The Art of Science – Berenice Abbott at MIT

Berenice Abbott, A Bouncing Ball in Diminishing Arcs

One of the leading photographers of the 20th century, Berenice Abbott is best-known for her scenes of Paris and New York in the 30s and 40s. But in the late 1950s, Abbott began spending time in the labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which hired her to create new photographic images for the teaching of physics.

Abbott spent two years at MIT creating photographs to document and illustrate the principles of physical science – mechanics, electromagnetism, and waves. She developed innovative techniques for capturing scientific phenomena, including one for very detailed, close-in photography that she called Super Sight.

So it is fitting that the MIT Museum chose to inaugurate its new Kurtz Gallery for Photography with an exhibit of over seventy images by Abbott taken during her time at MIT.  The Show, “Berenice Abbott, Photography and Science: An Essential Unity” is at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, through Dec. 31.

Abbott said of her work in illustrating physics, “The science made its own design.  But just patterns and just beautiful design wasn’t it at all. The principle had to come through first and foremost, and that’s a hard thing to do, really.”

More information about the exhibit is here. More images are here.

Sunday Poem: Imposing poses on nature

A poem on the difficulty of seeing and comprehending the world without metaphor or without “posing” its parts in our mental constructs, Wallace Stevens’ “Add This To Rhetoric”:

It is posed and it is posed
But in nature it merely grows.
Stones pose in the falling night;
And beggars dropping to sleep,
They pose themselves and their rags.
Shucks...lavender moonlight falls.
The building pose in the sky
And, as you paint, the clouds,
Grisaille, impearled, profound,
Pfft... In the way you speak
You arrange, the thing is posed,
What in nature merely grows.

To-morrow when the sun,
For all your images,
Comes up as the sun, bull fire,
Your images will have left
No shadow of themselves.
The poses of speech, of paint, 
Of music - Her body lies
Worn out, her arm falls down,
Her fingers touch the ground.
Above her, to the left,
A brush of white, the obscure,
The moon without a shape,
A fringed eye in a crypt.
The sense creates the pose.
In this it moves and speaks.
This is the figure and not
An evading metaphor.

Add this. It is to add.

The first two sentences of this poem lay out the theme, our struggle to understand what “merely grows” using the only tools we have available, mental constructs, within which we pose and pose again the parts of nature. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), that this applies to scientists as much as it applies to the poet. Continue reading “Sunday Poem: Imposing poses on nature”

Favorite Sci-Fi cover art

Vintage sci-fi cover art connoisseur Joachim Boaz has posted his favorite covers over at Science Fiction Ruminations. Go check it out.

This is fun, and I want to play too. Here are my five favorites from my paperback collection:

Continue reading “Favorite Sci-Fi cover art”

The Art of Science – Giant Squid

Canadian painter Helen Gregory is serving as artist-in-residence at the Canadian Museum of Nature as part of her Ph.D program in at the University of Western Ontario. Since May, she has been exploring the museum’s collections, finding inspiration among the natural history specimens that inspire her work. A show of her work, dramatically titled Unrequited Death, is on exhibit at the museum in Ottawa, Ontario, until September 3.

Unrequited Death features eleven paintings that juxtapose biological specimens with ornate, romantic backgrounds reminiscent of the Victorian era.  Among the pinned butterflies and dead birds, one stands out: the giant squid.  It’s based on an actual specimen in the collection of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery in St. John’s, where it was first shown in 2009. Let’s face it, it’s just not every day you see a 12-foot-long painting of a gigantic deceased cephalopod, so if you’re in Ottawa in the next few months, don’t miss this one.

Gregory uses painting to explore biological specimens both in relation to our knowledge of the natural world and our understanding of cultural meaning. “Objects are imbued with layers of meaning that shift with their context.  For example when a dead bird is picked up, preserved, labeled, catalogued, and held in a museum collection, it becomes more than a biological specimen: it makes the transition from natural to cultural artifact,” she notes.

Gregory will be speaking about her work on June 21 at the museum – details are here.  For more of her work, visit her website.

In honour of Ray Bradbury, Robin Woywitka’s bar fight in space

Casually reading online last week, I thought about the staying power of different pieces of news. In my informal recollection and comparison, hardly another individual incident has shown up more often in my online reading spaces, from such a variety of friends and acquaintances, and for such an extended a time period as the death of Ray Bradbury on June 5. It’s a strong indication of the prolific writer’s impact on several generations of readers. Ray Bradbury was a storyteller in the truest and most powerful sense, filling readers with grief and joy in sometimes just a few short paragraphs. Continue reading “In honour of Ray Bradbury, Robin Woywitka’s bar fight in space”