Brain Pickings

Art, Science, Food: Kevin Van Aelst

The sweet side of the Periodic Table, or what kitty litter has to do with your DNA.

Jackson Pollock’s near-fractal paintings notwithstanding, science and art have always had a tortured Cold War of a relationship. But photographer Kevin Van Aelst is on a mission to change this — his series of food photography presents scientific and mathematical concepts through creative images of donuts, crackers, gummy bears and other such wildly unscientific snackables.

Cantor Set

Chromosomes

The images aim to examine the distance between the ‘big picture’ and the ‘little things’ in life — the banalities of our daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence.

Cellular Mitosis

The Golden Mean

We’re also quite taken with his fingerprint series — a visceral reminder of how the physical environments we construct reflect the intimate realities of our personas.

Right Index Finger

Right Middle Finger

While the depictions of information — such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or anatomical model — are unconventional, the truth and accuracy to the illustrations are just as valid as more traditional depictions. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Left Pinky Finger

Right Ring Finger

via SEED Magazine

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One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur

What literary genius has to do with indie music icons, a cabin, and San Francisco.

Jack Kerouac was perhaps the last big literary rock star. The avatar of the Beat movement, he skyrocketed into success in the late 50′s after the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road. But, by 1960, Kerouac had fallen victim to his own success, unraveling into addiction, depression, cynicism and a jaded disaffection Beat culture. After a tortured attempt at spiritual revival in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, Kerouac wrote the gritty semi-autobiographical novel Big Sur.

This year, director Curt Worden takes us back to that cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City in One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur — a cinematic journey into the events the book is based on. Narrated by John Ventimiglia of The Sopranos fame, the film stars some of Kerouac’s iconic contemporaries — writers, poets, actors and musicians, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Johnson, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, and Sam Shepard — whose first-hand accounts and reflections come to life in a stunning selection of high-def visual imagery.

But what caught our attention about this film in the first place was its extraordinary soundtrack, an inspired collaboration between Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Jay Ferrar of Son Volt. Recorded over the course of three days in the cabin Kerouac wrote about, the original score is coupled with haunting, intimate lyrics taken straight from the pages of Big Sur — a melodic contemplation of this powerful story of epic talent and epic collapse.

Today, the film opens in theaters and the gem of a soundtrack becomes available on appropriately classy vinyl with DVD. But, if you’d still rather have bits over atoms, you can snag it in good ol’ mp3 form, too.

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Smells Like Modern Art: Six Scents Series Two

What cognitive psychology has to do with experimental film and the smell of roses.

At their most compelling, the creative arts go deeper than the aesthetic brilliance of a beautiful painting or the auditory indulgence of a superb sonata. They explore the boundaries of our perception and the intersection of our senses, our emotions and our intellect. And we don’t normally think of fragrance or the olfactory world as a typical playground of such ambitious art. But experimental project Six Scents is working hard to challenge this assumption.

Six Scents explores the relationship between artist and nature through a collection of fragrances, stories, films, art and photography.

Every year, Six Scents invites six prominent artists to create a series of fragrances for six of the world’s greatest parfumers, with the goal of raising awareness for a chosen charity.

Series Two, this year’s edition, includes three experimental short films, each capturing the stories behind all six fragrances on multiple and very different levels.

Flashback by Marco Brambilla explores the notion of memory through a conceptual collage, creating a kinetic video canvas out of iconographic images in a play on human emotion and cognitive psychology.

Subliminal by Justin Edward John Smith and Alessandro Tinelli captures the emotion and character each fragrance embodies, and how these characters interact with their unique environments.

Contact by Azuma Makoto reflects on the creation of scents and the beauty of the moment through a slow, surreal journey into the materials — roses, dirt, leather, wood, soil, bone — used in making each fragrance.

This year, the effort benefits Pro Natura — an international nonprofit aiming to conserve biodiversity and mitigate climate change by combating poverty, an underlying social and economic trigger for these issues.

Explore Six Scents and immerse yourself in this eerie world of sensory cross-pollination and postmodern creativity.

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