Our Illustrated Lectures at The British Library

Congratulations to all the science and cinema students for their wonderful presentations yesterday!!

Connor McIntyre/Transhumanism

Colton Kooker/The Future of the Universe

Charlie Lowrey/Lucid Dreaming

Michelle Grudzinski/The Journey of Green

David Oakley/The Light Knows

Ashley Meek/Where Does the Edge of Reality Lie? AI & AR

Katie Hitch/The Science of Scents

Justin Rogers/ Micro-organisms and Life Elsewhere

Guy Casavan/ The Chemistry of Film

Josh Lester/ 3-D

Nate / Gems Minerals Crystals

Brian Solka/ XRAYS

Chris Allred/Automatism

Colton, with helper Charlie, demonstrating how we can look back through time

Michelle's interactive color wavelength activity, after demonstration with a slinky.

David shows with a laser and two prisms how light can jump over empty space

 Katie's illustration of the lock-and-key combination of molecules in the creation of  scents

Ashley's presentation on Artificial Intelligence utilized an augmented reality software called Pixlive that we downloaded onto our smartphones to see the videos she embedded into certain key areas of her large drawing of a robot  thinking (after Rodin's The Thinker)

you can learn more about Milo here

Goodbye!

 12/2011

WEEK 16: Final Frontiers: Augmented Reality

New media artist Meredith Drum visited with us in our final week of classes and demonstrated the Oyster City project  she has been working on using  GPS enabled Augmented Reality technology . She also brought her iPad along so we could play with a new AR project called PYRITE recently showcased at the Miami art fair,  developed with her team Augmented Mountain, where you can transform an image into a virtual sculpture!
Here are some of my screenshots of her presentation made using the SkyView app, another kind of augmented reality (tricky!) Thanks Meredith, great presentation and wonderful way to end our semester long adventures in Science and Cinema. T_T

Week15: Encounters at the End of the World

{The good ship Endurance, photo from Shackleton's Antarctica  expedition 1914-1916}

1. Listening to the seals through the ice: clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World 

2. artist Aleksandra Mir travelled with artist Pierre Huyghe to Antarctica and spent 7 weeks on a ship where she made daily drawings, sketchbook here

LIBRARY lll: maps!

Collaborative map projection

After watching Jacqueline Goss's flash animation THERE THERE SQUARE we each drew a map of the United States on individual transparencies and laid them on top of each other on the overhead projector, see?

WEEK 12: The Library II: The Cosmos

(a map of every space probe sent out into the void)

Today was our second trip to the fantastic Special Collections Library, and the subject was Visualizing the Cosmos, Physics and other Equations. First Librarian Greg read a poem to us aloud from this lovely book:

Ashley presiding over the artist books table, note the Fresnel's Tower telescoping cylinder book!

 Do you know what a palm leaf book is?

Guy reading a Samuel Delaney graphic sci-fi novel

Librarian Barb was inspired to whip out her iPhone and show us her new app called SkyView, which I promptly downloaded, here's an image I made with it :

WEEK 11: MAPS, and guest artist Judit Hersko visits!

Today, in preparation for Judit Hersko's visit , we starting thinking about maps. Like The Peters Projection map, and Lewis Carroll's Ocean Chart from The Hunting of the Snark. 

We also had some readings from  You Are Here: Personal Geographies and other maps of the imagination

Then we performed our own maps for each other on the overhead projector:

Chris, Route to Breckinridge

 David, Crestone

Nate, Map of a Dream I Remember

Connor, The Map to Balto

Josh, Map to Nowhere

Colton, Trip to the Moon

 Michelle, Walk to Work

Katie, Path to Lighthouse

Charlie, Bike Path

WEEK TEN: Visualizing Time and Space

We started this week with the classic POWERS OF TEN film by Charles and Ray Eames (above) (though in actuality we watched a 16mm print of their earlier A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film of Powers ofTen, 1968) Check out the Eames office website too with a nice Powers of Ten interactive sliding scale toy.

Then it was back to the master of science as fiction, Jean Painleve, as he explored time and space in 1936--"Painlevé could blow minds—as in his jaw-dropping “The Fourth Dimension,” which explains dimensional space via juxtapositions and manipulations that Luis Buñuel would envy." said Noel Murray at The AV Club. I would like us to remember that this film ends with a question mark.

Last we explored some of the recent work of filmmaker, artist, and scientist of sorts Reynolds Reynolds,  who --did I mention?--studied both science and film here at CU BOULDER!!! His recent work is called Six Easy Pieces (2010)  and is the last part of a trilogy exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life--this film in particular is based on the book "Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its most brilliant teacher Richard Feynman". You can check it out and his other works on VIMEO.


oh, and last but not least, teh mesmerizing animation by Kelly Sears "THE DRIFT" (2007) opened us up to the possibility of  mixing fact and ficiton, watch it HERE

WEEK 9: Black Holes as told by Andrew Hamilton

This week we had a very distinguished visitor to our class, CU Professor in the Dept of Astrophysics and developer of the Black Hole Flight Simulator, the inimitable and exciting Andrew Hamilton. His website is full of research and examples of his particular type of science visualizations, or SCI VIS, made to think about black holes in space.  He has contributed science visualizations to NOVA programs, to travelling Planetarium shows originally developed at the Denver Science Museum, and in fact it's hard to  do any research on black hole visuals without bumping into him--he is surely the dark star of our Astrophysics dept! Check out this article on him "Strange Physics" at DISCOVER magazine.

WEEK 8: SPACE (1) SemiConductor, Janna Levin, &The Galilean Satellites

This week's first steps into the macro universe included two videos by the UK artist duo Semiconductor--we watched their videos Brilliant Noise (2006) made from raw data images of the Sun, and Magnetic Movie (2007), both of which uses very interesting soundscapes to explore the reality of background radiation in the universe by utilizing very low frequency  field recordings or 'natural radio' . Find out more aobut this by checking out VLF guru Steve MacGreevey.
The we watched another TED talk, this one by physicist  Janna Levin, who also writes novels.  Here's a Seed Salon video version of a conversation about Truth & Beauty between Levin and author Jonathan Lethem that is a companion to the handout we read from Science is Culture.
Lastly we looked at some incredible 16mm films by Courtney Hoskins, a graduate of CU Boulder's Film Dept who keeps a blog called An Astronomer in Hollywood. She made a suiteof films in response to the Jupiter mission's data on the moons, called The Galilean Satellites.
Now we might just be ready for Professor Andrew Hamilton's visit.

Researchers Turn iPhone Camera into Cheap Microscope with $40 Lens

Researchers Turn iPhone Camera into Cheap Microscope with $40 Lens

WEEK 7: Professor Jean Hertzberg, + our liquid image experiments

A huge and heartfelt thanks to Professor Hertzberg for taking the time to visit with us and present so many beautiful and interesting images  from her unique course on Flow Visualization.  Art & Science together at last, take one!

In preparation for her visit we tried making some of our own images with fluids, just to get our feet wet ;)

 THE VIDEOS: 

1. Ashley tries for glowing bubbles

and

2. Charley has fun surface tension

THE IMAGES:

3. Colton says

4. David says

5. Connor says

6. Katie says

7. Josh says

8. Michelle says

9. Spence says

WEEK 6: Alfred P Sloan, and Fluid Images

Today's screening was Alex Rivera's 2008 narrative sci-fi film en espanol The Sleep Dealers which was one of the films awarded The Alfred P Sloan Film Prize at Sundance --the Sloan Prize is given to a  film that furthers the public imagination about science every year by a panel of scientists and science -friendly artists.  This year's prize went to Another Earth by Mike Cahill and Brit Mar.

Oh--here is the article we were discussing in class today from Scientific American about the recent MRI experiments that have been publicized as a breakthrough in dream-imaging. Hmmm...

So Professor Jean Hertzberg is coming to visit next week to demonstrate her own research and visualization software on blood flow in the human body. She is also an interdisciplinary educator in the  worlds of science and art as you can see here by her detailed website for her amazing course in  Flow Visualization. You know you want to sign up for that next semester!

ps. Make sure to check out the galleries of student work, for inspiration.
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Week 5: Painleve, Thornton and Jeremijenko

this week's meditations on art & science practices = the artists Jean Painleve, Leslie Thornton, and Natalie Jeremijenko

Read this article on Painleve called Fluid Mechanics , by Ralph Rugoff from Science is Fiction

see Leslie Thornton's work on Ubuweb

and Natalie Jeremijenko on TED.com

and please share your thoughts!