Effeminate sheep

The Gay Animal Kingdom, the 2006 SEED article about animal homosexuality that Illinois high school biology teacher Dan Delong was almost fired for assigning to his students.

More September happenings

Friday, September 18; Thursday, September 24; Tuesday, September 29




"On Clouds" Exhibition at Observatory

with prints and photographs by James Walsh in the gallery, and an evening program of projections, performances, poetry, and other events by various artists throughout the run of the show.

Friday, September 18 through Sunday, November 15, 2009
Opening: Friday, September 18, 7-10

Th 9/26 Joshua Beckman on clouds. Two seatings, 8 and 9pm
Tu 9/29 Klara Hobza on cloud making and Catriona Shaw and Pauline Curnier Jardin on their cloud opera. 8pm
$5 admission to all events

Beginning Sunday, September 27 we will have regular gallery hours -
3-6 Thursday and Friday
12-6 Saturday and Sunday

Clouds have long been the object of scientific study and artistic depiction. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the emerging science of meteorology allowed the fleeting and apparently formless clouds to be closely observed, categorized, and recorded. At this same time, in England and Germany, painters and poets also began to look more intently at clouds. While insisting on artifice and inspiration over mere recording, they increasingly sought to give their work a sense of greater realism and emotional power by focusing on the careful observation and accurate depiction of the natural world. The worlds of science and art were much closer then, with artists and scientists meeting in society and following each others’ work, and this allowed a shared culture to develop. At its best, detached observation was allied with emotional projection, and imagination was grounded and enriched by careful, systematic recording, all in the service of what they called natural philosophy and we would call natural history.

In this exhibition, James Walsh will present three bodies of work that trace this blending of science and art in the depiction of clouds from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.

Saturday, September 26



Monthly Jazz-Age dance club Wit's End this month features music by the Brian Newman Trio and a Charleston dance lesson by Neal Groothius and Jeri Lynn Astra.

Antik/Marion's at 356 Bowery
The last Saturday of every month at 8:30
$10 at the door

Blog discoveries for August

Art and Science, Anatomy

Photo Synthesis
   » "The Beauty of Night Rockets"

Science, Humanities, Culture

The Frontal Cortex
   » "Ketchup"

Maps, Graphs, Data Aesthetics

Flowing Data
   » "Choose Your Own Adventure — Most Likely You'll Die"

Art Collections

Daily Art Muse
   » "jennifer trask: flourish"

Artists

Drawing Life by Fred Hatt
   » "Meanings of the Nude"

Win free science books

Seed Magazine has a daily book giveway where you can enter a drawing to win a free science book (today, it's The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager). There's a new book and a new chance to win every day, so you can just keep entering as many times as you like. There's no spam or automatic mailings (the newsletters are strictly opt-in) — it's a nice no-strings offer.

July Observatory events

This week:

Antique Science

Date: Friday, July 10
Time: 7:30
Admission: $3.00

An evening of unexpected and obscure nature films. Each short film will be introduced by Jessica Oreck, director of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a beautiful documentary on insect collecting in Japan.

The evening will feature the trailer for Oreck’s fascinating film, as well as short films by Jean Painleve, the great french nature documentarian of early avant-garde documentaries on everything from crystals to seahorses to vampire bats.

Then we’ll have a look at The Cameraman’s Revenge, a silent stop-motion film from 1912 by the Polish animator, Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965). The leading players of this short animation are real insects.

Antique Science will also introduce you to a behind-the-scenes film documenting the techniques of Disney’s vintage nature films. The films of insect-life and plant time lapses are beautiful, the early filming techniques awe-inspiring, and the 1950s naturalist couples who made them adorable.

We’ll round the evening off with a outtake reel from one of our favorite nature hosts, plus a few other surprises, time warranting.





Next week:

Layered Orders: Crowley's Thoth Deck and the Tarot

Jesse Bransford

Date: Friday, July 17
Time: 7:30
Admission: Free

UPDATE: The lecture will also be repeated at 9:00 to accommodate demand.

A deck given to his brother by his mother in 1986 sat in Jesse Bransford’s childhood bedroom from the early 90’s until recently, delivering itself into Bransford’s possession at an opportune moment…

The Tarot in general and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in particular represent a miasmic confluence of image and thought into a single structure that is both liberating and overwhelming in its scope. In creating the deck, Crowley (in collaboration with painter Lady Frieda Harris) sought to integrate the mythological structures of the major mystical systems of both Western and Eastern occult traditions and to bring them into line with contemporary scientific thinking. The symbolism of the cards blends Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, Egyptian mythology, quantum physics and even the I-Ching in ways that are at the same time clear and utterly confounding.

In an image-soaked personal narration Bransford, whose research-based artwork has delved into many of the territories Crowley sought to unify, will discuss some of the basic concepts of Tarot symbolism, returning to Crowley’s deck as among the most total example of the cards’ syncretism and as the most controversial.

Jesse Bransford is a Brooklyn/Queens-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. He received a B.A. from the New School for Social Research, a B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design, both in 1996, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2000. He is currently a Master Teacher with the post of Undergraduate Director at New York University where he has been teaching since 2001, as well as a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. His work is represented by Feature Inc. in New York, Kevin Bruk Gallery in Miami, Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Köln, and Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland. Images of his work, a complete bio and related articles can be seen at www.sevenseven.com/, a website he has continuously maintained since 1997.

Both events are at the Observatory event space between the Proteus Gowanus Gallery and Reading Room, the Cabinet Magazine headquarters, and the Morbid Anatomy Library at 543 Union St. in Brooklyn.

Fg is for Franklin Gothic

The Periodic Table of Typefaces by Squidspot.

Via feuilleton.

Tonight at Observatory

I'm skipping work for this. Tonight at 7:00, Observatory is hosting its first lecture event: a talk by University of Hawaii at Manoa professor Kathryn Hoffmann entitled "Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art".





This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Observatory is the new Brooklyn exhibition/event space run by a bunch of my favorite bloggers: Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy, Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras of Curious Expeditions, Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile, Herbert Pfostl of Paper Graveyard, and artists G.F. Newland and James Walsh. It's the newest addition to the little neighborhood of galleries that's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city: adjoining Observatory are the Proteus Gowanus gallery, Cabinet Magazine space, and Morbid Anatomy Library, where I stopped in for tea a couple of weeks ago and had the pleasure of browsing the shelves and meeting Joanna, Michelle, and Dylan.

Anyway, tonight's talk looks to be excellent, and if you're in New York, have the evening free, and actually read this in time to do something about it, I strongly recommend you come by! Plus, it's free and there will be wine. Full event info here.

For some related reading, check out Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties at bioephemera, which discusses a previous lecture given by Dr. Hoffmann.

Yogic physics

I am a great lover of serenity and silence, but there are times when I long to talk back to my yoga instructor.

Now, I hate all the New Agey trappings that the trendy modern brand of hipster yoga is cloaked in, so there are plenty of times during a typical practice where I must simply shut my eyes and tune the chatter out. For me yoga is no more than an effective and agreeable physical exercise, and I would gladly excise the vague mystical overtones and pseudotherapeutic insights that are usually served along with my sixty minutes of physical conditioning. Sometimes it gets to me.

Last week, as we were being goaded to assume a crazy pose where you tip your head back and lose your balance, the instructor embarked on a miniature sermon about fear and letting go: "It's okay if you lose your balance, it's okay if you fall. As children, we weren't afraid to fall. We did it all the time, we loved it. As we got older, something changed, and we became afraid of looking foolish, afraid of losing control. Falling became a shame, an embarrassment. Remember how it used to be when you were a child. Let yourself feel again what it's like not to have that fear."

I had a very strong urge to open my mouth and respond.

"WE HAD MUCH LOWER CENTERS OF GRAVITY THEN!"

Beneath the surface of things

Beyond Light is the gallery of x-ray photographer Albert Koetsier. He arranges plants, animals, seashells, and other natural objects into delicate, ethereal compositions.









Unlike many x-ray artists who photograph flowers and natural objects, the celebrated Nick Veasey turns his camera outward, revealing the insides of objects from everyday life — like plastic dolls or underwear — but plants and animals have their time under his lens, too. He has published a book of his award-winning personal and commercial work, X-Ray: See Through the World Around You.









In his series of röntgen etchings, artist Ben Kruisdijk embellishes x-ray photographs with fanciful illustrations.









Photographer Bert Myers does simple x-ray portraits of a variety of subjects, both natural and man-made objects.









Commercial artist Hugh Turvey creates brightly colorized x-ray photographs of household objects as well as plants, animals, and other items.









Leslie Wright uses x-rays to look inside plants, animals, high-tech devices, and everyday objects.

Particle rap

Tomorrow is the official inauguration of CERN's breakthrough particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It actually went online weeks ago. I missed it — while the fate of the world hung in the balance (not really), I was off in Alaska, peacefully enjoying the continued existence of the planet Earth. While that was cause for celebration (and if you want to celebrate, io9 has got you covered), just over a week later the LHC was shut down again due to mechanical issues, and will stay down for winterization. Still, it'll be expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and imperiling the Earth again next spring.

So, the point of this post: in order to explain the mysterious, sometimes feared, and much-misunderstood workings of the LHC, a bunch of clever folks bravely stepped up to demystify the project and give the world the reassurances it needed in the form of the brilliant, beautiful Large Hadron Rap. Because science is best popularized through rap, as MC Hawking well knows. If you want to memorize every word and sing along, check here for lyrics and other info.





Don't forget that on the day the LHC went live, Torchwood was there, to make sure the Earth was safe. On "Big Bang Day", BBC's Radio 4 broadcast "Lost Souls", a Torchwood radio play commemorating the activation of the LHC. It's no longer available freely (again, sorry for the lateness — Alaska), but it can be purchased for download, and there's also an audio cd.





And just because the song made me think of it: They Might Be Giants - Particle Man. As dramatized by Tiny Toon Adventures. That was my first introduction to the song, and it's good enough for you, too.

I actually screened several different Particle Man music videos on YouTube, until some peculiar live-action renditions (is that the real TMBG video?) and what appeared to be a slew of similarly-executed entries from some beginning animation class project began to turn my brain to mush, and I simply fell back on what was oldest and most familiar. So enjoy this musical and animation classic on, roughly speaking, the subject of particles. Sort of.






I think what this post needs to finish it off is some MC Hawking. MC Hawking - Entropy.





And now I promise I'm all geeked out. It'll be something classy next time.

Modern vintage illustration

Mad Meg takes the dead, the weird, the natural, and the artifical, and mashes it all up in a fascinating curiosity cabinet sideshow that merges modern sensibilities and vintage aesthetics. The well-designed site will lead you through dream images, comic-strip tales, reimagined masterpieces, freak-show magazine covers, anatomical renderings, and a virtual natural history museum. At the end, you can snag some unique wallpapers to take away — provided you think you desktop would look good in, say, a nice insect-headed man or some dead rats.







Ben Tolman evidences influences from manuscript illumination, Northern Renaissance paintings, nineteenth-century engravings, early twentieth-century graphic design, and pulp-era science fiction in his intricate Boschian tableaux, which paint the modern psyche in dense, epic, riotous, symbolic visions.






Lorenzo Petrantoni is a commercial illustrator who applies his strong graphic talents to remix turn-of-the-century style into something both quaint and fresh. His new-old collages pop with a vibrancy that could only come from our era — and not just because of the occasional Nike logo and suchlike anachronisms.

Spots and shadows

This image spooked the hell out of me.

So now I'm linking to the article at Damn Interesting where it came from, about a fellow called Charles Bonnet and the things his grandfather saw and the curious hallucinatory phenomenon to which he gave his name, not only because it is, as always, a damn interesting read, but because I wanted to be able to spook you all with that picture, too.

Small things

Small World is an annual photomicography competition sponsored by Nikon, and in its many galleries you can see all the winners and honorable mentions going back to 1977. It's a great collection of some really outstanding images.

Below: Deformation of a polyethylene folio, Spirorbis sp. (aquatic worm), leaf scales of olive (Eleagnus), and Drosophila virilis (fruit fly) sperm.
Via 30gms.





There are also the Biomedical Image Awards, another collection of beautiful award-winning microphotography images. From the website:

The winners of the Awards challenge the public perspective that scientists don't have an artistic side. Working every day with microscopes and imaging technology, these biologists have been able to capture stunning images through a blend of original and innovative techniques.

Despite the obvious visual appeal of the pictures, their primary purpose is investigation. The images are from research projects with the ultimate goal of helping to improve healthcare through new forms of prevention, treatment and vaccination.

Below: bread mold, damaged nerve cells, and a cancer cell.






Plant Cellular Anatomy is a large, unannotated collection of one biologist's images of brightly stained plant cells. Though presented as science rather than art, they are beautiful more or less by default.





Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell is an eight-minute cinematic rendering of cellular biological processes created for Harvard biology students. The stills are nice, but what really makes it is the animation -- the way the proteins and globules and cell-parts swim, glide, coil and curve, join and separate, and jostle around. The project was an attempt to render cellular activity in a more dramatic way than the usual technical demonstrations, complete with a musical score. Of course, what would be really nice is knowing what it all is...
Via Pruned.