viz.

Image Credit: John Boswell, "We Are All Connected"

H / T to Catherine

During today’s class discussion of Frankenstein, one of my students referenced the Symphony of Science, a series of electronic-music videos that “deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.” The project intersects nicely with the upcoming DJ Spooky event as well as current conversations about the remix on viz. Also: it’s just seriously groovy.

In retro-trippy fashion (e.g., in the video above Carl Sagan’s head fades into an image of the sun as he intones, “We're made of star stuff/We are a way for the cosmos to know itself”), Symphony of Science reanimates, as it were, the great scientific popularizers of the past 30 years. Musician John Boswell uses Auto-Tune software to convert the voices of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Bill Nye, et al. into something approaching song.

Image Credit: John Boswell, "A Glorious Dawn"

H / T to Catherine

If nothing else, these samples from science documentaries past and present are a great pedagogical tool for underscoring that rhetorical figures are all over the discourse of popular science, a factor that makes for some surprisingly catchy hooks: e.g., here’s Boswell sampling Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We are all connected;/To each other, biologically/To the earth, chemically/To the rest of the universe, atomically.”

As M. Shelley herself remarked about the remix (in the preface to the 1831 Frankenstein): “Invention…does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”