All posts tagged with art

I work as a web developer for the agency Cogapp, which is based in Brighton, UK. We create websites and other digital services for museums, art galleries, archives and the like, but every couple of months we hold a “hack day”. A hack day involves spending a day working on projects which generally revolve around a particular theme and which ideally we can do in one day. This allows us to get the creative juices flowing and to further our agenda of innovation.

The theme this past hack day at Cogapp was ‘Museum APIs’, but the looser interpretation was that we were to use open data provided by museums in our projects. I was inspired by the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr which is a massive collection of free-to-use scientific images. I immediately knew I wanted to utilise this resource as I love scientific illustrations of nature.

I’ve also had an interest in Machine Learning for a while and I recently discovered Derrick Schultz and his YouTube channel Artificial Images. Here he publishes videos of his Machine Learning courses which he runs for people who want to use ML for creative purposes.

I watched Derrick’s tutorials on training a StyleGAN Neural Network and the things he was saying made a degree of sense to me, plus he had published a handy Google Colab notebook with step-by-step code, so I decided it was something I might be able to have a go at.

Art is an integral part of scientific investigation and documentation. Before the advent of photography, illustrations were used to capture the natural world and share it with broader audiences through reproduction via woodcuts, engravings and etchings, and lithography in natural history publications. Even today, scientific illustration is important, articulating morphological, physiological and anatomical features with more detail and clarity than can often be captured through photographs.

Scientific illustrations are useful for communities in a wide range of disciplines. Our audiences have shared how they use these illustrations to support studies in the sciences, such as identifying the earliest observations on heterostyly in plants, researching the history of herbaria, and revisiting the legacy of women in science. Citizen scientists make use of these resources on platforms like Wikipedia and to research the identities of natural history artists.

Given that these illustrations are works of art, it’s not surprising that these collections are also providing a wealth of inspiration for artists like Dee Etzwiler, who recently used BHL images within nine pieces she created for a group show — Conversations: Reflections of 14 Women Artists — exhibited at the Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, OR) from 10 January – 7 February 2020.

Vanity, an art installation by Joseph Gregory Rossano created for and with the support of the Museum of Glass (MOG) in Tacoma, Washington, tells the story of eleven species and subspecies, presumed extinct, presented through the lens of humanity’s role in their demise. The exhibition features historical accounts detailing each species’ “discovery” (collection date, type locality, collector, scientific illustrations, etc.), humanity’s role in its extinction, and the year it was declared “Extinct”. To produce these species tales, Rossano collaborated with Sandra I. Berríos-Torres, MD. Berríos-Torres served as author of the 11 historical accounts and as Editorial Director of the exhibition catalogue, on behalf of Joseph Gregory Rossano.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library was a crucial resource for Berríos-Torres. Consulting dozens of publications in BHL while conducting research for Vanity, she ultimately cited 16 of them in the historical accounts that were incorporated into the exhibition and catalogue.

Emile-Allain Séguy was a popular French designer throughout the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements of the 1920s. Often confused with the French entomologist Eugene Séguy who was active during the same time period, E.A. Séguy designed primarily patterns and textiles and was heavily influenced by the natural world. He was particularly fond of the intricate patterns and beauty of insects (Eugene would have approved), which he saw as “mechanic wonders” that provided abundant inspiration for interior design (Schiff, 157).