7/12/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics


Let's start with some art… Brilliant students work from the Bartlett School of Architecture of UCL who won the RIBA President's Medals Student Awards with a range of projects:
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/04/riba-presidents-medals-student-awards-2013-winners/
More here: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/news/bartlett-sweep-2013-riba-presidents-medals
I love the Kizhi Island piece:

The timeline itself is a work of art:

While on deezen, a fantastic feature on 'liquid light'
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/28/the-liquid-light-of-diego-garcia-by-viktor-westerdahl/
also via Bartlett School of Architecture graduate - Viktor Westerdahl

Innovative, imagination-driven and utterly detached from utilitarian constraints…


Edward Burtynsky's 'Water' reviewed in GuernicaMag is worth reading - fantastic photographer with a deep obsession for human impact on landscape: http://www.guernicamag.com/art/edward-burtynskys-water/
Some images of his work:

 
And his iconic...

From his Water series:

And his webpage: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

A quote from GuernicaMag: "Landscape, here, meaning not just the genre of art, but—more importantly—the medium of exchange through which we conceive and represent the physical environment and our relationship to it. A landscape is that which we see and the way in which we see it—a natural scene mediated by culture."

A bit too much of 'academism' there. I prefer to describe this work as forcing the landscape into the frame: powerfully transformative and, thus, powerfully narrative. The visual literally screams at us, and there is not a moment of reprieve from its potent brutality. Which makes it all amazingly beautiful... a sort of hot-cold ice...


And in the same vein of human transformation of landscape, here's AtlasObscura story on Goats of Cingino Dam: http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/goats-of-the-cingino-dam

Having mentioned ice above, here is another landscape photographer: Michael Quinn, profiled in MyModernMet blog: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/michael-j-quinn-greenland-reflection

Now onto science: given the beauty of surreal Earth-scapes, time to move to astronomy and get us some Saturn-scapes…
http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/dec/05/saturn-north-pole-hexagon-jet-stream-nasa-video?CMP=twt_gu

Full story via NASA, absent annoying commercials: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/cassini/saturn-north-pole-hexagon-20131204i.html#.UqOKMGRdVBw


What beats what: books vs films… I had a nice discussion with a friend recently about two films based on one same book… the merits of Stanisław Lem's original Solaris (the book) are indisputable. The merits of Tarkovsky's interpretation of Solaris (the movie) are of their own accord… and since no one remembers the first Solaris (the movie) by Boris Nirenburg, the debate was really about Steven Soderbergh's third version (the movie)… I am not a fan… my friend is… we had great breakfast chat about it…

Alas, in real life, merits of movies over books (unlike in the case of Tarkovsky's sheer genius) are dubious. And there is 'scientific' proof to this conjecture: http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books-vs-films-the-infographic


So WLASze advice for the weekend - switch off that TV and grab a book…

And don't forget to smile, while reading… or reading for the sake of smiling… here's a candidate:
"‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x/abstract
That's right: we fancy ourselves as being hot, when we are drunk… which begs a question: what do we think about our beauty quotient when we are so drunk, we no longer believe we are drunk?..

Enjoy WLASze sensibly...

24/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics. Enjoy!


Shopping malls rarely inspire - both in terms of exterior architecture and interior design… their utilitarian purpose combines with aesthetic of the masses to produce bland, dentally-inspired greyness… unless, of course, it is a shopping mall in Sweden, where extreme capitalism collides often spectacularly with extreme socialism to produce unexpected visuals. Behold this Van-Damme-Volvo-ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10) equivalent in the shopping mall architecture:
http://it.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2013/november/14/malmos-melted-shopping-mall/
After all, energising those satiated consumers to spend their money on things other than social justice requires visual experiences that are truly spectacular...

Three sets of links relating to space next.

First, NASA's latest Cassini images of the Titan - with high resolution section showing Northern Lakes (Salt Flats): http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=4900
H/T: @raluca3000 @NASAWebbTelescp (click on image to enlarge)

Second, a beautiful set of visuals to put the relative dimension of the Earth and our solar system compared to some stars out there:
http://www.mbandf.com/parallel-world/our-sun-is-extremely-large-our-sun-is-fairly-small

The page above comes courtesy of a fantastic Mechanical.Art.Devices (M.A.D.) Gallery http://www.mbandf.com/mad-gallery/explore/ A fascinating glimpse into the world of unique engineering and design… (not strictly space image, but so elegant, it might just be stellar)...

Three: one hell of a cool story, via arstechnica, from the Antarctica, where earlier this year, scientists discovered Ernie and Bert, "two neutrinos with energies over 100 times higher than the protons that circulate in the LHC. Now, the same team has combed through its data to find an additional 26 high-energy events, and they've done a careful analysis to show that these are almost certainly originating from somewhere outside our Solar System."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/south-pole-detector-spots-28-out-of-this-world-neutrinos/

And in a related story, http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech-literally-running-a-south-pole-data-center/ arstechnica covers the jobs at the South Pole data centre where they have to "heat the air used to cool… data centre".

Brilliantly written and fascinating!


Science Gallery at TCD is featuring this week in dezeen with a story about the latest show "Grow Your Own - Life After Nature" that runs through 19 January 2014 and is worth visiting…
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/20/olafur-eliasson-tears-used-to-make-human-cheese/ See @ScienceGallery

A brave show, pushing the bounds of what we consider aesthetically acceptable and blending these bounds with what we consider both art and science. And the science bit is not about the actual physical stuff, like growing cheese culture based on human body excretions-produced bacteria. Instead, it is a science of our self-awareness, the compartmentalising nature of our understanding of the acceptable. In many ways, this is about ethics reaching beyond their own domain into aesthetics. As we commonly have a problem with seeing the animal that provides us with a steak in their living condition, we have a problem seeing (let alone tasting) a slice of cheese that was grown from the bacteria harvested from our bodies.

"Selfmade is a series of ‘microbial sketches’, portraits reflecting an individual’s microbial landscape in a unique cheese. Each cheese is crafted from starter cultures sampled from the skin of a different person. Isolated microbial strains were identified and characterised using microbiological techniques and 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. Like the human body, each cheese has a unique set of microbes that metabolically shape a unique odour."

We then frame the whole experiment into what is ethically or aesthetically acceptable to us: "Cheese odours were sampled and characterised using headspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, a technique used to identify and/or quantify volatile organic compounds present in a sample."

I will leave you at this and suggest you explore the said boundaries on your own…



Interesting show in London's St Petersburg gallery: Vladimir Baranov-Rossine: From Cubism to Surrealism:
http://www.saintpetersburggallery.com/exhibitions.html

Apparently, the first exhibition in 30 years retrospecting his works in Europe.

While on Russian art, an amazing collection of rare Allies posters highlighting the role of the Soviet army during the World War 2: http://rbth.co.uk/multimedia/pictures/2013/11/14/wwii_lend-lease_posters_campaigning_for_soviet_troops_31715.html

And travelling further in time, an unseen until recently collection of early photographs of life in Russia from the beginning of the 20th century
http://www.businessinsider.com/prokudin-gorskii-photos-of-russian-empire-2013-9#a-water-carrier-poses-for-prokudin-gorski-in-the-street-25
Here's a sample - both in colour and original print:

Readers of WLASze would know that I am not a big fan of Zaha Hadid, having written before my opinion about her over-exposed, over-worked studio. However, where credit is due, it should be given. Fantastic aesthetic and total absence of respect for balance can be a cool combination. This building confirms:

http://www.designboom.com/architecture/innovation-tower-by-zaha-hadid-at-hong-kong-polyu-11-20-2013/


And for the last bit - an absolutely fantastic Gel talk by Vi Hart on mathematical applications to music composition:
http://vimeo.com/29893058?utm_content=bufferb7b81&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Enjoy!