circles vs. triangles, hypercubes and starry nights
I planned to go to the first big session of Amp09's year last Tuesday but, due to a headache that has been giving me irregular stabbing pains on one side of my head, I bailed on going. So far I haven't seen any reports to suggest that I actually missed all that much apart from seeing some lovely people, which I think I made up for by going to the Michael Faraday lecture at the Royal Society.
This year's recipient of the award was cosmologist John D. Barrow, whose lecture on the influence of imagery on scientific development, and vice versa, was really interesting, making some fascinating comparisons between scientific research and artistic endeavours. Things like William Parson's Whirlpool Galaxy influence on Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, or the way Thomas Moran's vivid landscapes have influenced the way that photographers render colour in photographs of the Eagle Nebula.
There were all sorts of other interesting things mentioned or alluded to, many related to cartography, such as Florence Nightingale's pie charts; the Arno Peters elongated atlas (dismissed by someone as looking "like long winter underwear hung out to dry on the arctic circle"); andHarry Beck's redesign of the tube map, which Barrow argues is the first topological map.
One artist who intrigued me was Irving Geis, who is most famous for this painting of a whale proteins, which took him about nine months to paint. He wore microscopic glasses and often painted with single brush hairs. I'd heard of this before, but there's a paucity of useful information about him online, which is a bit frustrating.
The other person whose life interested me was Charles Hinton, creator/discoverer of the tesseract, whose father was a free-love espousing polygamist with several wives. Hinton himself was convicted of bigamy and ended up visiting Japan and teaching at Princeton. Interesting life.
There's a video of the lecture online here, although Barrow also wrote an article covering the main points which you can read here.
After that, I dashed down Duke of York Steps to see Jeff Lewis lecturing on Watchmen at the ICA. This was essentially him reading from his 1997 college thesis, and I was sitting in the front row of a dark room, so I unfortunately didn't manage to take any notes.
It was another fascinating lecture, though. It's been years since I even read Watchmen - I never got a copy of my own, because I lived for years with other people who owned it, and I was never overly smitten with it anyway. However, I was infected by Lewis' enthusiasm for the book, and now I really want to read it again with all of his insights in place. He managed to find so many interesting subtleties in Dave Gibbons' artwork - sometimes I wondered if he was only finding the symbolism because he was looking for it, rather than because it was actually there in the first place, but it gave the work so much more depth, that it doesn't matter if it is just a figment of Jeff Lewis' fevered imagination. I'm looking forward to rereading the book and keeping an eye out for all the circles and triangles.
Lewis' lecture style could do with a few more illustrative examples, since he focusses so much on the imagery, and it will definitely improve once he's found confidence in his material, but if you get the chance to attend the lecture I highly recommend it. Thanks to Ade for the ticket, and it was nice to bump into Maartje, too!