The Ascent by XXXY is equal parts art installation and carnival ride.
About the project:
The Ascent is a live-action performance installation that allows individual participants to levitate over 30 feet into the air through interactive sound and lighting via the power of their own focus and meditation.
See how it works:
Pieces from Angela Palmer’s Life Lines London exhibit on display through June 15 at the Waterhouse & Dodd gallery.
About the exhibit:
Waterhouse & Dodd’s upcoming show by Angela Palmer takes the viewer on a journey through space and time. Using digital information provided by MRI and CT scans, Angela peels back layers to uncover a hidden natural world and ‘maps’ these patterns onto individual sheets of glass. These are encased to form beautiful sculptures outlining the complexity and elegance of not just the human body. “From certain angles, above and from the side, they become invisible, mere glass. From other vantage points, however, they are exquisite celebrations of when the ordinary become extraordinary. Palmer simultaneously maps the natural and the sublime.” Andrew Billen 2012.
39 Brains Form a Flower by Pablo Garcia-Lopez. Garcia-Lopez holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry from Autonoma University, and a PhD in Neuroscience. His work explores the connections between Neuroscience and Art.
About the work:
[His work is] directly influenced by Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s idea that “the cerebral cortex is similar to a garden filled with innumerable trees, the pyramidal cells, that can multiply their branches thanks to an intelligent cultivation, sending their roots deeper and producing more exquisite flowers and fruits every day.” (Cajal, 1894)
Garcia Lopez’s sculptures and prints explore the themes of sprouting, branching, budding and pollinating, in the brain as in a garden. The artist says that “Cajal’s romantic and naturalistic visual metaphors inspired his projects against the current mechanistic models that have dominated science during the latest centuries, helping to mechanize the body and the mind.”
Olfactory bulb image by Camillo Golgi, 1875
In 1875 the physician Camillo Golgi invented the reazione nera (black reaction) cell-staining technique, which allowed anatomists to view individual neurons in their entirety for the first time. Potassium dichromate and silver nitrate are added to preserved nervous tissue, and the neurons become visible as tiny silver chromate crystals form inside the cells.
Golgi used the technique to make detailed neuronal maps, such as this drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb, made in the year he discovered the reaction. The technique became widely known as “Golgi’s method” and marks the beginning of modern neuroscience.
Click here to see other images from the book Portraits of the Mind by Carl Schoonover
The BrainCar by Olaf Mooji
From WHOA:
The BrainCar was created by Rotterdam artist, Olaf Mooji, and is a mobile sculpture that features a brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. During the day, the vehicle drives around (operated by a human driver, obviously) and captures and stores images and video from its travels. During the night, the footage is remixed and projected from within the brain sculpture and visible to passersby on the outside. Mooji’s body of work involves the alteration of motor vehicles in pieces that express the nearly psychological connection between drivers and their cars. In the case of the BrainCar, Mooji wondered what it would be like if “…the car itself could experience with a kind of consciousness its own passage through spacetime.”
Read more…
A wonderful promo for TEDxAmsterdam 2011: Human Brain #1 (dress rehearsal) (by tedxams)
A collection of 158 drawings and watercolours from the hundreds Baker drew daily between 1997 and 2008, it is an “astonishing insight” into the artist’s journey to recovery after she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996, said Mind, and “a graphic, often darkly comic insight into the life of an artist grappling with huge internal upheavals”.
It may not be anatomically correct, but I find any sort of representation of how the brain imagines itself quite fascinating.
Yaron Steinberg created a giant installation of what he imagines his brain looks like, completely made of cardboard. The amazing thing is he imagines his brain as some kind of barreo, made up of hundreds of tiny houses with all kinds of tiny lights and windows.
You can see more of the installation (including video) here.
Images from the Mind Exhibition in Dresden, Germany.
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