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2 ART MEETS SCIENCE
About a half hour’s drive northeast of downtown Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research
Center, Sam Droege holds court in a lab filled with hundreds of insect specimens neatly pinned in styrofoam-lined boxes. On
any given day, the biologist shares the space with interns under his tutelage and the meticulously classified and catologued
insects.
Some of the insects—wasps, bees, crickets and beetles—Droege collected himself, either near his home in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, or
on the grounds of his lab in Beltsville. Others are sent to him by scientists at the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and
the National Park Service, as well as by researchers and students from other institutions.
Droege is tasked with photographing the different species, and his images appear in guides, identification manuals, posters and power
point presentations used by the USGS. The publications, Droege explains in an email, “illustrate everything from the general look and
feel of a species to the intricate details of their legs, mandibles and integument.”
Biologist Sam Droege’s sharply-focused photographs of bees, used for identifying different species, make for fine art
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Bee-utiful!The Stinging Insect Gets a Close-Up
ART MEETS SCIENCE 3
To ensure that his subjects don’t have mangled wings or matted
fur (“There is nothing worse than a bee with bad hair!” he says),
Droege takes bees stored in water, alcohol or glycol, puts them
in a canning jar with a screen top, washes them in warm water
with splash of dish soap and rinses off the suds. He then dries the
specimens with a hair dryer. No need to be gentle, he explains in
instructional videos on YouTube. The bees are hardy.
His close-ups of bees magnify the specimens anywhere from
one to five times their true size. At this rate, a viewer is privy to
all details one would see under a microscope. “An illustration of
the magnification?” says Droege. “Our biggest problem is tiny
specs of dust that show up on all these specimens that have to
be photoshopped out, but normally would never be seen.” The
photographer can print the images large-scale, about 5-by-8 feet,
without them pixelating.
Droege has a queue of about 500 pictures vying for his attention.
He will edit them in photoshop and eventually post them to his
Flickr site, a virtual museum of sorts for both science and arts
enthusiasts. The biologist certainly has a flair for the artistic.
He chooses to display the bees on stark black backgrounds, as
opposed to white or gray, to avoid the distraction of brightness.
“The insects themselves come with palettes of color that are
naturally balanced, harmonious and draw you in,” says Droege.
“The level of detail of the pictures and the offset flash lighting
pops the small surface features, making visible what normally
gets lost in lower resolution shots, and provides the depth and
contrasts of sculptures and oil paints.”
I can’t resist saying it: The photographs are bee-utiful!
As I write this, Droege has 1,236 photos uploaded to his Flickr
photostream, a number that grows by the day, and about 75
percent of those images are of bees.
Droege leads the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. In this
role, he has been documenting many of the 4,000 species of bees
in North America, so that he and his colleagues can first accurately
identify individual bees and then track fluctuations in different
species’ populations. As many media outlets have reported,
bee populations have collapsed for any number of supposed
reasons—climate change, parasites, disease or our pesticide use in
agriculture.
To properly identify different species based, “We needed some
good pictures,” he recently told NPR. “We really high-definition
pictures that people can drill into and say, ‘You know the pattern
of the crosshatching between the pits on the skin of the upper part
of the bee is really different than this one.’”
Droege riffs off a technique pioneered by the Army’s public health
lab. The Army took detailed photographs of insects capable of
carrying human diseases and other pests on remote military
bases and sent them to entomologists around the world for
confirmation, he explains. With a $8,000 getup, including a
camera, a 60 mm macro lens, a flash, a StackShot rail to ensure
highly detailed images and special software, Droege takes multiple
shots at different distances from a bee and then stitches the
images together to create one sharply-focused portrait.
4 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Artist Lisa Nilsson creates elaborate anatomical illustrations from thin strips of paper
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Slice of LifeArtistic Cross Sections of the Human Body
Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing
trip three or four years ago when
a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The
cross was crafted using a Renaissance-
era technique called quilling, where thin
paper is rolled to form different shapes and
patterns.
“I thought it was really beautiful, so I made
a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says
Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams,
Massachusetts. She incorporated these first
forays in quilling into her mixed media
assemblages.
Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was
teaching herself to mold and shape the
strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend
sent her a century-old, hand-colored
photograph of a cross section of a human
torso from a French medical book. “I have
always been interested in scientific and
biological imagery,” says the artist. “This
image was really inspiring.”
In the cross section, Nilsson saw many
of the shapes that she had already
been coiling and building. The quilling
technique, she thought, with its “squeezing
shapes into a cavity,” certainly lent itself
to her subject matter. She could make tiny
tubes and squish them together to fill the
many different spaces in the body—lungs,
vertebrae, pelvic bones and muscles.
Her first anatomical paper sculpture,
Female Torso (shown at top), is a near-
direct translation of the French medical
image.
Nilsson went on to create an entire Tissue
Series, which offers artistic slices, literally,
of male and female bodies: a cross section
of a head at eye level, another of a chest
just above a man’s arm pits and one of an
abdomen at navel height, to name a few.
Nilsson began exhibiting her paper
sculptures at galleries and museums.
“The two words that I heard most often to
describe the work were ‘beautiful,’ which
is always nice to hear, and…’creepy,’ ”
she said in a talk at TEDMED, an annual
conference focusing on health and
medicine. The artist admits that she never
found the project disturbing. “I was so
enthralled with the aesthetic possibilities
I saw in cross sections, I had kind of
overlooked the idea that viewing the body
in this sort of ‘slice of deli meat’ fashion
ART MEETS SCIENCE 5
could be a bit unsettling to people,” she said.
Viewers come in close, at first, she says. “They would see the
piece as an intriguing handmade object and put their noses up to
the glass and enjoy the subtle surprise that it is made of paper,”
she says, in the TEDMED lecture. Up close, a portion of the lacy,
intricate sculpture appears abstract. “Then, people would typically
back away, and they would be curious about what region of the
body they were looking at….They would usually start to identify
familiar anatomical landmarks.” The heart, perhaps, or the
ribcage.
When making a paper sculpture, Nilsson starts with medical
images, often culled from the Visible Human Project, a National
Library of Medicine initiative that collected anatomical images
from one male and one female cadaver. She usually consults
illustrations of specific parts of the body in medical textbooks as
well, to better understand what it is she is seeing in the Visible
Human cross sections. “My background is in illustration”—she has
a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design—”so I am used
to combining sources and just being resourceful in getting all of
the visual information I need to say what I want to say,” she says.
Nilsson creates a composite image from these sources and adheres
it to a base of styrofoam insulation. The two-dimensional image
serves as a guide for her three-dimensional paper sculpture; she
quills in between the lines, much like one colors in a coloring
book.
“I often start in the center and work out,” says Nilsson. She builds
a small quilling unit, pins it to the styrofoam base and then glues
it to its neighbor. “It is almost like putting a puzzle together,
where each new piece is connected to its predecessor,” she
adds. Working in this “tweezery” technique, as the artist calls it,
requires some serious patience. A sculpture can take anywhere
from two weeks to two months to complete. But, Nilsson says, “It
is so addictive. It is really neat to see it grow and fill in.”
There is a basic vocabulary of shapes in quilling. “I have really
tried to push that,” says Nilsson. “One of the things I don’t
like about a lot of quilling that I see is that the mark is too
repetitious. It is curlicue, curlicue, curlicue. I really try to mix
that up.” Follow the individual strands of paper in one of her
sculptures and you will see tubes, spirals, crinkled fans and
teardrops.
When the sculpture is finished, and all the pins have migrated to
the periphery, Nilsson paints the back with a bookbinder’s glue
to reinforce it. She displays her cross sections in velvet-lined
shadow boxes. “I really like them to read as objects rather than
images. I like the trompe-l’oeil effect, that you think you might
be actually looking at a 1/4-inch slice of a body,” says Nilsson.
“The box, to me, suggests object and frame would suggest an
image. The decorative boxes also say that this is a precious
object.”
Many medical professionals have taken an interest in Nilsson’s
work. “It feels like an homage, I think, to them, rather than that
I am trivializing something that they do that is so much more
important,” she says, with a humble laugh. Doctors have sent
her images, and anatomists have invited her to their labs. She
even has a new pen pal—a dissector for Gunther von Hagens’
Body Worlds, a touring (and somewhat startling!) exhibition of
preserved human bodies.
The connections Nilsson has made in the medical community
have proven to be quite helpful. “Where does this particular
anatomical structure end and where does the next one begin?
Sometimes it is not all that clear-cut,” says the artist. As she
works, questions inevitably arise, and she seeks out anatomists
for answers. “Sometimes I want to know what is a general
anatomical structure and what is an idiosyncrasy of the
particular individual I am looking at. Rib cages. How much
variance in shape is there? Am I overemphasizing this ? I am
always wondering, am I seeing this accurately? Am I reading this
right?”
Ultimately, Nilsson hopes that her works familiarize people with
the internal landscape of the human body—the “basic lay of the
land,” she says. “Everything is tidily squished in there in this
package that is graphically beautiful and also highly functional,”
she adds. “To me, the shapes are endlessly interesting. There is
just the right amount of symmetry and asymmetry.”
The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Pathogens
Few non-scientists would be able
to distinguish the E. coli bacteria
from HIV under a microscope.
Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe
in intricate detail the shapes of a slew
of deadly pathogens. He is intrigued by
them, as a subject matter, because of
their inherent irony. That is, something
as virulent as SARS can actually, in its
physical form, be quite delicate.
Clearly adept at scientific work—as an
undergraduate, the Brit was offered
a spot on a university engineering
program—Jerram chose to pursue art
instead. “Scientists and artists start by
asking similar questions about the natural
world,” he told SEED magazine in a
2009 interview. “They just end up with
completely different answers.”
To create a body of work he calls “Glass
Microbiology,” Jerram has enlisted the
help of virologist Andrew Davidson from
the University of Bristol and the expertise
of professional glassblowers Kim George,
Brian George and Norman Veitch.
Together, the cross-disciplinary team
brings hazardous pathogens, such as the
H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent
glass forms.
The artist insists that his sculptures
be colorless, in contrast to the images
scientists sometimes disseminate that
are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses
have no color as they are smaller than
the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in
an email. “So the artworks are created as
alternative representations of viruses to
the artificially colored imagery we receive
through the media.” Jerram and Davidson
create sketches, which they then take to the
glassblowers, to see whether the intricate
structures of the diseases can be replicated
in glass, at approximately one million
times their original size.
These glass sculptures
require extreme
attention to detail. “I
consult virologists at
the University of Bristol
about the details of
each artwork,” says
Jerram. “Often I’m
asking a question about
how a particular part
of the virion looks,
and they don’t know
6 ART MEETS SCIENCE
British artist Luke Jerram’s handblown glass sculptures show the visual complexity and delicacy of E. coli, swine flu, malaria and other killing agents
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the answer. We have to piece together
our understanding by comparing grainy
electron microscope images with abstract
chemical models and existing diagrams.”
Yet, to physically create these structures in
glass, the design may have to be tweaked.
Some viruses, in their true form, would
simply be too delicate and wouldn’t hold
up. Jerram’s representation of the H1N1
(or Swine Flu) virus, for instance, looks far
spikier than it might in reality. This was
done, not to add to the ferocity of the virus’
image, but to prevent the artwork from
crumbling or breaking.
Jerram has to decide what to do when
new research suggests different forms
for the structures of viruses. “Over time,
scientific understanding of the virus
improves and so I have to amend my
models accordingly,” explains the artist.
For example, “I’m currently in dialogue
with a scientist at the University of Florida
ART MEETS SCIENCE 7
about the structure of the smallpox virus.
He has published papers that show a very
different understanding of the internal
structure. I now need to consider whether
to create a new model or wait until his
model has become more widely accepted
by the scientific community.”
Jerram’s art is often used in scientific
journals as an alternative to colorful
simulations, so being as up-to-date as
possible is definitely in his best interest.
Jerram’s marvelous glass sculptures bring
awareness to some of the worst killers of
our age. “The pieces are made for people
to contemplate the global impact of each
disease,” he says. “I’m interested in sharing
the tension that has arisen between the
artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”
8 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Oftentimes, when parents first see Jason Freeny’s
sculptures that reveal the inner anatomy of cherished
childhood toys, they get a little worried that their
children will be disturbed. Most kids, though, have a rather
different reaction.
“Kids aren’t scared by them. They’re fascinated,” says Freeny, the
New York-based artist who’s hand-sculpted hundreds of these
inner anatomies, built into commercially-available toys, over the
last seven years. “I believe that being frightened by inner anatomy
is a learned thing. It’s something that’s taught to kids by society,
rather than something that’s innate.”
Freeny himself responds to supposedly morbid anatomical
features—like, say, a Lego’s intestines, or Mario’s lungs—the same
way kids generally do. “I love anatomy,” he says. “As an artist, I’ve
always been a big fan of drawing organic shapes, because of their
complex detail.”
Freeny, who now creates the sculptures and other art full-time,
documenting their creation on his Facebook page, began working
on the project in 2007 on the side, while he still worked his day
job as a designer at a tech startup. It began when, while digitally
illustrating a balloon animal, he decided to try his hand at drawing
its inner anatomy. “I started by drawing its skeleton system, and
I was just fascinated by the completely grotesque skeletal system
that its shape was dictating to me,” he says.
After illustrating the innards of several other characters (including
a gummy bear), his startup closed, and he was laid off. Eventually,
he moved from his 600-square-foot Manhattan apartment to
Long Island—where he had enough space in the garage to do
some sculpting—and embarked on his first 3D anatomy project. “I
started cutting into a little Dunny toy, and decided to give it a clay
skeleton anatomy,” Freeny says. “That’s when it all really took off.”
In the years since, Freeny has anatomically-supplemented dozens
of different characters from video games, movies and even brand
See the Inner Anatomy of Barbie, Mario and Mickey Mouse—Bones, Guts and AllArtist Jason Freeny transforms familiar childhood characters into realistic anatomical models
B y J o s e p h S t r o m b e r g
ART MEETS SCIENCE 9
advertisements. For each sculpture, he begins by buying a high-
quality toy (“If it’s a crappy toy to begin with, the sculpture is
going to end up looking crappy too,” he says), then cuts away a
portion of it. Using clay, he sculpts the character’s bones and a few
internal organs, then paints them what he imagines to be realistic
colors. Working on several pieces at a time, he completes about
four or five per month, and sells the hand-built sculptures on his
website along with his other artworks.
Hypothesizing the proportion of each character’s innards is the
trickiest part. “It’s like a reverse forensics project,” Freeny says.
“The exterior shape dictates what the skeleton looks like.”
He generally uses scientific illustrations to make the sculptures as
accurate as possible. However, because the characters themselves
are fictional, that’s sometimes impossible. “Mickey Mouse, for
example, is a mouse, but he walks upright, like a person,” he
says. “So his body, like many characters, ends up being more of a
version of a human skeleton, distorted to fit inside the character.
It’s a balancing act.”
One of Freeny’s current projects—Sid, the sloth from Ice Age—has
proven to be particularly difficult. “His body’s just very extreme,
and cartoony,” he says. “At first, I was approaching him as a
human, and it just wasn’t working, so I used some sloth anatomy
proportions. Almost the entire length of their bodies are ribcage,
which solved a lot of anatomical problems for me.”
Initially, Freeny was unsure what reactions his unconventional
work would garner, but they’ve been overwhelmingly positive.
In some cases, he’s even gotten praise from the creators and
manufacturers of the characters (although he’s also had a couple
of corporate legal teams tell him to stop making the sculptures,
alleging intellectual property infringement).
Although he recognizes the value of his sculptures as tools for
scientific education—and has seen his own kids learn from the
dozens of pieces lying around his workshop—his original intention
was never to teach anyone anatomy. “I just love exploring these
characters, and seeing what they look like inside,” Freeny says.
“I want to see the grotesque, weird anatomies that these toys
dictate.”
10 ART MEETS SCIENCE
In his book, Serpentine, Mark Laita captures the colors, textures and sinuous forms of a variety of snake species
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Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his book, Serpentine. But,
it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los
Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles.
“It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he
did, though herpetologists and snake enthusiasts will surely perk up when they see the photographs. “Really, it is more about color,
Snakes in a FrameMark Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts
ART MEETS SCIENCE 11
form and texture,” he says. “For me, a
snake does that beautifully.”
Over the course of the project, Laita
visited zoos, breeders, private collections
and antivenom labs in the United States
and Central America to stage shoots of
specimens he found visually compelling. “I
would go to a place looking for this species
and that species,” he says. “And, once I got
there, they had 15 or 20 others that were
great too.” If a particular snake’s colors
were muted, Laita would ask the owner
to call him as soon as the animal shed its
skin. “Right after they shed they would be
really beautiful. The colors would be more
intense,” he says.
At each site, Laita laid a black velvet
backdrop on the floor. Handlers would
then guide each snake, mostly as a
protective measure, and keep it on the
velvet, while the photographer snapped
away with an 8 by 10 view camera and
a Hasselblad. “By putting it on a black
background, it removes all of the variables.
It makes it just about the snake,” says
Laita. “If it is a red snake in the shape of a
figure eight, all you have is this red swipe
of color.”
Without much coaxing, the snakes curved
and coiled into question marks, cursive
letters and gorgeous knots. ”It is as if these
creatures are—to their core—so inherently
beautiful that there is nothing they can do,
no position they can take, that fails to be
anything but mesmerizing,” writes Laita in
the book’s prologue.
For Serpentine, the photographer hand-
selected nearly 100 of his images of
vipers, pythons, rattlesnakes, cobras
and kingsnakes—some harmless, some
venomous, but all completely captivating.
He describes the collection as the “ultimate
‘look, but don’t touch’ scenario.”
In his career, marked with the success of
having his work exhibited in the United
States and Europe, Laita has photographed
flowers, sea creatures and Mexican
wrestlers. “They’re all interesting, whether
it’s in a beautiful, outrageous or unusual
way,” he says, of his diverse subjects.
So, why snakes then? ”Attraction and
repulsion. Passivity and aggression. Allure
and danger. These extreme dichotomies,
along with the age-old symbolism
connected with snakes, are what first
inspired me to produce this series,” writes
Laita in the prologue. “Their beauty
heightens the danger. The danger amplifies
their beauty.”
Laita embarked on the project without
any real phobia of snakes. “I used to catch
them as a kid all of the time. I grew up
in the Midwest where it is pretty hard to
find a snake that is going to do too much
damage to you,” he says. If he comes across
a rattlesnake while hiking in his now
home state of California, his first impulse
is still to try to grab it, though he knows
better. Many of the exotic snakes Laita
photographed for Serpentine are easily
capable of killing a human. “I probably
have a little more fear of snakes now after
dealing with some of the species I dealt
with,” he says.
He had a brush with this fear when
photographing a king cobra, the longest
venomous snake in the world, which
measures up to 18 feet. “It is kind of like
having a lion in the room, or a gorilla,”
says Laita. “It could tear apart the room
in second flats if it wanted to.” Although
Laita photographed the cobra while it
was enclosed in a plexiglass box, during
the shoot it “got away from us,” he says.
It escaped behind some cabinets at the
Florida facility, “and we couldn’t find it for
awhile.”
He’s also had a close encounter with a
deadly black mamba while photographing
one at a facility in Central America. “It
was a very docile snake,” he recalls. “It
just happened to move close to my feet
at some point. The handler brought
his hook in to move the snake, and he
inadvertently snagged the cord from
my camera. That scared the snake, and
then it struck where it was warm. That
happened to be the artery in my calf.”
Smithsonian contributing writer Richard
Conniff shares more gory details on his
blog, Strange Behaviors. Apparently, blood
was just gushing from the bite (“His sock
was soaked and his sneaker was filled
with blood,” writes Conniff), and the
photographer said the swollen fang marks
“hurt like hell that night.”
Obviously, Laita lived to tell the tale. “It
was either a ‘dry bite,’ which is rare, or I
bled so heavily that the blood pushed the
venom out,” he explained in a publicity
interview. “All I know is I was unlucky
to be bitten, lucky to have survived, and
lucky again to have unknowingly snapped a
photo of the actual bite!”
12 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg reconstructs the faces of strangers from genetic evidence she scavenges from the streets
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Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places
It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather
Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at
Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe
keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of
forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through
New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks
onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she
gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of
discarded chewing gum.
Do you get strange looks? I ask, in a
phone conversation. “Sometimes,” says
Dewey-Hagborg. “But New Yorkers are
pretty used to people doing weird stuff.”
Dewey-Hagborg’s odd habit has a larger
purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student,
studying electronic arts at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New
York, extracts DNA from each piece
of evidence she collects, focusing
on specific genomic regions from her
samples. She then sequences these
regions and enters this data into a computer
program, which churns out a model of the
face of the person who left the hair, fingernail,
cigarette or gum behind.
It gets creepier.
From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures
using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called “Stranger
Visions,” she hangs the life-sized portraits, like life masks, on
gallery walls. Oftentimes, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style
wooden box with various compartments holding the original
sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.
Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she
will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her
process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used
condoms. She tells me she has had the most success with cigarette
butts. “They really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette
butt,” she says. “There just tends to be more
stuff there to actually pull the DNA from.”
Dewey-Hagborg takes me step-by-step
through her creative process. Once
she collects a sample, she brings it to
one of two labs—Genspace, a do-it-
yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one
on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. (She splits her time between
Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early
on in the project, the artist took a crash
course in molecular biology at Genspace,
a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn,
where she learned about DNA extraction
and a technique called polymerase chain
reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA
extraction kits that she orders online to
analyze the DNA in her samples.
If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a
little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller
pieces. She puts the tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals,
incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times,
until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that,
Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA,
amplifying specific regions of the genome that she’s targeted. She
sends the amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells’
Photo by Dan Phiffer
ART MEETS SCIENCE 13
nuclei) to a lab to get sequenced, and the
lab returns about 400 base pair sequences
of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine
(G, A, T and C).
Dewey-Hagborg then compares the
sequences returned with those found in
human genome databases. Based on this
comparison, she gathers information about
the person’s ancestry, gender, eye color,
propensity to be overweight and other
traits related to facial morphology, such
as the space between one’s eyes. “I have a
list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I
have either successfully analyzed or I am in
the process of working on right now,” she
says.
Dewey-Hagborg then enters these
parameters into a computer program to
create a 3D model of the person’s face.”
Ancestry gives you most of the generic
picture of what someone is going to tend
to look like. Then, the other traits point
towards modifications on that kind of
generic portrait,” she explains. The artist
ultimately sends a file of the 3D model to
a 3D printer on the campus of her alma
mater, New York University, so that it can
be transformed into sculpture.
There is, of course, no way of knowing how
accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—
since the samples are from anonymous
individuals, a direct comparison cannot
be made. Certainly, there are limitations
to what is known about how genes are
linked to specific facial features. “We are
really just starting to learn about that
information,” says Dewey-Hagborg. The
artist has no way, for instance, to tell the
age of a person based on their DNA. “For
right now, the process creates basically
a 25-year-old version of the person,” she
says.
That said, the “Stranger Visions” project
is a startling reminder of advances in
both technology and genetics. “It came
from this place of noticing that we are
leaving genetic material everywhere,” says
Dewey-Hagborg. “That, combined with
the increasing accessibility to molecular
biology and these techniques means
that this kind of science fiction future is
here now. It is available to us today. The
question really is what are we going to do
with that?”
Hal Brown, of Delaware’s medical
examiner’s office, contacted the artist
recently about a cold case. For the past
20 years, he has had the remains of an
unidentified woman, and he wondered
if the artist might be able to make a
portrait of her—another clue that could
lead investigators to an answer. Dewey-
Hagborg has worked on a sculpture from a
DNA sample Brown provided.
“I have always had a love for detective
stories, but never was part of one before.
It has been an interesting turn for the art
to take,” she says. “It is hard to say just yet
where else it will take me.”
14 ART MEETS SCIENCE
A biologist and a poet team up for a new exhibition at the Seattle Aquarium that features images of bleached and stained fish skeletons
B y H e l e n T h o m p s o n
The skills that make a good biologist are not unlike those
that make a good artist. “A desire to understand detail,
you focus on how things work. These things are qualities
that good poets and good biologists share,” says Adam Summers,
a biologist at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs
and consultant on Finding Nemo.
Summers draws on his talents as a biologist and a
photographer for “Cleared: the Art of Science,”
an exhibition recently at the Seattle
Aquarium. The show depicts fish
specimens, bleached and stained
to reveal the complex skeletal
structures beneath their
scales.
Fish fascinated
Summers, even as
a graduate student.
“Always what interested
me was the interplay of
physics and engineering with
structure and evolution. So, when I saw in
museum collections, these cleared and stained animals. I was
immediately taken with them,” he says.
“Cleared” fish are fish rendered translucent by a combination
treatment: hydrogen peroxide to dissolve dark pigments, a
digestive enzyme called trypsin to dissolve the flesh apart from
collagen in the fish’s skin and skeleton and glycerin to make
skin and connective issue appear invisible. The technique
Summers uses to clear and stain fish has been common practice
of reasearchers for decades and relies on two dies: Alcian blue,
which gives cartilage a blue hue, and Alizarin Red S, a red dye that
acts on bone. Summers made a habit of including an image in the
scientific papers he would submit to different journals; the image,
directly related to the research at hand, was often selected as the
publication’s cover art.
Some of the specimens featured in the exhibition came from
bycatch and others were part of a study examining how fish
skeletons develop. Once a fish specimen enters Summers’ lab,
it might end up in several different studies on fish skeletal
structures, how they work and why they’re important.
Photographs of the wings of a butterfly ray and skate species, for
instance, provided insight into how a wing fin propels the fish
forward, a finding with applications in robotics. More recently,
the lab used a cleared and stained image of a northern clingfish
to figure out how the fish’s belly sucker, which can adhere to any
surface, works.
Summers’ first images were more scientifically oriented than
artistic, so when the opportunity arose to put together an
exhibition for the aquarium, he took new shots of many of the fish,
trying to achieve a more aesthetic affect. “I now sort of understand
that in order to make the animal relate to you, you need to
have some action and motion, some asymmetry, and a sense of
movement is really helpful,” he says.
The idea of standard captions for the images also seemed
underwhelming to Summers. So, he asked Sierra Nelson, a poet
The True Inner Beauty of Fishes
ART MEETS SCIENCE 15
based in Seattle, if she would be interested in writing a poem to go with each fish. Nelson and Summers had worked together on another
art-meets-science endeavor: teaching companion courses on poetry and marine biology in a special program at Friday Harbor Labs. For
the cleared and stained specimens, having a caption as a poem “actually tells a lot about the actual biology of the fish,” he says. “That’s
the way Sierra works in her poetry.”
The experience has been enriching for Summers, who says that he’s learned more about art and how to communicate with the general
public. Because the lab’s research is largely funded by the National Science Foundation, he feels it’s important for taxpayers to see what
they’re paying for. “I hope that people looking at it get some appreciation for the internal beauty of fishes. That there’s more to them
than swimming around in an aquarium,” he says. “There really is this other dimension of their biology that’s worth appreciating.”
16 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher captures tears of grief, joy, laughter and irritation in extreme detail
B y J o s e p h S t r o m b e r g
The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears
In 2010, photographer Rose-Lynn
Fisher published a book of remarkable
images that captured the honeybee in
an entirely new light. By using powerful
scanning electron microscopes, she
magnified a bee’s microscopic structures
by hundreds or even thousands of times in
size, revealing startling, abstract forms that
are far too small to see with the naked eye.
Now, as part of a new project called
“Topography of Tears,” she’s using
microscopes to give us an unexpected view
of another familiar subject: dried human
tears.
“I started the project about five years
ago, during a period of copious tears,
amid lots of change and loss—so I had a
surplus of raw material,” Fisher says. After
the bee project and one in which she’d
looked at a fragment of her own hip bone
removed during surgery, she’d come to the
realization that “everything we see in our
lives is just the tip of the iceberg, visually,”
she explains. “So I had this moment where
I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder what a tear
looks like up close?’”
When she caught one of her own tears
on a slide, dried it, and then peered at it
through a standard light microscope, “It
was really interesting. It looked like an
aerial view, almost as if I was looking down
at a landscape from a plane,” she says.
“Eventually, I started wondering—would a
tear of grief look any different than a tear
of joy? And how would they compare to,
say, an onion tear?”
This idle musing ended up launching
a multi-year photography project in
which Fisher collected, examined and
photographed more than 100 tears
from both herself an a handful of other
volunteers, including a newborn baby.
Scientifically, tears are divided into three
different types, based on their origin. Both
tears of grief and joy are psychic tears,
ART MEETS SCIENCE 17
triggered by extreme emotions, whether
positive or negative. Basal tears are
released continuously in tiny quantities (on
average, 0.75 to 1.1 grams over a 24-hour
period) to keep the cornea lubricated.
Reflex tears are secreted in response to an
irritant, like dust, onion vapors or tear gas.
All tears contain a variety of biological
substances (including oils, antibodies and
enzymes) suspended in salt water, but as
Fisher saw, tears from each of the different
categories include distinct molecules as
well. Emotional tears, for instance, have
been found to contain protein-based
hormones including the neurotransmitter
leucine enkephalin, a natural painkiller
that is released when the body is under
stress.
Additionally, because the structures
seen under the microscope are largely
crystallized salt, the circumstances under
which the tear dries can lead to radically
dissimilar shapes and formations, so two
psychic tears with the exact same chemical
makeup can look very different up close.
“There are so many variables—there’s the
chemistry, the viscosity, the setting, the
evaporation rate and the settings of the
microscope,” Fisher says.
As Fisher pored over the hundreds of
dried tears, she began to see even more
ways in which they resembled large-scale
landscapes, or as she calls them, “aerial
views of emotion terrain.”
“It’s amazing to me how the patterns
of nature seem so similar, regardless of
scale,” she says. “You can look at patterns
of erosion that are etched into earth over
thousands of years, and somehow they look
very similar to the branched crystalline
patterns of a dried tear that took less than
a moment to form.”
Closely studying tears for so long has made
Fisher think of them as far more than a
salty liquid we discharge during difficult
moments. “Tears are the medium of our
most primal language in moments as
unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger
and as complex as a rite of passage,” she
says. “It’s as though each one of our tears
carries a microcosm of the collective
human experience, like one drop of an
ocean.”
18 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Beachgoers despise the stinging animals, but photographer Aaron Ansarov finds surreal beauty in them
B y M e g a n G a m b i n o
The Vibrant Patterns of Portuguese Men-of-War
Aaron Ansarov experienced some
depression after retiring from his
post as a military photographer in
2007. But, one of the things that made him
happy was walking in his backyard with
his son, pointing out beetles, salamanders,
praying mantis and other creepy crawlies.
“One day, he just said, ‘Daddy, let’s take
pictures of them,’” says Ansarov. “That
just never occurred to me. That’s when
everything changed.”
Ansarov, who lives in Delray Beach,
Florida, has three children: a 12-year-
old, a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old. He
transitioned from photojournalism to
commercial photography and fine art, and
in the process, he says, he has followed one
simple rule—to look at things through the
eyes of a child.
“It is very tough
as adults, because
we get bored. We
see things over
and over and they
are no longer as
fascinating to us as
they were when we
were a child,” says
the photographer.
“All I try to do is to
force myself to see
things freshly.”
After exploring his backyard (National
Geographic is featuring his “My Backyard”
series in a four-page spread in its June
2013 issue), Ansarov turned to the beach,
about a mile from his home. There, he
became captivated with Portuguese men-
of-war.
A man-of-war, if you’ve never encountered
one, is a bit like a jellyfish. It is a
transparent, gelatinous marine creature
with stinging tentacles, except unlike a
jellyfish, a man-of-war is a colonial animal
made up of individual organisms called
zooids. The zooids—the dactylozooid (that
brings in the food), the gastrozooid (that
eats and digests the food), the gonozooid
(that reproduces) and the pneumatophore
(an air sac that keeps the animal afloat)—
are so integrated that they form one being
with one shared stomach. Without their
own means of locomotion, the little-
studied men-of-war are at the whim of
tides and currents. Scientists do not know
how men-of-war breed or where their
migrations take them because they cannot
attach tracking devices to them, but, the
animals wash up on shore in Florida from
November to February. They turn from
purple to deep reds the longer they are
beached.
For the most part, Floridians and tourists
find men-of-war to be a nuisance. To some,
they are disgusting and dangerous even. As
a kid, I stepped on one at a Florida beach,
and I can attest that the sting is painful.
But, Ansarov approaches them with a
child-like curiosity. From December 2012
to February 2013, he made special trips
to his local beach to collect men-of-war.
He finds the creatures, with their vibrant
colors, textures and shapes, to be beautiful
and has made them the subject of his latest
photographic series, called “Zooids.”
To give credit where credit is due,
Ansarov’s wife, Anna, is the collector. She
ART MEETS SCIENCE 19
wears industrial-grade rubber gloves and
walks the surf with a small cooler. When
she spots a blob in the sand, she grabs it
by its non-poisonous air sac and stows it
in her cooler with some sea water. Ansarov
then takes the men-of-war back to his
studio, where he washes the sand from
them and lays them one-by-one onto a
light table.
“I’m spreading them out and I’m using
tweezers to somewhat separate their
tentacles and untangle them and then from
there just move them around and see what
shapes develop,” says the photographer.
“I’ll shoot one for five or ten minutes and
then put it back and do the same process
with the others.”
After the shoot, Ansarov returns the living
men-of-war to the beach where he found
them and let’s nature take its course.
“Either they get swept back out to sea or
they die with the others on the beach,”
he says.
Ansarov often sees air bubbles that
resemble eyeballs and tentacles that frame
alien-like faces in his photographs. To
accentuate this, he “mirrors” each image
by opening it in Photoshop, expanding
the canvas and flipping it once. In nature,
he points out, we respond more to
symmetrical things. “If we see two eyes or
two arms or two legs, we recognize it a lot
more,” he says.
In Ansarov’s Zooids, the anatomical parts
of the men-of-war quickly become any
number of things: moustaches, antennae,
beaks and flared nostrils. The colorful
patterns are “nature’s Rorschach test,”
the photographer has said. Everyone sees
something different.
“One person told me they saw a raccoon
playing on drums,” says Ansarov. I see a
startled toucan in one—and aliens, lots and
lots of aliens.
Photo by Scott Schmidt
20 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher uses a powerful microscope to capture all of a bee’s microscopic structures and textures in stunning detail
B y J o s e p h S t r o m b e r g
What Does A Bee Look Like When It’s Magnified 3000 Times?
You’ve probably seen a bee fly by
hundreds of times in your life, if
not thousands. When it arrived,
maybe attracted by something you were
eating or drinking, you likely shooed it
away, or perhaps remained entirely still to
avoid provoking a sting.
One thing you probably didn’t do was
consider how the bee would look under
intense magnification, blown up to 30,
300 or even 3,000 times its original size.
But—as photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher
has discovered over the past two decades
working with powerful scanning electron
microscopes (SEMs) to capture images of
the insects in remarkable detail—everyday
bees feature incredible microscopic
structures.
“Once you scratch the surface, you see
there’s a whole world down there,” says
Fisher, who published her photos in the
2010 book Bee and had them featured
in an exhibition Beyond Earth Art at
Cornell University in January 2013.
“Once I started, it became a geographical
expedition into the little body of the bee,
with higher and higher magnifications that
took me deeper and deeper.”
Fisher began creating the images back in
1992. “I was curious to see what something
looked like under a scanning electron
microscope, and a good friend of mine
was a microscopist, and he invited me to
bring something to look at,” she says. “I’ve
always loved bees, and I had one that I
found, so I brought it in to his lab.”
When Fisher first looked at the creature
through the device, she was awestruck
by the structures that comprised its body
ART MEETS SCIENCE 21
at scales naked to the human eye. One of
the first that captured her attention was
the bee’s multi-lensed compound eye. “In
that first moment, when I saw its eye, I
realized that the bees’ eyes are composed
of hexagons, which echo the structure of
the honeycomb,” she says. “I stood there,
just thinking about that, and how there are
these geometrical patterns in nature that
just keep on repeating themselves.”
Fisher was inspired to continue exploring
the body of that bee, and others,
continually looking at their microscopic
structures and organs in greater and
greater detail.
Her creative process started with the
obvious: collecting a specimen to examine.
“First, I’d find a bee, and look at it
through my own regular light microscope
to confirm its parts were intact,” she
says. “The freshest ones were the best,
so sometimes I’d find one walking on
the ground that looked like it wouldn’t
be around much longer, and I’d bring it
home and feed it some honey, to give it
something nice for its last meal.” Some
of these were rejuvenated by her care,
but those that weren’t, and perished,
became the subjects of her microscopic
exploration.
At her friend’s lab, in off hours, Fisher used
a model of scanning electron microscope
called a JEOL 6100, which can detect
objects as small as 40 angstroms (for
comparison, a thin human hair is roughly
500,000 angstroms in diameter). Before
scanning, she’d carefully coat the bee in an
ultra-thin layer of gold sputter coating.
This coating, she explains, enhanced the
electrical conductivity of the bee’s surfaces,
which allow the microscope to detect
them in finer resolution. “The SEM uses
a very finely focused electron beam that
scans across the surface of the prepared
sample,” she says. ‘It’s akin to shining a
flashlight across the surface of an object
in a dark room, which articulates the form
with light. With an SEM, it’s electrons, not
light—as it moves across the bee’s surface,
it’s converting electrical signals into a
viewable image.”
Once the bee specimen was prepared
and mounted inside the SEM’s vacuum
chamber, Fisher could use the machine
to view the insect at different angles, and
manipulated the magnification to look for
interesting images. At times, zooming in
on the structures abstracted them beyond
recognition, or yielded surprising views
she’d never thought she’d see looking at a
bee.
“For instance, when I looked at the
attachment between the wing and the
forewing, I saw these hooks,” she says.
“When I magnified them 700 times, their
structure was amazing. They just looked so
industrial.”
Zoom in close enough, she found, and a
bee stops looking anything like a bee—its
exoskeleton resembles a desert landscape,
and its proboscis looks like some piece of
futuristic machinery from a sci-fi movie. At
times, Fisher says, “you can go in deeper
and deeper, and at at a certain level, your
whole sense of scale gets confounded.
It becomes hard to tell whether you’re
observing something from very close up, or
from very far away.”
22 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Inspired by Japanese fish rubbings, two University of Texas biologists make spectacular prints of a variety of species at different stages of decay
B y M e g a n G a m b i n o
Animal Specimens, From Fish to Birds to Mammals, Get Inked
Adam Cohen and Ben Labay are
surrounded by thousands of
fish specimens, all preserved in
jars of alcohol and formalin. At the Texas
Natural Science Center at the University
of Texas in Austin, the two fish biologists
are charged with documenting
the occurrences of different
freshwater fish species
in their home
state and those
neighboring
it.
That is
their day
job, at least.
Outside of
work, Cohen and
Labay have teamed up
on an artistic venture they call the Inked
Animal Project. Since 2008, the colleagues
have made surprisingly tasteful prints
of actual animal carcasses—scales, fur,
feathers and all.
Both scientists have dabbled in art—
drawing, painting and sculpting—for
as long as they can remember. As a kid,
Cohen even used an octopus and flying fish
that he bought at an Asian market as huge
stamps to make ink patterns on paper.
Fish, of course, were a natural subject for
two ichthyologists, but Cohen and Labay
were also familiar with a Japanese art form
called Gyotaku (meaning “fish rubbing”),
where artists slather ink on fresh fish
and press them onto paper as a means of
recording the size and other details of the
catch.
Their first collaboration was a poster with
prints of all ten sunfish species that live
in Texas, and the Inked Animal Project
was born. They inked trout, bass and
catfish. But why stop with fish?
The duo quickly expanded
its repertoire, applying
the same printmaking
technique to mice,
squirrels, rabbits,
geese, gulls,
hummingbirds
and a smattering
of deer, pig and cow
skulls. No specimen
seems to fluster the artists.
I interviewed Inked Animal’s creators
by email to learn more about where they
obtain their portrait subjects, how they
produce the prints and what exactly
possesses them to do this.
As you know, Gyotaku is both an
art form and a method of
scientific documentation.
Are there certain
anatomical traits you try
to accentuate in your Inked
Animal prints for scientific
purposes?
Ben: I don’t think we print for any
tangible scientific goal, though we do print
in a spirit of documentation, similar to
goals of the original Gyotaku printings I
guess. As we’ve expanded our medium
beyond fish, we’ve been interested in
trying to document life processes through
the animals, such as internal or unique
anatomy and “road-kill” or animated
postures.
Adam: Not long ago I ran across some
field notes belonging to a fish collector
from the late 1800s, Edgar Mearns, who,
rather than preserving a particularly large
fish, decided to trace the animal on paper
and insert it in his fieldbook. We were well
into the Inked Animal Project at that point
and that‘s when I realized what we were
really doing was a form of documentation
as well as art. But, in reality, these days
with cameras so ubiquitous, there is little
need to print or trace the animal on paper
for documentation purposes. I think our
prints have relatively little scientific value,
but substantial artistic value. I often
think about the physical characteristics
that someone who knows the
species well would
need to see
to verify the
identity of the
specimen, but I
try not to let that
get in the way of
creating interesting
art. I’d much rather
have interesting art of an unknown and
unverifiable species.
ART MEETS SCIENCE 23
How do you collect the animals you
print?
Adam and Ben: We get the animals in all
sorts of ways. In the beginning
we went fishing in
our spare time.
Recently, as word of
our project got out, we’ve
had people donate specimens. A
lot of our friends are biologists,
hunters, exterminators and people
who work in animal rehabilitation; they
have access to animals and are excited to
donate to the cause. Additionally, there are
a lot of great animals to print that can be
purchased through exotic Asian grocery
stores. We’re getting serious about printing
larger animals, like farm livestock. We
would love to get an ostrich or emu too.
On your website, you say, “Our
tolerance for gross is very high.” Can
you give an example of a specimen
that pushed this tolerance to its
limits?
Ben: My personal worst was the armadillo.
We’ve had worse-smelling animals like a
gray fox that was sitting in a bucket for a
full day before we printed. But something
about working with the armadillo really
grossed me out, almost to the point of
vomiting. Most mammals are squishy with
decay, but the armadillo was a stiff football
of dense rotten meat. It’s also a bizarre
animal that we don’t ever expect to get so
intimate with. This is just a crazy theory,
but animals like the Eastern cottontail
or gray fox are more familiar, and maybe
more approachable or acceptable when
rotten. When it comes to larger, strictly
wild animals, things get more interesting
and intense.
Adam: Ben mentioned a gray fox that we
printed in the early days of Inked Animal. I
remember picking it up and the juices ran
down my arm. But I was so excited by the
print we were getting, which I think was
the first time we realized that we were on
to something really unique, that I hardly
even thought about it. We recently printed
a very rotten deer whose skin peeled away
as we lifted the cloth to
reveal a writhing mass
of maggots—that was
pretty gross too.
You are almost
more interested
in prints of
dismembered, rotting
or partially dissected specimens,
right? Why is this?
Ben: When we started to expand from fish
to other types of animals, Adam and I felt
excited about not just doing something
unique, but doing art that was deeper
than just a pretty picture. I think we both
feel that there is something indescribable
about the animal prints, which allows
people to view them from different vantage
points. You see it as an animal print,
and also as a process. I like the idea of
documenting rotting or dissected animals
because it emphasizes the process part
of the experience. People see it and can
immediately imagine what must have
happened to produce the image. Most
people love what they see even though it’s
something, which if seen in real life, would
disgust and repulse them.
Adam: At first I think most people think
working with animal innards to be a
little gross, but really there’s lots to offer
aesthetically in the inside. Ribs, lungs and
guts provide very interesting patterns and
textures. Blood stains and feces add color.
These are the parts of the animal that are
not usually seen so they catch the viewer’s
attention and cause reason for pause.
If, for example, the animal is a road kill
specimen, whose guts are spilling out—well
that’s an interesting story that we can
capture on paper.
Do you try to position the specimens
in a certain way on the paper?
Adam and Ben: Absolutely. We think
about position quite a bit. Mainly we want
to capture natural poses, either making
the animal seem alive or dead. Often if the
animal has rigor mortis or could fall apart,
due to rot, we are limited to how we can
pose them. Sometimes animals come to us
very disfigured, depending on the cause
of death, and we’ve been surprised by the
beautiful prints that can be obtained from
them.
Can you take me through the process
of making a print? What materials
do you use, and what is your
method?
Adam and Ben: We are always
experimenting with different papers,
fabric, inks, clays and paints as well as
different application methods, but it really
all boils down to applying a wet media to
the animal and then applying it to paper
or fabric. The trick is finding the right
kinds of materials and transfer technique
for each kind of specimen. The process for
bones is very different than fleshed out
animals; and birds are different than fish.
Having two of us is often essential for large
floppy animals where we want to apply
the animal to the table-bound paper. Fish
can be the most difficult; their outer skin
is essentially slime, which repels some
inks and creates smudgy prints on paper.
You have to remove this outer slime layer
24 ART MEETS SCIENCE
before you print a fish. Salt seems to work
well for this. We often do varying degrees
of post-processing of the raw print with
paint or pencils.
What do you add by hand
to the actual print?
Ben: For each animal we’ll
likely do half a dozen to a
couple dozen prints searching
for the perfect one. With
all these replicates, we’ll
play around with different
techniques of post processing.
The traditional Gyotaku
method restricts touch-ups to
accenting the eye of the fish. I
think we’ve at minimum done
this. But we’ve employed a lot
of post-processing techniques,
including pencil, watercolor,
acrylic, clay, enamel and even
extensive digital touch ups.
Adam: There is a balance that we are
trying to achieve regarding preserving
the rawness of the print and creating a
highly refined piece. We like both and find
ourselves wavering. Recently, we’ve started
to assemble prints together digitally and
sometimes alter colors and contrast for
interesting effects.
What are the most challenging
specimens to print?
Adam: I think small arthropods
(animals with exoskeletons)
are particularly difficult and
time consuming. We’ve come
up with the best method, to
completely disassemble the animal
and print it in pieces. The other trick with
them is to apply the ink very thinly and
evenly. Anything with depth is also difficult
and sometime impossible since the way
paper and fabric drapes across the animal
can result in very distorted looking prints.
Ben: Small fish or insects. Fish because
they are just so small, and the details
like scales and fin rays don’t come out
well. And, insects because they can be so
inflexible, and their exoskeletons are, for
the most part, pretty darn water repellent,
restricting what kinds of paints we can use.
What animal would you like to print
that you haven’t yet?
Ben: Generally, I’d love to print any
animal that we haven’t already printed.
That said, I have a gopher in my freezer
that I’m not too excited about because it
will likely turn out as a
hairy
blob. And once you’ve
done one snake, another the same size is
hard to distinguish. Large animals are, of
course, charismatic and impressive, but I
also really enjoy the challenge of trying to
capture details on smaller animals. There
are some animals that do, in theory, lend
themselves to printing. For example, we
have a porcupine in our freezer that I’m
really excited about.
Adam: I get excited about anything new
really. To date, we’ve been primarily
interested in working with Texas fauna,
but we are excited about other possibilities
as well. I especially like animals with
interesting textures juxtaposed. For
example, I think the more-or-less naked
head and legs of an ostrich with the
feathery body would be interesting and
very challenging. But, beyond specific
animal species, we’re now experimenting
with the process of rot, a commonality
of all dead animals. One project involves
placing a fresh animal on paper and
spray painting it at various intervals with
different colors as it rots and expands.
The result is an image of the animal
surrounded by concentric rings that
document the extent of rot through time.
What do you hope viewers take away
from seeing the prints?
Ben and Adam: We like to think there
is something in the animal prints that
captures both the spirit and the raw
corporeal feel of the animal. It’s amazing
to us that the art was created by using an
animal as a brush so-to-speak, and that
there’s even DNA left on the art itself.
We hope people have a similar thought
process and feeling
about the work.
We also hope that
the project and print
collection as a whole
serves as a way people
can better approach and appreciate the
biodiversity around us.
ART MEETS SCIENCE 25
Most of us are content to
hear music. But, German
photographer Martin Klimas
decided he wanted to see it.
“I was listening to lots of minimalist
music—contemporary classical and free
jazz—and I started looking for imagery
that could express it best,” he says. “Then,
soon afterward, I came across the research
of Hans Jenny and his Study of Wave
Phenomena.”
In the sixties, Jenny, a German physician
and scientist, began experimenting with
and photographing the effects of sound
vibrations on a variety of materials—fluids,
powders and liquid paste. By setting these
substances on a rubber drum head and
making it vibrate, he found that different
tones produced different spatial patterns
in the materials: Low tones led powders
to gather in simple, straight lines, while
deeper tones produced more complex
patterns.
“It gave me an idea,” Klimas says. “I
wanted to take these two things—the
effects of vibrations, and music—and bring
them together.”
Over the next year, he spent countless
hours capturing what he calls “sonic
sculptures” of a variety of musicians—
everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Pink
Floyd to Philip Glass and Johann Sebastian
Bach. “I use an ordinary speaker with a
funnel-shaped protective membrane on top
of it,” he says. “I pour paint colors onto the
rubber membrane, and then I withdraw
from the setup.”
After cranking the speaker to max volume,
“I leave the creation of the picture to the
sound itself,” Klimas says. At the precise
moment when the paint starts flying, a
soundtrigger—a device that detects spikes
in noise—automatically snaps photos with
his Hasselblad camera.
Klimas used songs from a variety of styles
and periods to make the photos. “I mostly
selected works that were particularly
dynamic, and percussive,” he says. Many of
the songs he chose were by musicians with
some relationship to visual art—like The
Velvet Underground—or had influenced
artists, like Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,
A Collective Improvisation.”
In total, the series took months to produce,
and required hundreds of attempts. “The
most annoying thing,” Klimas says, “was
cleaning up the set thoroughly after every
single shot.”
See more of Martin Klimas’ work on his
website.
Photographer Martin Klimas sets paint atop a speaker and cranks the volume, snapping shots as the boom of music pulses paint into the air
B y J o s e p h S t r o m b e r g
The Sounds of Pink Floyd, Daft Punk and James Brown, As Expressed by Flying Paint
26 ART MEETS SCIENCE
With the help of a little liquid nitrogen, German photographer Martin Klimas captures the fragile chaos of flowers as they explode
B y J o s e p h S t r o m b e r g
What Happens When You Freeze Flowers and Shoot Them With a Gun?
German photographer Martin Klimas has a thing for
explosions. Previously, he’s made art by photographing
shattered fragile ceramic figures as they hit the ground
and firing projectiles at onions, pumpkins and ears of corn.
Now, he’s brought this explosive approach to a new medium:
flower blossoms in full bloom, frozen by liquid nitrogen.
“I was inspired by the blossoms themselves,” he says of his new
project, “Exploding Flowers,” which he worked on for nearly a
year and publicly debuted in the summer of 2013. “There are so
many different forms and species on the planet. I was interested
in the blossom’s architecture, and I tried to make that visible by
breaking the blossom into as many pieces as possible.”
To achieve this, he sought out flowers with particularly complex
internal structures and froze them to -200° Celsius in liquid
nitrogen. Once they were frozen, he had to be careful. “They’re as
fragile as raw eggs,” he says. “You can destroy them by sneezing.”
After the flowers were frozen, he brought them to his set and
placed the stem in a vice to hold the blossom in front of a white
background. He used a normal air gun rigged with a device that
ART MEETS SCIENCE 27
let him remotely pull the trigger, and took a series of shots right at
the moment of impact.
“I often use science often to create new photographs,” he says. “I
look to the scientific techniques that have evolved over the past
100 years, and I try to extract the poetic side of science to generate
powerful images.”
Like many of Klimas’ previous projects, “Exploding Flowers”
brings disorder to objects and images we usually think of as
stable. “Many of the images I produce, you normally can’t see that
moment with the naked eye,” he says. “My images make these
moments of chaos visible. To me, that’s the fascinating part.”
Of course, when you break flowers into thousands of tiny pieces
to create this chaos, someone has to clean it all up. Between each
session, Klimas had to sweep up piles of fragmented flower petals.
“It’s a bit annoying,” he says, “but there are other projects—like
when I worked with paint—that are much more intensive to
clean up.”
28 ART MEETS SCIENCE
Houston photographer Deborah Bay captures the violent power of projectiles lodged in bulletproof plexiglass
B y M e g a n G a m b i n o
The Big BangEnthrall ing Photos of Exploding Bullets
Deborah Bay was in a store that
sells building materials in her
hometown of Houston, Texas,
when she saw a display of bulletproof
plexiglass. A few different types of
ammunition were lodged in the hard
plastic to demonstrate the strength of the
product.
“I thought it was intriguing,” says the
photographer. “You could see all the
fragments of metal. You could see the
spray of the shattered plastic and then you
could see the trajectory lines that were
running through the panel of plexiglass.”
Bay did some research, talking with people
and poking around online, to try to find
some law enforcement officers who would
create some similar plexiglass panels for
her. She was about to give up when she
found a willing group of professionals
at the Public Safety Institute at Houston
Community College. The officers shot
several different weapons with a variety
of bullets at panels of bulletproof
plexiglass. The result was an array of
beautiful explosions in the plastic—a static
testament to an energy that was once
violently kinetic.
From there, Bay photographed the
plexiglass panels against a black backdrop,
ART MEETS SCIENCE 29
different colored lights cast on them, using a medium format
camera with a macro lens. She calls her series of about 20 images
“The Big Bang.”
“When I go in and start working with the camera,” says Bay, “it
really does take me to another world.”
The patterns that the projectiles leave on the plexiglass on impact
look like galaxies, stars and meteors flying through space. The
more the photographer combs collections of images taken by the
Hubble Space Telescope, the more she sees the resemblance. It’s
this intuitive leap from the macro to the cosmic that inspired the
series’ clever name.
Of course, once viewers are brought back down to Earth with the
knowledge of the actual subject, they can sometimes experience
what Bay calls a “psychological tension”—that is, the unsettling
contrast between the beauty of the images and the destruction
that comes with a gunshot.
“As arguments about the right to bear arms fill the media, guns
continue to fascinate and to repel—sometimes simultaneously,”
says Bay, in a statement on her website. The issue hits home for
her as a resident of Texas, a state with about 51 million firearms
or, as she notes, “two guns for every man, woman and child.”
“Only a small amount of imagination is needed to realize the
impact any of these bullets would have on muscle and bone,” she
says. “I just want people to think about what these bullets
can do.”
30 ART MEETS SCIENCE
With a surprisingly light touch, the New York City-based photographer instills feelings of solitude in his images of massive glaciers
B y M e g a n G a m b i n o
Caleb Cain Marcus’ Photos of Glaciers on a Disappearing Horizon
What happens when you lose
your grip on the horizon?
How much does it warp your
sense of scale? One trek on the 97-square-
mile Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia
and Caleb Cain Marcus was hooked by
these questions of perspective. With that
experience, in January 2010, the New
York City-based photographer launched a
two-year odyssey, documenting, in his own
minimalist style, glaciers all around the
world—in Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand
and Norway.
Marcus shares 3o photographs taken in
his travels in his latest book, A Portrait
of Ice. The images—three of which were
acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art—are “eerily gorgeous and unusual,”
writes Marvin Heiferman, a known critic
and curator, in an essay featured in the
book. “Instead of picturing monumental
walls of ice that advance over and disrupt
what lies beneath, or icebergs that break
away from glaciers to float majestically, if
threateningly, at sea, these photographs
suggest that glaciers cover the earth’s
surface lightly, like a sheet, rather than
bearing down upon it,” he adds. The
comparison that Heiferman makes later
in the essay is compelling: “The jagged
rocks, ridges and pinnacles that poke
through the frigid surfaces don’t register
as being particularly dangerous, but more
like the eccentrically rendered landforms
you might soar over in a dream or in the
ART MEETS SCIENCE 31
elegant flight-simulation of a video game.”
Intrigued, I recently had the opportunity to
interview Marcus by phone. We discussed
some of the thoughts driving the project
and his process:
When you exhibit the series, you
like the photographs to measure 43
inches by 54 inches. Why do you like
to work in this large-scale format?
Obviously, the glaciers themselves are
quite large. I think it is easier to get
immersed in something when it is large. I
think small makes things potentially more
intimate. If it is small, you are required to
go up close to it and inspect it. If it is large,
you can sort of be overwhelmed by it.
What inspired your initial trip to
Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia?
I was visiting someone in Buenos Aires,
and then we took a side trip and flew
outside of El Calafate, which is a small
town in Patagonia. Near El Calafate was
Perito Moreno. It seemed like a good
opportunity to go and visit a glacier. I grew
up in Colorado, and I have a love for the
mountains and open space, which I don’t
get much of in New York.
How did you explore the glacier?
What did you get to do?
I just hiked around on it. Many glaciers are
covered with snow, so you don’t really see
them as glaciers as much, at least I don’t,
because you are not seeing the ice. You are
seeing the snow, which is layering on top of
the ice. This was probably the first hard-ice
glacier I was on.
What was it about the experience
and the photographs that you shot
that really inspired you to spend
the next two years photographing
glaciers around the world?
The ice landscape was certainly one that
I hadn’t visited before. I think that many
people never really get a chance to visit it
or never choose to visit it. Most of us have
seen some form of a desert and a forest
and an ocean, but we haven’t really just
seen ice. It is quite a different ecosystem,
and one that fascinates me quite a bit.
Everything is so open and so expansive.
I think it was that feeling of expanse and
emptiness and solitude, on a personal
level, that made me want to be there.
When I took the pictures, I had this idea to
try to see what would happen if the horizon
disappeared. Living in New York City,
unless you live very high up, you never see
the horizon, which is really kind of odd
and something that took me a few years to
realize. You are missing that. It is such a
grounding presence for people to be able to
see the horizon. I’m not sure we are really
aware of the effects of not being able to see
it. I thought, okay, if I get rid of the horizon
or I try to, how is that going to affect the
feeling of the picture? You lose a sense of
scale.
Many of the images are vertical, with
mostly sky and then the surface of
the glacier occupying just a small
portion at the bottom. Why did you
choose to compose them this way?
I think there are three general options. One
would be that you would have about half
glacier and half sky. I think that would be
too balanced. Then, you could have much
more glacier than sky, which would work,
but it would produce something that is
much denser. I didn’t really feel like the
glaciers were so dense or so heavy, even
though they are so massive. I wanted to
create a feeling of more openness; I think if
you have more sky than glacier that helps
to do it. It helps to make it float a little
more. Having just this small amount of
density of color at the bottom, contrasted
by that wide open space, also creates a
balance in a way. Because the sky is more
empty, they still sort of take up equal
weight on the image.
Do you want the viewer to lose
perspective?
I would say probably most people looking
at it wouldn’t realize that there is no
horizon—at least, not consciously. But
I think that one of the things it does
is it makes it feel less familiar. When
something is less familiar, then we look
at it more closely, instead of just glancing
at it and saying, “Oh, I know what that is.
It is a glacier, or that’s a tree or a person
or an apartment building.” If it has a little
32 ART MEETS SCIENCE
bit of a twist, then I think people spend
a little more time or there is a little more
examining. Maybe there is more potential
that there is some effect on them, which
would be ideal.
How did you think about color?
In terms of the colors of the glaciers,
whether they are blue or gray or more
cyan, I didn’t have too much choice. I was
looking for the glaciers with more color.
There are a few that are almost black and
white, which are in Iceland. That was after
the volcano erupted a couple of years ago,
so those have the mist and the ash from the
volcano. It doesn’t give it an intense color,
it is giving it a very subtle color.
Did you have certain criteria for
the glaciers and locations that you
picked?
That was one of the challenging aspects.
You never really knew what you would
get. I would look at topographic images
and satellite images. I would talk to other
climbers and get a general sense of what a
glacier I was going to might look like. But
whenever I got there, it was all a surprise.
I was looking for texture and color, so
that they had some kind of resonance,
some personality. In the book, there are
nine different glaciers. I probably went
to more than 20 glaciers, so only a small
number of them are represented. The other
ones, either I wasn’t on the ball or else the
glacier wasn’t on the ball. Somehow the communication between
the two of us didn’t work out.
I imagine there were a bunch of logistics that went into
these trips.
In terms of getting to the glaciers, pretty much all of them
required a hike. I kayaked into some of them and took a helicopter
once or twice. Most of the time I had a guide. Of course, the
guides are there to find access to the glacier and then also as a
safety measure or policy. In that regard, they want to make sure
that you come back in one piece, which is a good thing, but it also
means that they always try to keep reins on you. I don’t like having
someone holding me back. I am always running around, and they
are always yelling at me. It would usually take a few days for our
relationship to sort of coalesce into something smoother. There
would be some friction in the beginning. Then, after a few days,
we would have a better understanding of each other.
The guides were quite resourceful in terms of their information. I
actually met with a few scientists on various glaciers. In Norway, I
met with a couple of them measuring the speed of the flow of the
glacier. So, I would always take the opportunity to talk to them.
In your own essay in A Portrait of Ice, you write, “The
Inuit elders say the melting of the ice is the land crying
out in pain. Now we must listen.” The statement implies
an activism on your part. Is that one of your intentions?
ART MEETS SCIENCE 33
Do you want viewers to care more about the environment and about the melting of glaciers?
I think photographing glaciers I was pretty aware that even if there wasn’t too much of that sentiment that it would be there in the
background. I feel very close to the earth or however one wants to term it. I think that we have more than half of the people living in
cities now in the U.S. With that, we are losing an awareness for the natural environment. Whether these bring people closer to the
environment or not, I don’t really know. I certainly think that if people were more connected to it, that they would act differently in their
lives. A lot of the people who make decisions on a high level are, I think, even more detached because they are so immersed in running
corporations or in making more money. I think that the planet suffers because of that, and so do we.
These images are excerpted from the book, A Portrait of Ice, published by Damiani.
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