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.