Archives for the Month of March, 2015

The Rhetoric of Weird Wonders Gleefully Carousing in Morphospace : The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr Collection

EchinothuridenPlate from Anatomie der Echinothuriden – Walter Schurig [1906]

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global biodiversity commons.

Scientific illustration, especially of a biological kind, reached an apex in terms of draughtsmanship and delicateness during 19th century before photography become widespread. Though the emphasis on these illustrations was on accuracy, utility and facsimile of biodiversity, the personal aesthetics of the artists inevitably wrestled their way into the frame.

Ernst Haeckel’s brilliant illustrations are the canonical example of this kind of treatment. The imperfect geometries of real world protists and radiolarians were rectified to a crystalline precision and made perfect. Haeckel’s organisms are made to appear to behave like tiny machines. Their colours are over saturated and amplified to the point of psychedelic hyperreality. The revisions in his illustrations were sometimes made to fit theories that defined his own slant on Darwinian evolution. This was taken to the extreme in Haeckel’s embryology illustrations that he hoped would popularise his ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ theory.

Biologische_Untersuchungen02Plate from Biologische Untersuchungen – Gustaf Retzius [1890]

Biologische_Untersuchungen02Plate from Biologische Untersuchungen – Gustaf Retzius [1890]

MedusaPlate from Die Medusen – Otto Maas [1897]

MedusaPlate from Die Medusen – Otto Maas [1897]

crinoid_genus_ScyphocrinusPlate from On the Crinoid Genus Scyphocrinus and its Bulbous Root Camarocrinus – Frank Springer [1917]

Æolididae0Plate from Æolididae e famiglie affini del porto di Genova pt.1 – Salvatore Trichese [1879]

Rummaging through the BHL Flickr account will give you an idea of how much material is available for research – more than 2000 albums of plates from manuscripts and proceedings. It amounts to well over 100,000 images. Each album contains annotations and links to the original publications which can be downloaded or viewed online. The title of this post, ‘The Rhetoric of Weird Wonders Gleefully Carousing in Morphospace’, is fragment of a sentence taken from Richard Dawkins’s excellent book The Ancestor’s Tale.

radiolarianPlate from Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria) – Ernst Haeckel [1862]

radiolarianPlate from Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria) – Ernst Haeckel [1862]

naked_eye_madusaPlate from A Monograph of the British Naked-Eyed Medusæ – Edward Forges [1848]

Plate from Denkschriften der Medicinisch – Ernst Haeckel [1879]

Here’s a pick from the collection (the illustrations above are taken from these monographs):

A Monograph of the British Naked-Eyed Medusæ – Edward Forges [1848]. Monograph can be found online here.

Æolididae e famiglie affini del porto di Genova pt.1 – Salvatore Trichese [1879]. Monograph can be found online here.

Die Medusen – Otto Maas [1897]. Monograph can be found online here.

Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria) – Ernst Haeckle [1862]. Monograph can be found online here.

An Account of the Indian Triaxonia – Franz Eilhard Schulze [1902]. Monograph can be found online here.

Anatomie der Echinothuriden – Walter Schurig [1906]. Monograph can be found online here.

Spongiaires de la mere – Duchassaing de Fontbressin & Giovanni Michelotti [1864]. Monograph can be found online here.

Denkschriften der Medicinisch – Ernst Haeckle [1879]. Monograph can be found online here.

On the Crinoid Genus Scyphocrinus and its Bulbous Root Camarocrinus – Frank Springer [1917]. Monograph can be found online here.

Biologische Untersuchungen – Gustaf Retzius [1890].

Further reading:
Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations – Nick Hopwood [PDF]

Selected Tweets #23: Polyhedra, Primes, Pathogens.

Selected tweets from my Twitter stream @MrPrudence [Summer 2014] with occasional addition annotations:

Going Into Detail - Peter RichardsonGoing Into Detail – Peter Richardson

Going Into Detail – Peter Richardson on metaphorical and geological boundaries illustrated with height-map globes.

Basrah Zoom – Jonathan Cecil’s satellite imaging data of geologic & urban structures reconfigured into a planetoid.

Mathematical Equations as Architectonic Forms. Bldgblog on the Altgeld Math Model Collection.

Max Brückner’s Vielecke und Vielflache, from 1900, includes plates of intricate models of complex polyhedra.

Non-Sequitur. Anthony MoreyNon-Sequitur. Anthony Morey

Poema de los Números Primos. Esther Ferrer’s geometric drawing configurations generated using prime number sequences.

100 Drawings. Alex Maymind’s quasi-scientific architectural classification systems.

Non-Sequitur. Anthony Morey’s series of plan abstractions with volumetric explorations and axonometric matrices.

titlePlate from Vielecke und Vielflache – Max Brückner

Nanoinjector. The tiny nanoeasthetics of DNA sequence transfer from BYU.

Outbreak. Rogan Brown’s hand cut paper reliefs of cells, pathogens & neurons.

On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces. Ben Fry visualizing the unfolding of Darwin’s ideas

Iannis Xenakis – Music and Architecture: Architectural Projects, Texts, and Realizations [PDF].

PolytopePolytope – Iannis Xenakis

The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham [c935-1039]. Where the earliest known correct schematic of the human visual system is to be found. [PDF].

Jean François Niceron’s La Perspective Curieuse [1638]. An early treatise on perspective distortion [Plates are to be found at the end of the book].

Capsules of time and space. Drafts/drawings of early soviet spacecraft interiors [1965-66].

The Schematics of the Light Prop – László Moholy-Nagy & Stefan Sebök

The Mechanics of the Light PropThe Mechanics of the Light Prop – László Moholy-Nagy & Stefan Sebök [1930]

László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a kinetic light sculpture device capable of real-time expanded cinema projection, is well known and widely documented online. Lesser known are a series of associated drawings which were used as plans for the device, some of which were made in collaboration with the engineer Stefan Sebök. It was Sebök who was actually responsible for the design and build of the Light Prop mechanism. The plans for the Light Prop present graphic abstractions of the exploded view schematic where arrows indicate the movement of gear mechanisms and notate the choreography of the machine’s internal parts. The cubist-like multiple and distorted perspectives confound the positions and relationships of the components, perhaps intimating on the way in which light and shadow would be expanded, refracted, deflected and compressed by the device itself. The plans indicate Moholy-Nagy’s intentions to ‘produce a great range of shadow inter-penetrations and simultaneously intercepting patterns in a sequence of slow flickering rhythm’ with ‘discs made of polished metal slotted with regularly spaced perforations, and sheets of glass, celluloid and screens of different media’.

Construction Scheme for Light DisplayConstruction Scheme for Light Display – László Moholy-Nagy [1922-30]

According to a passage in The Visual Mind II, edited by Michele Emmer, Moholy-Nagy never actually used the term ‘Light Space Modulator’ to describe his optokinetic device even though this term is more commonly used than ‘Light Prop’ in literature. Moholy-Nagy did, however, use the title ‘Space Modulator’ for a number of drawings, collages and works for some time after Light Prop was finished, and until his death in 1946.

Light Prop - László Moholy-NagyLight Prop – László Moholy-Nagy