il moto è causa d'ogni vita

a PhD thesis -behind the curtains- on the land where sciences and arts meet

[furtho]

Wendy Carlos photographed in Keyboard magazine, 1993

[hitku]

Lindsay Cage

[fishstickmonkey]

[Frustules of Diatoms]

Artist: Attributed to Julius Wiesner (Austrian, 1838–1916)                     Date: ca. 1870                                     

Medium: Cyanotype                                       

Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.9 cm (3 7/8 x 3 1/8 in.)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

[humanoidhistory]

Is #TheDress white and gold? Or is it black and blue? Wired reports on the controversy that’s driving humanity insane.

The fact that a single image could polarize the entire Internet into two aggressive camps is, let’s face it, just another Thursday. But for the past half-day, people across social media have been arguing about whether a picture depicts a perfectly nice bodycon dress as blue with black lace fringe or white with gold lace fringe. And neither side will budge. This fight is about more than just social media—it’s about primal biology and the way human eyes and brains have evolved to see color in a sunlit world.

Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object. “Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.” (Neitz sees white-and-gold.)

Usually that system works just fine. This image, though, hits some kind of perceptual boundary. That might be because of how people are wired. Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes color. That chromatic axis varies from the pinkish red of dawn, up through the blue-white of noontime, and then back down to reddish twilight. “What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.” (Conway sees blue and orange, somehow.)

Read more at Wired.

[renaissance-art]

Details from The Unicorn is Found of the Unicorn Tapestries

[humanoidhistory]

1637 map of the world based on the work of Gerhard Mercator (1512-1594).

(New York Public Library)

[humanoidhistory]

The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, illustrated in The Beauty of the Heavens: A Pictorial Display of the Astronomical Phenomena of the Universe, 1842, by Charles F. Blunt.

(ETH Bibliothek)

[renaissance-art]

Details from The Unicorn is Found of the Unicorn Tapestries

[rabald]

Les Cités Obscures by François Schuiten

[mattfractionblog]

One note I tend to give almost universally when looking at portfolios (which I try to avoid doing up but sometimes people don’t take no thanks for an answer) is that figure work is good, and environmental work is good, and life drawing is good, but drawing figures that look like they belong in space, that have weight and density, that have mass that interacts with an environment that exists with its own weight, mass, and density, is really fucking hard. I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the work I’ve seen in a portfolio that had solid spatial work. Look at your work: is that space real? Is that guy really standing on a floor? That woman, does the mass of her coat have results on her posture? Is that room a space we enter or merely an array of visual codes that tell our brains “room” without actually earning it?

It’s the work of François Schuiten I’ll point to time and time again.

In art school we were made to draw a white bag of sand with its neck pinched tight by white tape, sitting on a sculpture pedestal, about 480,000,000 times. Aside from my own face it was the most educational thing I ever had to draw.

[rabald]

Les Cités Obscures by François Schuiten

[mattfractionblog]

One note I tend to give almost universally when looking at portfolios (which I try to avoid doing up but sometimes people don’t take no thanks for an answer) is that figure work is good, and environmental work is good, and life drawing is good, but drawing figures that look like they belong in space, that have weight and density, that have mass that interacts with an environment that exists with its own weight, mass, and density, is really fucking hard. I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the work I’ve seen in a portfolio that had solid spatial work. Look at your work: is that space real? Is that guy really standing on a floor? That woman, does the mass of her coat have results on her posture? Is that room a space we enter or merely an array of visual codes that tell our brains “room” without actually earning it?

It’s the work of François Schuiten I’ll point to time and time again.

In art school we were made to draw a white bag of sand with its neck pinched tight by white tape, sitting on a sculpture pedestal, about 480,000,000 times. Aside from my own face it was the most educational thing I ever had to draw.

[definitelydope]

Edinburgh By Daniel Farò

[drunkpalindrome-deactivated2018]

Edinburgh always makes my insides hurt

[humanoidhistory]

An 1883 portrait of Charles Darwin, born on February 12, 1809.

(National Portrait Gallery, London)

[nemfrog]

Book cover. 1886.

[scientificillustration]

Full text at BHL

[nubbsgalore]

photos by (click pic) michael poliza, dennis fast and matthias brieter of polar bears amongst the fireweed in churchill, manitoba. the area has the largest, and most southerly, concentration of the animals on the planet. in late summer and early fall the polar bears make their way to the hudson bay, waiting for it to freeze over so they can hunt for seals on the ice. but every year, the ice is forming later and later, forcing the polar bears to go hungry for longer. (more polar bear posts) 

[bloometal]

[bloometal]

All great ideas are dangerous (O.Wilde, feat. threadless)

[bloometal]