Nature of Neptune

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.

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.

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.

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

Olympus BioScapes contest winners

The 2007 Olympus BioScapes digital image winners are in (image below by Andy Fischer, 3rd place).  A panel of four biologists picked the top ten life science optical microscopy images based on three criteria: scientific importance, aesthetic beauty, and technical merit.  The winners include glowing fluorescent images of mouse embryonic cells, chicken retinas, inner ear hairs, and a rat cerebellum.

The photos are undeniably fascinating and spellbinding.  It's not every day that you see the textural cross-section of a chicken retina, eh?  While it does a great job showing detailed views of microscopic biological terrains, the BioScapes contest fails to elaborate on the science behind the images.  Are there reasons the scientists dyed certain features certain colors?  What new information have these images uncovered?  What exactly are we looking at in each photo anyway?

Scientific explanations aside, do pretty photos of scientific topics count as art?  I would argue that, in order to qualify as "art", these images need several more layers of meaning to allow a viewer a subjective understanding of the scientific concepts involved.  Arbitrarily chosen fluorescent colors aren't quite doing the trick for me.