Archive by category | Arts

Waltzing for science

The Vienna Science Ball 2017, in the city's Town Hall.

Around midnight on 28 January, hundreds of couples lined up in the splendid ballroom of the Vienna City Hall for the quadrilles — and the Vienna Ball of Sciences became tangibly interdisciplinary. Students, scientists and scholars of myriad fields whose paths would scarcely cross in daily academic life moved gracefully to the waltzes of the younger Johann Strauss. Laughter filled the air as rows of elegantly clad dancers performed (in reasonably perfect composure) the bows and figures of the traditional courtly dance.  Read more

Tracking the propulsive power of science books

Tracking the propulsive power of science books

What makes a science tome so audacious, original and right that it kickstarts a life’s journey, propelling someone to the bench or field? Science writer Ann Finkbeiner (of The Last Word on Nothing) has written about that for A View from the Bridge. And when Academic Book Week fired up on 23 January, I started musing anew about encounters with remarkable books.  Read more

Thomas Bayrle: mesmerising machines

Autobahn (mixed media).

In the 1950s, when the German Pop Art pioneer Thomas Bayrle first trained as a weaver, he says he was “put into a state of trance by the loud and monotonous noise of the machines — until they began to sing”. His more recent artworks, currently on display at an exhibition of wall pieces, light projections, videos and electronically driven sculptures at the Kunstbau gallery in Munich, have a similar mesmeric effect. The ‘continuous-loop’ animations and smoothly moving sculptures, accompanied by monotonous sounds, are hypnotic portrayals of mass production and the complexities of society.  Read more

The making of science

Some of the mycorrhyzal materials made by Maurizio Montalti for Officina Corupuscoli

Scientists are makers. The specialized skills they hone in the lab over many years – from assembling robots and circuits to growing microbes and cells – mirror the practices of artisans such as seamstresses and potters. Chemists may melt, stretch and snap a glass tube to make a pipette. Jewellers rearrange silver atoms each time they warm the metal to anneal or soften it.  Read more

O brave new world of fantastic beasts

O brave new world of fantastic beasts

From the start, European visitors to the New World have celebrated its fantastic biodiversity. What looks like a scarlet macaw embellishes German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, the first to name these lands “America”. Eighty years later the English artist John White, a governor during England’s first attempt at settling North Carolina, was painting fireflies, “which in the night [emit] a flame of fire” (a sight of pure magic on a warm summer’s evening).  Read more

Werner Herzog gets geological

Werner Herzog gets geological

The film Into the Inferno opens with a grand spectacle. The camera glides up and over tiny figures clustered on the peak of the volcanic island of Ambrym in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Far below, an ominous lava lake splutters to a bombastic choral soundtrack. There is a sense of ritualistic grandeur here that sets the tone for what follows.  Read more

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.  Read more

Science fiction: journey to the East

Cixin Liu

Last week’s Chinese Sci-Fi event at the London Literature festival was irresistible: I love science fiction and have a keen interest in the Far East. The star here was Cixin Liu, whose 2008 Hugo-awarded novel The Three-Body Problem is a huge best-seller in China and, since its English translation (Head of Zeus, 2015), beyond. (See Nature’s interview with its translator, sci-fi writer Ken Liu, here.) Liu’s fellow panellist was Xiaolu Guo, the award-winning, genre-defying Chinese novelist and filmmaker now living in Britain, whose works include the 2014 I Am China and 2012 UFO In Her Eyes.  Read more