into a fascination for patterns

A Catalogue Concerning

A RESEARCH

INTO A FASCINATION FOR PATTERNS

INTO A FASCINATION FOR PATTERNS

WORD IT

SO CLOSE - THE INFINITESIMAL AND THE INFINITE. BUT SUDDENLY, I KNEW THE WERE REALLY THE TWO ENDS OF THE SAME CONCEPT. THE UNBELIEVABLE SMALL AND THE UNBELIEVABLE VAST EVENTUALLY MEET, LIKE THE CLOSING OF A GIGANTIC CIRCLE. I LOOKED UP, AS IF SOMEHOW I WOULD GRASP THE HEAVENS. THE UNIVERSE, WORLDS BEYOND NUMBER, GOD’S SILVER TAPESTRY SPREAD ACROSS THE NIGHT. AND IN THAT MOMENT, I NEW THE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE OF THE INFINITE. I HAD THOUGHTS IN TERMS OF MAN’S OWN LIMITED DIMENSION. I HAD PRESUMED UPON NATURE. THAT EXISTENCE BEGINS AND ENDS IN MAN’S CONCEPTION, NOT NATURE’S. AND I FELT MY BODY DWINDLING, MELTING, BECOMING NOTHING. MY FEARS MELTED AWAY.

From the movie THE INCREDIBLE SINKING MAN 1957

Chapter One A Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Chapter Five It’s A Fractal World Benoît Mandelbrot

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Yayoi Kusama Anish Kapoor Cecil Balmond

10 Chapter Two A World Of RGB

Chapter Five Under A Microscope Rose-Lynn Fisher Fernan Fedirici

Adam Ferriss

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34 Chapter Tree Glitches In Apple Maps

Chapter Six Other Vision Technologies Phillip Staerns

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Peter Norrby

44 Chapter Four Landscapes Seen From Space/ Earth As Art 46

Chapter Seven Head Games Maiko Takeda

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SUMMERY

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Micros by Stephanie Deheyder

YAYOI KUSAMA ANISH KAPOOR CECIL BALMOND

Artist’s

Chapter One

Catalogue

Of My interest in pattern formation and structures, the repeating of simpler units, different types of symmetry seen in geometry and nature has shown me many ways. I got inspired by nature phenomena it’s richness and due to artists who proceeded with this kind of data.

BODY

YAYOI KUSAMA One of Japan’s most prominent living artists, Yayoi Kusama, aka the “Princess of Polka Dots,” is making an international comeback in the avant-garde art scene and beyond. Her extensive body of work covers everything from large-scale installation, painting, film, and fashion, to polka dot-themed nude “happenings” held around New York City in the 1960s. Best known for their rhythmic repetition and neurotic detailing, Kusama’s pieces are a reflection of the powerful hallucinatory manner in which she sees the world. Kusama reports that since childhood she has been plagued with hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts. She spoke of once staring at a red, patterned tablecloth and then looking up to find the entire room—floor, walls, and ceiling—covered with the same pattern. Soon she found that even her own body was covered with this pattern, and she felt as if she was disappearing, or being obliterated. Frightening visions such as these have shaped Kusama’s work, giving us a look into a world that only she can see. These powerful images permeate every medium she works in from painting to performance, creating the unmistakable Kusama-universe, in which her bizarre persona is the epicenter. Some manifestations of this neurotic patterning include her Infinity Net paintings, polka dot rooms, objects completely covered with sewn and stuffed phallic shapes, and outdoor painted pumpkins.

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

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Princess of Polka Dots

2012 was Yayoi Kusama’s year.

She collaborated with Louis Vuitton on a fashion collection and is now exhibiting a traveling retrospective, all while continuing to live in a mental institution in Japan. But who is this enigmatic woman?

By Priscilla Frank

De artieste, een van de zwaargewichten in de New Yorkse avantgardekunst, is door de jaren heen misschien wat in de vergelheid geraakt, maar op 83-jarige leeftijd stond ze er meer dan ooit. En daar heeft Louis Vuitton op zijn minst gezegd veel te maken. De voormalige restassenproducent sponsort niet alleen haar wereldwijd reizende retrospectieve, maar bracht in juli 2012 ook een tribuutcollectie uit waarin Kusuma’s obsessieve bolletjes alles overnamen. Zo bleef haar werk door de samenwerking ook nu de wered veroveren.

Polkadot per polkadot.

Matsumoto, Japan, 1929. Yayoi Kusama wordt geboren in een welvarend middenklassegezin van handelaars in plantenzaden. Plantenzaden die latr regelmatg in haar werken zullen verschijnen. In een weinig rooskleurige thuissituatie met een afwezige vader en een moeder die haar links laat liggen en naar eigen zeggen met arde hand behandelt, worstelt ze al van kindsbeen met hallucinaties en obsessieve gedachten. Denken aan zelfdoding was de jonge Kusama niet onbekend. Psychoterapeuten zullen dit

later in verband brengen met de kille verwaarlozing van haar moeder. Kijkend naar het bloemenpatroon op het tafelkleed, wordt ze plots zelf een bloem en neemt het patroon alles over. Die patronen vermenigvuldigen zich eindeloos: op trappen, de muren, het plafond en op zichzelf. Het is een manier voor de jonge Yayoi om aan de werkelijkheid te ontsnappen. Dit soort hallucinaties zullen als een rode draad door haar werk blijven lopen en haar meest kenmerkende figuren vormgeven. Stippen zonder begin en einde vormen naast andere stppen een patroon dat zich tot in de oneindigheid verder kan ontwikkelen. Met die stippen, netten en nerven die als krokelende wormen canvassen, voorwerpen, mensen en gebouwen bezetten, wil ze haar verdraaide kijk op de wereld delen: “Ik wil Kusamawereld maken, die niemand ooit gemaakt en betreden heeft.” Ook al verscheurde haar moeder vele van haar tekeningen, Yayoi ging traditionele Japanse schilderkunst, Nihonga, studeren. Net zoals al het traditionele van Japan bleek dat niets voor haar te zijn.

Geleidelijk werden steeds meer westerse invloeden zichtbaar in haar werken. Nihonga ging de strijd aan met

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het kubisme, het surrealisme en Mir’o. Het begon haar te dagen; New York was waar alles in de kunst op dat moment gebeurde. Daar moest ze heen “In Japan blijven was nmogelijk”, zou ze later zeggen. “Voor mijn kunst die gaat over leven en dood, over wat we zijn en wat leven en dood betekenen, was Japan te klein, te onderdanig, te feodaal en te smalend tegenover vrouwen.

Mijn kunst had oneindige vrijheid nodig, een wijdere wereld.” In 1957 naait ze illegale dollars in een zoom an haar rok, steekt haar koffer vol tekeningen die ze later wil verkopen en enigzins rond te komen en verlaat Japan. Ze is 28 als ze aankomt in New York. Een Japanse met traditionele achtergrond in een Amerika dat zich Pearl Harbor als gisteren herrinerde. En een vrouw in een overwegend mannelijke kunstwereld. Kusuma had duidelijk meer dan genoeg potentiele struikelblokken in haar strijd om beroemd te worden, maar begin jaren 60 prijkt ze al aan de top van de hedendaagse kunstwereld.

Met haar obsessiever werken zoals Pacific Ocean uit 1960 —gigantische canvassen met miniscule, gedetailleerde inkepingen — wordt ze een van de meest toonaangevende kunstenaars in de avant-gardescèene.

“De koningin van de polkadot”, zoals de paparazzi haar kroonden, wordt in een adem vernoemd met artiesten als Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd en Andy Warhol. Kunstenaars onder hen die later grotere bekendheid zullen genieten, laten zich inspireren. Kijk Warhols Cowpaper uit 1966 en haar Kusama’s Agrgregatio: One Thousand Boat Shows. De gelijkenis in hun gebruik van massaduplicatie is treffend. Cruciaal verschil? Kusama was hem drie jaar voor. Ze wil ook de grootste zijn en op een bepaalde manier is ze dat ook. Haar werk is overal en treedt ver buiten de grenzen van de schilderkunst.

Ze hanteert niet alleen het penseel, maar gaat zich ook verdiepen in fotografie, plastische kunsten, schrijven en installatiekunst. Ze lijkt niet te stoppen, en dat gaat zich na verloop van tijd tegen haar keren. Door overexposure kregen de New Yorkers genoeg van haar en tegen het begn van de jaren zeventig is haar succes tanende. In 1973 besluit ze terug te keren naar Japan. Hallucinaties vormden de aanleiding en inspiratie voor haar werken, maar ze brachten haar in 1977 ook vrijwillig tot het besluit om zich na een turbulent leven terug te trekken in een psychiatrische kliniek in Seiwa, nabij Tokio. Ondertussen is Kusuma 83, maar blijft ze werken afleveren.

Overdag in haar kleine aterlier en ‘s avonds weer naar de

instelling. Eind jaren tachtig herinnert de wereld zich de vergeten ster weer en stelt Kusama haar werken tentoon op grote expo’s zoals de Biënala van Wenen en het MOMA in New York.

Het is in haar kleine studiootje aan de psychiatrische kliniek van Seiwa dat Marc Jacobs, sinds 1997 creatief directeur bij Louis Vuitton, haar in 2006 ontmoet. Jacobds werkt op dat moment samen met regisseur Loïc Prigent aan een documentaire over zijn leven en werk bij Louis Vuitton. Kusama is dan 77 jaar. Over die ontmoeting is Jacobs naar eigen zeggen nog steeds enthousiast. “Het was ongelofelijk. Charmant en speciaal.

Ik bezocht haar in haar studio waar we een tijdje samen zaten en spraken over het leven, werk en gemeenschappelijke passie om dingen te creëren. Het obsessieve karakter en de onschuld van haar kunstwerken raken me echt. “De creatieve teams van Louis Vuitton wisten Yayoi Kusamas kenmerkende sfeer perfect te integreren in de nieuwe collectie. Van het kleinste accessoire tot de sfeer van de catalogus. Marc Jacobs beaamt. “Het lookbook voor de collectie was helemaal in lijn et de geest van haar werk. We wilden de reeks zeker niet serieus maken en gaven ook de modellen een Kusama-look met felrode lippen en een bobkapsel.” De prijzen van de collectie zijn net iets minder ludiek. Handtassen kosten al snel bijna 400 euro meer dan hun standaardvariant. Zo begint Neverfull Monogram- een lederen tote bag met Vuittonprint - normaal bij 485 euro, terwijl de Neverfull Monogram Waves van Kusama zo’n 875 kost. Met de samenwerking wil de artieste een ultiem doel bewerkstelligen: de eeuwige liefde uitdragen.

Kusama verklaart het als volgt: “Een polkadot heeft de vorm van de zon, die een symbool is van de energie van de hele wereld en van ons leven, maar die ook de vorm heeft van de maan die rond, zacht, kleurrijk en ontwetend is. Stppen kunnen niet opzichzelf staan, net als mensen. Als je je omgeving en jezelf overschildert met stippen, word je onderdeel van de eenheid van je omgeving. Je wordt onderdeel van het eeuwige en lost op in liefde.” Dat Louis Vuitton de uitgelezen gelegenheid s voor dit doel, beaamt ook Marc Jacobs:” Louis Vuitton heeft fans over heel de wereld en ik hoop en verwacht dat, net zoals bij de overige samenwerkingen, die het werk van Yayoi Kusama naar een nieuw publiek zal brengen..

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

YAY O I K U S A M A

YAY O I K U S A M A

Louis Vuitton at Selfridges, London (1)

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

(2)

(3) 15

YAY O I K U S A M A

Kusama at Modern Tate: The Brilliance Of Life

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body Kusama’s Installation at Matsumoto Museum 2009

ANISH KAPOOR born on 12 March 1954 is an Indian sculptor. He became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment, and plaster. These early sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured, using powder pigment to define and permeate the form. “While making the pigment pieces, it occurred to me that they all form themselves out of each other. So I decided to give them a generic title, A Thousand Names, implying infinity, a thousand being a symbolic number. The powder works sat on the floor or projected from the wall. The powder on the floor defines the surface of the floor and the objects appear to be partially submerged, like icebergs. That seems to fit inside the idea of something being partially there.” His later stone works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightnessdarkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, malefemale, and body-mind). “In the end, I’m talking about myself. And thinking about making nothing, which I see as a void. But then that’s something, even though it really is nothing. Since 1995, he has worked with the highly reflective surface of polished stainless steel. These works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings. Over the course of the following decade Kapoor’s sculptures ventured into more ambitious manipulations of form and space. Lightness-darkness,visible-invisible and the conscious-unconscious.

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body Kusama’s Installation at Matsumoto Museum 2009

ANISH KAPOOR

Leviathan 2011, Anish Kapoor has invited Richie Hawtin to perform in front of his sculpture Leviathan in the nave of the Grand Palais, Paris, as part of Monumenta 2011. The connection between the two artists began when Hawtin felt a sonic emptiness after placing his head inside Kapoor’s sculptures: “Suddenly I was able to walk around a physical version of what I wanted to do musically,” says Hawtin. That encounter culminated in his 1998 Plastikman album Consumed.

In Facing The Leviathan Hawtin aims to work directly with the specific acoustic properties of Kapoor’s work.

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Resin 1st Body, A Ghosts Endeavour

Mirrors, Exposition Martiin-Gropius-Bau 2013

ANISH KAPOOR

Mirror Balls RA, London

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Shine 2012

Mirror 2012 23

CECIL BALMOND is a Sri Lankan - British designer, artist, architect, and writer. In 1968 Balmond joined Ove Arup & Partners, leading him to become deputy chairman. In 2000 he founded design and research group, the AGU (Advanced Geometry Unit). He has been hailed as “one of the main forces in the contemporary architecture of today”. In 2003, he received the prestigious RIBA Charles Jencks Award for Theory in Practice and he was also selected for the Duma Matsuiprijs, one of the highest honors for architectural engineers in Japan for its structure design for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by Toyo Ito in 2002. Balmond sees the structure “as an episodic and rhythmic punctuation mark of space”.

His work is known to regard as a global designer, artist, mathematician, thinker and writer. Balmond sees the structure “as an episodic and rhythmic punctuation mark of space”. His work can be seen as a Visual application of theories and has led to new insights into the aesthetics. Balmond’s principle that conceptual rigor in structure can be seen as architecture significantly changed the appearance of both architecture, art and engineering.

Visual applications of theories has led to new insights into the aesthetics. Balmond’s principle that conceptual rigor in structure can be seen as architecture significantly changed the appearance of both architecture, art and engineering.

His dynamic and organizational approach to structures is the result of the scientific analysis of non-linear complexity and organization. He considers the universe

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

as a constantly changing series of patterns. Ancient wisdom and non-Western mathematical Archetypes are vital sources for him. Balmond believes that getting there is lyricism. In addition to craft and technique, there is always also art and poetry. Balmond conducts research into mathematical concepts and their impact on the natural shapes and structures. He lectures frequently and currently holds the Paul Philippe Cret Chair at the Penn Design as a professor in the architecture. He founded there the NSO, Nonlinear Systems Organization, and research project design considered research.Balmond works regularly with Anish Kapoor.

Of their most recent designs is the Orbit, a 114.5 m high sculpture designed for the 2012 Olympics in London’s Stratford. Also for the Marysas, a white plastic funnel covered with red cloth with a length of 40 metres, suspended between a circular framework, they worked. The sculpture was exhibited in 2002 in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. Also the huge Tees Valley art installation they developed together. Through his provocative designs in collaboration with leading architects and artists and eloquent writings, including Informal (2002) and Number Nine: The Search for the Sigma Code (1998) Balmond has put forward a dynamic and organizational approach to structure that is informed by the sciences of complexity, non-linear organization and emergence. Recognizing that the universe is a constantly changing array of patterns (both random and regular), he also draws on

CECIL BALMOND

ancient wisdom and non-western mathematical archetypes. Taking structure to be as much a verb as a noun— as structuring, organizing and patterning— Balmond redefines the relationship between structural engineering and architecture beyond the ethos of rationalism, efficiency and optimization, which has characterized not only high-tech design but modern architecture in general.

His experimental, constructive and algorithmic methods open a rich territory for design at different scales and in different media and regimes of matter, extending the horizons of both reason and beauty.

They designed a 115m high public artwork called Orbit at Olympic Park in London, to be built as part of London’s Olympic Games in 2012. Kapoor and Balmond believe that Orbit represents a radical advance in the architectural field of combining sculpture and structural engineering, and that it combines both stability and instability in a work that visitors can engage with and experience via an incorporated spiral walkway. It has been both praised and criticised for its bold design. It has also been criticised as a vanity project, of questionable lasting use or merit as a public art project. “I wanted the sensation of instability, something that was continually in movement.

Traditionally a tower is pyramidal in structure, but we have done quite the opposite, we have a flowing, coiling form that changes as you walk around it… It is an object that cannot be perceived as having a singular image, from any one perspective. You need to journey round the object, and through it. Like a Tower of Babel, it requires real participation from the public” — Anish Kapoor.

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Arcelor Mittal Orbit, (2012). Olympic Park, London, Kapoor & Balmond

CECIL BALMOND

Arcelor Mittal Orbit, Kapoor & Balmond

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Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Nexus, Wallpaper Handmade Exhibition, Milan 2012 (1)

(2)

CECIL BALMOND

Danzer, Louisana Museum of Art, Denmark (1)

(2)

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(3) 31

Mind bending digital pattern formations are the work of Los Angeles based photographer and new media artist Adam Ferriss. Inspired by the glitch aesthetic, Ferriss uses custom software procedures to separate and digitally reengineer his own photographic work. Ferriss’s photography works in a similar way, except the artist, rather than allowing your brain to create a realistic image from the photograph, is more interested in breaking the color down into its components and taking the everyday and familiar and making it somehow new and strange again.

Interview with

ADAM FERRISS

By Little Ramonas

In A World Of RGB

source: littleramons.com

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ADAM FERRISS’ RGB WORLD

AF: As an art practice, I think it is sort of similar to play. I will “sketch” out a program, or tweak something written by somebody else over and over again until it begins to develop into something that seems interesting to me. I like to poke and prod at the structures that comprise our digital world in order to expose the digital medium for what it is. But at the same time I’m interested in reconfiguring what is already out there. Most of my work usually has a source image, which is then transmuted by some seemingly unknown process or custom made glitch into something wholly different. Often all the parts are the same, but it’s as if you had stuck your fingers in the pixels and swirled them around. In this way nothing is added or subtracted, it’s just rearranged.

LR: WHAT ROLE DO PIXELS PLAY IN YOUR DAILY MIND AND LIFE?

AF: In my daily life? I don’t know for sure. I’m certainly invested in spending a fair amount of time in front of the computer. I spend a good deal of time thinking about ways in which they can be manipulated in unorthodox ways, and unwound from their containers. How can they be rewrapped, stretched, sorted and resorted, randomized, or duplicated outside their edges.

LR: TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROCESS OF CREATING IMAGES, WHAT SOFTWARE DO YOU USE AND WHY?

AF: I mostly use Processing when I’m in the creative planning and sketching phase. In Processing, it’s very easy to get something up and running relatively quickly, and with very little overhead. Some of these recent images are created by placing a “seed” pixel at a random location in the image.

That pixel then looks at it’s neighbors (the pixels that it is touching) and iteratively expands outwards. As it goes it’s color changes based on random noise values. It’s a bit of an abstract process, it makes more sense if you see it in action.

LR: WHEN IT COMES TO THE SELECTION OF COLOR, IS IT SOMETHING YOU PLAN, OR DO YOU ALWAYS DO TRIAL AND ERROR IN ORDER TO CREATE THE COLOR SCHEME YOU WANT?

AF: See above. Yes color is not something that I fully control. I usually have certain aesthetic

tendencies that I lean towards, but much of the actual color picking is done by the algorithm. I can control the color in some regards, as in, how often it changes, or how big of a range the color will be allowed to fluctuate in. I like to let the computer decide, and then throw away whatever I don’t like.

It is a lot of trial and error, but more often than not the computer can do a better job than I can at creating color palettes.

LR: HOW IS FILM PHOTOGRAPHY INVOLVED IN SOME OF YOUR WORK?

AF: I went to school for photography, and I will always have a love for film. About a year ago I was working on a project photographing plants and waves using a process color tricolor separation.

Over the past year as I’ve become more and more invested in these algorithmic and purely digital processes, it has sort of fallen by the way side. That being said, I often use a photograph, or scanned image as a source. I like to try and stay grounded in photography on some level, I think it can really help(or hinder) in keeping my images recognizable as “real” subjects. There is a delicate balance between an altered digital image and a photograph. I’m curious about when that line is crossed and when the classifications of photograph v. digital image start to blur or merge.

LR: HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR WORK EVOLVING? WE NOTICED THAT YOU STARTED WORKING WITH ANIMAL IMAGES SUCH AS DOLPHINS...

AF: Haha, yes I was starting to venture into working with pre-existing 3d models I was finding online.

I was mostly using the animals because I wanted something more interesting than a cube or sphere to work with. I’m not very familiar with 3d software, but I’m trying to learn more, as well as begin a foray into creating small games, or little interactive experiences. I think a lot of my work is just a byproduct of learning new software, so it’s helpful for me to keep trying out new things.

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

LR: HOW DO YOU DEFINE YOUR WORK?

LR: DO YOU CONSIDER THIS TYPE OF DIGITAL “ART” AS HIDDEN TREASURE THAT NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT? AF: Hmm, well I’m not sure that it is considered hidden as much nowadays as it used to be. The images and archetypes associated with new media and net art movements seem to be becoming less of a trend and more of an ongoing set of methods and ideas. I think that it’s a slow transition, but it’s gradually becoming more and more mainstream.

LR: WHO INFLUENCES YOUR WORK?

AF: I’m very much influenced by my surroundings.

I moved to California not too long ago, so and I’ve been fascinated with the plants out here, as well as the landscape, the mountains breaking down into the ocean (and the ocean itself!). To name a few artists that I’ve been looking at recently: been Nicholas Sassoon, Brenna Murphy, Vince McKelvie, Jeff Thompson, & Rick Silva.

LR: WHAT PROJECT OR COLLABORATION HAVE YOU WORKED ON IN THE PAST THAT YOU LIKE THE MOST?

AF: When I was working on the color separation series, I spent a lot of time traveling to different gardens and hikes around southern california. Maybe it was the travel that made it exciting, but it was immensely satisfying to visit new places. It’s a shame I don’t do more work on the computer outside.

LR: WHAT IS THE GARMENT PIECE YOU LIKE THE MOST IN YOUR CLOSET AND WHY? AF: An old Epcot Center shirt from Disney World that I think my dad originally owned. It has this retro-future font and graphic on it. It’s lost a lot of it’s original vinyl decal by now, but in some ways it’s kind of like Epcot itself; an outdated vision of the future.

35 Stairs

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

ADAM FERRISS’ RGB WORLD

ADAM FERRISS

Tartan Ribbon

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

Processing

Blocked Memory 37

ADAM FERRISS

observing io

Catalogue Of Artist’s Body

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Of the handful of self-inflicted blunders Apple’s had to deal with over the last few years, the Apple Maps debacle stands apart simply because it was so hard to miss. Where Antennagate had been an invisible plague and Ping was almost instantaneously forgotten, Apple Maps announced its screwiness from day one, unapologetically misplacing businesses and matter-of-factly routing drivers into nearby bodies of water. You didn’t have to poke and prod to find bugs.

It was swarming with them. The app’s 3D views were problematic too. Cities were peppered with warped buildings and other strange Daliesque distortions. For a user named Peder Norrby, though, those visual hiccups had an odd effect. They made him use the app more.

Norrby, an engineer who specializes in graphics

IN

APPLE

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GLITCHES software, first happened upon one of the app’s broken landscapes when he was using it to explore his hometown of Stockholm. Next to a red-roofed housing complex, there was an obvious snag. A solid street was smeared, like someone had run a sponge across a daub of wet paint. Norrby thought it looked cool, so he took a screenshot, uploaded it to Flickr, and gave it the somewhat cryptic title of “The Drop.” Part of the appeal is purely aesthetic. Norrby occasionally adds Instagram filters or does some post-processing in Photoshop to give the screenshots a bit of flair. But the project is also about documenting and appreciating the serendipitous goofs unique to our technological moment. “I like the idea of looking at an error as something good or at least interesting,” Norrby says. “It happens a lot in art and coding that the mistakes we make turn out really great.” And while Apple’s engineers have been scrambling to fix the kinks wherever they pop up, Norrby thinks there’s something a little bit perfect about these algorithmically-authored oddities. “I like that the errors aren’t intentional,” he says. “It wouldn’t be the same for me if I had made those images in a 3D graphics app.”

MAPS

PETER NORRBY

screenshots of glitches in Apple Maps.

Images Peter Norrby (1)

(2)

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WRAPPED LANDSCAPES

Glitches In Apple Maps

(3)

(4)

Landscapes

seen from Beautiful satellite images of earth from the Landsat programme as art.Also the Advanced Land Images from NASA’s Earth Observing are captured by satellits, this true-color images of terraced landscape appears in shades of different colors.

space

EARTh Earth is truly beautiful when viewed from space. But add some false color produced by satellite sensors, and the result is stunning. The U.S. Geological Survey has released a new selection of particularly interesting images from the Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites. These space craft have been prolific sources of data for earth scientists, but the new shots were chosen solely based on aesthetics.

Chapter One

AS

ART

Beautiful Green Aurora Australis, August 6, 2005 As Seen From Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-114)

Right: The Moon, the Stars, and the Aurora Borealis Over Earth, August 19, 2006 As Seen From the International Space Station (Expedition 13)

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SEEN FROM SPACE

Agriculture is one of the oldest and most pervasive human impacts on the planet. Estimates of the land surface affected worldwide range up to 50 percent. But while driving through the seemingly endless monotony of wheat fields in Kansas may give you some insight into the magnitude of the change to the landscape, it doesn’t compare to the view from above. When seen from space, those same boring wheat fields are transformed into a strange and even beautiful pattern. Some of the most arresting agricultural landscapes occur in the Midwestern United States in areas that rely on center-pivot irrigation (shown at right). The area pictured above near Garden City, Kansas, is being farmed to the point of resembling abstract art or a Magic Eye illusion.

Groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer is used to grow corn, wheat and sorghum in the region. In this gallery, collected some of the most interesting views of crops from space, including rice paddies in Thailand, cotton fields in Kazakhstan and alfalfa growing in the middle of the Libyan desert. satellite images of river deltas across the world reveal beautiful sinuous patterns. Seen from space, rivers create paths resembling branching blood vessels or works of modern art as they reach the sea. These images have been coloured to highlight geographical features such as vegetation and flooded areas. A false-color composite made using data from near infrared, red and green wavelengths and sharpened with a panchromatic sensor. The red areas actually represent the greenest vegetation. Bare soil or dead vegetation ranges from white to green or brown.

Or a simulated true-color shot by NASA’s Terra satellite. Bright greens are healthy, leafy crops such as corn; sorghum would be less mature at this time of year and probably a bit paler; wheat is ready for harvest and appears a bright gold; brown fields have been recently harvested. The circles are perfectly round and measure a mile or a half mile in diameter. In 1960, NASA put its first “Earth-observing environmental satellite” into orbit, and, ever since, these satellites have let us observe the dynamics of our planet in a new way. They can tell us all about changing weather patterns, the impact of climate change, what’s happening in the oceans, the coastlines, rivers and more.

The satellites have also demonstrated again and again the Earth’s aes-

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Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate. Islands are some of the most beautiful, peaceful, violent, desolate and unique places on Earth. While experiencing a tropical island from its sandy beaches, or a volcanic island from its towering peaks is wonderful, experiencing them from above can be inspiring as well.

Asteroid impact craters are among the most interesting geological structures on any planet. Many other planets and moons in our solar system, including our own moon, are pock-marked with loads of craters. But because Earth has a protective atmosphere and is geologically active — with plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, mostly relatively young oceanic crust, and harsh weathering from wind and water — impact structures don’t last long and can be tough to come by. —

Argicultural Landscapes

thetic beauty, revealed in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures seen from space. That beauty is what gets celebrated in NASA Earth As Art, a new visual publication made available as a Free 160-Page eBook (PDF) and a Free iPad App. Featuring 75 images in total, the app gives you a very aerial look at places like the Himalayas, Arizona’s Painted Desert, the Lena River Delta in Russia (shown above), the Byrd Glacier in Antarctica, and much more. Enjoy the images, from the surreal to the sublime.

To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years. Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures. Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles.

Germany 2000. This agricultural area in midwestern Germany also features enormous opencast coal mines, one of which appears in the far right of this simulated-naturalcolor image, taken by NASA’s Terra satellite Aug. 26, 2000. Light green patches are crops, dark green is forest, grey is bare soil or urban areas, and the bright blue and white striped area is the mine. The mines in the area are worked by the Bagger 293, the largest machine in the world. The bucket-wheel excavator is twice as long as a soccer field and as tall as a 30-story building It digs up 30 million tons of lignite per year.

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Argicultural Landscapes Bolivia 2000. The star-shaped patterns pictured above are radial soybean fields that are part of a planned settlement east of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. The stars radiate from small towns (shown at right) three miles apart and are separated from neighboring stars by a small stretch of the dry tropical forest that used to cover the area. The deforestation of the Amazon Basin in Bolivia can also be seen in the false color image on the right, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite on Aug. 1, 2000. Long paths are the result of logging and large blocks have been cleared for herds to graze. Green, healthy vegetation shows up as red in this image.

Images: NASA

EARTH AS ART

Ganges River Delta

01

The Ganges River forms an extensive delta where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. The delta is largely covered with a swamp forest known as the Sunderbans, which is home to the Royal Bengal Tiger.

Picture: BP/ Barcroft Media

The Himalayas

02

17 February 2002 — Soaring, snow-capped peaks and ridges of the eastern Himalayas Mountains create an irregular white-on-red patchwork between major rivers in southwestern China. The Himalayas are made up of three parallel mountain ranges that together extend more than 2,900 kilometres.

Picture: BP/ Barcroft Media

Island Rebound

03

6 September 2007 — During the last ice age, Akimiski Island in Canada’s James Bay lay beneath vast glaciers that pressed down with immense force. As the climate changed and the ice retreated, Akimiski began a gradual rebound. The island’s slow but steady increase in elevation is recorded along its naturally terraced edges where the coastline seems etched with bathtub rings, the result of the rising landmass and wave action at previous sea levels.

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

Desert Patterns

04

April 13th, 2003 — Seen through the ‘eyes’ of a satellite sensor, ribbons of Saharan sand dunes seem to glow in sunset colors. These patterned stripes are part of Erg Chech, a desolate sand sea in southwestern Algeria, Africa, where the prevailing winds create an endlessly shifting collage of large, linear sand dunes.

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

Byrd Glacier

05

January 11th, 2000 — Truly a river of ice, Antarctica’s relatively fast-moving Byrd Glacier courses through the Transantarctic Mountains at a rate of 0.8 kilometres (0.5 miles) per year.

More than 180 kilometres (112 miles) long, the glacier flows down from the polar plateau (left) to the Ross Ice Shelf (right). Long, sweeping flow lines are crossed in places by much shorter lines, which are deep cracks in the ice called crevasses. The conspicuous red patches indicate areas of exposed rock.

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

Mississippi River

06

Small, blocky shapes of towns, fields, and pastures surround the graceful swirls and whorls of the Mississippi River. Countless oxbow lakes and cutoffs accompany the meandering river south of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border between Arkansas and Mississippi. The “mighty Mississippi” is the largest river system in North America.

Image taken by Landsat 7 on May 28, 2003

Caribbean Luxury

07

April 24th, 2003 - The Caicos Islands in the northern Caribbean are a popular tourist attraction, renowned for their beautiful beaches, clear waters, scuba diving, and luxury resorts.

The islands lie primarily along the northern perimeter of the submerged Caicos Bank (turquoise), a shallow limestone platform formed of sand, algae, and coral reefs covering 6,140 square kilometres (2,370 square miles).

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

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08

October 21st, 1999 — This stretch of Iceland’s northern coast resembles a tiger’s head complete with stripes of orange, black, and white.

The tiger’s mouth is the great Eyjafjorour, a deep fjord that juts into the mainland between steep mountains. The name means ‘island fjord,’ derived from the tiny, tear-shaped Hrisey Island near its mouth. The ice-free port city of Akureyri lies near the fjord’s narrow tip, and is Iceland’s second largest population centre after the capital, Reykjavik.

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

Belcher Islands

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Like sweeping brushstrokes of pink and green, the Belcher Islands meander across the deep blue of Canada’s Hudson Bay. The islands’ only inhabitants live in the small town of Sanikiluaq, near the upper end of the middle island.

Despite the green hues in this image, these rocky islands are too cold to sustain more than a smattering of low-growing vegetation.

Image taken by Landsat 5 on Sep. 21, 2001

Great Barrier Reef

August 8th, 1999 — What might be mistaken for dinosaur bones being unearthed at a paleontological dig are some of the individual reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest tropical coral reef system.

The reef stretches more than 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles) along the coast of Queensland, Australia. It supports astoundingly complex and diverse communities of marine life and is the largest structure on the planet built by living organisms.

Picture: USGS/NASA/Landsat / Rex Features

Okavango River

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Like poster paints run wild, this image reveals an eclectic montage of landscapes in Iran’s largest desert, the Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. The word kavir is Persian for salt marsh.

The almost-uninhabited region covers an area of more than 77,000 square kilometers [29,730 square miles] and is a mix of dry streambeds, desert plateaus, mudflats and salt marshes. Extreme heat, dramatic daily temperature swings, and violent storms are the norm in this inhospitable place.

Image taken by Landsat 7 on Feb. 10, 2003

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Like a watercolor in which a brushstroke of dark green has bled into a damp spot on the paper, southern Africa’s Okavango River spreads across the pale, parched landscape of northern Botswana to become the lush Okavango Delta. The delta forms where the river empties into a basin in the Kalahari Desert, creating a maze of lagoons, channels and islands where vegetation flourishes, even in the dry season, and wildlife abounds.

Image taken by Landsat 5 on Apr. 27, 2009

Great Salt Desert

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Dessert Patterns

Icelandic Tiger

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Dessert Patterns

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Dessert Patterns

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Dessert Patterns

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D E M A R I A WA LT E R 1960

“I THINK NATURAL DISASTERS HAVE BEEN LOOKED UPON IN THE WRONG WAY. NEWSPAPERS ALWAYS SAY THEY ARE BAD. A SHAME. I LIKE NATURAL DISASTERS AND I THINK THAT THEY MAY BE THE HIGHEST FORM OF ART POSSIBLE TO EXPERIENCE. FOR ONE THING THEY ARE IMPERSONAL. I DON’T THINK ART CAN STAND UP TO NATURE. PUT THE BEST OBJECT YOU KNOW NEXT TO THE GRAND CANYON, NIAGRA FALLS, THE RED WOODS. THE BIG THINGS ALWAYS WIN. NOW JUST THINK OF A FLOOD, FOREST FIRE, TORNADO, EARTHQUAKE, TYPHOON, SAND STORM. THINK OF THE BREAKING OF THE ICE JAMS. GRUNCH. IF ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO GO TO MUSEUMS COULD JUST FEEL AN EARTHQUAKE. NOT TO MENTION THE SKY AND THE OCEAN. BUT IT IS THE UNPREDICTABLE DISASTER THAT THE HIGHEST FORMS ARE REALIZED. THEY ARE RARE AND WE SHOULD BE THANKFUL FOR THEM.”

63 land, November 20, 2006 As Seen By the MODIS Instrument Aboard NASA’s Terra Satellite

Earth As Art

Dual Cyclones In the North Atlantic Ocean Separated By Lydveldid Island — Republic of Ice-

BENOIT MANDELBROT

FRACTAL

A Chapter Four

IT’S

WORLD

A FRACTAL WORLD

A fractal is a mathematical set that typically displays self-similar patterns, which means it is “the same from near as from far” Fractals may be exactly the same at every scale, or, they may be nearly the same at different scales. The concept of fractal extends beyond trivial self-similarity and includes the idea of a detailed pattern repeating itself. Fractals are distinguished from regular geometric figures by their fractal dimensional scaling. Doubling the edge lengths of a square scales its area by four, which is two to the power of two, because a square is two dimensional.

There is some disagreement amongst authorities about how the concept of a fractal should be formally defined. Mandelbrot himself summarized it as “beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.” The general consensus is that theoretical fractals are infinitely self-similar, iterated, and detailed mathematical constructs having fractal dimensions, of which many examples have been formulated and studied in great depth.Fractals are not limited to geometric patterns, but can also describe processes in time.Fractal patterns with various degrees of self-similarity have been rendered or studied in images, structures and sounds and found in nature, technology, art, and law.

Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician, noted for developing a “theory of roughness” in nature and the field of fractal geometry to help prove it, which included coining the word “fractal”. He later discovered the Mandelbrot set of intricate, neverending fractal shapes, named in his honor.

Mandelbrot created the first-ever “theory of roughness”, and he saw “roughness” in the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies. His personal quest was to create some mathematical formula to measure the overall “roughness” of such objects in nature. Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models for describing many “rough” phenomena in the real world. He concluded that “real roughness is often fractal and can be measured. Whether the result tends towards infinity when a particular mathematical operation is iterated on it.

Treating the real and imaginary parts of each number as image coordinates, pixels are colored according to how rapidly the sequence diverges, if at all.

More precisely, the Mandelbrot set is the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial. View of a part of the Mandelbrot set, with iterative use of colour, depending on the number of iterations a sequence turns out to be untethered. Values within the Mandelbrot set traps have a black colour In images is the Mandelbrot set, often with a black color and the numbers that fall outside the collection with a different color. Often a large number of colors used, which gradually into one another. The colors In many color reproductions are an indication of

the amount of iterations needed before an untethered sequence a value that falls outside of the circle in which the Mandelbrot set. When zoomed in is on the edges of the image of the Mandelbrot set, be visible soon, hundreds of iterations with points that need locations before it is established that they are untethered. Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness.

Each is the topic of a branch of physics.

Chemistry is filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols — all are concepts derived from sensory perceptions. Roughness is just as important as all those other raw sensations, but was not studied for its own sake.

People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. We descended from those primates who were best at spotting the telltale pattern of a predator in the forest, or of food in the savannah.

So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not. It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others— and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it.

So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world’s largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers. Dr Mandelbrot’s work also demonstrated the usefulness of computerbased visualisation and experimentation in mathematics. Many mathematicians, he

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A Fractal World

BENOIT MANDELBROT

BENOIT MANDELBROT

says, liked the idea that certain structures defined by formulas were simply unimaginable; during the 20th century, he notes, many of them took refuge in wilfully obscure branches of mathematics, on the basis that such work had no military application. Ironically, the work of these pacifist mathematicians in areas such as number theory provided the foundations for modern cryptography, a key military tool. Fractals such as the Mandelbrot set are commonly associated with the study of complexity, also known by the trendier moniker of chaos theory.

But the study of chaos is now somewhat discredited, having failed to make any useful progress. Dr Mandelbrot has always distanced himself from such voguishness, preferring to avoid any topic “in which the data are not abundant and proof cannot be provided.�

Images The Mandelbrot Set

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From sea shells and spiral galaxies to the structure of human lungs, the patterns of chaos are all around us.

Fractals are patterns formed from chaotic equations and contain selfsimilar patterns of complexity increasing with magnification. If you divide a fractal pattern into parts you get a nearly identical reducedsize copy of the whole. The mathematical beauty of fractals is that infinite complexity is formed with relatively simple equations. By iterating or repeating fractal-generating equations many times, random outputs create beautiful patterns that are unique, yet recognizable.

This variant form of cauliflower is the ultimate fractal vegetable.

Its pattern is a natural representation of the Fibonacci or golden spiral, a logarithmic spiral where every quarter turn is farther from the origin by a factor of phi, the golden ratio. Extinct for 65 million years, ammonites were marine cephalopods that built chambered spiral shells. The walls between these chambers, called sutures, were complex fractal curves. Stephen Jay Gould used the complexity of ammonite sutures over time to argue that there is no evolutionary drive toward greater complexity and that we are a “glorious accident,� alone in the universe.

The shells of ammonites also grow as a logarithmic spiral, patterns that appears often in nature, as with romanesco broccoli.

Mountains are the result of tectonic forces pushing the crust upward and erosion tearing some of that

crust down. The resulting pattern is a fractal. Ferns are a common example of a self-similar set, meaning that their pattern can be mathematically generated and reproduced at any magnification or reduction.

The mathematical formula that describes ferns, named after Michael Barnsley, was one of the first to show that chaos is inherently unpredictable yet generally follows deterministic rules based on nonlinear iterative equations. In other words, random numbers generated over and over using Barnsley’s Fern formula ultimately produce a unique fern-shaped object.The marine stratus clouds above were photographed by the Aqua satellite over the South Atlantic Ocean, off the west coast of Africa.

A fractal cloud pattern is interrupted by a series of diagonal grooves. According the NASA Earth Observatory, it is highly unusual to see such a sharp boundary in a continual cloud formation such as this, and scientists have yet to explain how it could form. Many plants follow simple recursive formulas in generating their branching shapes and leaf patterns.Also the path lightning takes is formed step by step as it moves towards the ground, turning air into plasma.

Crystallizing water forms repeating patterns in snowflakes and on frosty surfaces. The patterns have inspired claims about the power of consciousness to affect matter, as well as one of the first described fractal curves, the Koch snowflake.

A Fractal World

FRACTALS FOUND IN NATURE

Romanesco Broccoli

Fractals in lightning

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Snowflake

Ferns’ fractal

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT FRACTALS

Quotation: Michael Barnsley Fractal geometry will make you see everything differently. There is a danger in reading further. You risk the loss of your childhood vision of clouds, forests, flowers, galaxies, leaves, feathers, rocks, mountains, torrents of water, carpet, bricks, and much else besides. Never again will your interpretation of these things be quite the same.

Quotation: Peter Aktins I wonder whether fractal images are not touching the very structure of our brains. Is there a clue in the infinitely regressing character of such images that illuminates our perception of art? Could it be that a fractal image is of such extraordinary richness, that it is bound to resonate with our neuronal circuits and stimulate the pleasure I infer we all feel?

Quotation: Time Lightbox In a world made small and accessible by technology, it is easy to forget the magnitude of nature’s infinite complexity. But sometimes technology reminds us, such as when trawling planet Earth on Google’s Satellite View, zooming across landscapes partitioned by natural and unnatural boundaries.

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Quotation: Benoît Mandelbrot Why is geometry often described as ‘cold’ and ‘dry’? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.

Quotation: Jess Zimmerman ... If I hadn’t looked them up, I’d suspect some of these were computer generated - but no, they’re real rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges branching into mathematically and aesthetically beautiful patterns. [cut] Did you have any idea you lived inside a Mandelbrot set? Well, now you do.

HUMAN

TEARS

A

MICROSCOPE

Chapter Five

UNDER

ROSE-LYNN FISHER Back in 2008, photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher was going through a rough stretch. She’d lost a couple of people who were close to her, and her own life was in a period of flux.

Needless to say, she was crying a lot. One day, instead of brushing the tears away, Fisher stopped to look at these droplets and an idea sprung up. What if she photographed the tears under a microscope? What would they show?

Would each one be different? “You know that classic science experiment where they show us all the life that’s present in one drop of pond water? Well I wanted to find out whaxt was present in one tear,” Fisher says. Fisher had long been interested in microscopic work, so luckily she had the necessary equipment on hand to start right away: A standard-light Zeiss attached to a QImaging MicroPublisher digital microscopy camera.

When she peered through the lens at her first couple of tears (some of which were wet, some of which were dry) she didn’t know what to expect and was surprised to discovered that some of the tears actually looked like aerial shots. All the water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes in the tear mimicked the rivers and fields and buildings you see while flying several thousand feet in the air. It immediately reminded her of the famous 1977 short film, Powers of Ten, which deals with the notion of scale and compares the vast reaches of the universe to the microscopic world of carbon atom. In particular, she says she was moved by how “patterns of erosion etched into earth over millions of years looked

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similar to the branched crystalline patterns of an evaporated tear that took less than a minute to occur.”

Her sample size grew as she tried to gather and document all three of the classified types of tears; basal or lubricating tears; reflex tears which your body secrets when it responds to an irritant like an onion; and crying or weeping tears, which relate to our emotions. Fisher gathered multiple samples of each. She wondered more broadly if tears of joy would differ from tears of sadness.

And she was curious to find out if men’s tears were different from women’s tears.

Over time, the pursuit has become more psychological. Fisher started thinking about how tears reveal our feelings and wondered if her photos, which look like landscapes, became a sort of map of the emotional moment that caused the tear. Tears are something all humans share, so she also wondered if there’s something in a tear that that points to a collective experience. In some ways, she realized her approach tended to be very empirical, but says the results and the overall project are purely art. For her, it isn’t about trying to identify repeatable patterns, or make her photos some kind of Rorschach test you’d see in a doctor’s office. Instead, she just hopes the photos add to a larger conversation about human existence.

“I’m not approaching the project as a scientist, but I’m still interested in asking questions through my visual exploration,” she says.

R O S E - LY N N F I S H E R

Tears of well-being and gratitude

81 Tears of ending and beginning by Rose-line Fisher

Under A Microscope

Yawning

R O S E - LY N N F I S H E R

Tears of timeless reunion,

R O S E - LY N N F I S H E R

Laughing tears, Rose-line Fisher

MICROSCOPIC Fernan Federici’s microscopic images of plants, bacteria, and crystals are a classic example of finding art in unexpected places. A couple years ago, Federici was working on his Ph.D. in biological sciences at Cambridge University studying self-organization, the process by which things organize themselves spontaneously and without direction. Like a flock of birds flying together. More specifically, he was using microscopes and a process called fluorescence microscopy to see if he could identify these kinds of patterns on a cellular level.

In fluorescence microscopy, scientists shine a particular kind of light at whatever they’re trying to illuminate and then that substance identifies itself by shining a different color or light back. Sometimes researchers will also attach proteins that they know emit a particular kind of light to substances as a kind of identifier. In the non-microscopic world, it’s like using a black light on a stoner poster. Federici grew up with photography as a hobby, so looking through the microscope at all the different colors and patterns he realized that the

Text By Jakob Schiller

IMAGES

process was highly visual. He hadn’t seen many images like what he was seeing published for the general public, so he asked for permission from his adviser Jim Haseloff to post the photos on his Flickr site. Today that site is filled with pages and pages of microscopic images, some of which are from his work, while others are just for fun.

“Microscopy is always serious science,” says Federici, who is now a researcher at Pontificia Univerisdad Catolica de Chile. “For us [in the department at Cambridge] this was something we looked at as outreach. It was a way to bring this scientific data to the general public.” Many of the photos on the site show particular bacteria colonies that were studied for their self-organizing principles. Others are just images of old plants that were used to teach botany at the university over a hundred years ago. Before fluorescence microscopy, scientists used dyes to try and single out certain cells or structures. Those dyes, which sat for decades on the plants, now make for arty images under a microscope. Other photos on the Flickr page include microscopic images of crystals and oil.

Federici says there’s still a lot to learn about self-organization so viewers can look forward to more art from him. If or when his colleagues are successful at what they’re chasing in self-organization, they eventually hope to be able to control it through something called synthetic biology, which will be a game-changer. “We can imagine a future of intelligent material,” he says. “For example, instead of chopping a tree down to make a chair, scientists might eventually be able to control a tree to just grow a chair.”

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Under A Microscope

FERNAN FEDERICI

FERNAN FEDERICI

Old plant tissue stained for teaching botany at Cambridge (1)

(2)

Under A Microscope

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FERNAN FEDERICI

(3)

Fluorescent proteins in bacterial biofilms.

PHILLIP STEARNS “RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIOM AND OTHER VISION TECHNOLOGIES, REAL OF OTHERWISE IMAGINED.”

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Phillip Stearns is the creator of the Year of the Glitch, a yearlong glitch-a-day project, and Glitch Textiles, a project exploring the intersection of digital art and textile design. He received his MFA in music composition and integrated media from the California Institute of Arts in 2007 and his BS in music technology from the University of Colorado at Denver in 2005. Electronic media operate primarily on only two of our senses: sight and hearing.

Though I work with media technologies, electronics and electronic media, I tend to focus on condensing these in such a way that the technologies, tools, and media themselves become entangled with what would normally be read as the content or the message. As electronic media (digital or analog), images, video, and sound become reduced to signal—a manifestation of some order defined within a certain system—Light and Sound themselves become raw materials for reconstituting electronic signals back into physiological experience.

Through deconstruction and reconfiguration the technologically mediated environment is approached as an assemblage, where human activity plays a role of equivalent importance to environmental agency. From this perspective, the development

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and application of our technologies, machines and tools reveals our perceptual biases, desires, dreams and fears—both conscious and unconscious. Cultural values and meaning, then, can be viewed as derivative, shaped by the particular conditions facilitating the distribution of agency through cascading exchanges of mediated interactions.

I’m unable to find the source of the sentiment that the camera is an extension of the eye, but it’s that very idea which I’ve intentionally taken literally, to an extreme. When looking through the datasheets on various instant color film, I was struck by the similarities between the layering of materials in the film and the layering of cells in the retinal. Though I’m not well versed in the history of film development as parallels the development in the understanding of the physiology of the retinal, the similarities were striking.

We are situated in a place where the photograph as an object has lost its primacy to the digital image, and the whole discipline of photography has undergone fundamental technological changes without much consideration for how this alters our theoretical understanding of the role of the digital photographic image in society and cultural (re)production. Following my work with digital cameras, I felt compelled to explore, or rather challenge the ontology of post-digital photography using extended techniques—bending, cracking and breaking the medium—to not only produce a medium specific work, but something that is an absolutely unique image/object.

Without a camera, images were produced through a combination of processes which parallel techniques utilized in previous experiments with low-resolution digital cameras.

PHILLIP STEARNS

Various household chemicals are applied to the surface of the film both before and after exposure. Through symbolic act of cleansing, the fidelity of the film is compromised. The film is also subjected to 15,000 volts of alternating current. In a flash, arcs spread out across the surface, sometimes burning holes, even igniting the film. As in our eyes, images are conveyed in a stream of such electric impulses, only here amplified some 300,000 times. I find it curious and exhilarating that the impressions left behind after developing these extreme exposures so perfectly resemble networks of blood vessels in the retina.

A study of the effects of high voltage and household cleaning products on instant pull apart color film. Materials: Fujifilm FP100-45C Instant Color Film, various household cleaning products (bleach, vinegar, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, salt, rubbing alcohol), 15,000 volt neon tube ballast.

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Vision Technologies Retinal Pigment Epitheliom (1)

PHILLIP STEARNS

(2)

(3)

Vision Technologies

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PHILLIP STEARNS

In his work the main point is the idea of using the camera as an extension of the eye, exploring similarities with cells in the retina. In a certain way, the visual result is similar to capillaries in the human being.

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INFINITY

Endless Landscape Created by Reams of Data

Text by Enya Moore

ROOM

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U N I V E R S A L E V E RY T H I N G

universaleverything.com

Chapter Five

Installed in San Francisco’s Financial District at the 3 Embarcadero Centre for three days, the Infinity Room immersed visitors in a powerful visual narrative.

The seemingly endless landscape – reminiscent of those created by Yayoi Kusama in the past – was created in the 15 x 8 mirrored room using choreographed pixel spheres and LED animations. Created to highlight the capabilities of Microsoft’s new data analysis tools, the installation was designed in code by Universal Everything in collaboration with data journalist Simon Rogers.

Infinity Room (1)

Infinite Room

U N I V E R S A L E V E RY T H I N G

(2)

(3)

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Infinite Room

U N I V E R S A L E V E RY T H I N G

Maiko Takeda’s creations seem like a surreal creatures from fantastic dream world. The headpieces of her latest creation, ‘Atmospheric Reentry’, are excitingly different, delicate and futuristic. The Tokyo born graduate of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, seeks to ‘create surreal, subtle dramas around the person wearing a piece and the people near them’. She imagines to give the people wearing her pieces the opportunity to ‘experience or share surreal moments in their daily lives, at a party or in the privacy of their own home’. ‘I want my pieces to give people those magical experiences’.

Maiko Tapeda In many cultures the hat is a status symbol and wearing a hat is still an obligation to attend certain ceremonial occasions. A hat makes its owner appear taller, more important and gives the person a certain presence. A hat can enable a person to slip on a different personality and let him or her become someone different.

When Björk entered the stage wearing one of Takeda’s creations on this years tour, the young artist could hardly believe her eyes: ‘The first piece she wore actually covers the whole face, so I wasn’t sure if it would be comfortable for her to sing in. I went to bed thinking she probably wouldn’t wear it in the end. In the morning I woke up to seeing pictures of Björk on the internet wearing my headpiece. That was the most rewarding moment for me’. Moving from Japan to London has influenced MaikoTakeda in many ways. Experiencing a new aesthetic in London, she suddenly really felt comfortable being herself, more comfortable than she had felt being in Japan.

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When it comes to her work though, she never tries to be too Japanese. She is not too fond of bringing her own cultural references into her work. ‘I obviously can see that my work is quite Japanese, but it’s not intentional. ‘ Her work could be seen at this years London Fashion Week and will soon be shown at the Vienna MuseumsQuartier. About her work, the artist says: ‘I’d love to be making pieces that make me happy, seeing as I’m really self-critical. It would be great if I could keep on making pieces that create these subtle dramas and experiences for the people who wear them.’

Interview by Zofia Ciechowska

Why do humans put things on their heads?

Wearing something on your head is traditionally seen as a symbol of status and power, it makes you look bigger, taller and more important. It’s a very powerful body part to put something on. I think in terms of fashion, it really transforms you into a different person. By covering your face or eyes, or putting something on your head, you can easily acquire a new personality.

What do you want your wearers to feel when they put on your pieces?

I want to create surreal, subtle dramas around the person wearing my piece and the people near them. I imagine the people who wear my pieces want to experience or share surreal moments in their daily lives, at a party or in the privacy of their own home.

I want my pieces to give people those magi-

cal experiences. It’s also amazing to learn how other people interpret my work, which has been compared to “Hellraiser”, hedgehogs, caterpillars and acupuncture.

Your headpieces were inspired by Philip Glass’ opera “Einstein on the Beach”. What was so compelling to you in this piece?

I can’t really explain it in words, but it had a very powerful effect on me when I saw this opera at the Barbican Centre. I went to see it a second time, in Amsterdam. It is a very repetitive, non-stop physical work. The actors move like machines, but at the same time you can see them sweating and running out of breath. I found that very interesting to watch. I felt the strong power of young people who have nothing to lose when I saw it. It was the simplest form of expression. That really touched my heart.

Maiko Tapeda

Maiko Takeda’s Head Games

What did it feel like having Björk appear on stage wearing one of your headpieces? Is there anyone else you’d like to design for?

I couldn’t believe it! The first piece she wore actually covers the whole face, so I wasn’t sure if it would be comfortable for her to sing in. I went to bed thinking she probably wouldn’t wear it in the end. In the morning I woke up to seeing pictures of Björk on the internet wearing my headpiece. That was the most rewarding moment for me. There were many tears and sleepless nights as I worked on my collection, so that was the best encouragement I could ever receive.

Besides Björk, I would love to design for Tilda Swinton.

How has your move from Japan to London influenced you as an artist?

It influenced me in many ways. In Japan there are very few immigrants. At my school we were all similar in terms of appearance – hair, eyes, skin tone – but we also had similar aesthetics and a similar way of seeing things. When I moved to London, I really felt more comfortable being myself than I had in Japan. In a way, I can be more Japanese here.

When it comes to my work though, I never try to be too Japanese. I personally don’t like bringing my own cultural references into my work, I think it’s a very obvious device, and too easy. Having said this, I obviously can see that my work is quite Japanese, but it’s not intentional.

Can you see differences between Japanese and British millinery traditions?

Millinery and the culture of wearing hats is a British tradition. Japanese people wear a lot of soft hats in daily life, which is interesting to me. In early Japanese history, the emperor would often wear a flat object on his head, it was made of natural fibres, unlike the crowns of the English monarchs which were made out of gold and jewels.

What do you hope life has in store for you in the future?

I’d love to be making pieces that make me happy, seeing as I’m really self-critical. It would be great if I could keep on making pieces that create these subtle dramas and experiences for the people who wear them.

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Maiko Tapeda

M A I K O TA P E D A’ S HEAD GAMES

Images by Dan Wilton

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Maiko Tapeda

M A I K O TA P E D A’ S HEAD GAMES

Images by Dan Wilton

Image by Dan Wilton

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M A I K O TA P E D A’ S HEAD GAMES

Atmospheric Reentry

By Maiko Takeda Image by Bryan Huynh

Maiko Tapeda

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INDEX SELLECTED ARTICLES Yayoi Kusama

www.thecreatorsproject.vice.com Anish Kapoor

www.anishkapoor.com Cecil Balmond

www.design.upenn.edu Adam Ferriss, In A World Of RGB

www.littleramons.com

Peter Norrby, Glitches In Apple Maps

www.dailydot.com by Audra Schroeder Landscapes Seen From Space/ Earth As Art

www.wired.com by Betsy Mason www.telegraph.co.uk

Benoît Mandelbrot, It’s A Fractal World

www.nndb.com

Rose-Lynn Fisher, Human Tears Under A Microscope

www.wired.com by Jakob Schiller Fernan Federici

www.123inspiration.com Phillip Stearns, Vision Technologies

www.phillipstearns.wordpress.com

Universal Everything, Infinite Room

www.universaleverything.com Maiko Takeda

www.ignant.de

COMPOSITION & BOOKDESIGN Stéphanie Deheyder published 2014

CONTENT

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INTO A FASCINATION FOR PATTERNS

THANK YOU

INTO A FASCINATION FOR PATTERNS © Stéphanie Deheyder