BETTER
LIVING THROUGH MUSIC: There's a growing body of science that
shows sound has a very pronounced effect on the body. The big
challenge is finding the right mix of sounds and music that works
for you. Music created specifically for relaxation is often lumped
together derisively by detractors as New Age or metaphysical music.
But the reality is that the types of recordings that fall under this
banner are incredibly diverse, though they are almost exclusively
instrumental (if you don't count the chanting). Globe
and Mail (Toronto) 11/07/00
SMILING
SCIENCE: A neuro-scientist believes the enigma of the Mona
Lisa's smile might be due to an optical trick. "If you look at
the painting so that your gaze falls on the background or on Mona
Lisa's hands ... it would appear much more cheerful than when you
look directly at her mouth." Discovery
11/30/00
LOST
IN SPACE: How
come it's always the engineers that get to go up in space? Well,
obviously there are some good reasons. But designer and
choreographer Richard Seabra wants to "send artists and
performers into space to work in a special art module that he wants
to become part of the International Space Station (ISS). Seabra
wants to see to it that the arts and humanities are given a
permanent place in space, that science moves aside to make room for
the bounty of other cultural pursuits humans value. Space.com
04/23/00
THE
FINE ART OF OPPOSITION: Science is
changing our moral world. In turn, artists respond to its
discoveries and challenges. "The 'artistic' culture
differentiates itself from the scientific culture by cherishing the
individual gesture and scribble, and very often by characterising
itself as the subversive, the destabilising, the contrary." New
Statesman 04/10/00
MY
BODY MY ART:
A number of artists are tapping
into a vein of concern about what some see as runaway technology in
medical science. "The debate's over what we do with our bodies
- science is catalyzing these debates - but where they play them out
are culturally, personally, and legally. The artwork becomes a
corporate body to mimic what happens in reality."
Wired
05/15/00
UNDERSTANDING
IMPRESSIONISM: In the spring of
1886, your opinion of impressionism seemed determined by whether you
lived in Paris or New York: "In New York, critics aligned
impressionism with cubism by emphasizing their rationalist aspects,
whereas in Paris their differences as perceptualist and
structuralist modes took priority." A 21-page pamphlet entitled
"Science and Philosophy in Art" was circulated at an
exhibition in New York and eventually made its way back the
French impressionist painters, who took it up excitedly and
distributed it amongst themselves. The writer turned out to be
a 29-year-old American woman chemist, Helen Cecilia de Silver
Abbott, whose particular defense of impressionism was before its
time. American
Art Spring 2000
FREEZE
FRAME: Eccentric Englishman
Eadweard Muybridge discovered the photographic system that would
revolutionize scientific understanding and the process for
naturalist art. Was this dedicated craftsmen "a mad
scientist, promoting his lab experiments as photographic art? Or was
he an artistic opportunist, using science to gratify his flair for
fantasy?" Civilization
06/00
THE
SCIENCE OF ART: Until recently picture
conservation has been a somewhat sensual, hands-on and almost
medieval craft. No longer. New scientific methods unlock secrets.
"When Rembrandt painted white preparatory ground on his
canvases, little did he realise that some 350 years later a
scientist would be interested in the tiny fossils it
contained." Financial
Times 01/13/00
SCIENCE
OF ART: The scientific community has discovered the arts world,
investing in arts projects. The artists bring outside-the-box
thinking with their projects. New
York Times 02/03/00 (One-time
registration required for entry)
VAN
GOGH'S ASTRONOMY: It's not unusual to know the year a famous
painting was done, but the exact hour? Van Gogh's "White House
at Night" has been pinned down quite precisely: 7 PM on the
16th of June, 1890. The information comes, not from Van Gogh, but
from astronomers who studied the position of Venus in his nighttime
sky. New Scientist 02/28/01
CANALETTO
TO THE RESCUE:
Climate-change specialists and preservationists hoping to save
Venice from damaging floods and sinking are studying Canaletto’s
18th-century paintings for clues to what the city’s
sustainable water levels should be. Canaletto painted his cityscapes
using a camera obscura, and thus they are a remarkably accurate
measure of optimal flood levels.
BBC
2/15/01
