Category Archives: Communication

The artist as astronaut

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Probes is an inventory of space probes, which examines how the aesthetic of such craft has changed over time, as well as how functionality of design intersects with its cultural underpinnings. Mir views space probes as substitutes for human explorers, romantically searching for connection in the Solar System.

Artist Aleksandra Mir views space probes as substitutes for human explorers, romantically searching for connection in the Solar System. Her piece Probes (on floor) — part of her major work Space Tapestry — is an inventory of these craft, examining how their aesthetic has changed over time, as well as how the functionality of design intersects with its cultural underpinnings. {credit}Tate Liverpool{/credit}

 

3Q: Aleksandra Mir

 In 2014, Aleksandra Mir began a journey into the unknown. The London-based artist started talking with scientists and engineers about space — a realm in which she was a complete novice. The result of Mir’s dive into the cosmos is Space Tapestry, a vast wall hanging 3 by 200 metres, hand-drawn — in collaboration with 25 young artists — with fibre-tipped pens on synthetic canvas. Inspired in part by the eleventh-century depiction of Halley’s Comet on the Bayeux Tapestry, the work unfolds like a giant graphic novel to explore the unfathomable distances of space, the quest for extra-terrestrial life, and the impact of space technology on humans – from observing Earth to the politics of space. As the piece goes on show at Tate Liverpool, UK, Mir talks about her quest to get under the skin of science.

Why did you choose this format for Space Tapestry?

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Mir’s work Ring Nebula emerged from conversations with Jayanne English, an astronomer involved in creating Hubble telescope images. To move beyond the “ice-cream” coloured swirls that Mir views as “trashy”, they experimented with capturing the same information in a black-and-white sketch in which the angle of cross-hatching represents different phenomena.{credit}Aleksandra Mir{/credit}

I wanted to create an immersive environment, almost like a stage set. And I wanted to introduce a new aesthetic. Whenever you see a science illustration you get what I call the “sleazy aesthetic”: supposed to convey fact but made to seduce with their slickness, intense colours and airbrushed surfaces. There are other ways of picturing phenomena that can be as realistic. And some phenomena beyond our technologies or perception can also be portrayed poetically. This is where art becomes relevant to science. My original inspiration for the project was the 1066 Bayeux Tapestry. It features a very early portrayal of Halley’s Comet: you have this little group of characters staring out in horror and fascination, and there’s this simple line drawing of the comet. What was interesting to me is that it doesn’t look anything like an actual comet, but conveys a tremendous amount of scientific information – it has a direction, a velocity and luminosity – which makes it valuable for contemporary scientists. So this became the key to my ‘tapestry’: images with validity for the science community, but also treated in a very poetic, freestyle, emotive and personal way.

You’ve explored many issues over your 25-year career. Why space, and why now?

Space has been a strand of my work for a very long time. My family watched the Moon landing in 1969 in Poland (which was then behind the Iron Curtain), and this left a powerful mark on me. My best-known work is First Woman on the Moon, the transformation of a beach in the Netherlands into a lunar surface in 1999, in response to the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11’s feat. The video of this event has been touring for 17 years now. And I recently realised that while the gist of the work is still valid – no woman has yet set foot on the Moon – I needed to catch up on the achievements of today’s space industry. I attended my first space conference in 2014 and was sold on a world that for me was like an alien planet. I had to learn a new language. I spoke to a lot of scientists about their daily lives. And once you start looking at that from my perspective as an artist and anthropologist, a natural philosophy and sort of magic embedded in these practices reveals itself. I was never interested in science fiction. Science has everything of interest to me. I think that the whole scientific project is a romantic project, the chasing for a connection, the yearning for depth, taking on a challenge, risking everything for a passion, the struggle.

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Get on Da Spaze Buz – a detail in Mir’s Space Tapestry: Earth Observation & Human Spaceflight.{credit}Modern Art Oxford{/credit}

What did you learn about scientists and science?

Working on the Space Tapestry project has given me access to some extraordinary scientists, locations and visuals. Among those I interviewed was Jan Woerner, director-general of the European Space Agency. Marek Kukula from the Royal Observatory Greenwich has been one of my main advisors, and molecular astrophysicist Clara-Sousa Silva has been a huge inspiration. I visited high-security sites such as Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, UK; and saw the network control centres at Inmarsat and the Satellite Applications Catapult, both depicted in my drawings. I was allowed to ask tons of naïve questions, be critical, playful and absurd at times, which has connected and educated me in a big way. I can now hold a conversation in this realm, and in 2015 I was invited as a speaker at the UK Space Conference myself.

Solar system

The Solar System series, part of Space Tapestry: Faraway Missions, aims to help viewers find more poetic and metaphorical ways to think about distances that are impossible for the human brain to grasp.{credit}Tate Liverpool{/credit}

There is a newfound dialogue with scientists who are reaching the understanding that they also have been working in isolation.  I have also realised that the sophistication of their projects, the enormous budgets and the long timespans can in no way ever be comparable to what I, as one artist, can do. So, if anything, I have gained a greater respect for science. One conversation I’ve had with scientists, though, is that you don’t always have to be heroic and successful to garner respect. To struggle, fail, be tired and dirty is part of our nature and a fundamental part of all human exploration. Artists know how to draw power from it and I think my project both humanizes and makes science more credible.

Mr's piece First Woman on the Moon (video, 1999).

Mir’s piece First Woman on the Moon (video, 1999).{credit}Aleksandra Mir{/credit}

Interview by Elizabeth Gibney, a reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @lizziegibney.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Space Tapestry is on display in two parts: Faraway Missions will be at Tate Liverpool until 15 October; Earth Observation & Human Spaceflight will be on display at Modern Art Oxford until 12 November. An accompanying book forming part of the Space Tapestry project, We Can’t Stop Thinking About the Future, is also available, and includes 16 interviews with space professionals.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Chasing Coral: beauty and destruction

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Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson

Images shot by the Chasing Coral crew graphically show the progress of the coral bleaching event in xx over xx days.

Images shot by the Chasing Coral crew graphically show the progress of the coral bleaching event that began in 2014.{credit}Chasing Coral, courtesy of Netflix{/credit}

First we take the plunge, off the boat and into the blue. Once the bubbles clear, wonders emerge. Guided by the camera, the eye is initially drawn to the obvious: turtles, rays, eels, jellies, fish. But the star of this show is a different kind of animal. The focus shifts, and we see a variety of fabulously intricate and colourful structures, some branched like trees, others spiny and globular. Each edifice in this marine metropolis was erected by corals — master builders now under unprecedented threat.

Director Jeff Orlowski begins his latest documentary, Chasing Coral, with this view of living abundance. Soon enough, we see death. Images of reefs left white and mostly lifeless give way to apocalyptic footage of dead corals, covered in algae and disintegrating in murky waters. Orlowski’s film, which launched on Netflix on 14 July, reveals the shocking reality of the global bleaching event that began in 2014, spurred by human-driven climate change and only now coming to an end.

Jeff Orlowski filming corals on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.

Jeff Orlowski filming corals on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.{credit}Richard Vevers/Chasing Coral, courtesy of Netflix{/credit}

There are similarities between Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice, Orlowski’s 2012 documentary about melting glaciers, right down to the focus on time-lapse imagery to capture environmental degradation. But where Chasing Ice centres on James Balog, a National Geographic photographer who set up the Extreme Ice Survey to document ice shrinkage, Chasing Coral features, along with leading coral researchers, a curious collection of characters who embark on a technically daunting effort to document the transition from life to illness and death on a coral reef. The result is a fast-paced narrative arc that manages to carry a full-length film about global warming, the ultimate slow-boil.

Orlowski doesn’t hide anything. In fact, he becomes part of his own narrative through that of Richard Vevers, the man driving the project. A former advertising executive turned ocean activist and underwater photographer, Vevers relates how in 2010,  he decided to put his talents to better use: saving corals. After seeing Chasing Ice in 2013, he decided to contact Orlowski, who – in an intriguing meta-moment – makes an appearance in the film to talk about the genesis of the project.

A panoramic view of fluorescing and bleaching corals in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, in March 2016.

A panoramic view of fluorescing and bleaching corals in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, in March 2016.{credit}The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey{/credit}

To its credit, Chasing Coral goes beyond personalities and crises and gets into the science – as well as the challenge of communicating that science and raising public awareness. “One of the biggest issues with the ocean is that it is completely ‘out of sight, out of mind’,” Vevers says. “And that is an advertising issue.”

The first step the crew faced was acquiring a high-quality camera capable of operating underwater remotely for weeks at a time. Enter View into the Blue, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, that adapted a high-resolution underwater camera – with its own wiper system to keep the domed-glass housing case clean –  for the project. Step two: figure out where to deploy the camera. Glaciers are easy to identify and visit, and nearly all of them are melting now. But setting up a time-lapse camera to capture the death of a coral reef due to warm ocean currents requires considerable planning and a measure of serendipity.

Mark Eakin, who heads the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, provided forecasts and guidance on where to deploy. Vevers and the team figured out how to power the camera and retrieve data, but an initial deployment in Hawaii failed: the cameras lost their focus after the first shot. A second try on the southern Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia, saw the warm waters (fortunately) failing to arrive.

A reef decimated by warm-water currents.

A bleached reef.{credit}Chasing Coral, courtesy of Netflix{/credit}

So the team ditched the automation altogether and moved north to Lizard Island, and on to New Caledonia. Here, they manually photographed dozens of sites each day for 40 days. It worked. At one location after another, we see a rapid decline from vibrant colour and biodiversity to whitening and death. At this point the film switches to the emotional journey of ‘coral nerd’ Zachary Rago. “I’m not even sad that we are leaving, because it’s so miserable here,” Rago says when the job is complete.

Basic science is interwoven throughout. Through coral researchers such as Ruth Gates and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, we learn about the fascinating lives of corals, which operate as a collective to build and maintain an ecosystem that supports thousands of animals, from clown fish to sharks. We hear about the symbiotic relationship corals have developed with the algae living inside them, which provide their hosts with colour and energy through photosynthesis. And we see what happens when temperatures rise: the algae shut down and corals kick them out.

Chasing Coral also brings home the implications of decades of research. This latest global bleaching event, bolstered by a powerful El Niño in 2015-2016, is the third in recorded history; the first was in 1998. Research suggests that most of the world’s corals could perish within a few decades from rising temperature and ocean acidification without immediate action to halt greenhouse gas emissions.

The film mostly glosses over the scientific endeavour itself, however. After all, Vevers is the executive director of the XL Catlin Seaview Survey, a bonafide research initiative that launched in 2012 to catalogue the world’s corals (as Nature has reported here and here). But it’s a minor point. In the end, the film accomplishes its goals. Nobody knows precisely what an ecological collapse would mean for the oceans, but Chasing Coral makes it abundantly clear that it won’t be pretty. And perhaps that’s enough to inspire action.

Jeff Tollefson is a reporter for Nature based in New York. He tweets at @jefftollef. 

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Darwin Day: a poem on the Sandwalk

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Posted on behalf of Philip Parker

Charles Darwin (engraving adapted from photograph, in Francis Darwin (ed.), Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1891).

Charles Darwin famously built a circular path in the grounds of Down House near Orpington, Kent, soon after he moved there in 1842. It became known as the Sandwalk, a gravel-lined oval walk around the trees and bushes he planted. He called this his ‘thinking path’ and walked it morning and afternoon, often with his fox terrier Polly, observing seasonal changes, while mulling over his most difficult problems.

The Sandwalk has inspired me too. To celebrate Darwin Day — which marks the evolutionary biologist’s stunning achievements on his birthday, 12 February, each year — I wrote a sestude (a piece of 62 words) as part of 26 Postcodes. This project of not-for-profit UK organisation ‘26’ paired 26 writers each with a different postcode, which we visited literally, and in our imagination, to spark a piece of writing. I wrote ‘Last Circuit of the Sandwalk’ (below) after visiting Darwin’s house at BR6 7JT.

The Sandwalk at Darwin's home, Down House near Orpington, Kent.

The Sandwalk at Darwin’s home Down House near Orpington, Kent.{credit}Tedgrant at English Wikipedia.{/credit}

I knew from the outset that I wanted to reflect Darwin’s humanity, as well as the scope of his achievement, and that the piece would be in two parts. The first part attempts to present Darwin as a person, not an icon. Down House was his home for the last 40 years of his life, where he brought up his children and wrote his masterwork On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). His favourite child was Annie. She died at the age of ten and Darwin nursed her in her final weeks and wrote movingly of the loss. His writing indicates that he most likely became agnostic.

Down House was also Darwin’s laboratory. He was a practical scientist using garden and greenhouse for experiments, or laying out skeletons of birds on his billiards table, or indeed dissecting barnacles (his pioneering classification of barnacles made his reputation as a natural historian).

Visitors to Down can walk into his study, where his furniture has been returned including his wheeled armchair, and see what remains of the garden experiments. And you can tour the Sandwalk. While early drafts of the sestude concerned the house, my research on the Sandwalk was the ‘way in’. I saw Darwin, a venerable old man, standing on the gravel path looking back on his life, his journey.

Interior of Darwin's study at Down House in 1932.

Interior of Darwin’s study at Down House in 1932. {credit}Wellcome Images, images@wellcome.ac.uk, Wellcome Library, London. {/credit}

The letters of his children recollect how they played on the Sandwalk. At least 15,000 of Darwin’s own letters survive and have been diligently digitised by Cambridge University. The Victorian post was the internet of its day. A letter could be written and posted after breakfast, and a reply delivered back to the sender by teatime. In this way Darwin discussed his ideas and requested evidence and information from hundreds of colleagues worldwide, as well as eloquently replying to his critics.

These letters were most important to me. They show the man. He robustly defends his ideas, but also shows immense consideration for the feelings of his peers and family, reiterating his friendship. In them, he appears to me to be the most self-effacing and kind of souls.

The second half of my piece conveys his evidence-gathering and crystallising into the coherent theory he so elegantly described in what he refers to as Origin. It was because he had the most unusually broad but detailed knowledge of geology, botany and zoology that he could assemble the tens of thousands of pieces of evidence and begin to work out the mechanism of evolution, his specimens going back to his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle in the 1830s, finches’ beaks included.

Darwin’s many journeys culminated in the book, arguably one of the most influential of all time.

 

LAST CIRCUIT OF THE SANDWALK

Your kind, lined face peers into the thinking path. Fifty years, concentrating on millions.

Annie’s ghost dances round the birch you planted. Faith interred with her.

A closing correspondence. Evidence encircling the Earth, reaching kin, collaborators, critics. Your crystal mind the core.

Charting immense horizons of Beagle, beaks, barnacles. Focused to a final orbit of the Sandwalk. Tracing the elongated ‘O’. Origin.

 

Philip Parker is strategy manager for Royal Mail Stamps. The opinions expressed in this article are his own. He tweets at @parkerpj01. Find 26 Postcodes on Facebook and Twitter, and join the discussion at #26postcodes.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit  www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.