The Intersection

It may interest you to know that I have a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art.

Art and Science have never seemed to be separate to me, a position held by some quite respectable minds over the years.  In my view, both are ultimately about applying a process of experimentation and refinement to a problem, until a solution is arrived upon.  Over time, others build on that work, and expand it into a deeper understanding of the world.  

That process and the blurry division of Art from Science sometimes pops up in a very elegant fashion.
Take, for instance, this:

I haven't yet looked into the actual apparatus, but I can make some educated guesses.  The "tone-arm" of the turntable is set to slowly track in across the slice of tree.  Instead of a stylus, it has a high magnification digital camera (hence the very bright light).  The image is then treated as raw sound data and fed into a sampler, where it triggers a piano sample.  Variation in the ring produce different notes: dark areas such as old injuries or burns produce bass notes.  Lighter areas produce higher notes.  The distance between them determines the timing, hence the cacophony of notes produced by the second "album", which is much more tightly grained. The width of the features may determine the sustain of the note.  

I quite like it, as it transforms the events in a tree's life into a music of sorts; the thin darker rings at the end of the growing season and impending senescence contrast with the light spring wood, injuries pop out any time they occur, and uneventful periods of even, continuous growth are silent.

(tip o' the hat to friend and cultural maven Theremina)

Polished

Nature is a remarkable thing.

In particular, it is much more resilient than we sometimes think, and responds to things we do to it in subtle and surprising ways.  This is one of the themes, for me, of Urban Ecology.  People like to think of cities as completely unnatural, but they are often full of life earning an existence in every crack, open space, basement, and rooftop.

Sometimes, though, nature just responds to our bad behavior with beauty.
Take Glass Beach:

(image by photoscot, all rights reserved.)

These are the remains of untold glass objects chucked off a cliff and down into the sea near Fort Bragg, in California.  There was, apparently much more garbage as well, since cleaned up.  But the ocean took all that glass for itself, and made new stones from it, to pebble the beach with, and something beautiful and unexpected is the result.

You can seem more images, and read a bit more here.

(tip' o the hat to Meredith Yayanos for the link)

And now: space!

Saturn, and its various satellites, to be more specific.

Cassini has been a spectacularly successful mission, by any standard, documenting conditions on Titan, finding water geysers on Encedalus, providing clues to the forces that form and maintain Saturn's splendid rings, and much more.  It also has returned some of the most beautiful imagery of a member of the solar system thus far.

Enter Chris Abbas, who has taken the raw, uncorrected imagery, and produced a dazzling little film.  It's is absolutely gorgeous, and makes just about perfect use of the 'open source' Ghosts music project, by Nine Inch Nails.



CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Watch it full screen.

(h/t to Warren Ellis!)