a big button on the floor in front of each sculpture.  This includes my favorite, Cocktail Swords, which consists of spinning metal arms branching off of each other at right angles and becoming consecutively smaller.  The spinning motions are caused solely by friction gears of the arm segments rubbing against each other.  The smallest arms each hold a red cocktail sword as they spin through the air, looking like a perplexingly logical drunken pirate.

Theo Jansen's Strandbeests

Theo Jansen is a dutch sculptor who builds enormous, (mostly) self-propelled, walking creature/machines.  The pieces in his series Strandbeest are made out of yellow plastic tubing, and move uncannily like living beings.  Check out this (albeit slightly cheesy) YouTube video to get a look at the Strandbeests in motion:

Jansen's sculptures take beautifully simple engineering tactics to a stunningly powerful conceptual level.  As you can see in the simulation below, the "legs" are powered only by a rotating wheel in the center of the creature.  Many of his more recent pieces sport sails, allowing the wind to power their movement.  Jansen lets them loose on large windy beaches to roam at their will.

Jansen's work asks us where the line between animal and machine lies.  Are animals not just complex machines that act on external stimuli, just as his Strandbeests are powered by the wind?  When released onto a windy beach the sculptures are beautiful to watch, allowing viewers to contemplate their nature on a natural time scale.  There are no modern tricks behind the sculptures, no computers, no electricity even.  Cars, for example, move on their own too, but when we see one driving down a street, can we actually comprehend the process that makes it drive like it does?  Can we relate to it?  Jansen's sculptures lay bare the mechanics of life, showing how a force as common as wind can power such beautiful creatures.  This is something that we, as humans, can actually relate to.

See another interesting video in which Jansen talks about his sculptures and how he builds them.   Wired asks robotics designers what they think if Jansen's work, and Urban-ism discusses what Strandbeest means to the field of design.