Category: {science}

Science

Roger Hiorns’ crystal world

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A visitor examining Seizure. Photograph by Sarah Lee.

I’d love to see this installation work which opened on Wednesday at 157 Harper Road, Southwark, London. British artist Roger Hiorns has transformed a flat awaiting demolition by growing thick mats of copper sulphate crystals on all the interior surfaces, a work he calls Seizure. Copper sulphate always brings back memories of chemistry lessons at school and childhood chemistry sets. I recall growing the crystals in a test tube but such meagre attempts at efflorescence give little indication of how beautiful these things are at a larger scale. Happily Flickr has further documentation of Hiorns’ work while Adrian Searle reviews it for The Guardian, fittingly referencing JG Ballard’s The Crystal World. “Seizure is a sort of sci-fi nightmare in Southwark, and that this happens in a council flat makes it all the more uncanny and disturbing,” he says. A shame, then, that it wasn’t situated in an empty high-rise block for maximum Ballard overload.

Seizure runs until 2 November, 2008. Artangel has location details and opening times.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• JG Ballard book covers

The Lagoon Nebula

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Gas and Dust of the Lagoon Nebula by Fred Vanderhaven.

The Pink Lagoon, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Striking details can be traced through this remarkable picture, processed to remove stars and hence better reveal the Lagoon’s range of filaments of glowing hydrogen gas, dark dust clouds, and the bright, turbulent hourglass region near the image center. This color composite view was recorded under dark skies near Sydney, Australia. At the Lagoon’s estimated distance, the picture spans about 50 light-years.

The art of Jo Whaley

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Papilio ulysses (2000).

Best. Insect Art. Ever. From a series entitled The Theater of Insects, also the name of a book devoted to Ms Whaley’s photographs which will appear from Chronicle Books later this year.

The photographs in this book are fantastic field illustrations. While the insects in these images are real, the backgrounds are imaginary altered habitats of my devising. Inspired by the old dioramas found in natural history museums, the pinned insects are arranged in constructed environments. The studio where I create the images is as much a theatrical scene shop as it is a photography studio. The prop room looks like an eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities, in that it is filled with specimens of natural history and visual oddities of manufacture. I use free association and intuition to make decisions about arranging the insect with a particular backdrop. Looking at color, shape, and form, I move the elements about until the magic of the image appears. Lighting the scene is challenging as the sets are only about five by seven inches across with a depth of about an inch and a half. Yet the studio lighting is key to breathing a spirit into these pinned specimens and unifying the disparate elements within the mise-en-scène Finally, the performance of the image is concluded with a single click of the camera’s shutter. (More.)

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Coleoptera (2003).

Via Fabulon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• Insect Lab