Origami exhibit at Cowell College opens April 8 with public talks
A physicist and engineer, Lang is a pioneer of the cross-disciplinary marriage of origami with mathematics. Demaine, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done seminal work in the field of computational origami, working with his father, artist and sculptor Martin Demaine, to create abstract origami sculptures representing complex mathematical algorithms.
I promised to write up my trip to ScienceOnline 2012, and I’m going to start at (or near) the end. There was an art exhibit and a film festival at the conference; the art was displayed in a slideshow and the awards were announced at the closing, and the second-to-last session was the film festival.
Physics Sweeps the Online-scars
Winners of the Cyberscreen Science Film Festival at Science Online 2012
I watched the whole film festival and there were so many nice videos, to the point that I am intimidated by the thought of doing a video and entering it into competition (though I would most likely be saved by a screening process). But I still do well by association, because the three winners were all physics-related, showing how talented and good-looking we all are. I know Brian Malow from last year’s conference and got to meet Henry Reich of “Minute Physics” (even if I initially mistook him for someone else. Oops).
Smart Art. Not Schmart Art.
There were number of art entries, and winners in the categories of Most Innovative, Best able to convey complex ideas, and Best science art having to do with daily life, along with some special awards. (I had submitted two cartoons, one of which was accepted, but neither “snarkiest” nor “best cartoon” were on the judging list, so I was forced to compete on artistic merit, which doesn’t end well for me, prize-wise. Maybe next year.)
Here are the winners, and the slideshow of all the entries (my cartoon is at the 9:55 mark)
There was also the work of Perrin Ireland, who not only had entries in the contest, but was live-scribing some of the sessions. There’s a Flickr page of the works and at least one other blog post that has pictures.
To finish this off, here are some pictures I took at the JC Raulston Arboretum on Friday afternoon, giving my camera more of a workout in macro-mode than I normally do. I hope that the other photographers and artists who made the trip put their work online. I saw some of the work the tablet-sketchers did, and they were really good.
“Growing” Furniture Out Of Plastic And Magnets
The key secret ingredient is iron filings in the plastic.
Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane
This is so cool, and artsy as well; like a very complicated moving moiré pattern (which is basically what it is, as far as I can tell). You can see lines emerging, similar to the effect of driving past an orchard with evenly-spaced trees, and glimpsing the far side when you hit a particular “order” of the structure, but there’s so much additional structure in the animation.
I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.
Twenty-one large triangles animated by Melbourne, throughout Federation Square. MÖBIUS is a sculpture that can be configured into many cyclical patterns and behave as though it is eating itself, whilst sinking into the ground. The result is an optical illusion and a time-lapse of people interacting with the sculpture and moving through Melbourne’s landmark location throughout the day.
A fauxgo (fake logo) is a symbol or other small design created to represent a fictional company or organization that exists only on film.
A stunning display of natural birefringence
While the museum probably wouldn’t want you compressing or grinding their crystal ball for piezoelectricity or triboluminescence experiments, the birefringence is boldly sitting out on display.
Close-up pictures of things
‘Gulp’ is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman, depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics. The film has broken a world record for the ‘largest stop-motion animation set’, with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet.