Motion sensing and garbage bags

This has to be seen; by using garbage bags, motion sensors and cooling fans, this installation interprets the movement of the observer by inflating and deflating the garbage bags.

http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2010/11/19/one-hundred-and-eight/

Quick Images

These are some interesting science related images I found online this week, I have been busy so not had time to post, but will be back next Sunday!

This week I found an interesting article about one of the fathers of the Japanse Manga genre, Osamu Tezuka, at the Guardian website;

"Over the course of his long career (Osamu) Tezuka became a defining force in shaping the genre, publishing more than 700 manga running to more than 150,000 pages. Early Tezuka characters had large eyes, inspired by their American counterparts Betty Boop and Disney's Bambi. Large eyes have since become a stylistic hallmark of the whole genre."

Obviously the insfluence of this artist spreads far and wide into the world of cartoons and Manga art, however, from the persepctive of this blog, it is the medical mangas published by Tezuka that are of the most interest. Tezuka began his medically themed mangas in reaction to his 'frustration at what he saw as an ineffectual medical establishment.' Drawing on his medical training, Tezukas popular manga 'Black Jack', includes realistic portrails of sometimes impossible operations, but with care taken to include correct anatomical information and surgical techniques. The level of medical realism in Tezuka's work has added enough credibility for the Japanese medical establishment to use images from 'Black Jack' in public information campaigns, and make this manga one of the primary sources of inspiration for students choosing to study medicine.

Black Jack operates on himself with no anesthetic, but with all anatomy present and correct

Reading this article made me wonder about the power of science to capture the imagination. In some ways this is an obvious question, fictional medicine is a world of life and death, and most people in the world have experience of visiting a doctor, either themselves, or through family and friends. Added to the basic human fear of death and illness, you have a powerful narrative device. With science can there ever be the same level of emotional involvement? For example, Maxwells laws of electromagnitism revolutionised the world of physics, and it is hard to imagine most modern technology having been invented without this elegant piece of mathematics. As a physicist, I can be amazed by mathematical descriptions of the natural world, that can be proven to be universal in any place in the universe. However, there doesn't seem to be the same room for hanging a narrative over the Maxwell equations as there would be over open heart surgery, for example.

Of course, science fiction is full of metaphorical stories involving mad scientists, or future goverernments abusing science. Compared to the medical Manga however, these narratives show scientists in an unrealistic light, and also predominantly as sinister or tragic characters. My question therefore is; is there room for a more realistic drama, or novel, or cartoon about modern science? If an author or artist could create an inspiring and enrapturing comic, or cartoon or film about scientists, wouldn't that be a novel way to cure the current lack of interest in numerical sciences, both in terms of university students, and the general populus? I can see a proposal being written to the IOP asking them to consider funding a cartoon series, or a series of novels, about a handsome young physics professor at Oxford University who works for the UK government, solving crimes, or aiding MI5, in his time away from his research on condensed matter physics. In my mind I see a Hunter S Thompson style mavarick, always in trouble with the dean, but immune from trouble due to his brilliance in mathematical science. In fact, I might get my pen out and start writing now!

Quick Links:

MRI scans of the insides of various fruits and vegetables, takes me back to the start of my PhD!

Guerrilla Physics on facebook

How to pirate a vinyl record

Hayward Gallery

The New Decor exhibition at the Hayward Gallery provided my dose of culture this week. Similar to the Psycho Buildings exhibition last year, the gallery had asked artists for their take on interior design, and the result was spectacular; familiar household objects warped out of context, challenging the viewer to explore the way they interact and percieve the building blocks of day to day life. After loading myself with a coffee in the cafe, I spent an inspiring afternoon exploring installations, most of which looked like the psycho cousins of the trendy furniture shops on Marlybone High St, and ranged from humourous to dark narrative explorations of alienation. One of the standout pieces for me was a light sculpture based on a Bridget Riley composition, an interesting hommage that reimagined the visual illusion of the Riley piece in 3D, using blown glass and pulsing light sources.

  Bridget Riley is one of the pioneers of Op Art, utilising and playing with the basic mechanisms of human sight perception to create strange and sometimes uncomfortable optical illusions. Her work is well represented at most of the Tate group of galleries, and is worth taking the time to see at full scale. In the Piece below 'Movement in Squares' Riley uses black and white geometric patterns to fool our eyes into seeing movement and shapes that do not exist.

This work touches on many apects of science, including geometric shapes, and also deeper ideas about how our eyes percieve shape and forms. In essence the piece above is a much more sophisticated version of the Rubin's Vase, both play with our ability to only see one colour or another as the background.

On my way out of the gallery I also noticed these lamps in the shop;

These 'lab lights' recently won a design award for best new light design, which fascinated me. The visual language of scientific equipment emerging into a field such as lamp design is an interesting way in which the design world has specifically been influenced by the visual world of science. As I have said in previous posts, I think science offers an interesting and unique visual language that invites its own type of narrative exploration. In the same way that the Hayward Gallery exhibition invited artists to reimagine the world of interior design, an exhibition of scientific equipment reimagined by artists would surely invoke interesting interpretations of what science means to society as a whole, outside of the scientific community.

I Fold

I was recently rather enchanted by the buildings of Japanese Architect Tadao Ando, whos designs at first glance seem incredibly cold and sparse, but on further inspection reveal a masterful interplay of ratio and space, creating expressive buildings that excentuate and invite exploration of the spaces contained within them. The japanese style of these wonderful buildings reminded me of the Shinto shrines I visited on a trip to Tokyo a few years ago; these traditional structures seem to blend into the surrounding woodland, and through the use of gentle lighting and paper dividing screens, both exude a peaceful spiritual feeling, and at the same time, invite the visitor to invent a narrative around the minimal but perfect interiors. I am always amazed at the power of paper as a building material, and the inventive ways it is used in Japanese, Korean and other oriental style structures.
  I was rather delighted then to find that physicist Robert Lang has made a scientific discipline of the ancient art of paper folding, Origami. This is not a main post, so I am just going to link to an article in the new yorker that explains Langs fascination with the ancient art, however I find this a particularly inspiring example of the way maths can be used to create sculptures, which are even more spellbinding when you consider are folded froma single sheet of paper.

Article on Robert Lang in the New Yorker

Upcoming exhibitions

New and Old

This afternoon saw me visit one of my favourite London high streets, the Kings Road in Kensington, for a relaxed Sunday afternoon. After pouring over the economist while grabbing a quick lunch and coffee at my favourite Lebanese cafe, I filled by bag with pastries from Paul, and made a beeline for the Saachi Gallery. British Art Now is the theme of the latest exhibition, and unsprisingly, to me at least, it was a little bit too knowing and ironic, and I found it hard to really connect with much of the collection. There are of course some standout works, and the permanent Richard Wilson installation in the basement gallery is worth the trip on its own.

One gallery that stood out for me was a large installation by John Wynne, which looked at first glance like the worlds worst curated hi fi shop. Scattered speakers of various vintages, dimensions and designs are scattered across the space, culminating in the corner of the gallery, where they stack against the wall like a hi fi wasps nest. An old upright piano is embedded in this audio diaspora, operated by means of an old hoover. The resulting sound is combined digitally with ambient noise from the gallery space, and played through the speakers, creating a continuously undulating and evolving tide of sound described as an "abstract 3-D opera in slow motion".

The decrepid piano, and speakers, combined with cutting edge digital audio equipment reminded me greatly of the laboratories where I spend much of my professional life. The visual language of laboratories can often be the very embodiment of this 'old meets new' aesthetic that worked to great aesthetic effect in the Wynne installation. Old combining with new is of course also the visual language of the future, one of the reasons 'Blade Runner' captures the imagination so well is the way the film sets build the future on top of the present and the past. Anthony Burgess also achieved a similar effect in A Clockwork Orange, by splicing archaic English vocabulary in to the mix when confecting the slang spoken by the feral youth of the future.

I think it is time to curate a gallery of work inspired by the equipment that scientists have used over the last one hundered years to achieve our current state of technological greatness. These are machines and devices which were often not designed with aesthetics in mind, but accidentally ended up part of the visual fabric of modern life. This accidental aspect is facinating, how many times have I wandered past an unused piece of eqipment in a corridor and marvelled both at how out of date it looks, but also at the way it still suggests a narrative even today. For next week I might start my own photographic record of these devices to honor them.

As an aside, the economist this week contains a special section discussing the human genome, which I found very thought provoking.

Scientific Glamour Models

I visted Antony Gormeys new exhibition at The Cube gallery in London this weekend, which amazed me, and also filled me with a lot of questions about the role of artists in explaining scientific ideas to the general public. In the course of my education as a Physicist, I have formally studied Euclidian Geometry, and have some grasp of the more advanced mathematical expressions of space and form, like fractional dimensions for example. From a philospohical perspective, I have also studied the metaphysical ideas of our relation to objects and space, as layed out by Kant and many others; so how was it that a dark room filled with glowing rectangles could speak more to me about the relationship between space and objects than any of the forementioned studies?! This is of course not giving enough credit to the rigid mathematical explorations of space and form that have gone before, but methods of explaining hard scientific ideas to the general public in a fashion that encourages wonder and excitement is also a noble and important aim. I was amazed to see trendy Shoreditch kids in their skinny jeans and oversized black glasses walking gingerly around the glowing geometric forms, in an almost reverent study of geometrical beauty. I find it hard to imagine that some equations written on the wall, even if they were grey helvetica on white background, would enspire the same reaction.

When I got home I did a little bit of digging and found that the victorians had been at it too! The new exhibition of deep sea creatures at the Natural History Museum includes a display of victorian glass models of deep sea aminals. The purpose of these models was to allow curious Victorian citizens a glimpse of deep sea life without having to risk a Moby Dick style incredibily dangerous sea voyage. In a sense this is the same phenomenon as the Antony Gormley exhibition, which allows a casual visitor to appreciate the beauty of geometry without having to get their feet wet by sailing into the choppy seas of mathematical formalism.

I was therefore delighted to discover a modern artist named Luke Jerram who makes glass models of viruses for public displays. one of the most interesting quotes from the artists website was that;

  'Scientists aren't able to answer many of the questions I ask them, such as how the RNA is exactly fitted within the Capsid? At the moment, camera technology can't answer these questions either.'

Swine Flu Virus

So in effect the scientific models that are used by scientists to visualise and understand the processes going on inside a virus suffer the same limitations as the visual models created by Jerram. It is intriguing that the cutting edge of science is limited in a way that can be understood visually and not just through mathematical jargon. The second most interesting observation made by Jerram was that false colour microsopy images of viruses made by scientists are actually very misleading, and result in many people assuming that viruses look like multicoloured plates of spaghetti! By rendering viruses in 3D, in a medium like glass, it is possible to interact with the form of a virus, and gain an intuitive understanding of the science.

These models of science therefore should serve a reminder to non scientists that scientists are always dealing in models that are the closest fit to reality, and in no way are the 'real' phenomenon itself. For example, the way I choose to visualise a water molecule as an MRI physics student is different from the way another scientist may choose to visualise it, but for our individual purposes it will lead to accurate predictions and interpretations of reality. For a member of the general public it may be more satisfying to look at a model of water that is both visually pleasing, and also allows the maximum interaction and intuitive understanding of water without having to have any deep knowledge of physics.

The Influence of Art on Science

On a visit to the newly opened galleries in The Museum of London this weekend I noticed a display of stop motion film showing one nights worth of activity in London. The night time shots of the city, beautifully framed views of luminescent glass and steel towers laced with walkways, and criss crossed with layers of trains and blinking car traffic, immediately caused me to visually reference both Fritz Langs masterpiece 'Metropolis' and also the more recent anime rendering of the same name. How much influence does the world of art, and the visualisation by artists of the future, have on the actual outcome? Art which depicts the future can surely be seen as a commentary on the present, by extrapolating forwards and therefore magnifying problems and issues that are in the embryonic stages in the present day. More than this, the visual language and design of science and technology is often influenced by the visions of artists and filmmakers. Science is still limited by the ability of the human brain to imagine, and to create new ideas, therefore art often provides the stimulus for technological progress.

  The Chris Cunningham directed video for Bjork's All is Full of Love is a good example of this phenomenon. The video itself was informed by the previous decade of cyberpunk films, and japanese anime, but distills these influences into a short and haunting 4 minutes.

 

My favourite part of the video is the opening shot, which sees the camera pan upwards, trailing a huge bunch of cables, which eventually connect to the floor of the empty white room which contains the robots. The visual design of the room, and the machinery, seems to have informed the modern day robotics industry. If you look at the Honda robot ASIMO, the parallels between the design are uncanny.

The link between the way science expresses itself visually, and the art that informs these designs, is interesting for two reasons; firstly because groundbreaking science is usually accomplished by very creative individuals, therefore not only is the design component of the scientific discovery informed by art, but it is likely that the underlying science is influenced by art as well. Secondly, the way science is presented in art and film is also relevent to the consumers of science.

Many products, for example MRI scanners, appear to have borrowed design aspects from science fiction. The Siemens system shown above seems to share a lot of design elements with the Bjork video. This is especially important for products that are going to be used by the general public, because people find it hard to trust technology if it is not presented in the correct way. Suspicion can be avoided by using design to make products seem familiar, or seem 'futuristic' to inspire faith in the technology.

Amazing data maps showing geographic density of photographs taken in world cities

Very interesting and beautiful use of data; the author has taken information from Flickr about where photographs were taken in world cities, and overlayed this onto road maps. The result is a density map showing the most and least photographed regions in these destinations. It highlights the trend for cities to become islands of tourist hotspots, informed by guide books and tourist information, while certain areas of cities remain unexplored and unphotographed. It also links into the theory that for an individual a city becomes a small collection of regularly visited locations, effectively shrinking the city into a small, personal interpretation of the whole.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157623971287575/

Interesting article on the use of fMRI in courtrooms

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/05/brain-scans.html

Charlie Brooker on Craig Venter's new life form

This cracked me up;

"So far, so baffling. Then it gets weirder. To "watermark" their artificial bug, the geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase "to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" written through it like letters in a stick of rock. In other words, it's the world's most pretentious bacterium. After Quentin Letts."

Read entire article at The Guardian; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/24/charlie-brooker-artificial-life-here

Royal Society Science and Art Festival

http://seefurtherfestival.org/

The interface of science with the general public - the internet part 1

This Sunday morning I'm sipping a cup of Japanese Sencha, listening to Grant Green and wondering about how the world of science interfaces with the general public, and with other scientists. This is a big problem for an industry where knowledge is so specialised, and sometimes so abstract, that communicating to anyone who is not in the 300 strong group of experts in that particular field can be like trying to explain the merits of the cinema of Wong Kar Wai to a group of X-Factor enthusiasts. However, for the purposes of the scientific industry, and the cross pollination and dissemination of disparate ideas, which is vital to the progress of academic science, this boundary is one worth investing time and effort into understanding and exploring.

 The internet seems an obvious place to start exploring this relationship, because in the modern age it represents the newest and fastest form of communication, and the one available to the widest audience. I have chosen a group of websites that I think quite fairly represent the places the general public would begin looking for scientific information, and places scientists would venture to look at the work of other scientists. I have not included any academic journals in my study, because to me these are supposed to be used by clients who are already experts in a particular field, and therefore need to present information in a very specific visual language to make them accessible to the international scientific community, and to project a feeling of authority that is appropriate for a peer reviewed journal.

  The website for CERN seemed to be a logical place to start, representing a very high profile, cutting edge scientific organisation (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/). One thing I noticed immediately was the use of a blog like structure, with a post elaborating on a recent experiment using a clear graphic. The second thing that struck me was the use of 'fast' media; users are invited to join the CERN twitter feed. The lack of clutter and clear focus of information impressed me, especially considering how complex the science being investigated by this organisation is. I also found some interesting images of the equipment itself;

This immediately reminded me of the old images taken during the manhattan project;

A nice example of how the visual language of science in the popular conscience hasn't really changed for half a century.

My second website for todays post comes from the MIT website, the homepage of which is a little cluttered, but they seem to allow each department the freedom to create their own identity on the internet. I have chosen the following department website because it focuses on the develpment of sensors for use in urban design. Urban design is an area of scientific research that crosses disiplines and and also the line between public and scientific domains (http://senseable.mit.edu/) I especially liked the way this website allows the scientific projects to stand out, by having the research summary presented visually in the centre of the page. This method of presentation also invites interaction from a visitor, drawing them in with clever use of graphics combined with links to research projects. Compare this to the slightly drier list of research projects usually presented on departmental websites, for example from the MIT physics departmental website. (http://web.mit.edu/physics/research/abcp/areas.html). The comparison of these MIT websites offers an interesting observation; both of the departments behind the websites obviously draw a lot of research dollars, however the physics department is working in a less public space than the department designing sensors for use in urban environments. The use of smart design to interact with the public and governing bodies is apparently one that is already in the scientific vocabulary, but perhaps not used when communicating directly to other scientists.

 Overall, my impression is that scientists are actually developing good skills for knowing when not to use scientific jargon and equations to explain concepts to non-scientists, and also that on the internet scientists are exploring modern design concepts to communicate ideas. The MIT sensor development website shares a lot of visual charateristics with the design or art world, for example the grey helvetica on a white background that is so ubiquitous at art or design exhibitions.

Science Friction - Is there a place for design in science?

The visual language of practical bench science is well developed and understood, and recognised widely in the public sphere from press releases, and the interaction of the scientific world with the media world. Test tubes, glassware, and laboratory interiors have their own visual language with symbolic and narrative depth, which is usually utilised in films and by the wider community to try and interpret what 'science' means and what it does. However this is a rather involuntary visual language, and not one that is actually familiar to scientists themselves, or useful for the communication of scientific ideas to the general public. In an era of advanced scientific achievement it seems that the role of scientists as communicators of ideas has been overlooked. Modern design and the practice of efficient and aesthetically pleasing communication has become a vital part of any international organisation or business in the private sector, and in the age of branding and marketing it seems that those working at the cutting edge of human knowledge have not made the best use of the advances in visual communication made over the last 50 years. This blog aims to explore the role of design and visual communication in science, and how it can be used or misused to aid or hinder the advancement of science.
 Anyone wondering whether this is really an issue should consider why science, which accounts for the same percentage of the British GDP as banking, is still not seen as a first choice career option for science graduates, why the number of science graduates is falling, and why the higher eduation budget has been slashed by the government while the failing banking sector has been supported financially. The debate about whether banking is more or less important than scientific progress is something to think about, especially in relation to how much money, and how much prestige is bestowed on each career respectively. On Sunday afternoon as I walked past a flashy Deutchbank office in the city, I found myself wondering why my own research department are sitting in a portacabin, and how much smoother and more effient our own research could be if resourses were allocated differently, or if as scientists we could employ designers and architects to create our working environment.