Processed

21st-Century Cold War

Nature magazine reported Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has agreed to donate $37.5 million to a project undertaken by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the United Nations Foundation. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is planned as a central repository to preserve the genetic diversity of 21 essential food crops needed to sustain humanity. In the event of catastrophic natural disaster, nuclear war, or plant epidemic, the vault, dug into the side of a mountain in the far north of Norway, would serve as a “last-resort depository of agricultural diversity,” a “doomsday” seed bank including a database of genetic information and a library of seed samples preserved at low temperatures.

One can only applaud the foresight of those responsible for such an undertaking, although in the light of recent forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and this UN Foundation scientific panel, not to mention the continuing proliferation of nuclear technology, it’s chilling to consider the need for it. Architectural renderings (here and here) on the GCDT website depict a facility bearing a startling resemblance to the North American Aerospace Defense Command headquarters in the hills above Colorado Springs. NORAD was a colossal undertaking built in a remote location to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and Canada. The BBC has reported that the security needs of the Global Seed Vault have also been taken into consideration. One shudders to speculate about what the vault might need to defend itself against.

Making an Art of Life

This weekend the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a conference exploring the interface of biology and the visual arts. It was something of a scattershot program, and not completely satisfying. There were some provocative moments, though, and it was interesting to watch a divide emerge between conceptual and figurative methods for visually engaging with the living world, and to catch a glimpse of how this interface might be changing.

In his keynote address, Paris-based curator Jens Hauser established an important distinction that cast a shadow over the rest of the proceedings. Citing works by Wim Delvoye, Eduardo Kac, and other artists who use methods based in biotechnology, Hauser argued for a critical bar to which art interacting with the biological sciences should rise, and that something important is changing. Whereas work a decade ago would abstract images, content, and information from biological objects as source material for largely representative projects, he argued in favor of more recent works that employ biological processes in ways that blur the lines between biology and art. In Hauser's judgment, Kac's genetically engineered rabbit and mice are key examples of this trend.

I didn’t have the sense that any of the artists speaking on Saturday was entirely successful in taking up Hauser’s gauntlet, although there were several high points in the program. Check out Laura Splan’s Blood Scarf, for example, weaved of medical tubing and hooked up to an intravenous feed that fills it with the wearer’s own blood. Many of her pieces explore our queasy relationship with medicine and our bodies. There was also a very entertaining session juxtaposing Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest project and work by Andrew Biewener, a Harvard biologist who studies the mechanics of animal locomotion. For many years, Jansen has been evolving a race of incredible, larger-than-life animals constructed of plastic electrical tubing and able to harness the wind to walk across the Dutch shoreline. See some wonderful video of his creatures at his website, or drive up to Mass MOCA to see his piece in their current show, The Believers.

Michael Joaquin-Grey also presented works that mixed scientific metaphors, although many in the audience seemed more interested in Zoob, a toy system he helped to design. Zoob is a sort of Lego set for the DNA age, and it appears to allow an impressive range of experimentation. For Grey, this tactile experience of play is an important counter-activity to much of children’s play today, which is increasingly conducted on the screen. (On a related topic, see also this interesting article about the vanishing experience of childhood play in open space.)

Running in counterargument to Hauser’s thesis were a number of presentations focusing on the importance of visual representation as a tool for thinking about the tiny scales at which biology happens. For working scientists, images can become essential tools for  organizing data and for thinking about physical entities much too small and complicated to observe with any degree of precision. Columbia University's Wayne Hendrickson explained the importance of computer modeling in his efforts to understand protein structure and interactions, while Jonathan King of MIT discussed the importance of good diagrams to good pedagogy.

Wearing my editorial hat in the coming weeks I’ll be working on producing an eBriefing on the conference. I’ll post a message here when it goes live. For the time being, check out the last arts-related eBriefing we did. You can listen to presentations by V.S. Ramachandran on synasthesia, Margaret Livingstone on what art can tell us about the brain, and Barbara Tversky on good visual communication.

Weekend in L.A.

I’ve never felt much of a draw to Los Angeles, but here are some reasons to make the trip, or at least to experience it vicariously over the Web:

There is a show of new works by Tim Hawkinson on display through September 9 at the Getty Center. If you were lucky enough to see his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 2005, you might also have been inspired to make the trip to 590 Madison Avenue to view the Überorgan, a colossal barrel organ/intestine built from plastic detritus and dime-store electronics. The piece will be shown in the Getty’s main atrium, along with an exhibit of zoological forms “using common household and industrial items and reconfigured images of his own body.” You might consider checking out some clips in this PBS video feature, or ponder the similarities between his piece Signature, which signs the artist's name over and over on small slips of paper, and the famous 18th-century automaton The Writer, designed by Swiss inventor Pierre Jacquet-Droz, which writes Descartes' totemic statement "Cogito ergo sum."

I also stumbled across an unusual enterprise co-directed by Margaret Wertheim, perhaps better known as a science writer whose work appears regularly in major publications. The Institute for Figuring is (for the time being) a primarily Web-based museum exploring the interface between art and mathematics. Visit the site to view several online exhibitions, including a feature on Jeanne Mosely and her Business Card Menger Sponge, which also appeared in the most recent issue of the excellent Cabinet magazine.

My interest has also been piqued in the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It’s exciting to see that closer to home the CLUI has an outpost in Troy, New York, and will be reopening an exhibit on points of interest along the Hudson River. Their website also features lots of online content focusing on unusual land uses across the country. Fans of letterpress printing might also be interested in checking out the International Printing Museum.

It’s a Boolean Universe After All

In everyday parlance, we have an intuitive understanding of what information is. It can be a set of facts that we use to make decisions. It can be a piece of gossip that you hear from a friend. Or it can be whatever is in the back of that truck driving down the “superhighway” of the Internet. For mathematicians and scientists from a broad range of disciplines, however, information has a very specific, and quite different, connotation, and an entire branch of study called information theory has developed over the last century to explain what it is and how it works.

Recently published in paperback, Charles Seife’s book Decoding the Universe is an accessible tour of information theory, and an exploration of why it is so important in the sciences today. Perhaps the key idea that Seife works to communicate is that information is a real, concrete, and physical "thing," capable of being measured and manipulated like other properties such as mass or energy. It is a difficult concept to wrap your head around, but according to the theory, matter, energy, and everything that makes up the universe is reducible to bits, or a collection of physically embodied, yes-or-no, on-or-off propositions that create the code we recognize as higher forms of organization. Anyone reading this online is likely to have heard of the bit in relation to computers, which operate by the manipulation of a binary code expressed in patterns of electrical charges. But it is difficult to fully appreciate the concept when considering that our thoughts, our genetic makeup, and the nature of matter itself all rely on the ability to encode and process information. As researchers have gained the ability to monitor the firing of individual neurons, read the base pairs that constitute the genome, and observe quantum-scale effects, however, it increasingly appears that what appear to be inscrutable, complex processes may be reducible to these simple binary relationships. At the least, the approach has become a very useful set of tools.

Decoding isn’t the type of book that advances a new argument, but it is packed with clear, concise explanations of many of the key concepts that have advanced a certain branch of physics and mathematics in recent years. If you don’t know the difference between Maxwell’s demon and Schrödinger’s cat, or if you want an accessible introduction to some of the current frontiers in physics, this is a great place to start. I did miss more historical perspective, since although information theory as such really only began with Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, there is at least from Renaissance-era bell towers forward a long lineage of devices that articulated principles of information storage and retrieval that would make computation possible. I also wished there had been more about how information is important to the life sciences, and realized that the market is now oversaturated with expositions of the anthropic principle. Nevertheless, the book is recommended.

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Also spotted this week was a superb article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist magazine on the conceptual similarities between computer science and the logistics of running a fleet of freight trains. As train systems became increasingly complicated in the 1880s, a genre of mathematical puzzles developed to explore how to move individual cars around a railyard most efficiently using a limited number of switches. Such problems, according to Hayes, "informed the early years of the development of algorithms and data structures in computer science" while "the theoretical analysis of algorithms has suggested ways for railroads to improve their operations."