Make it Count

So someone just posted this incredible proposal on reddit:

I managed to track it down to the blog it was originally posted on: http://www.angelaandithyle.com/blog/2010/07/26/me-and-you-and-you-and-me/ which appears to belong to the wonderfully artistic couple pictured above. Just a little browsing has left me intrigued and addicted which I suppose is a reasonable state. I mean, check out their bio:

the inevitable bio

angela likes to paint.

ithyle likes to sing.

angela likes #6699CC.

ithyle likes #FF9900.

angela is an over gifter.

ithyle is a good package wrapper.

angela paints her toenails pink.

ithyle paints his toenails black.

angela startles easily.

ithyle relishes the fact that angela startles easily.

angela likes road trips.

ithyle likes bicycle trips.

angela likes what ithyle orders at dinner.

ithyle eats whats left of angela’s dinner.

angela likes to eat more than her fair share of tofutti cuties.

ithyle laments this.

Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

Cyborg Taxidermy

Artist Lisa Black has an affinity for dead animals (not to be confused with this Lisa Black, a watercolor/acrylic painter). She likes to mount them (in the taxidermilogical sense) and create thought-provoking (if not a little disturbing) creations. A recent post on treehugger.com, has an interesting take on her work:

“She titles each modified creature with the word ‘fixed’, as if to imply that they were somehow broken in their original state. Perhaps, in our technologically hypercharged day and age, it is somehow easier to regard animals as having cold, mechanical innards rather than organic ones–almost as if that would alleviate mankind of some moral responsibility in our present relationship with them.

In the end, we’re reminded of how much more complex the animal’s organic machinery is to the most complex human constructions–and that there’s no clock to wind when their time is up.”

More of Lisa’s work with this bent can be seen in a gallery here. Below are some more pictures of her machinery-ied/ mechanical concoctions:

She’s also responsible for the site www.guildedbutterflies.com, a site that sells necklaces and broaches created from sustainably harvested butterfly wings. I have a necklace I purchased from an Audubon shop with an inset of a butterfly wing also harvested sustainably, so I find Lisa Black’s shop intriguing. Her pins and necklaces have the wings shellacked onto bamboo with a hinge in the middle so the pendant can be worn open or closed. They’re quite pretty:

Nature Can Make A Little Music

So I know I’ve been negligent in posting. Life gets a little busy sometimes and I’ll be starting a new job up in Booth Bay, Maine so posting may be a bit sporadic until I’m settled into my normal routine. So enough whining, onto the post:

I saw this some time ago but never got around to posting it.  French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has installed an exhibit at the London Barbican, the largest performing arts center in Europe. The Curve is the center’s visual arts space, where Boursier-Mougnet has mounted eight Les Paul style guitars and populated the area with 40 squat little zebra finches. The instruments have all been carefully chosen (I have a personal affinity for Les Paul electric guitars as did Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton) tuned and  The birds scrabble over the strings and produce what surprisingly sounds like the crunchy guitar anthem of some experimenting rock star. According to Curve curator Lydia Yee as recorded in a BBC interview, “With the finches he started thinking about the relationship between sound and space. He wanted to create situations that would enable sound to happen but not in an enforced way, or a very composed way.” The installation requires some significant maintenance from which ranges from the delicate tuning of the instruments to clean-up after the birds themselves. The exhibition runs until May 23rd and can accommodate up to 25 visitors at a time.

An delightfully informative article on the exhibit, complete with a humorous bent can be found here. One of the more interesting products of the work has been you-tube clips showing the birds nonchalantly making rock history:

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when life is imitating art

This is especially true when looking at the real-life models artist Alexa Meade turns into living paintings:

She uses acrylics to turn 3 dimensional life into the flat, textured subjects of discrete works of art. In most of the pictures of her work that can be found on her flickr stream as well as her professional website, a few details give the secret away – hair that is too real to the eye, and  distinctly  flesh-colored fingers and toes:

Art Makes the (Drawn) World Go Round

"Goldfish" - Artist Lawrence Yang, portfolio at suckatlife.com

I don’t know how I stumbled across this guy, but I’m nothing, if not impressed. The artist is Lawrence Yang of San Fran. I generally have an infinity for this type of art – delicate ink based drawings that use black in contrast with some really vibrant colors. The characters that make appearances in his art are cute and eerily otherworldly, with some hint of childishness to them. They feel like they could fit in with Miyazaki or Neil Gaiman stories. His artwork can be found on his website, www.suckatlife.com. Also, check out his blog at the almost equally distressingly-titled www.blowatlife.com,  and enjoy his posted doodles and process shots.

"Tiny Triptych" - Artist Lawrence Yang, portfolio at http://www.suckatlife.com

"Jamie's Present" - Artist Lawrence Yang, portfolio at http://www.suckatlife.com

"Sideshow" - Artist Lawrence Yang, portfolio at http://www.suckatlife.com

She Blinded Me With Art and Science

I have to extend a fist bump (my dad’s favorite form of communication) to my friends who provided me both with this post’s title and the subject.

I’ve long been intrigued by the interlacing of science and the arts. Especially because on a personal level science can often inform my sense of creativity and curiosity.

Antarctic Tidal Rhythms - Nathalie Miebach

Artist Nathalie Miebach converts very real and informative scientific data into intricate visual, physical representations of patterns associated with tides, sea and air temperatures, moon phases, wind speed, etc.

Jordan Basin Buoy - Nathalie Miebach

According to Miebach:

“My work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Using the methodologies and processes of both disciplines, I translate scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology woven sculptures.”

Nathalie also take this fascinating idea a step further translating certain sets of data into both sculpture and music:

External Weather, Internal Storms - Nathalie Miebach

Click the musical score below to hear the performance of the piece – it is surprisingly beautiful

To learn more, visit Nathalie Miebach’s website

For more places where art and science co-comingle:

Art of Science

Seed Magazine – Science Needs to Find a Place for the Arts

NPR Special Series: Where Science Meets Art

Paint me a blue sky, I’ll paint you a red day

Some more fun interactive art  videos and websites:

Have some fun, and paint like Jackson Pollock on this flash website:

http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

Even someone with the blackest thumb like me can’t kill their virtual flower garden

Paint Like Picasso here:

http://www.mrpicassohead.com/create.html

Check out the interesting interactive video for Arcade Fire’s song “Neon Bible” , warning that it doesn’t seem to play too smoothly however. There is another one for the song “black mirror”

Interesting art pieces from Creaktif design studio can be seen here

The most wonderful and beautiful flash games can be found on the website,  Orisinal.com, my favorites are bubble bees and bum bum koala.

Finally I’d love to share one of my favorite videos plus a new one freshly discovered, from Vancouver Film School:

Check out their youtube film channel, I love their classic animation playlist

Nagi Noda – Bizarre Conceptual Art – Animal Hairstyles to

I stumbled upon Nagi Noda with the posting of several of her fascinatingly bizarre animal hair styles:

 

 

Doing an image search on google will certainly bring up more of these. It turns out, however, that Noda embraced multiple mediums – creating art in the form of music videos, film, fashion, and more. She sadly died last year at the young age of 35 due to complications in surgery to address pain issues she was having from a previous car accident.

Noda is pictured below:

 

These are two of the more amusing videos she made unique:

This one is a coke add with Jack White singing the add (hmmm):

Her official site can be accessed at:

Nagi Noda official site

 

Public Art

I’m always intrigued when artists use the outdoors to make the world a little bit more fascinating. Most of the works fall under the label of vandalism which seems like a shame when it tends to give some flavor to the usual.

Here’s some places to check out urban/street art some of which I’ll be adding to my links page:

More crosswalk art

Wooster Collective – beyond clever

Web Urbanist – architecture and alternative art

Google Video – Julian Beever

Robin Rhode – Interacts with his street art, featured at many galleries, very cool. His videos are usually the most interesting. This is a clip discussing his background but also featuring his work. You can see another clip of his video installations here. Also there’s a little bit about him in this clip about an exhibition called street level that was featured at Boston’s ICA for a little while…