Imagine music

Vibrations of sound in water

Chladni patterns
music of the spheres

As Pythagoras wrote, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Resonance phenomena

Rorschach inkblots

Jung

Drawing Mandalas

In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.

My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day…I guarded them like precious pearls….It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation -- Memories, Dreams and Reflections

In view of the fact that all mandalas shown here were new and uninfluenced products, we are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and in all places. Since this disposition is usually not a conscious possession of the individual I have called it the collective unconscious. -- Mandala Symbolism

Tibetan Sand Mandalas

The history of symbolism shows that everything can assume symbolic significance: natural objects (like stones, plants, animals, people, mountains and valleys, sun and moon, wind, water, and fire), or man-made things (like houses, boats, or cars), or even abstract forms (like numbers, or the triangle, the square, and the circle). In fact, the whole cosmos is a potential symbol -- Man and His Symbols

Carl Gustav Jung is credited with introducing the Eastern concept of the mandala to Western thought and believed this symbol represented the total personality - the Self. Jung noted that when a mandala image suddenly turned up in dreams or art, it was usually an indication of movement toward a new self-knowledge. He observed that his patients often spontaneously created circle drawings and had his own profound personal experience with mandala images. From 1916 through 1920, Jung created mandala paintings and sketches that he felt corresponded to his inner situation at the time [more about this and Jung's Red Book in a future post]. He believed that mandalas denoted a unification of opposites, served as expressions of the self, and represented the sum of who we are.

Cave of the heart

Plato's Cave

Theory of Forms

All metaphysics including its opponent positivism speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of his presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence. No outward appearance without light -- Plato already knew this. But there is no light and no brightness without the opening. Even darkness needs it. How else could we happen into darkness and wander through it? - Martin Heidegger, On Time And Being

Definition

Leonardo da Vinci anatomical drawings

northern lights

Nasa video

Moth Fly 
Scanning electron micrograph of a moth fly (Psychodidae)

Fly head 
Image of a fly showing the features of the head including the fly's compound eye, which is made up of many small lenses. Most of the hairs and antennae on the fly's head are used for sensory perception.

silvia weidenbach 

Text by Glenn Adamson, Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, author and a specialist on the history and theory of craft and design

‘I have experimented and explored, collected and ordered, discovered boundaries and got over them again.’

Were craft and technology ever truly at odds? That is certainly the impression one gets from the history of the crafts movement. Ruskin and Morris had, at best, a grudging tolerance for the machine, and paeans to the values of the handmade, in which the intimate contact of body, tool, and material take centre stage, form the mainstream of writing on the subject to this day. But lately there has been a rapprochement – or rather, a realization that craft has been technological all along. Equally, there is increasing awareness that technology has always had a firm basis in artisanal experimentation. Silvia Weidenbach’s new jewellery is the latest expression of this coming-together. Weidenbach has the most traditional of backgrounds, having been trained as a silversmith and studied jewellery at the Burg Giebichenstein in Germany (focusing on enamel). She has also done a stint as a resident artist at a stone-cutting centre, the Jakob Bengel Foundation. During her time at the Royal College of Art, however, she began to explore the possibilities of rapidforming, CAD, and in particular a tool called a ‘haptic arm.’ This digital sculpting tool allows the user to shape ‘virtual clay’ of a specified hardness, and gives palpable feedback. It’s relatively quick, physically nuanced, and best of all (like all computer-based modeling systems) allows the maker to get the piece just right before hitting the ‘print’ button. Experimentation happens immaterially, an expansive situation for the formative imagination. As Weidenbach puts it, ‘you have no limit in the computer as you do in the real piece.’

The leap that Weidenbach has made for the Jerwood Makers exhibition is to combine these high-tech processes with her own traditional skill-set of gemtone-setting, enameling, casting, electroforming, and metalsmithing. The results sit somewhere between the future and the past, like props from a stylish science fiction film based on Elizabethan jewels. Symmetry is an important feature. Computers are very good at generating complex form – think of the fractal patterns that were once a popular screensaver – and also good at mirroring. Even bilateral symmetry is difficult to pull off through traditional craft techniques, because the maker must match their own work exactly. (This is why most traditional handmade wares are symmetrical, in fact; it is a simple proof of skill.) Multiple symmetry, and other mathematically-derived formal logic, is still more challenging to realize by hand. Weidenbach exploits this capacity of the machine, but through subsequent embellishment she restores the objects to uniqueness and preciousness. Two realms of making are brought into exuberant, hybrid union.

jerwoodvisualarts.org 

Mark Fairnington interview

Louise Hibbert

silentplankton

Nature has created a wealth of wondrous forms whose beauty and diversity way exceed anything that has been created by man - Ernst Haeckel

Circle of Fifths

The circle of fifths is a visual representation of the relationship between the 12 tones of the chromatic scale
It shows the corresponding key signatures of the scales and their major and minor keys
It is a geometrical representation of relationships among the 12 pitch classes of the chromatic scale in pitch class space

Diatoms

Scanning Electron Micrographs of Diatoms

Project Echo

The Big Bounce, a film about Project Echo. Echo was an inflated aluminum coated balloon 10 stories tall that was launched packed inside a 26 inch sphere. Once in orbit, transmissions were aimed at Echo from New Jersey, bounced off, and were received in Goldstone CA.

Le Voyage Dans La Lune

a blind spot in the coverage of the polar-mounted 
receiver antenna

the big bounce

Metallophone

Moog

Leon Theremin devised the original Theremin in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Lenin, who was in power at the time, had 600 units made firstly for the Soviet people and secondly to showcase Russian engineering. To achieve the latter Lenin distributed some of the Theremins globally but after the second world war the Soviets “discouraged” further work on electronic music stating that “electricity should be reserved for the execution of traitors”

Microkorg

Prophet

Pheramone

Arp modular

Project echo

geodesic dome

satelloons and pavilions

orbit in the periphery

hidden object

passive satellite system

signal beam

hidden broadcasting device

hyphens and hurricanes

mechanism

Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell 

The smallest structural unit of an organism which is capable of independent functioning, (i.e., it has an independent metabolism and the capacity to reproduce (with a few exceptions within the human body)); it consists of one or more nuclei, cytoplasm, and various internal organelles, all surrounded by a semipermeable plasma cell membrane; it is capable, either independently and alone, or interacting with other related units of performing all the fundamental functions of life; "the unit of life."   [All cells have their origin in the primary cell from which the organism was developed.]

Eadweard Muybridge

Zoopraxiscope: a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the celluloid film strip

daguerreotypes

daguerreotypes

autochromes

photography

Kirlian Photography and the Aura

Kirlian photography refers to a form of photogram made with electricty.  It was accidently discovered in 1939 by Semyon Kirlian when he connected a photographic plate to a source of voltage. Kirlian believed that the image he was studying might be a human aura.

Micrographs and Sputter coating

Electron microscope

Sputter coating in scanning electron microscopy is a process of covering a specimen with a very thin layer of 
conducting material, typically a metal, such as agold/palladium (Au/Pd) alloy. Conductive coating is needed to prevent charging of a specimen with an electron beam in conventional SEM mode (high vacuum, high voltage). While metal coatings could be useful also for increasing signal to noise ratio (heavy metals are good secondary electron emitters), they are of inferior quality when X-ray spectroscopy employed. Therefore, when X-ray spectroscopy needed, the preferred coating is a carbon coating.

Neoteny

All complex organisms share a common morphology—initially. They acquire their distinctive, specialized adult forms as they develop. By retarding development, neoteny produces adults with juvenile features. This de-differentiation of morphology provides adaptive advantages in rapidly changing environments, including, one has to suppose, high-tech environments.

www.starlarvae.org