Anatomy and Art

So, this week I had a birthday.  And a friend of mine sent me one of those lists of other people born on the same day that you are.  Well, one of the names listed was Lucas Cranach the Younger.  He’s a German painter from the 1500s.  So I thought that sounded cool, and I looked him up.  He’s good!

And apparently he got the descriptor, the younger, by growing up in an art family and learning from his father who was known as Lucas Cranach the elder.  His brother Hans painted too, but it was the elder and the younger who’s style looks so much alike.  The younger was “known for portraits and simple versions of allegorical and mythical scenes” according to Wikipedia (see link above).

So that is something that I only just learned today.  And now you have too.

I realize that I am getting overdue for a post here.   Lots of works in progress these days, but not a lot of finished work to show off at this point.  Don’t worry though.  I’ll never run out of things to show and say here.  And I’ll get back to posting more again soon.  For today though, I am covered in paint and loving it, so I’m gonna get back to that again here.

I thought that while I’m still looking for that ideal career fit, I might as well go ahead and post my resume up here…

Last week there was a pretty cool story in the news about online gamers deciphering the structure of an enzyme that had long plagued scientists.  This happened through an online puzzle game called Foldit.

Foldit is a multiplayer online game, put together by a the University of Washington’s biochemistry and computer science departments.  The idea was to utilize the ingenuity and three dimensional problem solving skills of online gamers towards solving difficult protein structure prediction problems.  Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab says “We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed.”

Well, it worked.  And last week, the coolest story I personally read about was that gamers have helped work out the structure of a monomeric protase enzyme that had stumped scientists for over a decade.  And get this, they did it in just three weeks.  And as if that’s not cool enough, this discovery provides new insight into antiretroviral drugs, and is getting particular attention as a step in the fight against HIV.

If you would like to read the published article from Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, here is a link to where Foldit has posted the PDF.
http://fold.it/portal/node/990358

And here I just wanted to include a few links to other articles about this subject.
Enjoy!…

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle-20110919-1kgq2.html

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/18/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle/

http://techland.time.com/2011/09/19/foldit-gamers-solve-aids-puzzle-that-baffled-scientists-for-decade/

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/223079/puzzle-gamers-solve-scientific-mystery-that-could-help-cure-aids/

I’ve been playing with Super Sculpey again. This week I got back in to skulls.  I hadn’t done that in a while.  This was my first attempt at recreating the various foramen underneath, and still keeping a mandible in place.  It didn’t come out perfectly, but I’m pretty sure that I could get it the next time now.

I still need to make one perfect one, so that I can recreate them in a mold and have my very own basket of pocket skulls.  I still think it’s the perfect study aide for students trying to learn the foramen.  When you’re a student, you learn to treasure the things that you can take with you on the bus, or just walking around that let you review certain basics in those spare minutes of your day.  Maybe next week, I will do this right, once and for all.

In the meantime, it’s been good getting some practice in with sculpting in general.  I think that I may always come back to skulls for this purpose.  They can be as complex as you care to make them, or not.  And really, everyone loves a skull.  🙂

Just a quick bit here, but I noticed that Scientific American ran an article on a recent Brain-Art competition.

The link is here.

I think my favorite is this one called Rebrain by Robert Toro.  It is both visually striking and also works to solve a problem.  Apparently he has maximized the amount of visible cortex tissue without distorting it, thus allowing students and the like to recognize regions while still seeing this tissue.

I can’t say as I’ve spent enough time studying brains to fully appreciate the new view, but I am a fan of finding new ways to present material for added clarity.  So kudos to Robert Toro for doing just that.

I also appreciate Micheal Madore’s collaboration with Isabel Dziobek on the amygdala in autism.

You can read more about these and the other top entries and winners at Scientific American.

I wanted to bring up one more piece out there in the desert from last week.  Mostly I’ve just been calling this The Umbrellas, though I’m sure it probably has a better name than that.  I think that this one was a lot of people’s favorite after some of the bigger art out there.  The concept was simple.  You just stepped into a dome sort of structure and all around you were these lights that ran like falling rain.  The sky was covered in white umbrellas.  And speakers played the sound effects of a storm.

I noticed out there this year, that I was particularly drawn to displays that utilized sound effects.  And I found myself thinking how this relates back to my animation experience and video editing experience before that.  Even when it’s subtle, maybe even especially when it’s subtle, sound can really take a piece further.  It can engage an audience, and it tells a story, all by itself.

This particular piece out there was such a delight.  I visited it more than once, and it was always enjoyable.  It made me think on museums which engage students by creating large spaces to explore be it the heart, or the layers of the earth.  I think this is a really great tactic to take on presenting an experience, and I’d like to see more of it. I know that the Museum of Science and Industry out here in Chicago got rid of a walk through heart exhibit in favor of a computerized beating heart display.  The new piece is very cool there, but I hate to see a move away from that which can be walked through and explored from the inside.

I would so love to be able to build something like that someday.

Hello Readers!  I do believe that this is the longest I have gone without posting here, since I started this thing back in 2008.  Oh and what to say.  I’ve been away at Burning Man, my first time back in five years.  And it was amazing.

The event has grown a lot in those five years.  I knew that it had, but seeing it first hand was really something.  My travelmate and I got in the Sunday morning before the event was formally started, and that night the city was already built up to where I remember seeing it on Wednesdays or even Thursdays past.  They say that it is slowly becoming a two-week event, rather than just the one.  The sheer numbers that come out, pretty much require some sort of staggering.  We maxed out this year with more than 55,000 in attendance.  That’s a lot to put on one single road leading out there.

As usual, the city was a veritable cornucopia of sights and sounds to delight, inspire, annoy, impress, and just be taken in.  My favorite art pieces this year were probably the pier, and the skeletons.  The pier was quite simply a pier built out into the middle of the dried lake bed, fully equipped with a tackle shop, where a man talked to us about time shares, and fishing poles with glowsticks on the end so that one could go hippy fishing if they so desired.  They even had row boats docked up around the sides that one could go sit in, and a nice subtle sound effects track playing waves and seagulls to further the ambiance.

The skeletons were a different kind of piece.  From a distance it looked like a ferris wheel of skeletons.  But when people heaved on the big heavy ropes to either side of the wheel, the wheel would turn.  And if the wheel gathered enough speed, it would trigger a strobe light.  And if you happened to be playing with the piece at night, this would trigger an animation effect to the eye, and you would literally watch a skeleton at the base of the wheel rowing.  It was so cool.  Someone captured this image of the piece by day.  But the real magic of it just couldn’t be captured in any still image.  I think that’s part of what  I liked so much about it.  And y’know, skeletons!

The piece that caught me most by surprise though, was certainly the Trojan Horse.  Every year I’ve ever been out to Burning Man, there has always been some moment of break down, something that just gets you.  This year for me, it was the Trojan Horse.  And I know, lousy journalist that I am, I didn’t photograph any of that one either, but there are some nice shots up in this Mail Online collection of it, including this Associated Press shot.

I believe it stood about forty feet tall.  And Friday night we all walked over to see it burn.  While we waited, I found myself wrapped up in a conversation with a truly amazing woman about what it all really meant.  Does it matter that people build such awesome things out in the desert for a week, or should we be putting our efforts into something bigger, something further reaching.  Or are we perhaps reaching further with the art created at this one event than is readily apparent.  Well, the horse was lit, and suddenly I found myself completely emotionally sucker punched.  Somewhere in the lighting, the piece stopped being a big giant wooden horse that some people built, but became utterly symbolic of a horse I lost years back.  But as difficult as that moment was, I still feel so very fortunate to have been surrounded by the people I was just then and there.  And yes, Djinnaya, I suppose the art we make out there does matter.

So you may be wondering at this point, what did I get around to photographing out there, if not any of the pieces I’ve been talking about so far.  Well, I’ve always been mostly drawn to photographing people.  It’s the people that really make any event for me.  And I also spent a little time photographing The Man, and The Temple.

The rest of my posted photographs can be found here.
http://snapshotgenius.com/gallery/bman2011

I am so glad to have been able to make it out again this year.  And I am so grateful to those people who helped me get there, and who were a part of the experience with me.  Yay!

Ok, I first saw this image on a website called Poorlydressed.com, but I think the dress is awesome.

Unfortunately I can’t seem to find anything on the designer, but in trying I did find one more really cool anatonista look.  I don’t know who is out there making these, but I like them!

So I was recently very impressed to discover Choi Xooang.  Based in Seoul Korea and only just a few years older than me, this sculptor is doing some truly amazing work. The best write up I’ve seen so far in looking up this artist comes from Slash/Paris and goes into the various exhibitions seen thus far (see link)
http://www.slash.fr/en/evenements/the-islet-of-asperger

I believe that I am most drawn to these images of stone figures which incorporate highly realistic human components, such as I’ve shown here.  Choi Xooang’s work also includes more complete and elaborate human figures but it’s these I find myself the most fascinated by.

And I just couldn’t refrain from showing this.  The piece is called Pruritis.  It’s true, I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for hands, but come on, just look at this!  I love this work!