Seeing, Not Believing: Landscapes at Various Scales

I've had the pleasure of collaborating with some amazing artists over the years. One of my favorites is South African ceramic artist Christina Bryer. Her porcelain works comprise intricate geometric patterns. They are nothing short of stunning, and spawn comparisons with some of nature's most elegant architects (i.e., Foraminifera, of course). Another favorite is Katherine Glenday (who wrote the poem recently posted here). Katherine's ceramic vessels are materpieces of form and make beautiful music, too. A few years ago, both artists kindly donated some "kiln failures" for use in an art/science project but, sadly, what we had in mind didn't materialize. Nevertheless, I found them handy in other ways, per below:

Broken fragments of porcelain art donated by Katherine

I like to explore the concept of scale - it's part of my work as a scientist, but it's something that humans often have a hard time with. For example, temporal scales beyond about a century ("several lifetimes") are difficult to reconcile. We can't imagine vast stretches of time, such as a few million years in the past when our ancestral hominids roamed the earth. It's easier and more comforting to reject science and think in a young earth timeframe. (That's my rationalization for certain religious fundamentalist beliefs.)

Likewise, linear dimensions often baffle the mind. Under ideal conditions, most of us can see sub-millimeter objects. Smaller objects than that, however, become a leap of faith without the use of microscopes. To help young students understand the concept of scale (and or fun), I took a piece of porcelain and ground it to dust using a mortar and pestle.

It took about an hour to make dust out of Christina's pieces of ceramic

I sprinkled this dust onto a polished aluminum "stub" and coated it with a thin film of gold to make the dust conductive. Using a scanning electron microscope, the powder looks like rocks and boulders strewn across a mountain highway following a landslide.

Small pieces of dust at the sub-millimeter scale viewed by scanning electron microscopy

Micrometer dust on millimeter dust

And with a little more magnification, we see that each piece of dust is decorated with finer dust particles which are at the micrometer scale.

Nanometer dust on micrometer dust

And if we zoom in on each of the tiniest particles shown above, we see that they are, in turn, littered with even tinier particles. Using different instruments we could proceed down to the atomic scale, and with other types down to the subatomic. It's all there to be seen, and it's all real.

In the same vein, it should be no leap of faith to appreciate that we can accurately date the age of the earth, or the age of the universe for that matter, and accurately chart the evolution of our species from life's simplest forms. Again, the evidence is all there to be seen, and it's real.

But this is not a lesson about belief. What strikes me here is that each microscopic landscape is a vista worthy of exploration and expression in the hands of artists. We just need the right tools to see with, and the skills to depict our findings in ways that are comfortable to live with. It seems so obvious that combining art and science is a powerful, straightforward way to educate young minds.

Turning nomenclature on its side

Today it's snowing like it should be during winters in Albany - some predict as much as two feet (~61 centimeters) will coat the ground. Slippery under foot, slippery under treads, I'll need some traction to walk home from the lab tonight. Which got me thinking about feet and how we, as biologists, name things. Many types of single-celled organisms have structures that serve as "feet" at the functional level. But when naming body parts, structure seems to trump function. Don't ask me why - this is probably a rule made by the ancients. Unfortunately, when I talk to young students about the work we do, the terms used in the lab seem strange and unfamiliar. Like the term "pseudopods," which literally translates to "false feet." The term "aperture," which is a hole in the shell, is another one that glazes over young eyes.




Structural definitions imposed on a shelled protist

 

One theme I've been touching on lately is that protists like forams use these "feet" for feeding as well as locomotion. Sort of like a dog holding a bone (or chewy chew treat) with its feet while it happily muches, belly on the floor.



Terms turned sideways

 I wonder if adding a little humor will help give kids get both the structural and functional concepts? But then again, they'd have to know what "maw" and a "paw" are. Ugh, it's time to brave the weather and slide home on foot ...

Cereal Killers

My colleagues and I give dozens of art/science talks to audiences ranging from 1st graders to senior citizens. They seem to enjoy stories about diving under the ice, watching penguins play, and how we go to the bathroom when it's minus 20. But when it gets to the science, do they really understand the important implications of carnivorous single-celled organisms? Don't ask me where the thought came from, but perhaps a play on words, together with an interesting piece of "art," would help. Ergo, I sat down to illustrate a cereal killer foram. First step: buy a bunch of cereal and resist the temptation to eat it all in one sitting. (I love cereal!)
 


Preparing the palette

I have scads of Japanese rice paper left over from the spitball amoeba project. Might as well adorn it with rice crispy cereal (plus other cerealicious shapes, sizes, and colors). NOTE: I consulted the literature and concluded that this is the first time a foraminiferan collage has been made out of cereal. I hope it becomes a new movement ...




Moving breakfast around

   Artist friends often mention the satisfaction it brings to "push around paint." I fully understand what they mean. It's also rewarding to squirt around glue, and brush around cereal. Lots of fun!

The cereal killer with metazoan prey - just like in nature! (Well, artistic license with the bugs.)

In the end, I depicted Notodendrodes antarctikos with plastic metazoans adorning its branches. It's not accurate, of course, but it was fun to make and serves to illustrate the concept: single-celled carnivores littering the seafloor, eating small invertebrates. Sometimes silly examples can spawn serious discussion that lay audiences can grab hold of and tear apart.

Just like a Notodendrodes with a juvenile starfish. Or me with five boxes of yummy cereal to eat!

Curiosity

One theme of this blog, and of my website, is the intersection of art and science. I delight in conversation with artists, scientists, and educators who share this interest.

As you might gather from previous posts, Claire Beynon has been a constant source of inspiration in exploring the art/science interface. Our projects leave me puzzled at times, but they always foster playful curiosity. We are now collaborating with Schenectady artist/educator Chris Moran to help promote art, science, and their common element of curiosity through an upcoming workshop sponsored by the Capital Region Center for Arts in Education.

A puzzling moment (for me; Claire is amused) in the studio

Curiosity is a powerful driving force. In an evolutionary context, the adaptive significance of curiosity seems quite obvious: It prompts an individual to discover new resources (food, shelter, material goods), to find solutions to problems (e.g., cure an ailment), to select a compatible mate, and to occupy a comfortable social setting. At a personal or psychological level, however, curiosity presents many challenges. The risks and rewards of acting on our curiosity must be weighed carefully in order to optimize the outcome, which is the measure of success (and a definition of wisdom).

Modern science employs a well-scripted process - the scientific method - to act on curiosity. Adhering to this approach provides us with verifiable (more accurately, falsifiable) information which, in sum, has freed humanity from reliance on chance or superstition. Metaphorically, the scientific method provides us with the factual tools needed to navigate successfully the labyrinth of nature.

I wonder if the scientific method can help us explore imagined worlds, where outcomes are not necessarily the product of natural law? This question must have been asked a thousand times already. I'd love to hear from an artist who has formalized hypotheses, conducted controlled experiments, and analyzed the results with some measure of statistical significance.

More importantly, I'd love to know how they measure success. And I wonder if that success defines artistic wisdom...

Art/Science on Ice

Last night, Claire and I presented a talk about our art/science collaboration to the McMurdo Station community. It was the third time we've spoken together and, to be honest, the first time I've felt completely at ease.

In these talks, Claire and I set out to convey the genuine nature of our collaboration. Claire has worked in the lab and in the field "doing science" with me and, likewise, I have worked in her studio "doing art." As a result of this cross-pollination, we are adequately versed in each other's scientific and artistic processes. I think that this is why we can spawn new ideas, provide each other with helpful critiques, and jointly apply our technical skills. In a nutshell, we bounce seamlessly between each other's worlds.

The evening began with an introduction by the McMurdo Station manager, Terry Melton. The story of how Claire and I met at the Devon B&B in Christchurch followed (an interesting tale of serendipity), and then we launched into examples of Claire's art followed by some biological facts about foraminifera. The heart of the talk was a discussion of our InterfaCE project, which involves a process that Claire and I developed to study pseudopod ("false foot") structure and motile behavior of Foraminifera on textured surfaces. Claire's art provides templates for microlithographic fabrication of the substrates that the forams move along. (More thorough descriptions are found on Claire's website or mine.)  We finished by discussing the art/science work we're doing this season in collaboration with Katherine Glenday and Christina Bryer. This year's project involves the use of porcelain grains (derived from Katherine and Christina's pieces) as shell-building particles by the forams that we study. In a sense, it is a collaboration between me, Claire, Katherine, Christina, and Astrammina triangularis :-)

Our talk was structured to be a conversation, hoping to avoid too much didactic content. The approach apparently worked: The people we spoke with afterwards thought that the evening was unconventional, and opened their eyes to the commonalities of art and science rather than their differences.

How could it fail when I'm speaking with Claire about art, science, and Foraminifera?