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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known...

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

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In case you hadn't guessed...

  I'm back in Panama!

Posts will resume their regular sporadic-ness soon...

Photo by Castillo Kraemer

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Back when I was more artist and less chemist than now I attempted to make a light-weight sculpture that looked like stone. I carved my desired figures in styrofoam and then I coated it in a thick paste made of acetone and gravel. I knew acetone melted styrofoam and my thought was that the pebbles would stick in the surface as it dissolved, giving it the appearance of stone. Mostly I ended up with a fuming puddle of gravelly foam goo...

Luckily, Takashi Masabuchi, a student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, has the right mix of artistry and chemistry (and patience) to make this idea work.

Masabuchi doesn't just use solvents but also oil-based paints dripped slowly over the surface of styrofoam blocks.

Masabuchi basically employs the old adage "like dissolves like". Polystyrene (styrofoam), acetone, turpentine, the drying oils in paints - all of these are petroleum based or derived from plant oils. The non-polar liquids can easily dissolve the non-polar solid.

Of course polystyrene plastics (such as CD cases) don't dissolve if you spill nail polish remover (acetone) on them. Styrofoam will dissolve however since it is a highly-aerated polystyrene with lots of surface area for the solvent to react with. Think of dissolving granulated sugar vs. chunky raw sugar.

But that's enough chemistry for one day though - let's see the art.

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"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry."

Maria Mitchell, astronomer, first female member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

reblogged from desertstars:

(digital media, photos from UCSD Branson, HubbleSite, and art*setter)

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Painting With Fireworks

Amateur photographer David Johnson has been getting a lot of much-deserved attention lately for his beautiful long-exposure photos of fireworks.

By carefully refocusing over a second or two of exposure time he was able to capture these explosions with a stunning, painterly grace.

This technique required Johnson to carefully time his adjustments by using the sound of the launch as his cue. He explains his process in detail here.

These photos reminded me of some other visual artists who also work in pyrotechnics. Rosemarie Fiore paints with burning fireworks using the incendiary residues as her media.

Fiore uses live ground blooms, jumping jacks and other consumer fireworks which she carefully controls with wooden templates, buckets, and brushes during combustion.

The final works are often large-scale collages of many explosions, finished with burns and spatterings of sparks.

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang creates enormous site-specific pieces that are as much performance art as visual. Guo-Qiang lays down exacting stencils of gunpowder and fuses over rice paper. Layers of hemp paper, wood, rocks are layered over the gunpowder in order to control or contain the smoke and flame where necessary.

An artist working in many media Guo-Qiang first experimented with gunpowder paintings as a reaction to the more staid Chinese artistic traditions (such as ink painting) which he despised as a student. Guo-Qiang now says that he appreciates his training in these techniques - and these highly controlled techniques are evident even in these very spontaneous works.

Guo-Qiang's work blends destruction and creation, physics and meta-physics, the instantaneous explosion and unfathomably ancient minerals used in gunpowder. He often extemporizes on the dual nature of this work, how it is it to capture antiquity in a few fleeting seconds. This film shows the creation of Sky Ladder,a site-specific work at MOCA.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder from Antony Crook on Nowness.com.

Artworks from top down: Efflorescence #4, Efflorescence #22, Untitled, Firework Drawing #21, Firework Drawing #58, Touring Mountains, and Tree with Yellow Blossoms,

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“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”

Charles Baudelaire

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At HQ for the EDL! Hard to believe a piece of our world is about to land on that bright spot in the sky.

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"I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art."

--Lord Ernest Rutherford, 1932

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a very little music...

an SEM image of the groove of a vinyl record

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Painting With Photosynthesis

Twenty years ago the outline of a ladder left out on a lawn inspired two sculptors, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, to investigate using live plants and the process of photosynthesis to "paint". Probably no other artists currently working incorporate so many of my interests, scientifically and aesthetically.

Ackroyd and Harvey construct large-scale "canvases" of sod in darkrooms and then expose the lawn to a 400W projector bulb shown through a photographic negative, literally "developing" the image in differential pigmentation. The well-lit portions develop a deeper green and much more chlorophyll, the shaded portions produce lighter tones devoid of the key photosynthetic pigment.

This work has lead the artists to a beautiful collaboration with scientists Howard Thomas and Helen Ougham at theInstitute of Grassland and Environmental Research where they have been studying the biochemistry, genetics, and mechanisms of senescence in grasses.

Ackroyd and Harvey are now using a strain of stay-green grass developed at IGER that extends the lifetime of these transient artworks from just a few months to a more than a year before the inevitable yellowing and fading that eventually takes all photographs. This unique grass does not recycle chlorophyll upon senescence, rather the pigment remains in the leaf to disappear gradually through photo-oxidation.

The tactile process of capturing the light of an image in biomass gives new freedom to imagine or reinterpret our relationship to nature, either as stewards, captors, or creators.

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Metamorphoses

No, not that kind...

We're all familiar with the idea and image of the insect emerging from it's chrysalis, moving from a pupal stage to flight, however the Metamorphoses that I speak of here were written in the first year of the Common Era by the Roman poet Ovid.

Metamorphoses comes from the Greek word for "transformation" and this epic poem of fifteen books contains numerous transformative events. Like the pupal insect many of these transformations are physical: Daphne is turned into a Laurel tree, Cygnus into a swan, Callisto is changed into a bear and then is sent into the heavens and turned into the familiar Ursa Major. In one story Perseus uses the head of Medusa to turn Atlas to stone. In another Iphis is granted a gender change, girl to boy, by Egyptian gods. Other transformations are less tangible, more meta-physical: the Titans are displaced by the Olympians, mortal men like Hercules are deified, Prosperina (a symbol of the seasons) is fated to forever migrate between the Underworld and the Earth, neither alive nor dead.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid were a favorite topic of the great Venetian artist Titian who dedicated no less than seven canvases to depictions of these transformations. Above we see the unwitting Actaeon catching site of Diana while she bathes. The notoriously chaste goddess punishes him, turning hunter into prey.

This story is one of the subjects of reinterpretation in an exhibit at the National Gallery in London. "Metamorphosis: Titian 2012" is a celebration of the reunion of three of Titian's Metamorphoses accompanied by contemporary works inspired by Titian. The following film is a stunning retelling of the story of Actaeon and Diana by Tell No One.

Credit Suisse - 'Metamorphosis' from Trim Editing on Vimeo.

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Data Compression as Art

In the piece Tele-Present Water artist David Bowen uses real-time wave height and velocity data from NOAA buoy #46246 far off the coast of British Columbia to direct the movement of an articulated sculpture hung in an exhibition space.

The incredibly chaotic surface of the sea has been compressed into a simple grid and the essence of the ocean re-imagined.

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“All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light." - Louis Kahn

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So long Ray Bradbury

So, we’ll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon.

Lord Byron, as quoted in The Martian Chronicles

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Don't forget to stare at the Sun today.

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The Catenary

A chain hanging by two ends under its own weight will form a curved shape called the catenary or "chain curve". Galileo had believed this shape should be a parabola but in 1690 Leibniz, Huygens, and Bernoulli described this curve not as a parabolic polynomial, but as y = a cosh(x/a). Since this shape is not described by a polynomial it is termed a "transcendental function", meaning it is non-algebraic, dimensionless.

Artist David Lettelier has captured the transcendental beauty of the catenary function in a sonic sculpture constructed from hundreds of thin wires. Called Caten this piece is housed at the Chapelle du vieux St-Sauveur in Caen.

The sculpture is suspended at four points, each point by a rotating motor that also generates a tone with each full revolution. Together the motors play the first four notes of Ut Queant Laxis, the Hymn to St. John the Baptist.

The deep, harmonic drone of the hymn combined with the hushed metallic rustling of the shifting wires as they readjust to sustain the chain-curve create a truly beautiful, hypnotic experience for both eyes and ears. Please enjoy...

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From explore-blog:

Human hippocampus stained with a method pioneered by Italian physician Camillo Golgi in 1873.

"Golgi discovered a chemical reaction that allowed him to examine nervous tissue in much greater detail than ever before. For some reason, hardening a piece of brain in potassium dichromate, and subsequently dousing it with silver nitrate, dyed only a few cell bodies and their respective projections in the tissue sample, revealing their complete structures and exact arrangement within the unstained tissue. If the reaction had stained all the neurons in a sample, Golgi would have been left with an unfathomable black blotch, as though someone had spilled a bottle of ink. Instead, his technique yielded neat black silhouettes against a translucent yellow background."

Read more in Scientific American’s Know Your Neurons series.