viz.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.