Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Gorgeous



I love technology, and I love when people find interesting ways of using it to create art.

Via the NY Times, take a look at the amazing images scientist Thomas Eisner is creating with a common color copier. Eye-Catching Images of Nature, Made With a Common Machine
In 1952, Thomas Eisner, a graduate student at Harvard, drove around North America for two months with a fellow student, Edward O. Wilson, to see the country and its insects. For the past half century, Dr. Eisner, now an emeritus professor at Cornell, continued his travels in the fields of entomology, evolutionary biology, chemical ecology and conservation. Some of his best-known research was on the explosive chemical outburst of the bombardier beetle, which he and his colleagues analyzed and photographed.

snip

Recently, however, the limitations of Parkinson’s disease led Dr. Eisner to explore the capabilities of a new tool for capturing the natural world: the color copier. Now commonly available, the copier, he writes in an e-mail message, “can serve for the inventive generation of imagery, for composition of novel pictorial arrangements, and in that capacity find use in the expression of fantasy.”

Go read the whole thing, and take some time to look at the photo gallery on the NYTimes Website. The images are exquisite.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A most elegant picture. I didn't know the bed of a copier had depth.

four legs good said...

It doesn't. He lays the objects on the copier glass and then gently drapes black velvet to block out the light.

Easy and lovely.

ThePoliticalCat said...

Excellent article. Thanks! Off to read more about Wolf-Rayet stars, now.