June 21, 2009
June 14, 2009
Richard Wentworth
Here’s an image of a Richard Wentworth piece I found online – no caption info available though.
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.
June 9, 2009
Tomas Saraceno at the Venice Biennale
This piece, made of elastic ropes, is called Galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider’s web and is featured in one of the curated shows at the Venice Biennale.
More photos here
June 6, 2009
Photos of Atom Bomb
I’ve been reading a catalogue of Terry Winters’ work covering the period 1994 – 2004. IMMA have a show of his work covering the last 10 years coming up in a week or so. The book includes some pages from Winter’s notebooks where he has pasted in found photos. One of the pages includes photographs of atomic bomb explosions (pictured above and below).
The photographs were taken by Harold Edgerton at night with an extremely fast a shutter speed and a special 10 feet long lens which was set up in a bunker 7 miles away. These 3 pictures show the first 3 milliseconds of an atomic bomb detonation. The bomb was at the top of a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor.
