The Eyes Have It

‘Stippling’ speeds 3-D computer imaging

“Ancient artists used a technique called stippling – in which pictures are created by painting or carving a series of tiny dots – to produce drawings on cave walls and utensils thousands of years ago.

“Now engineers at Purdue University have created a new kind of computer-imaging software that uses stippling to quickly produce complex pictures of internal organs and other renderings. The method is 10 times faster than some conventional methods and could provide a tool for medical professionals to quickly preview images in real time as a patient is being examined with imaging technologies such as CT scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).”

I imagine every creative has felt like Nigel Purdy at one time or another.

The Bristol Biomedical Image Archive (Bristol BioMed for short) is an online collection of about 8500 medical, dental, and veterinary images for use in teaching and learning. All the images have been donated by academics working in the biomedical fields in different countries.

As a general rule, the images can be used free of charge in learning and teaching.

On Monday I posted a link to academic material examining the impact of genomics on contemporary medicine. Today, I’d like to offer a site exploring the artistic implications of living in the genomic age.

Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics is a major traveling exhibition that showcases powerful new artwork created in direct response to recent developments in human genomics. This research is having an enormous impact on artistic practice, providing new tools, processes, materials, and issues for consideration. Organized by the Henry Art Gallery, Gene(sis) seeks to bridge art and science by elucidating technical advances for a lay audience and examining ethical issues raised by genomic research.

SEQUENCE: work that explores the rhetoric and media representations of genomics
BOUNDARY: artists’ investigations of the now permeable boundaries between species
SPECIMEN: work that engages questions of DNA ownership, personal privacy and the management of genetic information
SUBJECT: artists’ reimaginings of individual subjectivity, family and human “nature” in the wake of recent genomic developments

Nicely designed, easy to navigate site that’s dense with both visual and text-based material. Offerings represent a wide range of conceptual styles, preoccupations and methods. Actual exhibit is making its way to Berkeley, Minneapolis and Evanston, IL starting in August of 2003. It closed in Seattle last August.

One of my favorite daily reads, CoreyNahman.com, the internet’s premier pharmaceutical news and information site (“Updated Daily By Pharmacist Editors; First, Fast, Reliable Since 1999″) has honored The Eyes Have It with Editor’s Pick status. Thanks Corey.

Personal website of Pat Lynch, Director of the Yale University School of Medicine’s Web Design and Development unit and co-author of the Yale Web Style Guide (Second Edition). As is to be expected, this is an elegantly designed site that features a comprehensive, annotated bibliography and a series of columns dealing with web design and information architecture issues (Ten Fundamentals of Web Design is definitely worth a read). The only fault I can find is that the site hasn’t been updated in a very long time which only proves one of his points from Ten Fundamentals…, “Maintaining a Web site is essentially a battle against entropy.” I think he needs to start a blog.

Genomics = the next big thing. This review article from the New England Journal of Medicine, the first of a series, is a good place to start if you feel the need to get up to speed.

Two quotes from a paper I blogged about a couple of weeks age — Envisioning Learning by Jay Cross of the Internet Time Group:

We’ve confused reading and writing with learning. Most lessons are linear and verbal. Most books do not contain a single illustration. On the web, one highly-regarded but seriously misguided guru maintains a large website on usability (of all things) that contains not one picture. eLearning lessons abound with garish, meaningless clip-art. Schools devote years to teaching students to read and hours on developing their visual intelligence.

In a world that is increasingly concerned with speed, we force learners to read words that they must repeat in their minds in order to decode them and process them associatively. You can grok a picture but not a block of text.

Last week I chanced upon a book on the shelves of the free bookswap at a neighborhood recycling center: Visual Thinking, by Rudolf Arnheim. He thinks our disdain for images comes from believing that perception is different from thinking. We’re aware that our perceptions may be faulty. The world abounds with illusion. Distant objects look small but they are not; a straight stick entering water looks bent. So society is suspicious of perception – and has been since at least the time when Moses came down from the mountain carrying tablets of text and decreed that the sculpture (“graven images) be destroyed. Arnheim makes a strong case that perception and thinking are one. We think visually.

“Science and the Artist’s Book is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Special Collections. The resulting artist’s books, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty, imaginative, and even poignant insights into the creative side of scientific research.”

Here is the entry having to do with medicine.

Here is the biochemistry entry.

Nothing decreases productivity like getting a new computer. But on the bright side, I’m getting nothing done faster. I hope to get back on the normal posting schedule tomorrow.

For Halloween, Portage wrote about De Humani Corporis Fabrica:

“Published in 1543 the work was the first anatomy to be based on the actual dissection and examination of human cadavers…It is still considered to be the cornerstone of modern anatomy and many consider it to be the point at which medicine became a science.”

The post also points to a couple related site, including this one at the University of Michigan (source of the image to the left) that features scans of more than 20 pages from the book.

This article in Communication Arts by John Paul Caponigro is kind of like the flip side of this blog’s focus on making words into pictures. Talks about how working with words, a process avoided by many visual artists, can make one better at working with images.

“‘Pictures should be seen and not heard.’ ‘If we could communicate what we want to communicate with words, then we’d be writers not artists.’ The words had rained down on me so many times that my mind had been saturated with the idea. While it reflects some truth, chiefly that a text (written or verbal) can never be a substitute for an image, it can also be misleading. Pictures have always been, continue to be, and will always be talked about—particularly by artists.”

“Artists approach the process of making the visual verbal with mixed feelings; part trepidation, part confirmation, part validation. To be sure, while there are many pitfalls to be avoided, there are many positive byproducts to making the visual verbal.”