emcg's blog

Sexy. Sputnik. Science.

emcg — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 02:09:28 +0000

Image Credit: Associated Press

In January’s State of the Union, President Obama called this “our generation’s Sputnik moment.” Since then, I’ve been curious about how the administration would visualize the core message of that speech, which foregrounded science, education, and innovation. Exhibit A: the Beatles-esque tableaux above, from last week’s visit to an NYC science fair.

The President is mobbed by swooning teens, prompting Politico to ask, “Is Obama making science fairs hot?”

Image Credit: Pete Souza/White House

H/T BagNewsNotes

Over at BagNews, Michael Shaw points us to another instance in which Obama brings his trademark cool to a pro-science photo-op, this time in the waiting room at Intel. In keeping with the sleek surroundings, Obama even provides a sartorial antidote to the industry’s characteristic Mark-Zuckerberg schlumpiness. However, Shaw rightly describes the scene as “Jetsons”-like: the mid-century modern look feels more back-to-the-future than Winning the Future. The black-and-white scheme also signals a decided shift toward simplicity, both in the iconography and the message, for a president accused of being too cerebral and complex in the first half of his term.

Image Credit: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

H/T BagNewsNotes

BagNews also posted this image from Obama’s tour of a GE plant soon after the “Sputnik” speech. I like how the photo deftly combines the futuristic-looking generator, with its grandly ambitious scale; the slouchy, hand-in-suit-pocket casualness of Obama at its center; and the American flag behind them, giving a benediction of sorts. Although the overall look might be more 21st-century modern, its iconography nonetheless harkens back to a Space Age triangulation of science, profit, and patriotism.

On the one hand, it feels like quibbling to challenge these representations when their sexy, swinging optimism about science provides such a welcome counter to, for example, House Republicans’ recent defunding of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has largely taken place behind the scenes. However, in its admirable attempt to make science visible within the political conversation, the administration also makes visible certain Sputnik-Era preconceptions about science: namely, a reduction of science (or science-as-engineering) to an economic activity disconnected from curiosity and understanding.

Reboot: Literacies: Visual and Auditory

emcg — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:06:11 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of a drawing by Katie Butler for my E314J class

Last year at about this time, Emily Bloom offered a thoughtful post in which she cautioned against privileging visual literacy at the expense of what she called “auditory literacy,” a crucial component of both analyzing and creating new media productions in the classroom. After assigning a narrated slideshow project this semester, with decidedly mixed aural results: I consider myself schooled.

This semester, I asked my “Literature and Biology” students to create a 4-6 minute narrated slideshow that analyzes a text on the syllabus while immersing viewers “in an act of storytelling.” Before proceeding to dissect the project, I should note that I consider it an overall success. I’m proud of—and grateful for—the hard work and creativity reflected in these projects, as well as the opportunity to compose my own sample slideshow. Embedded, with permission from their creators, are samples of my students' work that use images and sound to great effect—from the original drawing above, which renders Elizabeth Frankenstein as a 1950s housewife to emphasize her subordinate status in the novel, to a video with humorous visuals and a deadpan delivery befitting its subject: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow by Isaac Gifford for my E314J class

Yet, despite our attention to sound at viz. this semester, I still managed to forget about the importance of oral performance when preparing students for the assignment. Many otherwise promising slideshows faltered because of a rushed (or ponderous) pacing, poor recording quality, or the absence of audio entirely. I’ve since realized that successful image productions should begin with an in-class discussion of how image, sound, and text interact to create a cohesive whole, as well as an analysis of how successful podcasts, like those produced by RadioLab, use aural elements rhetorically. More specifically, students need practice narrating their slideshows before pressing “record”: in restructuring this assignment, I might ask them to read their scripts aloud to peers for feedback on their delivery.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow Bethany McNeely for my E314J class

So, because they bear repeating, here are Emily’s original reflections on sound in the classroom:

Image Credit: The Guardian

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000)

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential. Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting
questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric. The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy. It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions. Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would
push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.

Image Credit: Screen Shot of Garageband

While I originally intended to outlaw any visuals, I
relented and allowed them to use Garageband’s artwork track. This decision was inspired in part by the interesting results of the collaboration between UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center and Badgerdog, a local Austin creative writing program for K-12 students. I loved the way that participants in this program incorporated imagery into their podcasts without losing focus on the attention to language that makes podcasting such an interesting medium. The results were mixed. Some students seemed really motivated by the challenge of auditory delivery and blended interesting music, noises and audio clips into their presentation to create variety in their performances. Others presented simple, elegant spoken arguments with clear delivery. Then there were less successful uses of the medium: students who read papers that should have remained on paper and others who found oral delivery challenging for a variety of reasons. Those students that chose to incorporate visuals were not uniformly successful. I asked students for feedback on what they think defines a good podcast and very few mentioned visuals. They seemed to appreciate the medium as primarily auditory and one best approached through auditory innovation.

Image Credit: Undergraduate Writing Center

In general, my students were much better trained in visual literacy than, pardon the paradox, auditory literacy. However, they seemed to appreciate the particular auditory rhetoric involved in podcasts (which of course borrows heavily from old media such as radio) that to varying degrees they attempted to capture in their presentations. I wanted to end on this note because I think that many of our blogs on Viz are about the audio-visual or performative text rather than the exclusively visual and that we might want to further consider how teaching auditory literacy might help students better understand contemporary audio-visual rhetoric.

Peripheral Vision

emcg — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 03:28:55 +0000

Image Credit: Drew Berry/The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Via The New York Times

On Monday, the science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide, skyped into my “Literature and Biology” classroom. During his virtual visit, Lehrer shared many smart, engaging ideas (bonus: he’s also rather comely!). However, the take-away was that innovation often comes from those on the periphery of a field, which makes for a compelling, practical reason for openness and conversation across disciplines.

I thought of Lehrer’s comments the next day when reading “Where Cinema and Biology Meet” in this week’s “Science” section of the Times. While the article and accompanying video provide a fascinating overview of molecular animation as an emergent visualization tool, I want to focus on what I’ll call the tsk-tsk-ing section of the piece, which airs some scientists' doubts about the value of these animations for "actual scientific research," as they can "quickly veer into fiction."

Image Credit: BioVisions, "The Inner Life of the Cell"

This skepticism resonated with Lehrer’s take on Carl Sagan, whom one of my students named as a favorite science writer—i.e., the mistaken idea that Sagan's lucidity and popularity somehow threw his scientific credentials into doubt, and that, more generally, accessibility is inherently incompatible with accuracy and rigor. By turning attention to a more synthetic, experiential model of cellular processes, these short films help us to see in a way that supplements rather than supplants other approaches to visualization. And if they simultaneously inspire the general public through an immersive, "Hollywood," experience, all the better.

Ultimately, these animations support Lehrer's claim that moments of insight often come from the unexpected influences that jolt us out of our disciplinary tunnel vision. For Darwin, it might have been the volume of Milton's collected works that accompanied him on his Beagle voyage; for Robert Lue, a Harvard cell biologist quoted in the article, it might be the Death Star scene in the original Star Wars.

"Geneticists know what’s happenin'": Viral Science Rap

emcg — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:39:38 +0000

Image Credit: Baba Brinkman

In the spirit of Elizabeth’s “Picturing Poetry” post from a few weeks back, I’ve assembled a few of my favorite DIY science-rap videos. These multimedia productions collectively offer an alternative model for science communication, challenging top-down popularizations by talking-head experts and giving us new images of what it means to learn about and practice science.

Image Credit: Kate McAlpine, "Large Hadron Rap"

The goofiest of the lot might be the "Large Hadron Rap," the brainchild of Kate McAlpine, a science writer for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Shot a few months before the particle accelerator was started up in September 2008, the video has a charming (and disarming) low-tech, homespun quality that belies the supercollider’s multi-billion dollar price tag. Even more so than her instructional rhymes about the Higgs boson particle, McAlpine's gamely exaggerated performance works against fears prompted by the doomsday predictions that circulated in the months before the collider launched, as well as a murkier sense of distrust surrounding Big Physics, with its inscrutable (for most of us) questions.

Image Credit: Tom McFadden, "Regulatin' Genes"

H / T to Elaine

At Stanford, Human Biology instructor Tom McFadden has created a series of raps around course topics like metabolism, gene regulation, and cellular division. (You can scope out others on McFadden's youtube channel.) He stars in a few, along with a rotating cast of Stanford undergraduates and cameos by professors. Despite the gleefully hammed up performances and at times ungainly lyrics, these raps do serious work: by drawing on the rhetorical canons of memory and delivery, they demonstrate how performance can enable students to take ownership of content and concepts. I also love the atmosphere of unabashed fun generated through these collaborations, both for McFadden's Human Biology section and (based on the youtube comments) for bio students everywhere who have come across these videos. If the LHC and Stanford raps don’t always succeed artistically, they communicate how science is not necessarily opposed to a sense of play.

Image Credit: Baba Brinkman, "Performance, Feedback, Revision"

In contrast, the performances of Baba Brinkman (a self-styled “rap troubadour”) hinge on his skills as a wordsmith. Brinkman, with his MA in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, repurposes the rapper’s swagger to imbue scientists like Darwin and Dawkins with an iller-than-thou rep. Brinkman’s lyrics not only make the concepts accessible; they also argue for and model what it means for non-specialists to engage with scientific debates. And in songs like “Performance, Feedback, Revision,” which proposes an analogy between the writing process and descent with modification, Brinkman deftly weaves together art and science to create a spirit of convergence (or consilience, to borrow Wilson’s term).

A Sample Narrated Slideshow Using SoundSlides Plus

emcg — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:33:28 +0000

Image Credit: Eileen McGinnis

To follow up on this week's review of SoundSlides Plus, here is a brief demo that I made for my "Literature and Biology" students using the software.

Creating a Narrated Slideshow with SoundSlides Plus

emcg — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:37:24 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of my SoundSlides project

Thanks to Alicia Dietrich at the HRC’s Cultural Compass blog, we at viz. learned about this easy-to-use software that allows journalists to create sleek, sophisticated slideshows. But how does SoundSlides translate to the writing classroom? A mixed—but mostly enthusiastic—review after the jump.

SoundSlides’ appeal lies in its simplicity. As indicated by the initial screen (pictured below), sound + slides are really all one needs to get started: upload your folder of images, upload your audio, and you are well on your way to creating a beautiful slideshow.

Image Credit: Screenshot of SoundSlides

While the straightforward interface is praiseworthy, it means that quite a bit of initial preparation is required before you actually sit down to compose: students will need a pre-recorded narration or soundtrack, and a folder of images that will fit the length of their audio. They may also need to convert their files, as SoundSlides accepts only jpg and mp3 formats. In addition, they will not be able to edit the audio file once it’s been imported into SoundSlides.

Given that a narrated slideshow asks students to consider the interplay of word and image, the advance planning required by SoundSlides functions as a possible constraint. In fact, when I sat down to create a sample narrative slideshow for my students, I found myself gravitating instead toward iMovie, which allowed for a more dynamic exchange between images and sound. To me, this at times messy exchange was a crucial part of the composition process. It was when I started putting the narration and images together that I realized which images didn’t work or found places where an additional image was needed.

That said, SoundSlides Plus is still a relatively flexible tool. A simple drag-and-drop process enables you to rearrange and delete images. A "movement" tab animates individual slides to create a more dynamic, video-like feel. A timeline at the bottom of the screen allows you to customize the length of time that each image appears; click the play button at any time to preview the results.

Image Credit: Screenshot of my SoundSlides project

From a pedagogical perspective, another worthwhile feature is the ease of attributing images with captions. Given our emphasis in class on choosing and citing images responsibly, it’s nice that the journalistic context for the software puts attribution front and center.

Exporting your slideshow and publishing it to the web require a bit of care: this tutorial from the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley is quite helpful in walking you through the process. For instructors here at the Digital Writing and Research Lab, students will need to store their slideshow materials in their "Teacher Folder" in order to play their presentation on your course web site.

The pedagogical value of SoundSlides Plus depends a great deal on the context of your course and the specific goals of the assignment. Although SoundSlides doesn't allow students full control over manipulating and presenting their work, the simple interface allows them to focus on discovering, supporting, and structuring their argument, while still introducing them to the process of multimedia composition. I also like that my students will end up with an attractive, professional-looking slideshow they can take pride in. This project will still entail a great deal of choice and creativity, but the emphasis will be on practicing and extending the skills they’ve built this semester.

I’ll be introducing SoundSlides in class next week and will report back on my students’ experiences using the software. In the meantime, look for additional perspectives on SoundSlides Plus from Cate and Elizabeth in the coming weeks.

Better Living Through Visualization

emcg — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:24:43 +0000

Image Credit: Christian Behrens, "Flight & Expulsion"

On the heels of touring the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s visualization lab, I thought I’d highlight a new social-media platform for data visualization. Launched earlier this month by GE and SEED Media Group, visualizing.org is a collaborative space for visualizing complex issues like climate change, human migration, and food insecurity.

As the editors explain, “The site is open and free to use. Everything you upload remains your sole and exclusive property and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. Simply put, this means that anyone can share, copy, remix, or build upon the visualization as long as: (i) it is used non-commercially; and (ii) the visualization’s creator and source are credited.”

Image Credit: U.K. Government

Given the open-source nature of the site, offerings are necessarily uneven or idiosyncratic. For instance, while browsing, I encountered a playful series of vampire venn diagrams and a fanciful but enigmatic visualization titled, in all caps, “A_B_ PEACE & TERROR ETC. THE COMPUTATIONAL AESTHETICS OF LOVE & HATE.” However, the content curated by the site’s bloggers is so far consistently intriguing. They highlight innovative visualizations such as the UK’s new Google Earth layer to predict the effects of climate change and Christian Behrens' work on migration, which uses the same data set to generate several different visualizations, calling our attention to the function of graphic design in guiding our way of seeing.

Image Credit: Cause Shift, "Food Insecurity, Obesity, SNAP Participation and Poverty"

In addition to providing visualizations for classroom analysis, visualizing.org offers a space for students to share their own image productions, perhaps even the infographics that Cate contemplates in her latest post. Of course, the hard work of constructing and supporting such an assignment still remains, but the site would provide opportunities for students to get feedback from a larger community of graphic designers, beyond what an individual instructor can offer as an “infographics noob” (to borrow Cate's expression).

Image Credit: Rozina Vavetsi, "Languages of the World"

The site's rhetoric is perhaps over-optimistic, promising pie-in-the-sky social change via open-source pie charts: “By giving visual form to the often abstract systemic underpinnings that lie between broad concerns like health, energy, and the environment, we hope to generate actionable knowledge that can be used to improve lives.” Nonetheless, visualizing.org is an easy-to-use and potentially powerful platform for collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to visualization. At the same time, its open access allows us to add to the current science-and-society agenda: how might we visualize data related to our interests in English, rhetoric, and composition studies?

Visualization, Texas-Sized

emcg — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 21:17:47 +0000

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

In my very first post for viz., I marveled at Ben Fry’s visualization tool The Preservation of Favoured Traces, which helps us to visualize Darwin’s revision of Origin of Species over six editions. With a background in computer science, statistics, and graphic design, Fry had managed to approach the problem of visualizing textual history with striking economy and elegance. In my post, I wondered about the unorthodox solutions (and research questions) we might discover if we engaged in digital collaborations with designers and engineers. This question resurfaced yesterday as I toured the visualization lab at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

The centerpiece of TACC’s visualization lab is the world’s highest resolution tiled-display (at 307 megapixels), a 15 screen x 5 screen array of 75 30-inch flat panel monitors named Stallion. (All of the equipment has a Texas-kitsch moniker: e.g., Rattlesnake, Mustang, Horseshoe.) Other areas of the lab included a 20 x 11-foot flat screen mini-theater and an 82-inch 3D back-projection display. A partitioned collaboration room allows small groups to develop visualizations.

On our tour, we viewed samples of both art projects and scientific simulations that reinforced how (to quote the TACC web site) “visualizations generated by supercomputers can immerse you in data, visually.” Upon entering the darkened space, we were confronted with photographer Ricardo Meleschi’s one giga-pixel panoramic image of downtown Austin; a controller allows visitors to zoom in on a street sign or the inside of an apartment with remarkable (and rather invasive) clarity. The lab has also hosted two digital art exhibitions. Of the art pieces we viewed on Stallion, my favorite was one by Bill Haddad that riffed on the security-camera set-up of the monitors, offering faux surveillance footage of campus buildings and outdoor spaces manipulated to look like it was being taken in real-time. Clearly, though, collaborations with scientific researchers have been the lab’s focus: for example, we saw simulations that predicted, respectively, the path of Hurricane Ike and the patterned spread of the H1N1 virus in the U.S.

Image Credit: TACC H / T to Scott Nelson

As an instructor, I can be admittedly dinosaur-like, feeling that we should be clear on our pedagogical goals first before considering the technologies that enable us to achieve them. But as I stared at a sophisticated molecular model out of a pair of fancy 3D glasses embedded with a microchip, my techno-skepticism vanished, and I wondered why the chemists should have all the fun. When I asked Visualization Lab Manager Brandt Westing if the lab had worked with researchers in the liberal arts, he responded that this was a population the lab would love to collaborate with but that it was difficult to get the word out. All UT faculty, staff, and students have access to the visualization lab, which includes extensive training and support from TACC staff. Maybe we should just start dreaming up projects, albeit necessarily clunky and unsophisticated ones at first, and use the technology to see new questions and patterns?

Ultimately, though, my visit to TACC’s visualization lab raises larger questions than whether or not one absolutely needs to use supercomputers to do research in rhetoric, writing, and literature (the answer, alas, is probably “no”). More broadly, the lab is a high-tech space that invites us to think about the role that visualization (even if unabashedly low-tech) might have not only in presenting our research but also generating and investigating our research questions.

The Uncanny Valley

emcg — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:11:43 +0000

Image Credit: Retrolicious via Bioephemera

Inspired by Elizabeth’s close reading earlier this week, I thought I’d attempt to make sense of my attraction to the digital image above, which has been adorning my desktop for the past month or so. Pictured are Japanese inventor Yasutaro Mitsui and his steel humanoid, circa 1932. Why is this duo so appealing—and arresting? A few speculations after the jump.

The modernity of the mechanical robot contrasts strikingly with Mitsui’s formalwear and the plush ornamental carpet beneath them. The crease in the bottom left corner, which suggests the textural materiality of an “original” sepia-toned photograph, underscores the image's digital nature. There's also something both pleasurable and unsettling about the interpretive questions raised by encountering a contextless image. Though a modicum of digging tells me that it was reprinted in Haruki Inoue's Nihon Robotto Soseiki 1920-1938 (1993), I don't know who took this image and under what circumstances. What were the contexts in which viewers, such as Mitsui himself, might have understood it?

Image Credit: Wikipedia (Creative Commons)

Another clue to the image's appeal comes from an unlikely source: a graph named after Freud’s concept of the uncanny. The “uncanny valley,” a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, describes our considerable drop in comfort level when we encounter robot models that too closely resemble the human form. (For an overview of the phenomenon, which is not limited to our species, see this SEED article.) The humanoid here manages to avoid tumbling into the uncanny valley: the exposed electronics and steel rivets exaggerate its morphological and material difference, while its gesture of greeting offers a comforting sense of human familiarity.

And yet, the overall image isn’t merely cute or cutesy, nor does it fully banish a minor note of unease, of uncanniness. The image’s success hinges on a visual antithesis, as its composition sets up a comparison of human and humanoid. As I discovered when I came across the alternative version below, the aesthetic choice to crop the image makes it more compelling, removing unnecessary detail and distance so that we focus on its two central figures. The robot’s easeful welcome and open, animated stance call attention to Mitsui’s stern visage and wooden posture, his mechanical stiffness and discomfort. As one blogger noted, “I believe his robot looks friendlier than the inventor.” Both end up objectified under the camera’s gaze, through which they reflect and refract each other's traits.

Image Credit: Cybernetic Zoo

Ultimately, I'm still unsure about the fascination this image holds for me (which is reflected in my imprecision here). I’m curious if my response is purely subjective, or if this image stirs a frisson-like feeling in others?

Science Art: Our Specimens, Ourselves

emcg — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:51:21 +0000

Image Credit: Justine Cooper

In Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, philosopher Stephen Asma argues for natural-history museums as rhetorical spaces, with “deep ideological commitments quietly shaping and editing the sorts of things different cultures and different historical epochs consider to be knowledge.” But what can we learn from the museum’s less public spaces? In her narrated slideshow “Saved by Science,” artist Justine Cooper’s behind-the-scenes photographs evoke an eerie dreamscape at the intersection of scientific collecting and human desire.

In 2005, the Australian-born Cooper was granted rare behind-the-scenes access to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The results are fascinating for the way they both synthesize and dissect the artist’s and scientist’s modes of vision. In part, her photographs of "objects en masse" catalogue Cooper's journey toward a scientific gaze: "when you look closer at each of those individual specimens, you actually start to see individuality, difference." At the same time, Cooper recalls coming across a crate of cretaceous bones wrapped in newspaper from 100 years ago. Her paleontologist-guide noticed that one of the sheets was crumbling to reveal the bone of a T. Rex relative. But it was the wrappers themselves that caught Cooper’s eye, for the way they make visible that the specimens “aren’t just scientific objects, but are also wrapped in a cultural tissue.”

Image Credit: Justine Cooper

As the images here show, Cooper’s eye was repeatedly drawn to containers, which reflect not only available materials and technologies, but also more subjective curatorial choices. For example, the museum's anthropology collections for entire countries or continents are stored in sleek, space-age compartments arranged on a diagonal grid, their sterile anonymity begging the question of how a culture can be contained.

Some of the most poignant images here are ones that raise questions of scientific value and human motives. Cooper recalls feeling an affinity with a solitary lion’s head tagged “no data attached,” meaning that the animal’s death could not even be framed as serving the cause of scientific inquiry. The photograph reminded me of Andrea Barrett’s short story “Birds with No Feet,” which my students read in class earlier this semester. In the story, an Alfred-Russel-Wallace-like collector returns from the Malay Archipelago to a country in the midst of the Civil War; with no one interested in cataloguing his specimens, he comes to see his collecting, like his soldiering, as “another murderous journey.”

Other images are just plain fanciful: for example, coming across a fiberglass mold of Homo ergaster in the attic, the cast of which resides in the Hall of Human Biology, Cooper notes, “I could imagine a story where she’s running to join that part.” These photographs reveal--and revel in--the collection's “latent mystery,” while suggesting that its allure is intimately bound to the mystery of why we collect. Although humans are absent from these photographs, our imprint is everywhere. As Cooper finally asks, “Are we by nature obsessive, preservationist, or sentimental? Is it knowledge, ownership, or curiosity that drives us to collect?”

Ultimately, I’m drawn to "Saved by Science" as a model for the kind of interpretive, imaginative multimedia writing I would like my students to produce this semester. With 21 photographs and less than 8 minutes of narration, Cooper’s visual narrative accomplishes a great deal. In the classroom, how do we elicit (and guide) a similar process of critical analysis and immersive storytelling?

Database Review: Wellcome Images

emcg — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 01:16:44 +0000

An American physician of the late nineteenth century, with his doctor's bag and horse and buggy. Colour lithograph by E.C. Pease, 1910.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Last spring, viz. rounded up a number of important visual archives and databases. Viz. readers interested in the history of medicine should consider adding Wellcome Images to that list. A major visual collection of the U.K.’s Wellcome Library, its offerings range “from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.”

A French dentist showing a specimen of his artificial teeth and false palates. Coloured engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, 1811.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

There’s above all a spirit of freewheeling eclecticism that makes the database so enjoyable to browse. Representations of doctors range from the American dandy in the advert above, to a Japanese watercolor depicting a properly demure doctor-patient relationship, to dramatic canvases set in medical theaters. Images of ephemera from the collection include a medicine chest from the 1933 Mount Everest expedition and Charles Darwin’s whalebone walking stick with a goth-looking skull pommel. Artistic and medical images happily coexist: a digital artwork of a golden DNA double-helix appears next to a scanning electron micrograph of sickled and normal red blood cells.

In sum, Wellcome Images offers an experience of discovery and play akin to rooting around in a physical archive. The downside, as in a physical archive, is that one might struggle to contextualize these findings—the Wellcome's categories (e.g., “Nature,” "Life") are too broad to help us organize the images meaningfully.

Francis Crick Papers

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

In preparation for a brief unit on Literature and Medicine later this semester, I also decided to test out the database's search function, which allows users to refine results by date and technique. The search term "hysteria" resulted in 28 hits, turning up mainly photographs of female patients from the 1890s. This image search would make for a possible in-class exercise when we discuss Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow-Wallpaper." More broadly, the search results would work to initiate a conversation about the early use of photography as diagnostic tool, founded on a belief in its unassailable status as scientific evidence.

Three photographs in a series showing a hysterical woman screaming. Albert Londe, c. 1890.

Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The Wellcome Library allows watermarked-versions of their images to be “freely available for download for personal, academic teaching or study use, under one of two Creative Commons licences.” Visit the site for additional information about their terms of use.

Remixing Science

emcg — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 02:39:37 +0000

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.”

Medical Art: All That Glitters is Not...Cystic Acne

emcg — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:46:11 +0000

Image Credit: Laura Kalman, Cystic Acne, Back (2009)

Via Bioephemera

In a post earlier this week, Cate discusses “Freeze! Revisted,” an art project that literalizes our consumption of violence. In response to the “sensual suicide” of mod-pixie models sucking on gun-shaped popsicles, I offer these blinged-out (and beautiful?) representations of diseased female bodies.

In her series “Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments,” Lauren Kalman photographs models wearing jewelry arranged to mimic the skin infections, rashes, and sores that manifest underlying medical conditions. With remarkable spareness, Kalman’s images manage to shorthand a number of issues at the intersection of health, beauty, and consumption. The temporariness of the jeweled piercings (specifically, gold acupuncture needles adorned with semi-precious stones) mirrors the fleeting surface visibility of long-dormant diseases like syphilis. At the same time, the relative permanence of these materials underscores our bodily impermanence, a susceptibility to disease and decay that we attempt to “ward off” through consumption of “talismanic commodities” like jewels. As Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera notes, do the images also suggest that there is something “sick” about female consumption and body modification in the service of ideal beauty?

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Wart (2009)

Via Bioephemera

For me, the most intriguing aspect of this series is the provocative way it links commercial and medical representations of the “imaged body” (Kalman’s term). By connecting these seemingly disparate classes of images, Kalman calls attention to “the similarities between images that intend to project ideals and those that display subversive or even abject bodies. For example medical imagery, pornography, and advertising display anatomy, often using similar positions and compositions.”

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Nevus Comedonicus (2009)

Via Bioephemera

In class, it might be interesting to talk about why the photos are jarring—how do they subvert the binaries of health/disease, nature/culture? But while unsettling, are these images also beautiful? (Or, frisson-style, does their sexiness stem in part from the discomfort they provoke?) If so, is that in part because, while they undercut viewers' expectations, they simultaneously conform to certain conventional representations of (white, young, healthy) women? Kalman’s earlier series “Hard Ware” (2006) transforms jewelry into grotesquerie, as in the mouth encrustation below. Other pieces turn “shameful” bodily fluids (saliva, snot) into cartoonish, expensive-looking adornments. Less explicitly "diseased," these bodies are also less ambiguously repulsive: in "Hard Ware," jewelry takes on a runny or crusty or monstrous bodiliness, while in "Blooms" disease becomes abstracted, idealized.

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Lip Adornment (2006)

Via Bioephemera

Save the Words (through Images)

emcg — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 03:55:42 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of Save the Words

H/T to Elaine and Very Short List

To kick off my return to Viz. this semester, I’m excited to share two artifacts at the intersection of verbal and visual cultures. After the jump: a design savvy website that functions as a Linguistic Extinction List of sorts. Also, a short film that invites viewers to consider the neuroscience of language.

Oxford UP's web site Save the Words uses graphic design to re-invest obsolete or antiquated words with modern charm, even (perhaps) a certain glamour and intrigue. Employing colorful typography worthy of a Cosmo cover, the site gives words like jobler and squiriferous a graphic make-over, while the experience of navigating a virtual Wall of Words engages the roving eye of a 21st-century internet user. Once smitten by a particular graphic representation, visitors may pledge to use their adopted word daily.

Image Credit: Everynone

H/T to Elaine

Produced in conjunction with WNYC’s Radiolab, a weekly science podcast/radioshow, the short film “Words” is a curious celebration of words via their absence. After the opening frame, the textual presence is minimal. Instead, the viewer encounters a sequence of images and sonic information, and is asked to supply the words that make sense of these relationships. In addition to being just plain lovely, the video works as an interactive experiment: once you become clued into the logic of the film, you watch a second (or third or fifth) time to observe your brain’s language use--its ability to make verbal associations--in action. On another level, while the video assumes a kind of universal narrative that speakers of American English recreate to decode its "visual wordplay," I'm curious about the stories that individuals construct to make sense of these images: clearly, a clip of an amateur theater production or a coach outlining a football strategy signifies more than just the noun play.

I initially envisioned "Words" as a possible introductory activity for my Literature and Biology class, but ultimately decided to begin with some evolution rap instead. Do Viz. readers have any thoughts about the kinds of conversations that either of these artifacts might prompt in a rhetoric or literature classroom? I have a hunch that, given its explicit invitation to explore the intersection of word and image, "Words" might pair nicely with some of the questions raised by Paul Messaris in "What's Visual about 'Visual Rhetoric'?," which Tim Turner profiled for Viz. last year. This review essay asks whether there is something unique about the status of the visual in argument. For instance, the effectiveness of "Words" hinges on the narrative impulse that's particular to viewers of image sequences; according to Messaris, "Because of perceptual habits cultivated by the dominant role of movies and other visual narratives in our visual culture, all viewers are primed to see sequences of images as bits of stories, even when those images are also connected in more symbolic or conceptual ways."

Portrait of the Artist as a Science Dilettante: An Interview with Zack Booth Simpson

emcg — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:11:23 +0000

Last month, I posted a profile of Zack Booth Simpson, a local artist, game designer, and biology researcher. Earlier this week, we met up at Spider House here in Austin to discuss the creative process behind his interactive art installations; the dismal state of popular science in 21st-century America; and his unconventional path into academia. You can find a transcript of my interview with Zack here.

Portrait of the Artist as a Science Dilettante

emcg — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:10:18 +0000

Image Credit: Aaron Chevalier and Nature

H/T to The University of Texas at Austin

Next month, I’ll be posting an interview with fellow Austinite Zack Booth Simpson, a video-game programmer, artist, and part-time research fellow at UT’s Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. On the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” lecture, in which Snow described a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between literary and scientific cultures, Simpson’s eclectic body of work suggests the value (and urgency) of a new synthesis.

Simpson’s ten-year-old company Mine-Control fosters collaborations among programmers, artists, and scientists on art exhibits that allow viewers to explore scientific and mathematical themes, from RNA-folding to fractals. For instance, “Moderation” draws on the ecological message and visual motifs of the classic anime Princess Mononoke. As Mitch Leslie explains, "How fast you walk around a pool projected onto the floor determines whether the virtual plants and other life that sprout in your footsteps thrive or die out. Walk too fast, and the virtual ecosystem dies out.”

An Austin Chronicle review of “Moderation” asks, "Can artists really modify behavior?" If so, these visual arguments must rethink the conventional relationship between rhetor and audience in popular science communication, which often takes a patronizing top-down approach. Like Satre Stuelke’s Radiology Art, Simpson’s art installations, which draw on his gaming background, challenge elite access to the tools of scientific investigation; in doing so, they offer a compelling invitation to see. Like Jean Painlevé’s nature films or Ernst Haeckel’s radiolaria drawings, they also feature an element of whimsy and playfulness.

In 2004, Simpson talked his way into a UT biology lab, which went on to develop an award-winning method of bacterial photography, manipulating microbes to act like the light-capturing pixels of a digital camera (Simpson’s colleague, Dr. Andrew Ellington, is pictured above using the technique). Last year’s profile of Simpson in Science notes that some critics might label him a “science dilettante” for his unconventional entry into the arena of scientific research, bypassing traditional channels of academic credentialing. If this term might also signify an intellectual curiosity and openness that takes one beyond disciplinary borders or left/right-brain categorization, then I say, hurrah for amateurs. Long live science dilettantism.

Look for a conversation with Zack Booth Simpson in January.

Mannahatta my city

emcg — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:52:54 +0000

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Next month, I’ll be making a long-awaited trip to New York City, my adopted hometown. To prepare, I’ve been studying Adam Platt’s latest restaurant reviews, reciting Walt Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” nightly like prayer, and spending quality time with landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project.

A digital map of the island as it appeared in 1609, when Hudson first sailed into New York Bay, this visualization tool offers an intriguing argument about the city’s ecological future.

The (cleverly named) Mannahatta Project slyly repurposes the technologies employed by Hollywood disaster flicks to recreate the island’s former biodiversity and to model the 55 different ecosystems the island once supported. The model also takes into account the activities of the Lenape, whose 5000 years of settlement and cultivation also impacted the island's ecology. Project Director Eric Sanderson's TED talk provides an accessible overview of the complex, decade-long process of spatial layering, “geo-referencing,” and spinning of Muir webs involved in trying to re-capture the island's remote ecological past.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

Sanderson insists that the project's goal is not to lament the loss of the 1609 Mannahatta but to see today's Manhattan anew, to come to understand the city as a habitat, with its own dense, resilient networks. Sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, the Mannahatta Project is pitched as a tool that will allow us to design sustainable cities. I.e., by digitally reconstructing Manhattan Island as it might have been in 1609, the Mannahatta Project opens up a cognitive space for imagining what (else) New York might become. Sanderson’s visualization of Manhattan in 2409 shows rooftop gardens growing produce, city-dwellers on bikes, streams instead of sewers, and greater popular density to leave space for reclaimed green areas. No longer would one have to choose, as in Whitman's 1865 poem, between "Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs...Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus" and Nature's "primal sanities."

Returning to the question Noel posed two months ago: does the Mannahatta Project work as a new, creative visualization of ecological crisis? Is the message too buried, indirect? Have we altered the landscape too drastically for an effective (and affective) recognition of Mannahatta in 1609 as our city? I think that the site's exploration tool succeeds in appealing to New Yorkers' fierce turf loyalty, allowing visitors to select a particular city block and access information about its former (and current) native wildlife. The project works to make these landscape alterations personal, intimate, but I'm curious if it has the same appeal for non-New Yorkers.

Image Credit: Markley Boyer/Wildlife Conservation Society

H/T to The New Yorker

P.S. Sanderson has also authored a shiny coffee-table book: Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.

Science Art: You Can Have It All

emcg — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:06:27 +0000

Image Credit: Criterion Collection

Riffing on Anne’s recent post, I’d like to highlight a film collection that defies left-brain/right-brain categorization. The Criterion Collection recently released Science is Fiction, a three-disc anthology of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s body of work, which spanned the 1920s through the 1980s. With titles like “The Love Life of the Octopus” and “Freshwater Assassins,” as well as a 21st-century soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, Painlevé’s short films challenge any didactic, formulaic, or downright schlumpy associations of the Nature Film.

In an interview, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo notes that “a lot of [Painlevé’s work] seems like compelling abstract art—which happens to be done with fish.” However, Kaplan’s interpretation is needlessly limiting: what’s brilliant about Painlevé’s films is precisely that one can find so many levels of information and points of engagement, as he merges the artist's and naturalist’s vision.

For instance, while “The Sea Horse” (1933) contains visual puns, like a race-track scene juxtaposed with sea-horse footage, it also demonstrates Painlevé’s sensitivity to the medium’s potential for communicating scientific information. Microscopy allows us to get a feel for the subject via different levels of scale, immersing us in the sea horse's magnified world; accelerated footage lets us watch the development of a sea-horse embryo unfolding at over a thousand times the normal rate.

Social commentary also has its place in Painlevé's work. Quoting an interview with Painlevé, Scott MacDonald notes that Painlevé chose the sea horse as a subject in part for its "progressive gender politics," with the male and female collaborating in child birth. The film lingers on the male sea-horse as he gives birth—zooming in on his rolling eyes, noting his sped-up breathing, following his painful convulsions. He releases only a few babies at a time, which (Painlevé announces with some glee) means the contractions go on for several hours. As MacDonald explains, "He wants us to learn not only about but from this strange fish.”

Image Credit: Screen capture from Science is Fiction

Yo La Tengo's The Sounds of Science, commissioned by the San Francisco Film Festival in 2001 to accompany eight classic Painlevé films, is offered alongside the originals. The sonic information does affect our interpretation of the footage: for example, in "Love Life" (1967), Yo La Tengo's gnarly electric guitars make the sexual encounter between two octopi aggressive, frenetic, violent, whereas the trippy electronic music selected by Painlevé creates a kinkier vibe, calling attention to his sly narration: “The male has to insert the end of his special arm, the third to the right of his head, into the female’s respiratory category.” Pause. "There is no officially sanctioned position for doing that.”

However, this update works because (a) The Sounds of Science literally rocks, offering a modern entry point into Painlevé’s films and (b) Painlevé himself was all about the remix: he made three versions of each film, for academic study, for the scientific community, and for general audiences. In addition to shortening the films, he also “edited them to jazz, big band, and electronic soundtracks.”

Science is Fiction suggests that, in going back to the early nature film, we can re-discover its imaginative potential. What makes this compelling filmmaking is precisely Painlevé's unfettered embrace of the figurative's role in science. Science is Fiction is a fitting title not because we need to read Painlevé's science films only as avant-garde aesthetic fantasies or, more generally, to flatly reduce science to discourse. In each film, we see Painlevé responding creatively, fitting his aesthetic style to the particularities of each organism, educating us about the creature's life cycle or mating habits without denying the human and cultural perspective that also guides our vision of its otherness. For instance, in "The Vampire" (1945), shot to a throaty jazz tune and incorporating images from Nosferatu (1922), the Brazilian vampire bat also becomes a figure for the menace of Nazism. These films pre-figure Donna Haraway's lesson that “There is no border where evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environment takes up, where culture rules and nature submits...”

Science Art: The Secret Life of Objects

emcg — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:16:54 +0000

Image Credit: Radiology Art

H/T to The New York Times

In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that the formation of biology (as discipline, discourse) out of 18th-century natural history hinged on a new conceptualization of “life,” which insisted upon “the dividing-line between organic and inorganic…the antithesis of living and non-living.” However, two intriguing contemporary art projects suggest that our 21st-century visualizations of Life can no longer resist the vital hum of objects.

Kevin Van Aelst re-purposes everyday materials to make science, especially the science of life, more visible, immediate, and relevant to non-specialists. In one photograph, a Halloween pumpkin wears a beta-carotene-structural-formula grin. In another, cellular mitosis is tastily schematized via Krispy Kremes. However, there’s an effect of inertness, lifelessness in these composed images—e.g., the Central Nervous System becomes a sad, tangled heap of Christmas lights, spinal cord trailing on the floor, in some anonymous hipster’s apartment.

Image Credit: Kevin Van Aelst

H/T to io9

Artist-turned-medical-student Satre Stuelke also walks the line between life and death, organic and inorganic, in his Radiology Art. These pieces re-animate cultural icons, like Barbie, imbuing them with a kind of vital warmth. Curiously, a CT scan, which reduces the human body to its component organs, bone, and tissue, provides an animating force to non-living specimens. At the same time, toys, fast food, and electronics are treated (and diagnosed) like human bodies—with a kind of loving care and attention that suggests some level of affinity and identification.

Van Aelst’s photographs are fun and inventive insertions of science into the everyday, but perhaps hindered as effective science communication by forcefully willing science into our routines, our holidays, our hair. We don’t ultimately share in the artist’s process. In contrast, Stuelke's works, especially when accompanied by their playful captions, function as an invitation to see. His project also fosters a sense of complicity, giving us rare, unauthorized access to the visual realm of medical/technological expertise and appropriating it for cultural, aesthetic, existential diagnosis. Despite Stuelke’s hey-I’m-just-goofing-around-with-my-CT-scanner stance in this New York Times article, his images succeed because they invite us to participate, asking us to inquire more closely about the objects of our existence.

Science Art: Notorious

emcg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:10:54 +0000

Image Credit: Luke Jerram

H/T to io9

With the swine-flu pandemic ramped up to a national emergency on Friday, it seems a fitting moment to discuss Luke Jerram’s virology art, which includes the stunning depiction of H1N1 above.

Mesmerizingly beautiful and painstakingly researched, Jerram’s sculptures of notoriously deadly microbes also function as wry commentary: they target both the sensationalism of popular medical reportage as well as the claims to objectivity that underlie scientific visualizations.

In an interview with SEED, Jerram acknowledges that his project challenges the opacity of science communication, inviting non-specialists to be more critical of the scientific images they consume. His sculptures comment on scientific objectivity, calling attention to how specialists’ conventions determine the perceived accuracy of an image. By foregrounding the natural transparency of microbes, the glass sculptures underscore the limits of scientific vision. As SEED explains, "Microbes—such as bacteria, protists, and viruses—aren’t the brightly colorful creatures often seen in journals and newspapers. EM images and technical renderings are typically colored by scientists, either to mark processes or simply for aesthetic reasons.” Most viruses are also at the edge of our microscopes’ capabilities of perception, so visualizing them is a balancing act that involves an element of speculation. As Jerram notes, “We’re imposing our culture on scientific data whether we like it or not.”

Image Credit: Luke Jerram

H/T to io9

So, why does one get a sense of frisson, a shudder of illicit pleasure, at viewing these sculptures? What does it mean to grow weak-kneed when confronted with the beautiful form of the smallpox virus, which killed an estimated 500 million human beings in the 20th century? Is there a kind of species betrayal going on when deadly microscopic killers are displayed like rare jewels, as in the almost languorous pose of the bacterium E. coli above? There’s a suggestion here that our depictions of nature are colored (literally, in the case of microbes) by human values and human fears. In response, Jerram’s virology art offers this challenge: is it possible to find beauty in what can kill us?

LabLit has another conversation with Jerram, and you can scope out galleries of his haunting artwork at
SEED and The Guardian.

Cosmic Imagery

emcg — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:56:08 +0000

Image Credit: Cassini's Carte de la Luna (Map of the Moon), 1679

Via Harry Ransom Center

Last Friday, I visited Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works, showing through January 3 at UT’s Harry Ransom Center. Although overshadowed, as it were, by the HRC’s Edgar Allan Poe exhibit From Out that Shadow, Other Worlds is a worthwhile destination in its own right. However, the creative energy invested in these often visually stunning artifacts from centuries past left me with questions about the current (non-)status of astronomy in the public imagination.

But first: let me explain why an Immensely Pleasurable half-hour can be had by stopping into this exhibit.

Alongside paradigm-shifting works by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo are several Renaissance books using volvelle, decorated movable paper circles that are surrounded by fixed data for astronomical calculations. In these elaborately constructed volumes, the cosmos almost explodes out of the book's material limitations. From the HRC’s impressive Herschel collection, what stood out were Caroline Herschel’s spare and eerily beautiful gouache on paper depictions of Haley’s Comet (1835-1836). In The Moon (1874), Nasmyth and Carpenter photograph meticulously-lit plaster models of moonscapes, a curious attempt at photographic realism that nonetheless is artificially constructed, participating in the moon's long history as a site for earthbound imagination and speculation.

Image Credit: http://www.astronomy2009.org/
">International Year of Astronomy

Other Worlds coincides with http://www.astronomy2009.org/
">the International Year of Astronomy, which celebrates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope. More generally, the Year of Astronomy’s purpose is to “help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe…and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.” Although this popularization effort is laudable, my pesky inner critic wonders why the cosmos suddenly needs a logo ("The Universe: Yours to Discover"). Does astronomy no longer capture our imagination because the Cold War rhetoric of the Space Age is no longer useful or relevant? As the New York Times noted, last summer’s commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing looked backward, not ahead. Have our gazes been turning ever inward, toward microscopic and virtual worlds?

Perhaps the future of creative, inspiring visualizations of space lies in interactivity, like the Google Moon project or the computer games that Noel has described in an earlier post. Regardless, it seems to me that a new sense of purpose, exigence is needed rather than patronizing public outreach. Despite our advanced imaging and modeling of the cosmos, it's rare today to encounter the vitality of the visual artifacts on display at the HRC.

Image Credit: Göran Scharmer and Kai Langhans

Via Boston.com

Image Credit: Oddbjorn Engvold, Jun Elin Wiik, Luc Rouppe van der Voort

Via Boston.com

In any case, I’m curious: what is the last image you’ve seen that showed you the cosmos anew? For me, this gallery of solar images, courtesy of the (now-defunct) VSL: Science, gave me an appreciation of the sun’s dynamic surface (e.g., the granules, sunspots, and magnetic structures above)—as well as a weirdly textural experience of the sun.

P.S. Apologies to John Barrow for borrowing the title of his excellent book for this post.

Darwin in (Endless) Circulation

emcg — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:54:49 +0000

Anticipating 2009 as the Year of Darwin,* Olivia Judson offered this suggestion last year: let’s get rid of Darwinism. She criticizes the Darwin-centric focus of both specialist and popular discourse as “grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology.” Judson’s complaint, of course, is nothing new: as a peeved St. John Mivart notes in Man and Apes (1873), “Again, the doctrine of evolution as applied to organic life…is widely spoken of by the term ‘Darwinism.’ Yet this doctrine is far older than Mr. Darwin…”

Image Credit: Cartooning Darwin

H/T: Seed Daily Zeitgeist

While preparing to teach this week, I came across a couple of intriguing resources that help to explain how the figure of Charles Darwin entered circulation as a scientific celebrity, an icon of sorts, beginning in the late 19th century. They suggest the active role of popular visual culture in the intertwining of Darwin with evolution, even as the meanings of that term remained multiple, fragmentary, diffuse.

The offerings on the site Cartooning Darwin range from humorous depictions of the evolution of the fashion plate in the 1870s to pacifist commentary during World War One. To make sense of this fascinating-but-idiosyncratic collection, you might consult “Darwin in Caricature,” a paper by Darwin biographer Janet Browne. She notes two trends that emerge in these late-Victorian popular images: the association of Darwin with evolution (as in the 1890s advertisement for Merchant’s Gargling Oil above), and a sense that, even if not discussed in Origin of Species, human origins were the real evolutionary story. Browne's study illustrates a broader point: influence in the circulation of scientific ideas is not unidirectional, moving exclusively from specialist elites to popular culture.

Similarly, the exhibit Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts, which was at the Yale Center for British Art earlier this year, reveals the power of artistic images to shape non-specialist understandings of evolution. The exhibit traces how evolutionary theory proliferates, adapts, and mutates as it is interpreted in paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures from major European and American collections.

Image Credit: William Henry Simmons

H/T: The New York Times

Although Endless Forms offers an important argument about the interconnectedness of scientific and artistic modes of vision, its title and framing perpetuate a decidedly Darwin-centric perspective. As historian of science James Secord argues in Victorian Sensation: “Even those who contextualize and deconstruct Darwin’s work are inevitably reinforcing its centrality.”

Alas: I’ve done my part to reinforce Darwin’s centrality here and in an earlier post.

*In case you’ve missed the steady stream of anniversary-related ephemera, such as Mrs. Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book, February 12th was the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth. Next month marks the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Origin of Species.

Science Art, Part Two: Biology of the Strange

emcg — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:22:57 +0000

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

In the viz. archive, Dale quotes a 1979 interview with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in which he insists that "if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs." Re-watching Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which offers a strangely beautiful vision of Antarctica, I was reminded of the late-19th-century scientific drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Both give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange.

For Haeckel, stylized drawings like the radiolaria array above would help naturalists see the unity of life (and its common descent). However, both his contemporaries and modern scientists have questioned the accuracy of these illustrations, their fidelity to the specimens he collected. Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

Similarly, Herzog’s Encounters defies existing schemes of classification. Critics have pointed to its oddball poetry, its mystical vision; in particular, it’s been understood in terms of the “absurd quest” trope that dominates Herzog’s oeuvre, including his previous documentary Grizzly Man. But its quirkiness perhaps obscures its achievement: Encounters re-envisions the nature film.

Instead of “fluffy penguins,” the camera lingers on a disoriented, perhaps “deranged,” lone penguin as it follows a determined path into the interior, toward “certain death.” The underwater footage, set to majestic but slightly dissonant choral music, takes on an element of danger, even fear, when juxtaposed with researcher Sam Bowser’s science-fictional descriptions of this “horribly violent world,” with “worm-type things with horrible mandibles” that drove our ancestors to flee in terror to the land.

Image Credit: Encounters at the End of the World

The film also insists on human subjects and interventions as part of the Antarctic landscape: the camera turns with equal curiosity to the continent’s temporary human inhabitants and to the “bleak Motel 6 drabness” of McMurdo Research Base. Instead of the researcher as talking head, we see the nutritional ecologists who study the feeding patterns of Weddell seals enact a performance-art piece: they slowly crouch down to listen to the ice above the Ross Sea, accompanied by the “inorganic,” Pink-Floyd-like sounds of underwater seal recordings.

At the risk of mere gushy praise versus cool intellectual distance: I confess that I left the film with a sense of gratitude for its vision of scientific inquiry as deeply motivated by aesthetic appreciation and even mystical yearnings--from the glaciologist who dreams that he hears the cry of the iceberg B15 to the physicist who describes his investigations of the neutrino as an attempt to contact “some spirit or god” inhabiting a separate universe.

The apocalyptic resonance of the film's title points, ultimately, to the urgent need for "new images" of science. To reiterate the sentiments of last week's post, perhaps environmental activism must begin not with cliched images of cuddly, distressed polar bears trapped on ice floes, but with visions of wonder, with a sense of mysterious beauty, with the biology of the strange exemplified by Haeckel's studies of organic forms and Herzog's Encounters.

Science Art, Part One

emcg — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:22:10 +0000

Image credit: The IFF by Alyssa Gorelick. H/T to io9

Noel’s last post, in which she calls for “incisive, creative visualizations of ecological crisis," got me thinking about two recent, ongoing art projects that engage with the challenge of visualizing Eco-Perils: namely, the loss of biodiversity and the dying coral reefs. Ultimately, they suggest that our failure of vision, our inability to see ecological danger, is intimately linked with a failure of scientific understanding.

In her NOVA series, Isabella Kirkland creates life-size paintings of species that have been discovered within the last twenty years. NOVA: Understory (2007), below, juxtaposes species found across several continents. The lush but also crowded, feverish landscape suggests their impending extinction due to changing environmental conditions or shrinking habitats. As Jessica Palmer notes, these paintings recall 17th- and 18th-century cabinets of curiosities, though the logic of this tableaux reveals not a common taxonomic order but a shared “ecological plight.” While invoking a sense of the beauty and wonder of biodiversity, the series also points to the fragility of this state of profusion, the possibility that an abundance of forms will be replaced by a monochromatic landscape populated by what David Quammen calls “superweeds,” invasive species like roaches, rats, and humans.

Image credit: Isabella Kirkland. H/T to Seed Magazine

“Hyperbolic crochet” combines advanced geometry and feminist handicraft in the service of making visible the disappearing Great Barrier Reef, as project co-founder and historian of science Margaret Wertheim explains in this intriguing TED talk. Through its use of crochet, the coral-reef project gives the utter strangeness, alienness of marine life a kind of homespun intimacy.

The convergence of disciplines at play in this project is intoxicating, but I wonder: what work does it do? Will the reefs live on only in these cuddly, crocheted instantiations? Similarly, despite the vital and vibrant beauty of Kirkland’s paintings, are they ultimately a kind of memento mori for species on the verge of extinction—i.e., art-as-taxidermy?

Less pessimistically: perhaps these projects function rhetorically less as a call to activism than as an argument for a particular way of looking at the natural world, a crucial (if less dramatic) step toward environmental change. In Origin of Species, Darwin connects understanding with vision: “Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal…her scheme of modification, which it seems that we wilfully will not understand.” These artworks make visible the reality of a “web of complex relations" (quoting Darwin again) that we willfully will not see.

Visualizing Revision: The Case of Origin of Species

emcg — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:49:55 +0000

Image credit: Ben Fry

This month, Ben Fry at Seed launched a project called The Preservation of Favoured Traces, a visualization tool that allows us to witness how Origin of Species evolved across six revisions during Darwin’s lifetime. The results are intriguing not only for those of us who teach rhetoric of science (and who secretly harbor a crush on Charles Darwin, especially during his mutton-chop phase), but for scholars interested in how textual history might be visualized.

When you launch the site, revisions of the first-edition, color-coded by edition, begin to populate the screen, representing a textual rather than organic change over time. After a few minutes, the screen goes static, and we witness a marvel of Tuftian simplicity: six editions over thirteen years, graphically captured on a single screen.

In his commentary, Bly notes that he wanted to challenge the perception of scientific theories as "fixed notions," to trace the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry. However, this visualization tool would translate well to the rhetoric classroom, by underscoring how the first edition and its revisions document Darwin’s careful and constant attention to his difficult rhetorical situation. For example, the addition of the phrase “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph of the second edition is not evidence of the evolution of Darwin’s theory but a calculated response to a potentially hostile audience of general readers as well as specialists.

And yet: I’d also like to consider this visualization tool as a specimen of how a non-specialist (Bly has a background in computer science, statistics, and graphic design) approached an exercise in documenting textual history, even if he might not have conceptualized his effort in those terms. As someone who loves Origin as a narrative, even in its less scintillating moments (e.g., a chapter on pigeon breeding!), I found that Bly’s treatment of the text(s) as Mere Data left me slightly uneasy. I realize, however, that most "literary types" do not share my investment in Origin. So, I’m curious: what if someone had applied this visualization tool to, say, the 1818 and 1831 editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as the Bodleian Library manuscript? Does Bly's unorthodox approach to visualizing revision raise possibilities (or anxieties) for bibliography and textual studies?