In the early 1800s, as optical instruments like the microscope became more refined, there was a corresponding demand for things to look at and a commercial industry in prepared or mounted slides emerged. Not only did these slides gather and portray an astounding array of natural objects, but the actual mountings are beautifully crafted.
“Many of the slides…use a method of construction wherein the mounting slide (usually a 1″ x 3″ piece of glass or wood) is covered either wholly or in part with colourful gilt decorated lithographed papers. This practice of using paper covers originated as a necessary means to mechanically fasten the mica or thin glass covers that were placed over the specimens, to the main slide. However, the paper covers quickly became more of an expression of decoration and individual presentation than need, as the use of Canada Balsam and other mounting media became widespread. Much of the best early preparers work is immediately recognizable, as they each settled on standard paper colours and graphic designs, which became their trademark of sorts.”
Individual craftsmen – and they do appear to have been men – became known by their particular styles, and slides often bore the name of both the mounter and the optician who sold the slides. I was quite taken by the arranged slides – where many small objects were placed to form designs or patterns. Some of this work was so delicate that it required the use of boar bristles or cat whiskers to manoeuver the tiny objects or pieces into place.
Diatoms (Ernst Thum)
Radiolarians (Amos Topping)
Diatoms, Butterfly Scales, and Spicules (Mounter Unknown)
“A variation on the ‘Arranged Object’ mounts, Exhibition slides [1st and 3rd above] were often considered to be the pinnacle of the commercial mounters art, considering the degree of difficulty in their preparation. Combining various objects, often many 100s (or 1000s!) of individual butterfly or insect scales, diatoms, spicules, etc.; each piece was individually selected and assembled to create pictures or complex geometric arrangements.”
I was also really impressed to learn about microphotos, or those photographic images of “famous people, art works, buildings, geographic landmarks, etc.” that are only visible through a microscope.
There’s just something really astonishing about seeing the moon through a microscope; it messes with everything I understand about scale!
But I think that, most of all, I just love the attention to detail and the value placed on materiality. And I wonder: is there any contemporary or digital equivalent?
I’m doing some historical research right now on human-animal relations, especially those among sheep herders, their flocks and their dogs, and I’ve been completely charmed by New Zealand’s vegetable sheep.
Not to be confused with the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, vegetable sheep are actual plants of the Raoulia species. This “densely compacted, rounded cushion plant grow to several feet across and sometimes two feet high … and the white colour of its flowers and also of the hairy covered leaves gives it the appearance, from a distance, of sheep.”
[Figure 108 Large cushion of the Marlborough vegetable sheep, Haastia pulvinaris. Mt. Cupola, Nelson Lakes National Park. Photo: J. W. Dawson.]
[Figure 109 Close view of a portion of a Haastia pulvinaris cushion showing the branchlet tips closely invested by woolly leaves. Photo: J. W. Dawson.]
“On the shingle-slips the wonderful vegetable-sheep are encountered. These grow not on the shingle, but on the rocks which the stones have nearly buried. Large examples form great hummocks, 6 ft. long by 3 ft. across, or even more. Really they are shrubs of the daisy family, and are provided with a thick, stout, woody main stem and strong roots, which pass far into the rock-crevices. Above, the stems branch again, and again, and towards their extremities are covered with small woolly leaves, packed as tightly as possible. Finally, stems, leaves, and all are pressed into a dense, hard, convex mass, making an excellent and appropriate seat for a wearied botanist … The vegetable-sheep are not inaptly named, for at a distance a shepherd might be misled.”
– L. Cockayne, New Zealand Plants and Their Story, Wellington: Government Printer, 1910
“Though singular and interesting to the botanist, these plants are of no value economically, but, on the contrary, as we have shown, certain species of them are a plague to the shepherds, inasmuch as they give them much trouble and annoyance to discern between an animal sheep and a vegetable sheep.”
– John R. Jackson, “The Vegetable Sheep of New Zealand,” The Intellectural Observer: Review of Natural History, Microscopic Research and Recreative Science, Volume XI, pp. 128-135, London: Groombridge and Sons, 1867.
My first experience with RFID in New Zealand was when I was issued my university ID card – you know, the one that gets you into buildings and lets you check out library books – and I promptly put it in my wallet and forgot about it.
My second encounter with RFID was purchasing a Snapper card for public transit. Recently introduced in Auckland and currently used by one third of Wellington’s population, Snapper works just like an Oyster or Octopus card – what’s with all these sea creature names, anyway? – that cost me $10 to buy and charges me 25 cents every time I top it up or “feed” it at one of many local Snapper merchants (unless I want to pay online by credit card, for which there is currently no charge). Alternatively, the $25 Snapper Reader plugs into your USB port and is marketed as a way for households to “feed schools of Snappers.”
Using Snapper for transit is interesting – especially when you see the “how to” video posted on Go Wellington’s public transit Snapper page. I can’t embed the video here, so you’ll have to follow the link yourselves, but here’s an icon and partial text transcription to familiarise you with the interaction designed for “tagging on” and “tagging off”:
How to tag on correctly
Place your Snapper flat to the reader
Hold card flat and still
Wait for the green circle
How not to tag on
Don’t swipe too fast
Or make quick movements
Remember to tag off
Hold your card flat and still to the reader
And wait for green circle
So basically, the rule is that whether you’re coming or going, be sure to touch the reader and don’t move until you get the green circle. First, this is interesting when you remember that these types of cards are actually contactless – they can be read up to several centimetres and don’t require any touching at all. Second, this is interesting because people seem to want to move the card around so much that they have to be repeatedly told not to. Why do you think that is? Is there really no technological solution that would prevent us from having to adapt or change our behaviour? (Should there be?)
Now let’s consider the “tag on” – “tag off” system.Clearly it’s necessary to calculate the length of a trip, but I’d love to see the technical process made much more transparent and intelligible than in this description:
Q: Why do I need to tag off?
The Snapper system uses GPS (Global Positioning System), to record which stop you get on the bus and where you get off. This information is used to calculate the correct discounted fare for the journey. If you don’t tag off the system assumes that you travelled to the end of the line. The tag off penalty for both GO Wellington and Valley Flyer is the full cash fare. So if you don’t tag off your fare is calculated to the end of the line, and you do not receive the 20% discount.
And what happens when cards/readers/people fail?
Q: My card just gives me a red cross not a green circle. What is wrong?
The Snapper may not have sufficient value stored on it to pay for the fare. If you have plenty of value on your card, then it may be that the bus reader has not read your card clearly. Remove your card from the reader and give it five clear seconds before trying again. Remember to hold it flat and still against the reader and wait for the green circle. Then you are good to go.
So I get the red cross about a third of the time I use my card which suggests I don’t get close enough to the reader or am totally inept at standing still. I am also unable to carry my Snapper card and my university access card in the same wallet because it breaks the system and I get a fail warning. This reminds me that I don’t think it will be very long before I have several RFID cards that will apparently require several different wallets – and that will enable me to move as gracefully as a crash of rhinos. Of course, Snapper have already thought of this and offer local secondary schools the opportunity to embed Snapper tags in their student IDs. But really, is one card/fob that rules them all the only answer?
Incidentally, Snapper isn’t limited to buses – taxis will start accepting Snapper payment in March, beginning with the Total Mobility scheme, “a subsidised taxi service for the 7500 people in the Wellington region who, because of a disability, cannot use regular bus or train services.” And like Octopus or Suica cards, I can also use my Snapper card to pay for items at Snapper merchants (which are mostly dairies or convenience stores). And now that smart card (RFID-enabled) transit is becoming more widespread or normal, it’s the added ability to purchase things via RFID that interests me.
For example, I want to understand if or how it’s any different from the introduction of Interac in Canada or Eftpos in New Zealand – both of which arguably replaced cash years ago? And I wonder what we stand to lose in our never-ending quest for convenience?
“The Snapper USB allows you to feed directly from your credit card and still does everything that a regular Red Snapper does. You can still feed your Snapper USB at any Snapper Retailer, just like a regular Red Snapper and it can be age-enabled so that if you’re at school you’ll automatically get a child discount on the bus. Attach your Snapper USB to your key ring, mobile phone, handbag, or wallet for easy access any time.”
or the new “I Snapper NZ” key tag, which was recently renamed the Snapper Sprat in a public contest. If I can use my existing Snapper card in all the same ways, why would I purchase one of these products? Have they been designed for people who don’t use public transit and want something smaller and sexier?
I also noticed that Snapper CEO Miki Szikszai commented on Timo and Jack’s Immaterials video, saying that they “would love to see if you could map our devices in this way.” This got me thinking about how smart and aesthetically-pleasing videos could be exactly what I want to help customers understand how Snapper uses RFID and GPS – and what is at stake socially and culturally (eg. privacy vs. anonimity, traceability vs. surveillance) if this is the path we choose to follow.
Now I think it’s time to introduce myself to the Snapper folks and see what they’re up to. Stay tuned?
In 1920 Virginia Woolf published a wonderful short story called Solid Objects. It’s most often described as a tale about a politician who sadly gives up politics, but I prefer to think it’s about a man who happily takes up other things.
It begins with his discovery of a piece of glass:
“It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a finger. Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay. Or the oak sides of a sunk Elizabethan treasure-chest had split apart, and, rolled over and over, over and over, its emeralds had come at last to shore.”
I love how such a mundane object, just by being touched and taken in, becomes precious.This is transformation in the true sense. But I’m even more taken by Woolf’s description of how a person can become possessed by objects as well:
“Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything – china, glass, amber, rock, marble – even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there – thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantel-piece.”
What a lovely way to be reminded that if we are able to transform objects, then objects, too, are able to transform us. Continuing with the story, we can further witness John’s almost ecstatic transformation:
“One day, starting from his rooms in the Temple to catch a train in order to address his constituents, his eyes rested upon a remarkable object lying half-hidden in one of those little borders of grass which edge the bases of vast legal buildings. He could only touch it with the point of his stick through the railings; but he could see that it was a piece of china of the most remarkable shape, as nearly resembling a starfish as anything – shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points. The colouring was mainly blue, but green stripes or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind. John was determined to possess it; but the more he pushed, the further it receded. At length he was forced to go back to his rooms and improvise a wire ring attached to the end of a stick, with which, by dint of great care and skill, he finally drew the piece of china within reach of his hands. As he seized hold of it he exclaimed in triumph.”
And eventually, we see that his possessions come to possess him:
“[T]he meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china. As his eyes passed from one to another, the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man. He devoted himself more and more resolutely to the search. If he had not been consumed by ambition and convinced that one day some newly-discovered rubbish heap would reward him, the disappointments he had suffered, let alone the fatigue and derision, would have made him give up the pursuit. Provided with a bag and a long stick fitted with an adaptable hook, he ransacked all deposits of earth; raked beneath matted tangles of scrub; searched all alleys and spaces between walls where he had learned to expect to find objects of this kind thrown away. As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on. Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career – that is his political career – was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour.”
And so, in the end, John was left to his things. One abandoned; the other kept. Both transformed.
This is Luke Jerram‘s glass sculpture of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, from his gorgeous Glass Microbiology series, which includes E. coli, SARS, smallpox and HIV (in order, below).
“These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity.”
“The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception?”
“In response to these questions, Jerram has created a series of transparent, three dimensional sculptures. Photographs of these artworks will be distributed to act as alternative representations of each virus.”
“The sculptures were designed in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol using a combination of different scientific photographs and models. They were made in collaboration with glassblowers Kim George, Brian Jones and Norman Veitch.”
This is a video of glass blower Kim George, working on Jerram’s HIV virus design. Choosing glass as his sculptural material is really interesting, not least because it’s difficult to work with:
“I’m also pushing the boundaries of glassblowing. Some of my designs simply can’t be created in glass, Some are simply too fragile and gravity would cause them to collapse under their own weight. So there’s a very careful balancing act that needs to take place, between the limitations of current scientific knowledge and glassblowing techniques.”
But the translucency of glass is also important: first, because the actual viruses are transparent organisms, and second, Jerram is colour-blind so he has a different, even idiosyncratic, relationship to colourised representations, and this impacts the way he works.
But the matter of authenticity, or authentic representation, is quite complex in this case. While his sculptures may be “truer” representations precisely because they are not coloured, they are even more distanced or abstracted from the “original” viruses in the sense that his designs are based on other pictures and models. Nonetheless, in the Guardian article on Jerram’s work, it’s suggested that the clear glass sculptures look “less threatening than popular scientific imagery would have us believe” and this gets straight to the question of affect.
A quick Google image search yielded these two representations of the HIV virus. While the basic shape is similar, the different colours and textures suggest slightly different—if equally vivid—organisms. I’m not sure I find either one particularly “threatening,” but the one on the right is a bit creepier because it seems to have little hairs or tentacles (which, obviously, creep me out).
But back to the matter of colour. The top image is one of Jerram’s HIV sculptures and the one underneath it is David Sayer’s coloured photograph of another one. While both objects are effectively the same, the artificially coloured one appears more dramatic—which must surely be part of the reason the photo received an award from the Institute of Medical Imaging in 2007. But drama (or fear) is not the only way to move people, and isn’t beauty really just the ability to move and be moved?
For example, Jerram posts a letter he received from a stranger:
Dear Luke,
I just saw a photo of your glass sculpture of HIV.
I can’t stop looking at it. Knowing that millions of those guys are in me, and will be a part of me for the rest of my life. Your sculpture, even as a photo, has made HIV much more real for me than any photo or illustration I’ve ever seen. It’s a very odd feeling seeing my enemy, and the eventual likely cause of my death, and finding it so beautiful.
Thankyou.
This person was clearly affected by Jerram’s sculpture, and did not find it easy to resolve the emotional conflict arising from seeing some sort of beauty in his/her killer. And I wonder, was this affect/effect easier or harder to come by without colour?
But I also wonder if we’re just more effectively convinced by three-dimensional material objects? This becomes particularly interesting in the area of (scientific) data visualisation, which quite simply is not data materialisation. I’ve written many times on the importance of objects in social interaction, and Jerram’s sculptures bring to mind Elias Canetti’s crowds—but those are connections which I’ll have to flesh out another time.
Lucky London-based folks have the opportunity to see all of Luke Jerram’s virology sculptures at The Smithfield Gallery from 22 September to 3 October, 2009 and his H1N1 sculpture was recently acquired for the Wellcome Collection.
Update 16/09/09: I can’t believe I forgot about GIANTmicrobes – here are the plush versions of E.coli, H1N1 & HIV. Talk about different affective potential!
Update 12/10/09: My favourite science mag, Seed, has a short article on Jerram’s work and his focus on “the animation of otherwise hidden phenomenon.” David Ng also chimes in with some thoughts on the “complicated relationship between science and art” – something that might be of particular interest to designers making “conceptual” pieces and the challenge of answering the more empirical or technical concerns of scientists and engineers.
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