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curated by sierra gonzalez 
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Banking on the arts

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Dancer Sayako Tomiyoshi from the English National Ballet displays a Damien Hirst-designed sign at the British Museum. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

British artists, performers, museum directors, and leaders in theater and film rallied at the British Museum last week for the release of Cultural Capital: A Manifesto for the Future, a new report that demonstrates the economic contributions of the arts and culture sector. These leaders hope to discourage the British government from slashing funding in response to the country's huge deficit, arguing that the arts—especially theatre, music, and museums—both create jobs and contribute to the nation's GDP.

Last year, similar worries over arts funding in America prompted Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein to publish a study takes the argument one step further: artists contribute directly through their own fields, but they have also historically played a major role in scientific and technological innovation. What's more, the most successful scientists are more likely to pursue artistic expression:

...almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art to their scientific ability with some riff on Nobel prizewinning physicist Max Planck words: "The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination."

Their succinct article in Psychology Today gives many examples of scientific discoveries and technological innovations borne of artistic pursuits. "Successful scientists and inventors are artistic people," the authors argue. "Hobble the arts and you hobble innovation. It's a lesson our legislators need to learn."

Filed under  //   art   britain   economy   innovation   science  

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This is your brain on architecture

Michael Cannell has a nicely illustrated post on Fast Company about recent discoveries on the neuroscience of architecture. Among other discoveries, it turns out that our brains are more receptive to rounded, cushy designs instead of hard edges:

A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects—sofas, watches, etc.—subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.

And as if in affirmation, Jonah Lehrer observes that the "padded leather womb" of his Eames Lounge Chair makes reading tedious articles a little more approachable; he calls the chair a rare intersection of comfort and modernist (read: characteristically geometric and angular) beauty. (By the way, Lehrer also recently wrote about neuroscience and a different form of art—jazz improv.)

Filed under  //   architecture   design   design trend   modernism   music   science  

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Sugimoto as scientist

To be a good photographer you have to be a scientist as well.

Hiroshi Sugimoto on his latest project, "Lightning Fields." Sugimoto uses a Van de Graaff generator (capable of creating 400,000 volts) to charge a metal ball that he uses to shock large sheets of film. [Lightning Fields | Modern Painter ]

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Above: "Lightning Fields 013" (2006). Gelatin silver print, 59 x 47 in.

Below: Self-portrait by Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2008.

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Filed under  //   art   photography   science  

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Mid-century science and faux sci-fi books

I enjoyed the visual kinship between two recent discoveries: a gallery of video games as vintage sci-fi paperbacks and a Flickr set of science and technology ads published in the '50s and '60s. The simple lines, blocks of color and clean fonts in both galleries indicate that the video game spoofs did pretty well at picking up on a "vintage" aesthetic. The video game paperbacks were curated by Kotaku from this Something Awful thread; the Flickr set popped up in my Google Reader via Design Observer.

Filed under  //   advertising   color   game   graphic design   mid-century   sci-fi   science   technology   video game  

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Formulas for good design

Is there a mathematic equation for good design? A few articles from February tackle the relationship between beauty, math, science and design.

Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica | Wolfram blog
The developers of Mathematica, a modeling and computational software, riffed on a few corporate logos in a recent blog post. While it's hard to understand their process without experience using Mathematica, it's certainly fun to view the transformations; the Mercedes Benz exercise is even animated on their demo site (you can view a web preview without downloading their software). It seems like a compelling way to quickly view variations on a geometric design—but only if you've got the formula to create it first.

Unlocking the secret of beautiful design with mathematics | Boston Globe

Collector Horace "Woody" Brock has good design down to a science: he believes there is an optimal and measurable amount of symmetry that determines aesthetic satisfaction. Brock explained his ideas to a skeptical Boston Globe reporter covering an exhibit of Brock's decorative arts collection on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the exhibit catalog actually includes an appendix of equations and graphs to illustrate Brock's theory.

My problem with Brock's theory might simply be one of semantics: I think "beauty" is subjective, but it's clear that there are mathematical patterns found in nature (and in the built world) classically considered pleasing and "natural." (I don't think beauty is necessarily naturally pleasing—take Stravinsky, for example.) Brock acknowledges that what he considers "good design" is intuitive—"You just sense it," he says, "that's how it's supposed to be"—so perhaps he means classically pleasing rather than beautiful.

Bonus: to see how Brock applies his ideas to both design and music, read his review of Roger Scruton's The Aesthetic of Music (and Scruton's rebuttal, too).

Core Principles: How science can inform a theory of design | Seed
What is MoMA curator Paola Antonelli doing writing a design column for science mag Seed? Antonelli uses her first column to explore what it means to "design" and to link the practice with scientific discovery, both activities being reflections of culture and necessities for progress.

"Design" as a noun is stretched in so many directions, the only way to grasp its meaning is by abstracting it to its most conceptual skeleton, its basic construct. Science can teach design how to find its own core.

Filed under  //   beauty   collectors   design   logo   math   science  

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Saved by Science: Behind the scenes at AMNH


Waiting Room, Justine Cooper, 2005.

As part of Seed's birthday celebration for Charles Darwin, Carl Zimmer went behind the scenes at the American Natural History Museum in New York to look at the history of collecting science collections. Justine Cooper's accompanying photographs capture some haunting vignettes of the museum behind the curtain.*

*I had the Wizard of Oz in mind when I wrote that, but now it reminds me of Charles Peale's self portrait that reveals his personal collection--America's first museum--behind a red curtain:

The Artist in His Museum, Charles Willson Peale, 1822.

Filed under  //   behind the scenes   museum   new york   photography   science  

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The Romance of Objects

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has a brief piece in Seed encouraging children to fall in love with the world of things after noticing that her students and colleagues developed scientific curiosity "by the physics of sand castles, by playing with soap bubbles, by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio."

Objects don't nudge every child toward science, but for some, a rich object world is the best way to give science a chance.

Objects, Turkle argues, inspire scientific inquiry and encourage children to construct relationships with their environments. Turkle starts with relatively low-tech objects, but even though she touches on beginnings of computer culture, she seems hesitant to  include computers in that category of objects that motivate young children to learn. If you pick up some of her books (The Second Self, Evocative Objects) it becomes clearer that—at least with those she's interviewed, both children and adults—computers are some of the most influential and intimate objects of our lives.

Though Turkle has widened her studies from computer culture to a broader understanding of material culture and the role of objects in our lives, the Seed article merits a second read with a tech context, since that's the focus of much of her previous research, and, after all, technology is encorporated into many of the objects we use. Replace "object" with "computer", and the argument becomes a little more contentious:

...Many of us discourage the object passions of children, perhaps out of fear that they will become "trapped," learning to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This should not give objects a bad name. They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves.

Filed under  //   education   material culture   science  

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A new museum in San Francisco's Presidio

Should Gap founder Don Fisher build a museum for his modern art collection in the Presidio?  Jimmy Stamp at Life Without Buildings looks to sci-fi for an answer.

It seems that at some point in this alternate history, San Francisco's preservationists eventually conceded defeat. An "air tram station" boldly looks out over the Golden Gate Bridge and SF Bay. A softer mix of Brutalism and basic curvy sci-fi movie architecture. Ideal? No. But definitely an improvement over the current faux-historic designs mandated by overly-vocal and underly-visionary individuals, committees and trusts.

Filed under  //   architecture   museum   san francisco   sci-fi   science  

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