CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.
I’m back in Panama!
Posts will resume their regular sporadic-ness soon…
Photo by Castillo Kraemer
Back when I was more artist and less chemist than now I attempted to make a light-weight sculpture that looked like stone. I carved my desired figures in styrofoam and then I coated it in a thick paste made of acetone and gravel. I knew acetone melted styrofoam and my thought was that the pebbles would stick in the surface as it dissolved, giving it the appearance of stone. Mostly I ended up with a fuming puddle of gravelly foam goo…
Luckily, Takashi Masabuchi, a student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, has the right mix of artistry and chemistry (and patience) to make this idea work.
Masabuchi doesn’t just use solvents but also oil-based paints dripped slowly over the surface of styrofoam blocks.
Masabuchi basically employs the old adage “like dissolves like”. Polystyrene (styrofoam), acetone, turpentine, the drying oils in paints - all of these are petroleum based or derived from plant oils. The non-polar liquids can easily dissolve the non-polar solid.
Of course polystyrene plastics (such as CD cases) don’t dissolve if you spill nail polish remover (acetone) on them. Styrofoam will dissolve however since it is a highly-aerated polystyrene with lots of surface area for the solvent to react with. Think of dissolving granulated sugar vs. chunky raw sugar.
But that’s enough chemistry for one day though - let’s see the art.
“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.”
Maria Mitchell, astronomer, first female member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
reblogged from desertstars:
(digital media, photos from UCSD Branson, HubbleSite, and art*setter)
Amateur photographer David Johnson has been getting a lot of much-deserved attention lately for his beautiful long-exposure photos of fireworks.
By carefully refocusing over a second or two of exposure time he was able to capture these explosions with a stunning, painterly grace.
This technique required Johnson to carefully time his adjustments by using the sound of the launch as his cue. He explains his process in detail here.
These photos reminded me of some other visual artists who also work in pyrotechnics. Rosemarie Fiore paints with burning fireworks using the incendiary residues as her media.
Fiore uses live ground blooms, jumping jacks and other consumer fireworks which she carefully controls with wooden templates, buckets, and brushes during combustion.
The final works are often large-scale collages of many explosions, finished with burns and spatterings of sparks.
Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang creates enormous site-specific pieces that are as much performance art as visual. Guo-Qiang lays down exacting stencils of gunpowder and fuses over rice paper. Layers of hemp paper, wood, rocks are layered over the gunpowder in order to control or contain the smoke and flame where necessary.
An artist working in many media Guo-Qiang first experimented with gunpowder paintings as a reaction to the more staid Chinese artistic traditions (such as ink painting) which he despised as a student. Guo-Qiang now says that he appreciates his training in these techniques - and these highly controlled techniques are evident even in these very spontaneous works.
Guo-Qiang’s work blends destruction and creation, physics and meta-physics, the instantaneous explosion and unfathomably ancient minerals used in gunpowder. He often extemporizes on the dual nature of this work, how it is it to capture antiquity in a few fleeting seconds. This film shows the creation of Sky Ladder,a site-specific work at MOCA.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder from Antony Crook on Nowness.com.
Artworks from top down: Efflorescence #4, Efflorescence #22, Untitled, Firework Drawing #21, Firework Drawing #58, Touring Mountains, and Tree with Yellow Blossoms,
“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
Charles Baudelaire
At HQ for the EDL! Hard to believe a piece of our world is about to land on that bright spot in the sky.
“I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art.”
—Lord Ernest Rutherford, 1932
Twenty years ago the outline of a ladder left out on a lawn inspired two sculptors, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, to investigate using live plants and the process of photosynthesis to “paint”. Probably no other artists currently working incorporate so many of my interests, scientifically and aesthetically.
Ackroyd and Harvey construct large-scale “canvases” of sod in darkrooms and then expose the lawn to a 400W projector bulb shown through a photographic negative, literally “developing” the image in differential pigmentation. The well-lit portions develop a deeper green and much more chlorophyll, the shaded portions produce lighter tones devoid of the key photosynthetic pigment.
This work has lead the artists to a beautiful collaboration with scientists Howard Thomas and Helen Ougham at theInstitute of Grassland and Environmental Research where they have been studying the biochemistry, genetics, and mechanisms of senescence in grasses.
Ackroyd and Harvey are now using a strain of stay-green grass developed at IGER that extends the lifetime of these transient artworks from just a few months to a more than a year before the inevitable yellowing and fading that eventually takes all photographs. This unique grass does not recycle chlorophyll upon senescence, rather the pigment remains in the leaf to disappear gradually through photo-oxidation.
The tactile process of capturing the light of an image in biomass gives new freedom to imagine or reinterpret our relationship to nature, either as stewards, captors, or creators.
A collection of random science ramblings on evolutionary ephemera
