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":