Heather Sparks
Each Piece of Trashed Plastic Can Find a New Life as Art
Artist Sayaka Ganz converts consumer castoffs into meaningful work. She makes sculptures entirely of second-hand plastics that are in sum much greater than their parts.“Emergence,” 2013 / Sayaka Ganz In one important way, grocery stores were very different during my childhood. Catsup was only packaged in glass bottles. Soda came in either aluminum cans or […]
This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like
A few months ago, I sat poolside with friends in Palm Springs. Amid the quiet desert sublime, we reminisced about all the live music we’ve experienced over the years, just about every big and small act since the mid-80s: Prince, David Bowie, Guns ‘n Roses, Bruce Springsteen, and the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs among the them. […]
This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like
A few months ago, I sat poolside with friends in Palm Springs. Amid the quiet desert sublime, we reminisced about all the live music we’ve experienced over the years, just about every big and small act since the mid-80s: Prince, David Bowie, Guns ‘n Roses, Bruce Springsteen, and the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs among the them. […]
“Molecular Still Lives” Show the Science in Our Food in Us
Still Life with Gastric PeptideMia Brownell My grandfather wasn’t a big farmer, but his small garden in Kentucky was a miracle. There was rhubarb, corn, and peppers a-plenty, but mostly I remember the tomatoes. He bred his own, saving the seeds of the best specimens every year. By the time he was getting well into […]
A Grandfather’s Final Gift Recalls a Different Way of Life
One evening four years ago, photographer Andrea Tese received a phone call from a home-care nurse. Could she come to her grandfather’s house to assess the situation? the nurse asked. Her grandfather had been very ill and had stipulated he did not want to die inside a hospital; he wanted to stay at home. But […]
Living in the Long: Art & Engineering Peers Into Our Future
When was the last time you awoke right at the first peak of day? Or put away your work simply because night was falling? We are less and less tied to rhythms of natural time, living instead in the glow of computers and smartphone screens. Our days and nights roll by, marked as much by […]
Big Sky, Big Data: Art Made From Atmospheric Science
Many common air pollutants—ozone, various sulfur oxides, and even some particulate matter among them—are completely invisible to the eye. How interesting, then, that the EPA and other environmental organizations around the world, use color scales to communicate information about air quality. The US Air Quality Index, for instance, starts at green, meaning good air quality, moves […]
Each Piece of Trashed Plastic Can Find a New Life as Art
In one important way, grocery stores were very different during my childhood. Catsup was only packaged in glass bottles. Soda came in either aluminum cans or glass bottles, and there was no bottled water—no Fuji, Poland Spring, or Evian. Crackers were wrapped in waxed paper. Everything was bagged in paper. Now, some 30 years later, […]
Taking the Pulse of the City With Graffiti Artist EKG
Though New Yorkers are currently chasing down the next piece of Banksy street art, graffiti typically blends into the background. If you’re not a tagger, you most likely are not paying attention to the coded messages embedded in the endless stream of stylized names, faces, animals, and jokes that are constantly thrown up then torn […]
Glitched Art: Is Software a Whole New Animal?
Top row, left to right: 1) Exhibition signage. 2) Projection in the background: Jon Cates. GL1TCH.US: An unstable book for an unstable art, 2005-present. Television screen in the foreground: Holly Lay. Gentlemen Prefer Glitch, 2012. 3) Kim Asendorf. Spike’s Peak, 2013. Bottom row, left to right: 1) Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Benjamin Gaulon. Corrupt Yourself, 2011-present. […]
