This is a pencil drawing.

Gregory Brellochs

video by John Whitney
graphics programming by Dean Anschultz
music by Terry Riley

This 7-minute video by Brandon Pletsch takes viewers on a step-by-step voyage through the inside of the ear, to the acoustic accompaniment of classical music. Pletsch, a former medical illustration student at the Medical College of Georgia, first built a physical ear model and mapped which frequency ranges hit which parts of the inner ear. He then created digital renderings of each part of the hearing pathway using several software packages. A narrator describes how the sound waves travel through each portion of the ear, and how hair cells translate the vibrations they induce into nerve impulses.

A Semiconductor work by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency. Special Thanks to Andy Kale.

20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.

“Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension. Mathematical vertigo guaranteed!” – Dimensions

Malcolm Sutherland

The innovative stages of scientific investigation involve a definitely aesthetic mode of perceiving and thinking. When observing a phenomenon which is felt to be not understood, the empirical scientist must cast preconceptions aside, and avoid the conventional, classificatory perspective. Since he believes that his existing conceptual system is inadequate to grasp the phenomenon, he must prepare the emergence of new, possibly incommensurable concepts by embedding the concrete experience of the phenomenon in a rich network of analogical and associative projections across different domains. The move to a new conceptual system can only occur through the conscious experience of a formally incoherent state which is strongly reminiscent of the paradoxical “aesthetic concept” (which is emphatically not a concept!) invoked in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft.

From Radical Art

BUMPR show at AS220 in Providence tomorrow (BUMPR=Stephan Moore, Caroline Park, Tim Rovinelli and me), with Ted Hearne + Philip White and Evidence.