The Eyes Have It

While browsing the gallery of award winners, you can listen to commentary from the creator of each image describing how it came to be.

The winners of the Awards challenge the public perspective that scientists don’t have an artistic side. Working every day with microscopes and imaging technology, these biologists have been able to capture stunning images through a blend of original and innovative techniques.

Despite the obvious visual appeal of the pictures, their primary purpose is investigation. The images are from research projects with the ultimate goal of helping to improve healthcare through new forms of prevention, treatment and vaccination.

“A website about films + filmakers, science + scientists, Science Cinémathèque is a forum for short films, interviews, and articles that enhance the public understanding of Science and technology.”

This is an online exhibition located on the Museum of the Moving Image’s site.

[via Boing Boing]

There are probably some people out there who would say a collection of two works isn’t a museum. However, these quilts are so beautiful I don’t think it’s fair to quibble over what’s a museum and what’s not. I agree with Vaughan from Mind Hacks who described them as lush, intricate and enthralling. They are another example of deriving powerful art from the reinterpretation of medical imagery. Their creator, Dr. Marjorie Taylor, is Professor and Head of Psychology at the University of Oregon and focuses on work involving children’s imaginary companions. I hope Dr. Taylor is creating more of these and that they will be part of the museum soon.

(Housekeeping note: I’ve added a new category to TEHI for reinterpretations of medical imagery into other media and material. Please email me the details of any examples you might know of. I once did a bone density scan in paper for a osteoporosis slide set cover. I’ll see if I can track down a scan.)

[via Mind Hacks]

How the heck did I miss this? I stumbled across the site yesterday and it was, of course, too late for me to make plans to see it today. It would have been nice to see the old neighborhood. USP is right across the street from my first apartment. I’ll have to keep an eye on the Marvin Samson Center for the History of Pharmacy for future exhibits. It looks like it was a great show.

“University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP) is exhibiting a selection of original medical illustrations by Frank Netter, M.D. (1906-1991), a world-renowned anatomy artist who is regarded by many as the most accomplished and influential medical illustrator of the 20th century.

“The exhibition at USP consists of 47 unique gouache—watercolor—paintings from a corpus of more than 4,000 of Dr. Netter’s works that display various aspects of illness, trauma, anatomy, development, malformation, pathology, medical testing and diagnosis, and patient care. Many of his impressive illustrations, commissioned by Ciba-Geigy Corporation over several Woman with Dermatosisdecades, appeared in Clinical Symposia, a well-known quarterly clinical monograph used by primary care professionals as a teaching aid and reference. “

In order to promote his book, Eve, Aurelio O’Brien created a number of bizarre animations illustrating some of the more mind-blowing (and humorous) possibilities of genetic manipulation in the forth millennium. It looks like a good story but I can’t be the only one who finds that sink animation seriously disturbing.

“Pictures have always played an important role in the scientific process, especially in the history of anatomy Whether woodcut, sketch, sculpture, X ray, or MRI, visual images have helped us observe describe, model, categorize, analyze, and conceptualize the human body. How has this imagery changed the ways we look al our bodies? The Exploratorium invites you to delve into this provocative question posed by Revealing Bodies, an exhibition from March 18 to September 4, 2000, made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts“

A collection of powerful images put together by altenative journalist Kirsten Anderberg, described as “a rabble rouser living in the Pacific Northwest.”

From the site’s intro:

“The following museum includes positive vulva imagery in art, jewelry, sculpture, graphic art, and more. Kirsten is continually saddened to see the widespread disrespect that is displayed towards women’s genitals in most cultures and is offering this website as an alternative for women and men alike, to expand past the corporate, political, and religious brainwashing to learn to love and be proud of the genitals we live with in our lives. Enjoy!”

The site warns that it’s intended for adults and it may be considered NSFW as well.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area in the next few weeks, it looks like the Dali exhibit isn’t the only reason to stop by the art museum. Through June 26th, there’s also Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books.

“This lively exhibition traces the history of the colorful purveyors of patent and quack medicines over the past four centuries. It contains seventy-five works ranging from humorous caricatures of itinerant quacks, flamboyant advertising posters, and promotional pamphlets for rival panaceas (each supported by extravagant claims of efficacy), to prints that document the first governmental attempts to curtail the more flagrant abuses.“

Some of us from work are going to be there on a “field trip” in early April. I’ll try to post a review if time allows.

“Art images for the cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases are selected for communication effectiveness, audience appeal, artistic quality, stylistic continuity, and technical reproducibility. Art is drawn from many periods (ancient to contemporary) to ‘humanize’ and enhance the scientific content by creating order and harmony, showing chaos, revealing truth, raising consciousness, immortalizing, surprising, fantasizing, illustrating ideas, stimulating the intellect, and firing the emotions. … Emerging Infectious Diseases is not about art. The journal has a cover to protect the scientific content from the elements. But as a communication tool, art seems to work. Our readers enjoy the covers. We don’t know exactly why. But as Georges Braque once said, ‘There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.’”

[Via eyes of the goof]

“Q: Why a comic strip?

A: It was the right medium for the story I wanted to tell. Comic strips meld words and pictures to convey an idea with more economy and grace than either could alone. I was inspired to pursue the idea when I accompanied Mom to chemotherapy one day and did a quick sketch of her napping during the several-hour session. That sketch became ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black’ and encouraged me to give “Mom’s Cancer” a try.”

[via metafilter]

“My current work plays on the sensuality and beauty which underlies sense and being itself. My work takes a literal look at the foundation of our physical existence. I create sculptures of proteins, the universal building blocks of life. … Creating organically shaped sculptures out of a large number of geometric pieces fascinates me, because the complexity of a living being is similarly made up of simple “inanimate” subunits. I want to follow science in its reductionist approach and present its isolated finds in an art context. Science needs to separate; it requires the scientist to detach himself from the observed object and separate the object into its parts in order to objectively analyze it. Art, on the other hand, requires the artist to become one with the object in order to transform it into an art object. Because of this, art has the unique power to heal what has been separated: The art object is an object that has been given life by the artist and the ability to live in the viewer. My protein sculptures offer an emotional experience of a world that is usually accessible only through our intellect.”

[via Btang Reblog]