Sometimes the simplest visual explanations are the most powerful.  Case in point:  David Liittschwager’s series of photographs in which he shows how much life can be found in one cubic foot. Liittschwager’s team visited five diverse environments including Central Park, New York and Moorea, French Polynesia.  At each location, the team used a 12-inch metal-framed cube to carve out a mini-ecosystem, then observed the plants and animal life that moved in and out of the space, down to one millimeter.  In all, more than a thousand individual organisms were photographed.  Says Liittschwager: “It was like finding little gems.”  Seeing the inhabitants of each environment assembled together, the sheer volume of the collection is awe-inspiring.  One improvement I’d like to suggest: to give each environment some context, I’d like to see the specimens arranged by groups or the layers in which they were found.  Be sure to check out the videos that show how the team documented each eco-system.

Cell Tango is an evolving digital installation that dynamically organizes images transmitted by cellphone based on cellphones’ area codes, carriers, time and date of transmission, and participants’ contributed categories and descriptive tags.  Created by artists George Legrady and Angus Forbes, the exhibit is not so much an artist’s vision as it is an audience vision–one that suggests that everyday images taken with your cellphone camera could, in fact, mean something more.  Legrady suggests:

Will cellphone technology transform how we create/use images produced “on the fly”? In what ways do online visual databanks such as Flickr recontextualize the images we create and share? Can such online images be used creatively as components in artistic works that explore the construction of visual narratives through the juxtaposition of sequenced images? What may be relevant implementation of voice annotation to add metadata to images?

Cell Tango will be on display at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, through December 13.

See also:

George Legrady’s web site

Review of Cell Tango in The Boston Globe

Nikon has announced this year’s winners of its Small World Photomicrography Competition.  Pictured above is the winner for 4th place, a cross-section of an Anglerfish ovary, photographed by James Hayden.  Truly amazing.

Take a look at the Art of Science 2009 Gallery for some stunning images generated by researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines.

The image above is an unusual example in that it starts with an artistic representation. Researchers loaded a bitmap of the Mona Lisa into the memory of a test computer, then examined it after power interruptions of increasing lengths.

The title “The Persistence of Memory” is both literally descriptive of the experiment and a clever reference to Salvator Dali’s most famous painting.

Our Creative Director noticed something peculiar about the photo of Tenoumer Crater in Mauritania taken January 24, 2008, found on boston.com (NASA, Jesse Allen, NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team). The crater didn’t look crater-like; it looked like circle-shaped valley or like a cookie-cutter impression in some dough. After some experiments he discovered that if the crater is rotated 180 degrees, it looks like a crater should. Is it the lighting? Do we presume that light by default comes from the top of a picture? When he placed a second crater on the screen that could be rotated 360 degrees the interactions between the two began to get very interesting. The rotatable crater began to influence our perception of the stable crater. So we made an interactive movie to let you try for yourself. Sometimes you’ll need to look away from the screen to “flip” the image/s after rotation. See what your own experiences are!

The New York Times arranges their collection by category. I prefer the chronological order — and startling juxtapositions — of The Boston Globe’s collection (part 2, part 3).

Sports, politics, war, and disaster predominate, but some of my favorite pictures are those of science and nature, such as this photo from The Boston Globe: