SciArt Magazine Volume 29
February 2018
Table of Contents

Cover image: Still from "Sunspots: Location" by Jeff Snyder and Drew Wallace
Letter from the Editor

Dear readers,
Bioluminescent portraits, bitcoin assemblages, microbioloical music, and virtual sunspots are only a few of the aesthetic places we bring you in our first issue of 2018. From collaborating across disciplines to across species our featured artists, scientists, and cross-disciplinary practitioners this February come from New York, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, California, the Netherlands, Australia, and more. With the Internet as our global center, the 21st century cross-disciplinary Renaissance that is the SciArt movement is here, there, and everywhere.

As we move forward, we bring with us the spirit of da Vinci, and his tireless quest to better understand the world through experiment, observation, and creation. His journals contain plans for flying mechanisms, drawings of cadavers, drafts of new war technologies, and poetry - all on the same page. While there will always be distinct things called 'art' and 'science', it is the questions that we ask, rather than the mechanisms through which we pursue them, that unite us, that put us on the same page. What questions are you pursuing? We'd love to hear from you.

On a particular page of da Vinci's journals, he writes "Tell me if anything was ever done... Tell me... Tell me." It's easy to read this as a statement made in frustration. But I take a different view - because in art and science, questions lead to answers which lead to more questions. It is the nature of humanity to ask questions, because there's always more to know - we would never want to be 'done'. 

As always, thank you for your continued readership.

Sincerely, 
Julia Buntaine | Founder, Editor-in-Chief

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CONVERSATIONAL
Examining the body with Cristin Millett

JF: Your work deals with medical history. How did you get interested in that area?
 
CM: My research and discourse take their genesis from my childhood. I grew up in a household where dinner discussions focused on the human body—its diseases, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments...

SPACES & PLACES
Science Art Collaborations Emerge
at American Geophysical Union Meeting

A key aspect of science in the 19th century were field sketches that served as visualizations of observations, but as the 20th century and imaging technology progressed the lack of exactness of the sketch led to their exclusion from science writing. As the demand for more effective, widespread, and illustrative science communication increases, the role of art to help us visualize science is again emerging... 

COLLABORATION
Ants, Art, and Science

​Last summer I spent a month with my family in the town of Delft, in the Netherlands. Delft is the home of Johannes Vermeer, famous for his Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Milkmaid and The Little Street. But Delft was also home to Anton von Leeuwenhoek, who discovered the existence of microscopic life and, having discovered it, spent the rest of his life, as its obsessive explorer...

ONLINE
"Sunspots" by Jeff Snyder and Drew Wallace

​Have you ever wanted to go beyond, and into, the surface of a painting? Sunspots is a virtual installation which plunges you into the middle of four different and ever changing aesthetic worlds...

LISTENING
"Microsonic": An interdisciplinary musical project inspired by microbial communication

​Communication in biology is by definition the transfer of information from one cell or molecule to another, as by chemical or electrical signals. The most common way of chemical communication between microorganisms is quorum sensing, a mechanism that regulates gene expression in response to cell density. But microbial communication also takes place via physical interactions, including sound waves...

SPOTLIGHT
Bitcoins with Andy Bauch

Blending the disciplines of art and technology, Andy Bauch is a fine artist whose recent works range from issues of financial revolution, in the form of bitcoin-embedded artworks, to human obsolescence, through a series of workforce portraits where jobs have been replaced by automation...

IN SITU
Bioluminescent portraits with Hunter Cole

In 2003 I began to incorporate the use of photography with my love of drawing to capture images created with bioluminescent bacteria – bacteria which produces its own light. My art reflects the technological and artistic challenges presented through working with living organisms...

STRAIGHT TALK
Computational geometries with Marcus Volz

​DM: What got you started on making visual representations of mathematical data? What are some of the types of data that you work with?

MV: My interest in mathematical and computational art evolved from an initial interest in data visualization. I worked for several years as a consultant developing computer simulations of industrial processes...

ON VIEW | INTERVIEW
"A Perplexity of Conundrums" by Jim Jenkins

​"A Perplexity of Conundrums" is a solo exhibition by Jim Jenkins, showcasing the work he created as Fermilab's 2017 Artist-in-Residence. Fermilab's residency connects artists with in house scientists to observe, collaboration, and creatively express the daily science of high energy particle physics...

QUICK VIEW
Refractions of light with Jessica Lloyd-Jones

Jessica Lloyd-Jones creates sculpture and site-specific installations that examine light within the public space. Her works engage with public space to reveal new perspectives and encourage viewers to experience the world in a different way. Two of Lloyd-Jones’ works, Spectral Sensing and Arc, were recently installed at the Pontio Arts and Innovation Centre in Bangor...

SPOTLIGHT
Tweeting with Tiberiu Chelcea

One Second (Tweeted) is a net-based project/artwork that tweets all the assembly instructions executed in one second on a Windows box. The project consists of a Twitter bot which tweets one instruction roughly every minute; the project also has a browser component which displays the live feed of these tweets. The assembly instructions will be tweeted to completion in 1,210 years, 9 months, and 12 days. Thus, the project is a way to stretch one easily overlooked span of technology usage (one second) into more than a millennium...

ON SCREEN
Printmaker Todd Anderson Captures Disappearing Landscapes

Idyllic and sublime scenery has inspired artists for centuries, and for printmaker Todd Anderson, it is imperative that we continue to precisely capture the emotive qualities of landscapes today. Interdisciplinary collaboration is key for Anderson in addressing climate change through the arts, as he explains, “I’m trying to bring a larger audience to the science, and I’m also trying to bring the science to another way of looking at these things.”..
Founder, Editor in Chief: Julia Buntaine
Contributing & Guest Writers: Joe Ferguson, Mauri Pelto, Robert R. Dunn, Ruth Schmidt, Eva van Ooij, Lucas Wiegerink, Andy Bauch, Hunter Cole, Peter N. Gray, Danielle McCloskey, Sarah Allen Eagen, Tiberiu Chelcea, and Allison Palenske