Nature of Neptune

Abstracting Nature, Literally

In one of the first posts to this blog I looked at the winning photographs in the 2007 Olympus BioScapes competition, a photography contest for biologists, and pondered whether they could be considered "art".  It is an interesting question, and looking through the 2008 winners from the same competition, I couldn't help but notice how much some of the photographs reminded me of images and sculpture from contemporary visual art. 

Great science photography has always fascinated the mind and the eye, whether through the exquisitely detailed frozen moments of Harold Edgerton, the spellbinding symmetry and patterning of Felice Frankel, or the sweeping, vibrant, glowing space-scapes from the Hubble Space Telescope.  Part of the fascination with these images is believing in their objectivity; they show something real about the world, something nobody can disagree with.  Yet take these connotations away from the images, and you'll find that they don't quite stand up on their own as artwork.  Or to put it another way, if an artist had made them, we just wouldn't like them as much.

What strikes me about some of these BioScapes images is that they almost look like they were made by artists, not rigorously objective photographic recordings made by scientists.  The image to the left, by Michael Franklin, bubbles with layers of structure, ordered almost haphazardly and shining as though made of jeweler's wire, yet calling to mind a plant cell, or a tiny tree rings.  The fascinating patterning, large scale structure with small scale complexity, stunning focus and contrast, and subtle but very effective coloring all distract from the fact that this really is the cross section image of a tiny plant stem.  Below are two other images from the BioScapes competition: Volvox cell colonies by Gerd Gunther on the left, and a wild cucumber by Victor Sykora to the right.

 

We see some very similar aesthetic trends being explored in contemporary visual art.  Anna Hepler's fragile but tension-filled wire sculptures and drawings (seen to the left) explore non-repeating geometries in ways very reminiscent of biological structures or the moments right after an explosion.  Roland Flexner's drawings (example on the right) with ink bubbles tackle similar ideas by literally recording tiny explosions on paper.  Frances Richardson's delicate graphite drawings (below, with detail) create organic, subtle forms from a dizzying complexity of meticulous marks.

The work of each of these contemporary visual artists refers strongly to images from science (Flexner certainly owes much to Edgerton, for example), and quite possibly also refer to, or are inspired by, current research trends in nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, and emergent behavior that attempt to tease some sense out of chaotic structures and behavior.

Artists can use scientific concepts to add further dimension to their work, which is arguably the real key to making good artwork.  When a painting or sculpture not only captures the eye but also suggests that the forms abstractly relate to natural systems, the viewing experience is deepened.  In fact, the crux here may be how "abstractly" this connotation is formed.  A literal explanation of a scientific concept can be interesting and quite dazzling, but a Hubble photograph of a galaxy is not the same as the artwork above, no matter how glowing, swirling, or colorful it is.  Some of these BioScapes images are much closer to artwork because they are so abstracted.  They almost become something other than the actual objects that have been photographed, by only loosely suggesting a connection.  This is precisely where we find exciting combinations of science and art: in works that strike a nimble balance between the literal and the abstract.

Anna Hepler's image "Spheres" comes from her website, and Roland Flexner's "#1" and Frances Richardson's "060307" come from their respective websites.

Metamorphic Metaphors: Brian Knep's Aging Series

Another Boston-based artist taking advantage of the area's rich and extensive scientific community (see Daniel Kohn) is Brian Knep, and ongoing Artist in Residence at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.  Knep, a new media artist whose work is often interactive, has used his residency to develop a series of images and video installations exploring the life cycles of frogs.

To create the video pieces for Aging, Knep took thousands of photos of tadpoles at different stages of development and created a computer program to blend the images together (see an article from the Weekly Dig).  The result (shown in the second half of the video above) is an animal that morphs between tadpole and frog as it attempts to swim across the screen.  Gray lines moving from right to left add a sense of imperative as the frog appears to struggle against an unseen current.  As soon as the amphibian makes it all the way forward, it slips back again, struggling to stay on the screen.

Knep uses the striking changes frogs experience in their development to create a metaphor for human life.  The frog appears to struggle to make forward progress, but the progress never lasts and seems almost fruitless as the frog slips backward to start the struggle forward all over again.  The struggle is the same for all stages of the frog's life, as it constantly morphs back and forth into frog, tadpole, and breathing tadpole, each kick forward echoing through each stage of development.  What could be a frustratingly obvious existential metaphor questioning the meaning to life is elevated to a subtle display of interconnectedness, transformation, and beauty.  Forward progress may not be the right way to gauge our lives; perhaps beauty and satisfaction can be found in the cycles of our species and our lives.

While Daniel Kohn has attempted to develop useful visualization tools to help scientists as well as find an abstract visual language for "genomic space" inside cell nuclei, Knep has gone another route by relating ideas from science to our own lives.  Moments in his work yield a special kind of relevancy that isn't often seen in the art world: cold hard facts of science transformed into metaphors for the human struggle.  In fact, Knep could benefit greatly by including even more scientific concepts in his work that further nuanced his metaphor for human life.  Incorporating the frog's metamorphic changes with incredibly rigorous and precise observation is very compelling, but suggests further questions: Why does the frog go through such a life cycle?  What causes these changes to occur?  How do these changes occur within the frog's body?  While Knep's work would benefit from the inclusion of even more ideas from science, the way he ties scientific concepts and observation to human emotion has made his Aging series a true success.

Read more about Knep's work at Harvard Medical School in an interview at ArtSake and an article from the Boston Globe.  The photo is from Knep's website.

Sculpted by Larvae: The Experiments of Hubert Duprat

As the effects of human industry threaten our planet with pollution, climate change, and existential crises, both the science and art worlds have begun looking to nature for more efficient and environmentally friendly ways to create technology, as well as ways to rediscover the beauty in natural systems.  A growing number of scientists and engineers study natural processes to guide their design, while a corresponding number of artists and architects such as Andy Goldsworthy and Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch create work that brings direct attention to the beauty and complexity of natural systems.

French artist Herbert Duprat turns this idea of using natural processes in engineering and art on its head in his work with caddisfly larvae (Trichoptera).  Duprat took several caddisflies from their natural habitat and placed them in tanks filled with gold flakes and precious stones.  Caddisflies, who are often found in stream beds, are known for the protective cases they form around their bodies from pebbles, twigs, or sand.  When placed in a tank with flakes of gold and gemstones, the caddis flies simply created their protective sheaths from these materials instead.

The resulting structures are strikingly gorgeous, but confounding to see surrounding a hairy water bug.  Who, in fact, is the artist?  Is it Duprat, or is it the fly?  Is this even art?  Duprat brilliantly exploits a natural process, showing both the complexity of nature as well as questioning how we judge beauty.  And this is exactly why Duprat's work is art, because it challenges our ideas about the man made and the natural not through a chain of reasoning, but by our personal reaction to his images.

Both images are from Cabinet Magazine, where you can read more about Duprat's work with caddisflies.  Also see Genetologic Research and Leonardo On-Line for an interview with Duprat and more information on Trichoptera.

Anne Lilly's Purity of Motion

In the history of science, images and words have dominated the way concepts are conveyed to colleagues, students, and the public.  Books, prints, photographs, graphs, and diagrams have been the easiest way to portray profound ideas in scientific disciplines for centuries. 

What can often fall by the wayside in science education is how things move.  In science we see dazzling images of swirling galaxies, intricate cells, and dashing animals, but it is very hard to get a sense of the real motion of these objects.  What causes different types of motion?  Why do objects move the way they do?  Why do some movements seem graceful while others appear clunky?  And most importantly, rather than conceptualizing the motion of an object, how does the motion relate to our own bodies?

Artist Anne Lilly builds exquisite stainless steel sculptures that directly explore these issues of motion.  The pieces created by the Boston-based artist (and friend of Arthur Ganson) are propelled by the viewer's hand, giving a direct cause and effect experience for each viewer.  Once set in motion, Lilly's sculptures demonstrate how beautiful and simple motion can arise from simple rules of physics and mechanics.  While Newton's laws describe how objects move, Lilly's sculptures describe how these motions can appear to a human observer.  In her piece Parietals (see a video here), Lilly uses conservation of angular momentum to beautifully transform steel rods into both a science demonstration as well as a mesmerizing display of pure, graceful motion.  By presenting a graceful motion in such a simple way, the artist allows the viewer to contemplate each moment of cause and effect that causes the motion.

Because the motion in Lilly's sculptures is so simple and so pure, it is not hard to relate it to motion found in nature.  In her recent series of spinning steel rod pieces, specifically "There's a Certain Slant of Light", "Polaris", and "Parting" (click each to see a video), the motion of emergent flocking is suggested, such as the mesmerizing movement of starling flocks (also see Richard Barnes' photographs of the same subject).  The long, thin rods in Lilly's sculptures appear to move independently one moment, and then form a coherent motion the next.  They expand and contract, cohere and dissolve, much like many forms of natural flocking.

On another level, the same series of sculptures call to mind electrons swirling around an atomic nucleus.  Lilly's pieces are specifically geared so that none of the rods will ever touch another, which strongly parallels the Pauli exclusion principle forbidding any two electrons from simultaneously occupying the same quantum state.  In quantum theory, the enormous empty space surrounding an atomic nucleus is filled by a cloud of electrons that never "touch".  While the exact paths of the electrons can never be known (see the Heisenberg uncertaintly principle), the regions that they are most likely to be found can form very interesting geometric shapes.  Lilly's sculptures seem to provide an impossible view of how electrons would move through their probability regions if we could actually follow their individual motions.  Always surrounding an invisible nucleus, they never touch, sometimes appear random, but nonetheless form coherent patterns from simple underlying principles.  Form is created not by objects or images, but by pure motion itself.

All images and videos are from Anne Lilly's personal website, and the Arden Gallery website.

Tiny Universes

While I've written before that straight-up scientific images -- as pretty as they can be -- are not necessarily art, they can most certainly be inspiring.   Canadian biologists Eric Lecuyer and Henry Krause have recently published a stunning image of genetic material in fruit fly embryos that challenges boundaries between scientific images and visual art.

View the full sized image here (warning: 27MB file, but well worth seeing!).

Lecuyer et al. published the image for the cover of the Oct. 5, 2007 issue of Cell journal, which contains a corresponding article about their research.  The image shows the separation of genetic material during several stages of Drosophila (fruit fly) embryonic development.  The researchers were testing how much the distribution of messenger RNA (mRNA) dictates the distribution of proteins in a cell.  Using high resolution imaging, they found a strong correlation between mRNA localization and protein localization, showing that mRNA is a major influence on cellular organization, and thus cellular growth and differentiation as well.

The blue in the images correspond to mRNA, while the red shows the cell nuclei.  The mRNA and cell nuclei were stained, and the color was applied artificially using image analysis software.  The images in the article are red and green, which the researchers say provided the best contrast, suggesting that the red and blue combination must have been chosen for the cover for aesthetic reasons. 

The embryo images are not only visually stunning in terms of color, luminosity, complexity, detail, and abstract patterning, but provide several layers of conceptual meaning.  First, it doesn't take a biologist to recognize the exquisitely detailed mitosis (cell separation) occuring in several of the embryos.  This is the fundamental process of reproduction in animals, and seeing it occur in relation to an entire embryo conveys a breathtaking sense of scale.  Secondly, and maybe this has to do with my experience in astrophysics, the embryo images strongly conjure up all-sky images of the night sky, particularly the cosmic microwave background (CMB) shown to the left, that has been such a hot research topic in the past couple decades.  The embryo images suggest windows into the tiny universes of a new organisms.  Swirling luminescent material, bright points of dense nuclei, and fuzzy blobs of diffuse substances all suggest a strong connection between the tiny and the vast, and our bodies and the universe.

Is the image art?  I believe it could pass for art if presented as such, but that said, I think there is much more an artist could do with these images than the scientists have done that would bring out the conceptual issues I described, and quite possibly even more.
 
On that note, the researchers have a beautiful online database of their embryo images sorted by gene.  Click any gene and it pulls up stunning high resolution images that show the genetic expressions.



CMB photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Murmur

A small black bird, the European Starling is known for flocking in astonishing numbers, occasionally totaling over one million individual birds in one flock.  Not only are starling flocks large, but they expand, contract, and spiral in breathtaking unison, without any apparent leader.  In his series Murmur, photographer Richard Barnes has captured the spectacular aerial displays of the thousands upon thousands of starlings that gather annually in Rome, Italy.  Barnes' beautiful grainy black and white photographs call attention to a slew of issues involving science while achieving powerful emotional impact.

At first look, Barnes' photographs appear to be swirling clouds of gritty smoke or dark leaves.  On closer inspection (by viewing the photos large), one can see that the tiny objects are in fact the shapes of birds.  Barnes has done a wonderful job capturing many scales of starling flocks in a single frame, overlaying the seemingly sporadic patterns of closer birds with the tight clusters of birds further in the distance.  The perplexing shapes of the formations turn out to be the result of decisions made by living organisms rather than just scattered objects in the wind.  Barnes makes excellent use of film grain in many of his photos, allowing the sizes and contrast of the bird shapes to approach the size and appearance of the film grain.  The result is a sea of dark splotches, some are birds, and some are grains of background tone.  Where do the organisms begin, and the particles end?

The flocking Barnes has recorded in Murmur are stunning examples of emergent behavior in complex systems.   A hot topic in science, computer engineering, and design, emergence describes the behavior of complex systems and structures that arise out of simple rules or interactions.  Some scientists believe that starlings flock in order to avoid predators, but the reasons for their peculiar and breathtaking style is still unknown.   This fact makes Barnes' beautiful photographs appear even more dark and ominous.

This month's issue of Seed Magazine profiles Murmur, and displays several two-page spreads of the photos.  Picking up this copy (May/June 2008) is well work it.  Also read Jonathon Rosenthal's illuminating article about Barnes and starlings from the New York Times. 

All photos are from Barnes' website.

Art in the Lab: The Artist in Residence

Many of the the posts on this blog have examined the work of artists who incorporate concepts or methods from science into their artwork.  This, however, is only one way the incongruous worlds or Art and Science can combine.  What happens when, rather than bringing science into the studio, we bring art into the lab?  This scenario is happening in research institutions more and more, often in the form of the Artist in Residence, an artist brought into a lab to create artwork, or to offer a new viewpoint on the research being done.

Daniel Kohn, currently an Artist in Residence at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one such artist who has been invited to work at a premier genetics research center.  For a place to create artwork, Kohn was given part of a research lab to covert into his studio.  I recently had a chance to sit down with Daniel to discuss his experience at Broad and the work he has created while there.

The mission of the Artist in Residence is two-pronged.  First, the artist must absorb the research being done around him or her and translate or incorporate it into artwork.  Secondly, the artist should try to influence or augment the actual research being done.  Certainly the dialogue between artist and scientist should go both ways.

Kohn dove into the first objective head-long, unabashedly questioning the Broad scientists, and trying to learn and absorb what he could of the research being done around him.  While allowing the scientific concepts to "wash over" him, he started a long series of water color paintings exploring "genomic space."  He used these paintings to work through different ways of representing concepts from genetics, such as the linear string of nucleotides in a strand of DNA, or the spiral structure of chromatin.  The results are lush, abstract paintings, often with swirling movement and a strong sense of depth and ambient light.  A vague but fundamental sense of structure comes through as spiral/circular motion is contrasted with a linear/gridded framework.

Clearly, Kohn has successfully incorporated scientific concepts into his own visual language, but do his paintings speak about science?  The work is a pleasure to view, but it is fair to say that almost no one looking at them without any background knowledge would guess that they are based on the structure of DNA.  This is where we must ask if Kohn's work at Broad is engaging both directions of dialogue between artist and scientist.  Certainly his artwork has been influenced by the science, but how can the artwork itself return the favor, and in turn influence the science?

This is a tough question.  It applies not just to Kohn's work at Broad, but to the work of any artist working closely with scientific research.  There seem to be a few possible ways of achieving this goal.  One way is rather than directly influencing research, artwork can set a framework for scientific knowledge by putting it into the context of our own lives, specifically through our senses and emotions.  The work won't drive new scientific advancements, but can instead show a new way of understanding the information.  Successful artwork of this nature is very difficult to achieve.  It requires a very thorough and fundamental understanding of both the physical properties of an object or system, and the subjective experience of encountering the object.  Kohn acknowledges this, remarking that the process of turning his work at Broad into "art" will be a very long one.  See the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Ned Kahn for stunning examples of artwork that place scientific concepts in the context of our own everyday experiences.

Another way an artist can influence science is to address the methods rather than the concepts.  As visual thinkers, artists can offer new viewpoints about how to visualize scientific data in order to see information in a new light.  In fact, this is the method that Kohn has used at the Broad Institute in order to influence scientific research.  Together with a group of researchers, Kohn is helping to develop "functional visualization" tools that aim to help scientists understand complex biological systems.  Rather than working to provide generalized visualizations for communication with nonspecialists, the team is building tools that will drive new science.

Thus, one way of creating artwork that addresses science is to contextualize or personalize it; i.e. make art that brings scientific facts into the realm of personal experience.  The problem with this method is that it is very unlikely it will ever directly influence scientific research and help uncover new facts.  Another way artists can influence science is by using their visual skills to help scientists develop new methods of visualizing or modeling data.  However, this isn't actually artwork, it is design.  It uses visual methods to achieve specific, practical goals, and therefore must ignore many essential attributes of artwork: perception, emotion, and reflection.

Herein lies a fundamental difference between Art and Science.  The objectivity of science cannot, by definition, be influenced by the subjectivity of artwork.  Any notions that artwork could provide a missing key to driving scientific research are simply illusions.  When becoming involved with science in any way, an artist must choose between helping push the science without using actual artwork, or contextualizing the science without directly influencing it.  Kohn's success has been doing the former, and it will be interesting to see how other Artists in Residence will address this fundamental difficulty.

All images are from Daniel Kohn's Broad Institute webpage.

Sex, Food, and Shit: The Art of Wim Delvoye

As controversial as he is clever, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has received broad critical acclaim, as well as public outrage, for projects that have included tattooing pigs or selling machine-made feces.  Bent on undermining common conceptions about what it means to be "human," Delvoye has utilized several imaging methods and concepts from science to drive his points home.

Controversial as they may be, Delvoye's projects go far beyond simple shock value.  The image on the left shows an example from his Chapel series, which consists of a number of x-ray and stained glass combinations that were installed in a gothic chapel.  He obtained the images by taking x-rays of two friends in various stages of love-making. This window, called Erato, tiles images of the same scene taken (or processed) at different x-ray opacities.

In this piece, Delvoye uses the cold, but beautiful, objectivity of x-ray imagery to "see through" one of humanity's most cherished acts, the kiss.  By presenting such sterilized views of such an intimate act, he suggests that despite any emotional or physical beauty and complexity, it all boils down to primitive activity among two bone and organ-filled organisms.  While Slow Moving Photon astutely proposes that the series may offer the possibility of "diagnosing true love," I see the beautiful stained glass windows as more of a cynical take on acts (kissing, loving) that we cherish as defining aspects of humanity.  In other parts of the Chapel series, Delvoye creates beautiful patterns from x-rays of skulls, teeth, and intestines, showing that underneath the human mystique lie the simple biological activities of sex, food, and shit.

While not directly about science, Delvoye's Chapel series (as well as his Cloaca project) uses scientific knowledge to show different ways of thinking about the human body.   In an age where we have discovered that we may share up to 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, Delvoye suggests that human activity may be no different than that of other life forms.

Image from Delvoye's website.  See more images here.

Delicate Boundaries

The further the limits of our scientific knowledge are pushed, the harder it is to relate new discoveries to our everyday experiences.  One frontier where this issue is most evident is in terms of scale, both large and small.  When cosmologists discuss the large scale structure of the universe, or molecular biologists report on the genetic effects of certain protein molecules, the rest of us are left struggling to find any sort of subjective meaning.

New media artist Chris Sugrue brings our knowledge of the microscopic into our realm of experience through an elegant and engaging interactive installation piece.  While the piece, called Delicate Boundaries, doesn't quite tackle life on the cutting-edge molecular level, it does call attention to the ways that tiny single-celled organisms can interact with the human body.  Delicate Boundaries consists of a computer screen, a motion sensor, and a projector.  At first, a dozen or so little outlined microbial forms wiggle around the computer screen.  But when a viewer extends his or her hand and touches the screen, the little forms swarm towards it.  The captivating (or startling) part of the piece happens next, when the forms actually appear to jump the computer screen and flow up the viewer's arm, this time as projected light.  Once on the viewer, the beautifully outlined little microbial shapes wiggle up and down his or her body.

Aside from cleverly addressing very relevant cultural issues about the boundaries between virtual space and real space, Sugrue's piece explores human interaction with microscopic life.  Before the invention of the microscope, nobody knew such life existed, even though it has an enormous impact on human lives, from digesting our food to causing disease.  Now, many people feel squeamish when thinking about the millions of tiny creatures crawling all over our bodies all the time, even though the vast majority of them help us live.  When presented with Sugrue's delicate cartoon-like microbes "crawling" over your body, would you be captivated, repulsed, or a little of both?  This is the question the piece asks that successfully relates scientific discovery with personal experience.

Images from Sugrue's website.

Patricia Piccinini's Synthetic Organisms

With the dizzying number of groundbreaking advancements in biological sciences in the past few decades, questions of their use and morality keep challenging our society.  As mentioned in regard to Eduardo Kac's genetically modified rabbit, scientists (and artists) who "play God" by manipulating the genetic material of living creatures are not always well received by the public.

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini continues this debate by creating stunningly realistic silicone-based sculptures of genetically hybrid organisms that raise a number of questions about current advances in biotechnology.  Piccinini's piece, The Young Family (shown above), initially shocks the viewer with its grotesquely realistic portrayal of genetic modification gone disturbingly wrong.  Yet the almost-human features of the creatures also induce empathy within us, especially the incredibly realistic emotion on the face of the mother.  It is not the expression of suffering, but rather of the all-too-realistic weariness of child rearing.

Are these creatures abominations resulting from our society's scientific hubris, or do they show basic human/animal domestic tenderness?  Are we disturbed by the photo because it blurs the line between human and animal?  It is rare to find works of art so repulsive, yet so captivating.

The piece above, called Still Life with Stem Cells, tackles the swarm of issues surrounding another biological issue: stem cell research.  An incredibly realistic little girl sits on the floor, joyfully playing with an array of blob-like fleshy creatures.  The sculpture serves as a metaphor for stem cells and emphasizes their malleability.  Are these happy blobs of flesh a welcome modification, or a disturbing alternative to the human embryos they came from?

The Blog Blog discusses Piccinini's thoughts on her own work, and you can read an interview with her here.  Ron Mueck is another interesting artist who makes sculptures in a very similar way, but with a different focus.  Both photos in this post are from Piccinini's website.