Photography, Science and Jazz

In several previous blogs (Haeckel, Calder, Jess, Merian, and Baer) I referred to the occasional overlapping of art and technology.

The recent Scientific American magazine has an article on the 2008 BioScapes Photo Competition: story and photos. Entrants were allowed to use computers to enhance the images, turning scientific study into computer photo art. If you're still not sufficiently impressed, see the Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition.

For a completely different take on revealing the art in science, see the December 1 issue of The New Yorker magazine, which has an article on the collaboration between a musician and a biologist: Swing Science.

My latest series of digital prints is about grids other than the Cartesian. So far, I've covered curvilinear, parabolic spiral, sinusoidal, and cubic functions. Here's the last print, a grid following a cubic function in one axis:

Cubic Function Grid

Here's my first example of a cubic function grid. The vertical axis of the grid is a polynomial of degree 3.

A Sinusoidal Grid

Sinusoidal Grids: It's possible to create coordinate-based grids based on functions. In the example below I'm using a sine wave. I can simulate the module-based grid, with common corner vertices, or use coordinates to position cells without common vertices, overlapping and gapping the cells.

This image was inspired by columnar basalt.

Plant Senescence, Sample, Remix

Here's a new print, "Plant Senescence, Pixelated Sample, Vector Remix":

Pierre de Fermat

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the October 20, 2008, New Yorker, that in our accounting of creativity we have forgotten to make sense of late bloomers. We expect poets, artists, and mathematicians to do their best work before middle age. We tend to accept the conventional wisdom that age is the enemy of creativity.

Mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) had completed a manuscript for his pioneering work in analytic geometry by the time he was 35, but he also helped lay the groundwork for probability theory when he was 53. Fermat's example contradicts what G. H. Hardy said in his essay, A Mathematician's Apology (full text here):

"No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game." G. H. Hardy (1877 – 1947)

Hardy may have been right that original mathematics is the most difficult discipline to continue into middle age and beyond, but Gladwell says something else is going on. Gladwell's article covers the work of University of Chicago economist, David Galenson, who showed that there are two different life cycles of artistic creativity — the conceptual and the experimental. Gladwell writes:

"The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."

Fermat was a lawyer first, and though devoted to mathematics, he never felt the need to publish. His work survives through correspondence and notes he made, rather than finished writings. It seems to me that he chose to be the experimentalist, and wasn't distracted by his own early success. Like Cézanne, Fermat was more interested in the process of discovery, and less distracted by his own success.

I usually end a post with a gratuitous link to some new artwork of mine. In this case, I'm connecting Fermat's spiral, which he discussed in 1636, to the first drawing for a new series — Fermat's Spiral. (More to come. . .)

Ernst Haeckel

In previous blogs (More. . ., and Artist-Scientist Maria Sibylla Merian. . .) I referred to the artist/naturalist. Here's a link to 100 images by Ernst Haeckel, whose work survives alongside the prints of Maria Sibylla Merian. Here's a link to an exhibit of natural history books by ten authors, including Merian. Here's a link to the work of Richard Hertwig, a scholar of Ernst Haeckel.

Here's just one image of radiolarians from Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of nature), followed by my own interpretation, "Radiolarian Skeleton."

Alexander Calder

Continuing my search for artists with science or math training, while reading about the Whitney Museum of America Art exhibit "Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933", I discovered that Calder trained as an engineer. Previously, I identified Jess Collins, Jo Baer, Portland artists Julian Voss-Andreae and Stephan Soihl, and the artist and entomologist, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Calder went to the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and worked for a short time as a hydraulics engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company.

Surely the other end of the art spectrum from an exhibit at the Whitney would be a gallery show that accepts all entrants and charges a fee. For the time being, I'll have to be content with the later — Snap to Grid 2008, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art includes one of my "Canopy" prints.