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In the year 2000, the art exhibit Paradise Now was on show. The Farm, an enormous 96-by-120-inch painting by Alexis Rockman, may have been the most memorable piece there (above).

The Farm lays out a surrealistic timeline of agricultural advancement, beginning with wild boar at upper left, finishing with transgenic pig producing human organs lower right. We are now living at the lower right. This month, scientists reported that a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig functioned normally.

The NY Times review of Paradise Now was oddly lukewarm but glowing:

“Never mind that in ''Paradise Now'' the art isn't great, because the possibilities raised are endless, and the numbers, as they say on Wall Street, look good. More and more artists are tapping into science....So surely something big is bound to happen.”

The gripping Judy Chicago exhibit at San Francisco’s De Young Museum begins with “The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction”. The installation presses the viewer to consider their own inevitable death alongside the accelerating extinction of biodiversity around the globe.

Using delicate chinaware paint on black glass, Chicago has created dozens of seemingly divergent scenes—from an emergency room bed to a shrinking polar ice cap. But the black glass brings the viewer into the tableau, reflecting the viewer’s face and framing it amidst two vibrant, opposing forces: the pull of death and the struggle to survive.

Chicago has worked for over 50 years confronting the power relationship between men and women and patriarchal progress versus mother earth. Therefore “The End” is a fitting, engrossing start to the artist’s first retrospective.

The show runs in San Francisco until January 09, 2022.

At $28, tickets are a bit pricey but at the time of this writing, coupon code “DEST20″ takes off a decent 20%.

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Iris van Herpen

Fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a series of dresses that replicate the feathers and soundwave patterns of birds in flight, and showcased them alongside a kinetic lighting installation by Studio Drift.

Amsterdam-based Van Herpen studied the movement of birds’ wings to create her Syntopia collection, which she presented at Le Trianon on 2 July, for Paris Haute Couture fashion week.

To accompany them, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Studio Drift created an installation of moving glass tubes that also capture the motion of bird flight.

Each of Van Herpen’s 17 designs combine both organic and inorganic forms, to highlight the convergence of natural biology and manmade technology.

Traditional weaving techniques are combined with high-tech digital fabrication, resulting in a series of garments featuring complex parametric patterns. These range from pleated dresses made from liquid-coated silk organza, to wool coats made using laser cutting.

“As a former dancer, the transformation within movement has hypnotised me,” said Van Herpen. “For this collection I looked closely at the minutiae of bird flight and the intricate echoing forms within avian motion.”

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Concentric Bearings A by Vija Celmins

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A great article in The New Yorker about Vija Celmins and her breathtaking retrospective—soon traveling to New York’s MOMA from San Francisco:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/vija-celmins-surface-matters

I saw the Vija Celmins show at San Francisco MOMA yesterday. This woman’s work is so absorbing. The way she studies the natural world, and her graphite media, is incredibly intensive and resonates with Science Sparks Art greatly. Go see the show, it’s up only until the end of March!

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A Heartbreaking Parade Float Featuring a Giant Whale Choking on Trash at the Viareggio Carnevale in Italy

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In the personal work of illustrator Andrew Fairclough, the artist’s cerebral explorations are infused with comic and pop influences. See more here.

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The Moon Show was held at MIT’s Hayden Gallery in September 1969 and featured art and literature about the moon as well as artifacts from the Apollo missions. The event poster, and other works designed by artist Jacqueline Casey, feature prominently in the typography gallery of the fantastic, newly re-opened SF MoMA.

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The book, “Posters: Jacqueline S. Casey - 30 Years of Design at MIT” is available on Amazon for $300-$900!

We need artists to continue elucidating the unique beauty that resides only in the individual mind. Who else but this artist, Jonathan Monaghan, could create CGI worlds that are simultaneously so familiar and odd.

For us to remain human in our increasingly digitized world, we need artists to continue elucidating what surrounds us.

Like the work of Kal Spelletich, who works to help people commune with technology. In Split Brain Robotics pictured here, Kal invites visitors to control his chomping, smoking 14-foot robots with their minds. A zenlike state compels the robots to kiss.

As is often the case, our utopian ideals change. But for us to remain human, we need artists to continue helping us to understand the world around us, even if its increasingly complex or incomprehensible.

Jamie Zigelbaum’s 100 hours per minute does just that. It refers to the video upload rate on YouTube. 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (in 2015).

What does this incomprehensible vastness of visual information look like?

To try to understand it, visitors tweet search terms to @100_HPM using an algorithmically generated, one-time hashtag shown on the installation’s secondary display. These queries go into a queue and the averaged videos are created and presented in real time. Upon completion, the averaged videos are uploaded to YouTube and a link is tweeted back to the searcher.

We are learning how to enter and locomote in Cyberia. Our brains are learning how to exhale as well as inhale in the datasphere.

Dr. Timothy Leary Chaos and Cyber Culture, 1994

Today we’re living inside what Dr Timothy Leary termed ‘Cyberia’ in the 1990s.

Back then, the internet was just being built, and in the Bay Area home of Silicon Valley, it was seen as an extension of the psychedelic era. It was a way to expand the mind and commune with others, without limit.

The internet wasn’t what it is today. According to Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, to access Usenet you had to sign a contract that said you would not send any kind of promotion or advertisement. If you did, you were kicked off.

And that ideal has all but disappeared from daily practice.

So what is science and art today?

These unexpected, but very real gamma ray lobes that extend 25,000 light-years above and below the Milky Way, brought into sharp focus by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with some helpful landmarks to orient ourselves.

This image reveals something quite beautiful, and yet entirely real. Images like these are what some describe as “Space Porn.”

And so while that image can be considered remarkable and beautiful, it isn’t art. Science is, and always has been, the pursuit of what is knowable, calculable, and tangible.

Art is what brings us closer to the unknown or the unknowable. The intangible, the emotions and energy that bind us.

Art expresses what writer Doug Rushkoff recently described in his podcast as "The inexplicable, the immeasurable, the human.”

Much the way painter Jeremey Geddes has no idea what life in outerspace is like, his paintings of astronauts bring us a truth, nevertheless.

Art is a tool we can use to understand our place in the universe. A tool that transcends reason and speaks to our hearts and souls, beyond space and time, beyond cyberspace, too.

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On April 6, join artist Alexis Rockman for a talk about the romanticized and ambivalent view of a pre-industrial rural world in Grant Wood’s landscape paintings. Rockman will also discuss his own longstanding engagement with Wood through landscape paintings that mix contemporary dread and hope for our ecological future.

[Alexis Rockman (b. 1962), The Farm, 2000. Oil & acrylic on wood panel, 96 x 120 in. Courtesy the artist]

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After studying molecular genetics at Ohio State, I went to NYU in the fall of 2000 to study science journalism. This painting, The Farm, by Alexis Rockman was the first piece of art about modern genetics that I ever saw. It was part of an exhibit called Paradise Now--Picturing the Genetic Revolution. I wrote a small piece in Wired about it and have written about the artistic exploration of science ever since.

With its evolving poultry from artisanal cock at left to multi-chicken-wings chicken, lineage of swine ending as an organ factory, and it’s basket-shaped tomatoes, this painting evoked the reason I studied genetics in the first place. It crystalized my awe and concerns. It’s where Science Sparks Art comes from.

I would love to hear this talk, but unfortunately, I arrive in New York a day late!

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Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015. Now at Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

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From the ancient yule log, to catholic and Shabbat candles, in stained glass church windows and intricate mosque shutters, light has been integral to religious and spiritual ceremonies since time immemorial. The Quakers would ‘greet the light,’ as a form of meditation.

So, imagine my delight and surprise of being at the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas during SXSW last month and having a light-induced spiritual encounter at the permanent installation Ellsworth Kelly: Austin.

In January 2015, Kelly gifted to the Blanton the design concept for this a 2,715-square-foot stone building. With white walls and humped roof, the small building looks like a large adobe hut save for the artist’s signature minimalist color blocks..

Yet inside the space, things take on a different scale. The square glass blocks are arranged in a circular pattern. In the East to greet each sunrise, in the West to witness each sunset. The Southern wall and its grid of nine glass squares, allow in the sun year-round.

And it all glows.

In winter, with the Sun lower in the southern sky, the light will rise higher along the walls. In spring, the time between sunrise and sunset will lengthen. In summer, the stronger sun, further north now, will create sharper angled beams to concentrate the light closer to the floor. The summer and winter solstice would be turning points in the programing.

(Of course, if another were built in the southern hemisphere, the opposite would occur.)

Then there is the north facing vestibule, without windows, but with a plinth, the height of two or three people standing on each other’s shoulders. Its form, fluted at the top, gives the impression of shoulders and a sense of infinite expansion.

The single piece of wood, is a tree permutated. To align oneself behind this monolith is to reveal a geometric, geographic crossing of all the other vestibules, and all the playing of light from each translucent, tinted arrangement that together points to something much bigger than ourselves.

Then a new friend whispered to me, “You know where you are in the universe when you’re born. And then you’re told, ‘You live here. Your auntie and grandmother live there.' We start to believe the myth of this place, or that place. We forget that we know where we are in the universe."

Kelly’s installation is a chance for spiritual communion and the sermon is simply to notice the light. And in its changing angles, condition, strength or absence, one can remember that moment of being born, of creation, of the Big Bang itself.

I began studying genetics in the late Nineties. Dolly the Sheep had just been cloned, and I was fascinated by it.

I had a genetics lab, and the first time I successfully isolated DNA from a drosophila fly, I held it up in awe and announced to the rest of the lab that I held “the stuff of life” in my hands.

My outburst elicited nothing but a few eye rolls from the world’s next generation of geneticists. Soon after, I realized the ideas, facts, and implications of science resonated with me far more than the work of science itself.

I still rely on what I learned at that time. An ability to skim through and understand scientific papers, a healthy respect for statistical significance, critical thinking, and most especially, tapping into that original sense of wonder in my writing.

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