viz.

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.

By Eileen McGinnis, Viz. Contributor

Last month, I profiled Zack Booth Simpson, an Austin-based artist, game designer, and molecular biology researcher. Among his many projects, Simpson’s ten-year-old company Mine-Control creates interactive art installations that explore scientific themes. I met with Zack on January 19, 2010 at Spider House; selections from our conversation follow.

Julian Voss-Andreae earned a Masters in quantum physics at the University of Vienna, participating in a seminal experiment demonstrating quantum behavior for buckminsterfullerenes.  He then left academia to become a full-time sculptor in order to express his powerful artistic response to the scientific phenomena he'd been immersed in.  

Because I seem to be the first non-UT/DWRL blogger on viz., I’ll introduce myself.   I’m Anne Bobroff-Hajal. I'm an artist interested in something rather hard to find: fine art that incorporates clearly-graspable rhetoric.   Art that attempts to integrate the left brain with the right.

Detail of Home Security at Any Crazy Price

So my entries on this blog will be a treasure hunt, searching for artists who have a double goal: to communicate something rational or scientific about the real world in a way that also powerfully moves and/or delights us.   There aren’t many such artists.  John Jones accurately observed  that visual argument tends, “contrary to Aristotle’s advice, [to] foreground the use of pathos and ethos rather than logos.”  I’m searching for those very rare artists from whom I – and maybe others – can learn techniques to balance logos, pathos, and ethos.