August 14, 2010
June 21, 2010
June 1, 2010
Giant Hole in Guatemala City
This photo was taken from the Guatemalan Government’s Flickr feed and shows a “massive, spontaneous sinkhole (“hundimiento”) that appeared today in Zone 2 of Guatemala City, after overwhelming saturation of rains from tropical storm Agatha.”
More at boingboing
April 8, 2010
Tania Kovats – Tree
Here’s a video documenting the production of Tania Kovats’ artwork Tree made for the Natural History Museum in London.
The artwork is a slice cut from the centre of a real oak tree and was inspired by the work of Charles Darwin.
March 11, 2010
Concrete Cast of Enormous Ant Colony
“A giant ant colony pumped full of cement,and then excavated reveals one of Mother Nature’s marvellous wonders.
We’ve seen what these giant ant mounds look like above ground but this is an incredible view of what the structures looks like underground – which some have called a wonder of the world.”
January 30, 2010
Slime Mould Imitates Tokyo Rail System
“The researchers decided to task the slime mold with a problem human designers had already tackled. They placed oat flakes (a slime mold favorite) on agar plates in a pattern that mimicked the locations of cities around Tokyo and impregnated the plates with P. polycephalum at the point representing Tokyo itself. They then watched the slime mold grow for 26 hours, creating tendrils that interconnected the food supplies. Different plates exhibited a range of solutions, but the visual similarity to the Tokyo rail system was striking in many of them”
January 22, 2010
Katie Holten’s Tree Museum
There’s an article in today’s Irish Times about Katie Holten’s Tree Museum and her upcoming show at the Hugh Lane as a part of the Golden Bough series. The Tree Museum was a public artwork that examined people’s relationships to trees in the Bronx area of New York through an audio guide featuring recordings of local people. Below is a short video about the Tree Museum and the audio recordings are available through her website.
June 14, 2009
A Geometry of the Pitted, Pocked, and Broken Up
This quote from James Gleick’s book Chaos refers to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who is considered the “father of fractal geometry”. I think its interesting to think about in relation to contemporary sculpture.
Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying, Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in straight lines. the new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. it is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The understanding of nature’s complexity awaiting a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of lightning was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot’s work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the key to the essence of a thing.
June 13, 2009
D’arcy Wentworth Thompson
These illustrations by D’Arcy Wenworth Thompson show the shapes made by drops of ink in water (left) and the tentacles of a jellyfish (right). They are taken from a book called Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable by James Gleick.
May 25, 2009
Sculptures Made By Bees
Hilary Berseth makes sculptures with bees by placing armatures in their hives. I blogged about his work before ages ago but it has just been featured on Makezine where they’ve linked to this article on nymag.com which features a slideshow of images showing the process.
Someone in the comments section of the nymag article posted this link to the work Aganetha Dick who encourages bees to build honeycombs on figurines and other objects:
