Archive for visual culture
July 24, 2007 at 10:43 PM · Filed under art, narration, visual culture
From the Leonardo website:
Forty years ago in Paris, a group of artists, scientists and engineers got together and decried the lack of professional venues where emerging work bridging the two cultures could be presented, debated and promoted. Frank Malina, himself a research engineer and a professional artist, convinced publisher Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press to take on the challenge of publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly art-science-technology journal, the first time such a project had been attempted.
To date they have published the work of more than 5,500 artists, researchers and scholars. In keeping with our networked times, the Leonardo community is collaborating with groups around the world on a variety of events.
Watch an interview with Executive Editor Roger Malina as he explains a little more about the history and activities of the Leonardo community.
July 12, 2007 at 8:22 AM · Filed under digital design, visual culture
This week I am attending the ECHO (exploring and collecting history online) workshop about “Doing Digital History” hosted by the Center for New Media and History at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.
After starting out with introductions (you can see participant profiles at the ECHO site above), we surveyed a range of digital history genres from archives, exhibits, and teaching sites, to online communities and journals.
Later in the afternoon on Thursday, we looked at a very cool organizing tool for gathering online sources. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] “is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.” It’s going to be huge for my work which often involves collecting movie citations or references that I know–but don’t have entered into Endnote.
At the end of the day we perused javascript for building behaviors into websites. It’s always great to get any expert detailing their strategies. Jeremy Boggs gave a great rundown and suggested some good books. Jeremy is writing his dissertation on the history of CSS. Nice.
Today, Friday, we’ve launched into looking into some of the available tools for doing digital history…things like blogs, timelines, archives, wikis, feeds and so on.
Now (11:04), engaging the public…
June 11, 2007 at 10:43 AM · Filed under cinema, visual culture
Rudolf Arnheim, a pathbreaking psychologist of visual experience in the arts, died at the age of 102 in Ann Arbor, Michigan on June 9, 2007.
Roger Malina, Editor of the journal Leonardo, had this to say:
Arnheim was a giant in our community, a long time Leonardo Editorial Advisor and seminal figure bridging the era that saw film theory develop to the era of new media.
Arnheim was an honorary editor for the journal.
An obituary by Marvin Eisenberg is forthcoming from the Ann Arbor News.
wikipedia’s entry on Rudolf Arnheim
March 26, 2007 at 8:45 PM · Filed under art, bioinformatics, genes, genomics, interdisciplinary, visual culture
As part of the Penny Stamps Lecture Series at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange will perform excerpts from Ferocious Beauty: Genome on April 5th at 5pm in the Michigan Theatre, Ann Arbor, MI.
Liz Lerman, founder and artistic director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, recently completed a four-year collaboration between scientists and choreographers culminating in Ferocious Beauty: Genome, a multi media dance/theater work that explores the human implications of discoveries in genetic science. Created with geneticists from organizations including The Institute for Genomic Research, Wesleyan University, Stanford University, Princeton University and Howard University, Ferocious Beauty has toured from Connecticut to California, deepening dialogue between science and the arts. Lerman will be joined by two dancers who will perform excerpts from Ferocious Beauty: Genome.
more…
http://www.art-design.umich.edu/ev_lectures.php?aud=e&menucat=ne#lerman
http://www.danceexchange.org/performance/ferociousbeautygenome.html#ff
March 23, 2007 at 10:41 AM · Filed under art, biology, visual culture
The idea of making art with living systems is not new; you might even consider a garden or a goldfish pond to be biological art. What is new is the degree of control over biological systems and materials contemporary technology offers us. Topics on the organism weblog include technical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical issues related to making art with living systems. Artists, scientists, engineers, students, and anyone else with an interest in this area are invited to contribute.
visit organism
March 22, 2007 at 9:30 AM · Filed under art, biology, interdisciplinary, visual culture
A public conference:
Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?
at the The New York Academy of Sciences
Apr 14, 2007 – 8:00 AM – 7:00 PM
[New Location]
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600
Limited seating — Register now!
For details see:
click here to link to the conference website
We gratefully acknowledge our sponsor:
The William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts
This conference will explore the nature of the science-art interface, the
inspiration this interface provides to scientists and artists alike, and the
impact of these interactions on art, research and other human endeavors.
More specifically, the conference will focus on how biological
objects whether viruses, animals, plants, cells, or organelles become an
inspiration for certain artists’ work, and how scientists ever so particular
about accuracy and specificity respond to such artistic representations.
March 5, 2007 at 9:42 AM · Filed under cinema, making it public, narration, visual culture
This is a response to Carl Djerassi’s post on the topic of IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE as part of the Virtual Symposium On Visual Culture and Bioscience.
The public discussion is at http://visualcultureandbioscience.blogspot.com/
Immaculate Misconception! What a great title! I would love to see the play; it sounds very interesting.
This series of comments reminds me of the similarities between scientific narrative as it is presented in, for example, journal articles and the dramatic narrative evident in theater and film. The common narrative arc for science (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion) depends very much on cause and effect and follows closely the style of narration in film (exposition, some change in knowledge, a goal-oriented plot, investigation, and finally the climax).
I’m curious about the didactic quality often associated with information transmission and its role in pedagogy. Alfred Hitchcock remarked that, “Suspense is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention… It is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved… [The] conditioning of the viewer is essential to the buildup of suspense”.
Suspense is vital to narration in theater and film and is implicitly embedded in scientific communication both within the discourse of science and between researchers and the “public” audience.
One might argue that the usual style is a broad kind of suspense that keeps the audience in the dark about what will happen next and creates uncertainty. This kind focuses only on the protagonists so that when anything significant happens, it is a surprise to the viewer. As such, their responses can vary more widely depending their prior knowledge, which may or may not prepare them.
A second kind of suspense keeps the audience attentive through the use of deadlines and frequent shifts in perspective from the protagonist to other “actors” human or non-human.
I’d be curious to hear what theater folks and others who deal with stories and plot structures have to say about the use of these tactics to shape and moderate scientific narration.
February 11, 2007 at 9:36 AM · Filed under boundary objects, cinema, Design, interdisciplinary, teaching and learning, visual culture
For Tuesday’s discussion we will use a list of “brand personality” traits employed by product marketers to stimulate our thinking about the uses of cinematographic techniques.
“down-to-earth, honest, cheerful, wholesome, daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date, reliable, intelligent, successful, upper class, charming, outdoorsy, tough”
These traits represent dimensions of brand personality that were factored from an analysis of consumer preferences by Jennifer Aaker (Dimensions of Brand Personality. 1997. Journal of Marketing Research. 34:3. pgs. 347-356.).
The goal is to identify as many ways as possible that cinema techniques can be used. We will consider the possible uses of :
- lighting
- lenses
- framing
- camera movement
- camera position
- camera angle
- editing
For each of these categories identify all of the possible configurations that could most effectively communicate each of the personality traits you are given. Do this in groups of 3-4.
Think critically about what the effect of each technique is and how it makes a connection to the characters, their point of view, the plot, etc..
The drawback is the direct link to advertising and other high concept ideas of filmmaking that rely solely on genre convention. By this I mean that we may not all agree on what camera angle communicates “cheerful.” Try to come to a consensus within your group, but also try to include all possible solutions/techniques.
Remember, there is rarely any formulaic way to communicate these personality traits. They often rely on their context. Nonetheless, we can begin to come up with solutions by asking ourselves these questions.
One challenge is to consider how we might communicate non-human personality traits.
January 13, 2007 at 12:55 PM · Filed under relational aesthetics, visual culture
Workshop Topic: The purpose of the A&D Life workshop is to create space and stimulate a network for dialogue about the relationships between art, design, and the life sciences. Workshop processes can be described as attempts to critically identify and evaluate existing forms, structures, and strategies of creative engagement that span the artistic and life science domains. In these early stages of the organization’s development, the focus of A&D Life is to 1) understand the diversified viewpoints and approaches that structure creative engagement with the life sciences, 2) identify historical and contemporary precedents for work in these areas, 3) employ these theoretical and historical connections as catalysts for creative practices, and 4) register creative work as research that documents the complex, shifting relationships of art practice at the interface of contemporary social and scientific endeavor.
visit the A + D Life Wiki
Workshop Coordinator: Gabriel Harp
Faculty Advisor: Patricia Olynyk
Organized with financial support (2005-2007) from the Rackham Graduate School, Office of the Dean for Academic Affairs
January 13, 2007 at 11:28 AM · Filed under bioinformatics, genes, genomics, molecular biology, visual culture, visualization, yeast
Organelle View is a collaborative project aimed at developing the role of visual media (versus verbal) in the exploration of bioinformatic semantic networks. In cooperation with the Kumar lab and in my role as creative director and project manager, I led the team through the proof-of-concept stages of development with a successful grant application and navigation through the complex task of translation among scientific, IT, and artistic goals. In this instance, A virtual reality model dynamically linked to a bioinformatic database and designed to increase the use of rich media in collaborative learning. Developed with support from GROCS, the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, IBM, and Apple Computer, Organelle View allows users to learn about organelles and protein localization in a yeast model cell.
As a result of the Organelle View project, team members Chris Landau and Jamie Cope went on to form N Formation Design. The project is now being taken further in affiliation with the Kumar Lab. An animated version demonstrating the cell cycle in in the works.
organelleview.lsi.umich.edu
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Watch an interview with Executive Editor Roger Malina as he explains a little more about the history and activities of the Leonardo community.
