The Theory of Nevolution

The Tree of Life

Having just watched Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, I immediately needed to see this animation again. Not only does it outline in gorgeous CGI detail the growing complexity and history of life on this planet, but it's narrated by Mr Attenborough. In case you miss the connection, Darwin explored the idea of the tree in (typically) great length:

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

If you head on down to the Wellcome Tree of Life page, you'll find a rather nifty flash app that lets you play around with a simplified tree of life. It's rather unwieldy to move around, but a fun tool nonetheless. I've spent quite some time playing around and comparing where different species branch off from each other; like this comparison between the sponge and the snake. 

What would be a real killer app would be every possible species mapped in a huge sprawling four dimensional network map with the same clarity and awesome model renderings seen in the video. And throw in some four foot multi-touch displays while you're at it. Meanwhile, I highly recommend checking out the doco, it's one of the best.

COP15 from NR2154

With Copenhagen starting today I thought it worthy to highlight the brilliant conference logo by studio NR2154. After focusing on words like collaboration, climate, solidarity and simplicity they then moved on to words like dynamic, serious and complexity. What they then came up with is nothing short of beautiful. 

Referencing scientific data, there are 192 lines, one for each member state. But it goes further, looking at the fragility of the planet's densely interweaving ecological systems and the networks that help them work. It could also be a social network as well, highlighting the need for co-operation at this conference. I shudder to think of the problems the printers have come up against in reproducing it. And that's what else makes it special. As a series of fine lines, it highlights the fragility that it all rests on. I think it's the first logo I've seen to use complexity as a visual expression, yet is simple in it's execution. 

The use of line is continued in a series of commemorative stamps. While it doesn't continue with the visual complexity, it does continue with the same lightness. The stamps, low energy buildings and bio-energy, make use of the open lines to nice effect

 

Explaining the unseen

Leading off from the previous post Intelligence, Redesigned looking at intelligent scientific visualisation is this beautiful slideshow over at Design Observer on the life and work of designer Wil Burtin. I'd never heard of him or his work before, but the piece neatly sums up everything I needed to know about him and more. The more intriguing angle of either his work or the post is the role synthesis played in his work. 

Burtin referred to himself as an "integrator," a term he used to describe his own position as both a visual researcher and an interpreter of science... He clearly wavered between regarding himself as an artistic "creator" whose work was informed by the precepts and forms of visual Modernism, and depicting his practice as a sort of science of visual interpretation, where the work was informed by a discipline of engaged research.

Although he had a long history in publication and editorial design, it's his exhibition design that I find most interesting, and where his thought and working process become visible. As science was just beginning to understand hidden elements of the human body, Burtin helped to explain these ideas to the public, and to the scientists themselves.

His first exhibition, Integration: the New Discipline in Design begun his career working in four dimensions. It's from this that he solidified his thoughts and principles on visual communication. The Reality of Science, the fourth principle, is most interesting as a means of working:

The extra-sensory reality of science provides man with new dimensions. It allows him to see the inner workings of nature, makes transparent the solid and gives substance to the invisible... The designer stands between these concepts, at the center, because of his unique role as a communicator, link, interpreter and inspirer. To enlarge and define this vocabulary of visual language, and thereby contribute toward integration of our culture, is his social responsibility as a man, his job as a designer.

 

I really must speak to the maid

I've been working on a secret little Star Trek letterpress project for a few months, and this is a little hint of what's to come. You, yes you, the one in the corner. Stop sniggling. This comes from the series finale, and was by far the best episode of the series. Hell, one of the best episodes of tv ever. That is, if time and anti-time converging in a temporal anomaly is your type of thing. But skip forward to the one minute mark if you want to get to the juicy bits.

Intelligence, Redesigned

The latest issue of Wired has a fantastic feature, Intelligence Redesigned, updating 50s science textbook illustrations using current scientific knowledge and design techniques. Taking this as an example of Wired's dedication to hybrid formats of journalism, storytelling and design is the way this story has been parsed. 

I came across this story in the print version and instantly knew I had to reflect on the article here but waited on buying the issue until the price dropped from international overnight rates to the more sensible local price. Meanwhile, I looked online to see if the article had been posted. The online version has been translated from print to web in quite a nice way, allowing you to zoom in on the imagery. All while keeping the original look and feel of the article. Meanwhile, there's an interview with the author of these books Roy Gallant; although sadly not the illustrators - the real heroes of the story. To make matters even more interesting the Storyboard podcast has a discussion with the author of this piece, looking at the idea behind the article and some of the problems they came up against in translating the illustrations. For some reason they also provided print ready pdfs of the spreads causing me to spend way too much time playing around with them for this post. I won't discuss the changes they made in too much detail as the writers of the article, Carl DeTorres and Timothy Lesle have said it better than I could.

 

I've been a sucker for vintage science illustrations for a year or so, quietly collecting my own collection and documenting them to put up here. I suppose this will be the impetus I need to put some of them up here. In the process of collecting I've been thinking how they could be updated for today and these succeed on so many levels. As a technical exercise, they're fantastic, and achieve updating not only the complexity of what we now know, but in how we know and perceive it. Something painterly explanations could never hope to match, despite their warmth. 

What I find wonderful and charming about all of the original illustrations is their attempts to map and visualise the new and the unknown. Even the redesigned images illustrate not just the original information but explain new understandings of these systems, especially so with the earthquake visualisation. On a side note - is it just me or does anyone else find it unsettling that we live on a planet that is filled with boiling hot magma surrounded by a thin shell? Anyway. In the podcast they discuss the difficulties they had in exploring and visualising the idea that the earth is a three dimensional sphere existing in time, something omitted from the original. This is also shown in the representation of the atmosphere with the simple addition of the third dimension. At first I felt it an unnecessary addition. But considering no one had seen a photograph of the whole earth at that point, it is a very important addition.

Meanwhile, today's scientific illustrators have the far trickier task of visualising not just hidden information but also ever increasing information and complexity. The twentieth century was fascinated with the atom and the stars which by today's standards are quite easy to understand - in most part thanks to illustrators like these - but also because of the reductionist method of 20th century (and earlier) thinking. But in moving beyond this reductionism, and by extension Modernism (I'm just going to go right ahead and skip past Post Modernism for everyone's sake), we're also moving away from the search for the unchanging and the absolute. Instead of looking at singular elements we're looking at them in the context of whole systems, processes and networks. I've been thinking about an inverted equivalent to these spreads pretty much since I started collecting, sketching them whenever the glimmer of an idea comes to me. Trying to articulate the needs of today's science using old techniques and visual styles. It's turning out to be much harder than I thought. But it's looking at science from this perspective is where the new and unknown is to be found. And the most exciting, for both science and design.

Colophon: It would be quite irresponsible for me to not mention the illustrators of all the works considering my affection for the unsung illustrators of yesteryear 

Exploring the Weather: Lowell Hess
Updated illustration: Bryan Christie

Exploring under the Earth: John Polgreen
Updated illustration: Jason Lee

Exploring Mars: Lowell Hess
Updated map: NASA

On Process and Decay

I like psychedelia as much as the next guy, but usually it's steeped in neo-hippie mythology with a high emphasis on symmetrical fractals. It's all very nice and charming, and gee whizz aren't you proud of using photoshop filters, and yes, the Mayans were a charming bunch and no I don't like dolphins as much as you. In fact, I hate them.  

But this process called Datamoshing is so many levels of 21st century cool that seems way ahead of its time (that, or time is moving faster). I thought I could be clever and embed the two music videos in here, but seems like the copyright layers have prevented youtube from allowing that to happen. You'll just have to leave this page (gasp) and go watch them over at you tube. The first one, Evident Utensil by Chairlift is a somewhat sweet/somewhat grating neo-folk song that cuts in and out using glitchy compression artefacts to transition to the next cut. As soon as you figure out what's going on, you've lost it. Welcome to Heartbreak by Kanye kicks it up quite a few notches with the spit, polish and awesomeness that one expects from the man. While the Evident Utensil skilfully references 60s psychedelia with music, motion and imagery, Kanye bleeds, drips and flows from one element to the next and never stops flowing. 

It took the advent of the CD for people to fall in love with the hiss and clicks of vinyl. So I'm surprised that it took only a few years for video compression to be turned into an art form and an aesthetic. These two videos came out at roughly the same time, so there's no point in arguing over who came first. 

The irony here, is that they work best at high definition. Which takes away from the self referential charm of watching it on youtube. The interesting part here isn't on the visuals, but on highlighting the nature of decay and compression. The process is generative, but only to arrive at it's final form. I can't imagine the man hours spent in making sure each transition was just so, allowing each scene to hold and shift into the next one. Other examples I've found online don't have the same flow as these two.But it's to be expected when the big labels step in and need some form of polish. 

Ima let you finish, but David O'Reilly had the first video to use compression artefacts. But it's by no means the best. But he does make the good point (apart from having a bit of a whinge) in comparing the idea of Compression Artefacts of software in the same way that Bacon didn't hide brush strokes. It doesn't saturate the video with dripping transitions, but uses it sparingly and at the appropriate time. In saying that aesthetics should always serve the content he misses the point of transferring the glitchy techno fetishistic aspects of the technique and letting it be embraced by the two videos above. Sure, Kanye is master of the game and is quite able to hunt cool and novelty better than most, but the neo-folk music of Chairlift make a fitting tribute to psychedelia. So, if you're in the mood for some Venetian Snares play through; the compression occurs at about the 1.30 mark.

Passage

Having just played Passage for the first time, I can safely say that it's a beautiful piece of software; I'm hesitant to call it a game. It plays as a memento mori (latin for remember you will die), in which you navigate across a simple scrolling level. When you start, your whole life is in front of you, albeit mostly blurry. By the end of the game, which takes five minutes, you reach the end of the screen, and your whole life is behind you, blurry once again with nothing except memories of your passage. 

Early on in the game, you find a wife and a pixelated heart indicated that I was married. Cute. I slowly began to realise that I was ageing, noticing my baldness and how slow I moved. Not long after, my wife died. I was aware of the game before, and that this would happen. I wasn't expecting to feel sorrow at her death though. Not long after, I died. And that was it. It's also harder to move around with your wife, but finding treasures with her gives you more bonus points. But all those bonus points don't seem that important when you know, that in the blurry distance, death awaits. A truly beautiful poetic piece of software that drips in simple profundity.

More Synesthesia

Doesn't have the same surreal twang as the last video. I rather enjoyed listening to the interviewees discuss how they use it to their advantage. Oh, and watching the scientist draw on a whiteboard over a projection of the brain was pretty neat too. To watch the full unremixed video, point here.

Synesthesia

Who doesn't want Synasthesia? Everyone knows that synasthetetes have the most fun. Even more than blondes. Then you watch this brilliant video and it doesn't seem to be so much fun anymore.

Via Burnlab

Where's my damn jetpack?

Win. So very much a win. Hell, I'll even hashtag that baby. #win. I must read this book. Even the front cover is a total and bona-fide win.

Nostalgia for a future that never happened

A nicely paced video that looks at an amusing illustrator, Bruce Mccall. The use of gouache heightens his ability to convey his ideas; that of looking back at how we looked forward. The first I watched this video I paid it little attention, and fast forwarded through most of it with the sound off, assuming that it was the work of a serious artist. Only on re-watching it did I realise the humour evident here and the tongue in cheek nature of his work. A rather lovely fusion of form and content. Going through six categories of work, the first three are of particular interest here. 

Retro-Futurism: Looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.

Techno-Archaeology: Past miracles that never happened.

Faux-Nostalgia: Sentimental yearning for times that never happened. 

It's quite charming that he's able to encapsulate all the issues I'm trying to raise with his brush. Made even better by his painfully dry wit.

My point exactly

Seriously. My thoughts exactly. There are so many more things we were promised by now. What do we have? Nothing. The internet doesn't count, we were never promised the internet. Black swans don't count. We have Personal Communication Devices, but booooooring. If I don't get to meet aliens before my time is up I am going to be one seriously disappointed and pissed off dude. Where's my moon base? Flying car? Intergalactic travel? And don't start about the New Zealand dude who made his own jetpack. It's not really portable or useable, so it doesn't count either. This t-shirt is sold out, but you might be able to find them around town. In case you can''t read it: Where is my robotic companion, dinner in pill form, hydrogen fuelled automobile, nuclear-powered levitating house, cure for this disease. And yes, I'm still waiting for my jetpack.

The Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good

Turns out that ants aren't the industrious little model workers we all thought they were. NYTimes has an intriguing article discussing the work habits of ants; and an equally interesting photo gallery. Images are by Alex Wild, you should take the time to look at his amazing work. Dr Dornhaus, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona studied 300 hours of research after painting each ant with their own specific colour code. By tracking each ant she discovered most ants will spend most of the time standing around and doing nothing. Or worse, pulling a George Costanza and scurry around pretending to work. Meanwhile, the rest of the ants pull up the slack. Not even with the division of labour helps things much either. Even specialised ants who should be good at their job don't seem to be any better than the other ants when doing their task. And the other ants don't seem to notice either. 

Playing reality

Leading on from This is a mental public health issue from a week back I was happy to find Boing Boing/Offworld interviewing Jane McGonigal during the Games Developers Conference. Intriguingly, Jane is taking what she's learnt from organising ARGs and broadening the scope of games and the effects they can have. The first video (the interview is split into two parts) discusses her newest game Top Secret Dance Off, which taps into the positive emotions we get from dancing with people and harnesses it into a quirky social game. The way the game/site has been structured is designed to make people happy - the blip of happiness you get from humiliation - and seems to set the stage as an extension of the issues that I brought up/continued with regarding Jonathan Blow's critiques of the games industry and the psychology behind games. Although they work in different spaces it's great to see this sort of needed exploration of games and their powers.

I've spent the morning listening/watching all I could find on her and one of the cooler things she's arguing for is an inversion of games and reality. While games have been trying to emulate reality - better graphics, more immersion etc - she thinks it's high time that reality should be more game like. Clear cut objectives, feedback, elements of play; these are all missing from day to day life. She makes a fair point for her case; click through the presentation if you've got the time and the inclination. 

She also works at the Institute for the Future where she's been doing a lot of really interesting stuff using games to harness collaborative action. Almost too interesting.

Goat Milk

Fucking brilliant. So very very happy they went with goat's milk. Nothing says New & Trendy like a harmless goat staring at you from the bottle.