Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer.

It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum.

At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, left) in Brooklyn, NY. Testing the sample’s DNA revealed the smoker to be a male of Eastern European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Do you get strange looks? I ask, in a recent phone conversation. “Sometimes,” says Dewey-Hagborg. “But New Yorkers are pretty used to people doing weird stuff.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s odd habit has a larger purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student, studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects, focusing on specific genomic regions from her samples. She then sequences these regions and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind.

It gets creepier.

From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called “Stranger Visions,” she hangs the life-sized portraits, like life masks, on gallery walls. Oftentimes, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style wooden box with various compartments holding the original sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.

The portrait Dewey-Hagborg created based on the DNA sample from the cigarette butt collected on Myrtle Avenue. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used condoms. She tells me she has had the most success with cigarette butts. “They [smokers] really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette butt,” she says. “There just tends to be more stuff there to actually pull the DNA from.”

Also on January 6, 2013, but at 12:20pm, Dewey-Hagborg collected this cigarette but (above, right) on the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street (above, left) in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the smoker to be a female of European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg takes me step-by-step through her creative process. Once she collects a sample, she brings it to one of two labs—Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (She splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early on in the project, the artist took a crash course in molecular biology at Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, where she learned about DNA extraction and a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA extraction kits that she orders online to analyze the DNA in her samples.

If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller pieces. She puts the tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals, incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times, until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that, Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA, amplifying specific regions of the genome that she’s targeted. She sends the mitochondrial amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells’ nuclei) to a lab to get sequenced, and the lab returns about 400 base pair sequences of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine (G, A, T and C).

The artist produced this facial reconstruction from her DNA analysis of the cigarette butt she collected at Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg then compares the sequences returned with those found in human genome databases. Based on this comparison, she gathers information about the person’s ancestry, gender, eye color, propensity to be overweight and other traits related to facial morphology, such as the space between one’s eyes. “I have a list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I have either successfully analyzed or I am in the process of working on right now,” she says.

Dewey-Hagborg then enters these parameters into a computer program to create a 3D model of the person’s face.” Ancestry gives you most of the generic picture of what someone is going to tend to look like. Then, the other traits point towards modifications on that kind of generic portrait,” she explains. The artist ultimately sends a file of the 3D model to a 3D printer on the campus of her alma mater, New York University, so that it can be transformed into sculpture.

Five minutes later, at 12:25pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg obtained this piece of green chewing gum (above, right) on the corner of Wilson Avenue and Stanhope Street in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the chewer to be a male of Native American and South American descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—since the samples are from anonymous individuals, a direct comparison cannot be made. Certainly, there are limitations to what is known about how genes are linked to specific facial features.”We are really just starting to learn about that information,” says Dewey-Hagborg. The artist has no way, for instance, to tell the age of a person based on their DNA. “For right now, the process creates basically a 25-year-old version of the person,” she says.

That said, the “Stranger Visions” project is a startling reminder of advances in both technology and genetics. “It came from this place of noticing that we are leaving genetic material everywhere,” says Dewey-Hagbog. “That, combined with the increasing accessibility to molecular biology and these techniques means that this kind of science fiction future is here now. It is available to us today. The question really is what are we going to do with that?”

The artist created this portrait based on the DNA in the chewed gum. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Hal Brown, of Delaware’s medical examiner’s office, contacted the artist recently about a cold case. For the past 20 years, he has had the remains of an unidentified woman, and he wondered if the artist might be able to make a portrait of her—another clue that could lead investigators to an answer. Dewey-Hagborg is currently working on a sculpture from a DNA sample Brown provided.

“I have always had a love for detective stories, but never was part of one before. It has been an interesting turn for the art to take,” she says. “It is hard to say just yet where else it will take me.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s work will be on display at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 12. She is taking part in a policy discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on June 3 and will be giving a talk, with a pop-up exhibit, at Genspace in Brooklyn on June 13. The QF Gallery in East Hampton, Long Island, will be hosting an exhibit from June 29-July 13, as will the New York Public Library from January 7 to April 2, 2014.

Editor’s Note: After getting great feedback from our readers, we clarified how the artist analyzes the DNA from the samples she collects.

An artist’s rendering of Fog Bridge at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Image courtesy of the Exploratorium.

Artist Fujiko Nakaya believes in the transformative power of fog.

The first time she realized that her fog sculptures could change a person’s memory was in 1976 during the run of Earth Talk, a fog sculpture made for the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. After seeing her sculpture, an electrician told her how he had taken his family to see the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The mountain was fogged in at first and he couldn’t see it, but the fog cleared and the view of the mountain was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“The instant he saw the fog it changed his experience, and I liked that very much,” explained Nakaya. It was then she understood that her sculptures could feed back to personal experience and improve a person’s feeling about fog. After the electrician’s story, she was determined to reach more people, and not just those in the art world.

A view of Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Bridge. Image by Gayle Laird, © Exploratorium, all rights reserved.

For forty years, Nakaya has been creating public fog sculptures all over the world. Currently, she has seven projects going in five countries. Fog Bridge is her first in San Francisco, and is one of three inaugural outdoor artworks created for the new waterfront home of the Exploratorium.

The museum, which mixes science and art in its exhibits, was previously housed at the Palace of Fine Arts, but its new site—three times as big as the last, and at Pier 15—opens its doors to the public today. The 150-foot long Fog Bridge enshrouds pedestrians with fog for ten minutes every half hour; it will be lit at night, and so promises to be a spectacular sight. The bridge is located within the free, 1.5-acre outdoor area that encircles the Exploratorium and features artwork that honors the environment of the bay.

Fujiko Nakaya oversees a test run of her fog sculpture. Photo by Aleta George.

Nine days before the grand opening, Nakaya leaned against a railing to watch test runs of Fog Bridge. The 79-year-old artist was dressed comfortably in layers of black, though the day was warm enough for shorts. Coit Tower rose out of Telegraph Hill against a clear blue sky behind the bridge. Nakaya didn’t have to pull any wizard-like levers to release bursts of fog; the system is pre-programmed and designed to interact with real-time weather data. Each side of the bridge is divided into three sections and controlled by programmed valves in the pump room. For example, an eastern wind will prompt the valves to make fog on the east side of the bridge only.

In this way, an invisible wind is made visible with brush strokes of fog. The process starts with four pumps that force high-pressure water into pipes studded with 800 petite nozzles. At the tip of each nozzle is a hole six thousandths of an inch wide where the pressurized water is forced and meets a pin that explodes the water into droplets 15 to 20 microns wide. Nakaya developed the technology in 1970 with physicist Thomas Mee, and Mee Industries continues to use the patented technology for industrial and agricultural applications.

The water vapor spurts from a pipe studded with 800 petite nozzles. Image by Gayle Laird, © Exploratorium, all rights reserved.

Nakaya’s fog is, of course, a simulation of the misty blankets that spread over the “cool gray city of love” each summer when cold oceanic surface water interacts with warm moist air offshore. As warm air rises over the inland valleys, the fog is pulled through the Golden Gate, providing needed summer moisture to coastal redwoods, the tallest trees in the world.

“I hope I’m doing homage to San Francisco fog,” said Nakaya adding, “that the bay fog will devour this fog sometimes.”

The Exploratorium sees itself as a place for tourists to learn about the Bay Area’s land and seascapes, and so some of its displays and artwork educate visitors about things like the tide cycle and fog. San Francisco’s fog, however, has declined 33 percent in the last 60 years, according to a study published in 2010 by UC Berkeley biology professor Todd E. Dawson and climate analyst Jim Johnstone, and the trend is expected to continue as climate changes. Dawson says they aren’t sure of the reason behind the decline, but that it may be due to warmer sea surface temperatures. “Fog formation is really about the contrast between temperatures,” he says. “If you warm the water up, the temperature difference goes down and the fog formation goes down with it.”

Fog enshrouds visitors for ten minutes every half hour. Image by Gayle Laird, © Exploratorium, all rights reserved.

That said, Nakaya adds that fog always exists as water vapor even when we don’t see it. Only when conditions change is it visual.

In the first week that the museum is open, tens of thousands of people will walk across the bridge and be enveloped by fog. The sensation, I imagine, might feel like walking on clouds. Nakaya, reportedly, is particularly intrigued by the way that fog obscures one’s sight and heightens the other senses as a result. Perhaps this is why the artist believes that fog can improve memories and change thinking. “If you have even one little experience with fog, you start to see things differently,” said Nakaya.

The artist watched the artificial fog pour out of the northeast quadrant of the bridge where it hovered for a windless moment. “Nature is so complex. We can’t understand its complexity,” said Nakaya. “If you just tap one spot it will open up so many things and enlarge imaginations.”

Fog Bridge can be experienced at the Exploratorium through September 16, 2013.

“Bunny” Bunny, by Henry Segerman and Craig Kaplan. The pattern on the bunny consists of copies of the word “bunny.” Listen as the artist describes the sculpture in this YouTube video.

To say that Henry Segerman is schooled in mathematics is an understatement. The 33-year-old research fellow at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, earned a master’s degree in math at Oxford and then a doctorate in the subject at Stanford. But the mathematician moonlights as an artist. A mathematical artist. Segerman has found a way to illustrate the complexities of three-dimensional geometry and topology—his areas of expertise—in sculptural form.

First things first…three-dimensional geometry and topology?

“It is about three-dimensional stuff, but not necessarily easy to visualize three-dimensional stuff,” says Segerman, when we talk by phone. “Topology is sort of split along low-dimensional stuff, which usually means two, three and four dimensions, and then high-dimensional stuff, which is anything higher. There are fewer pictures in the high-dimensional stuff.”

Since 2009, Segerman has made nearly 100 sculptures that capture, as faithfully as is physically possible, some of these hard-to-grasp lower-dimensional mathematical concepts.He uses a 3D modeling software called Rhinoceros, typically used to design buildings, ships, cars and jewelry, to construct shapes, such as Möbius strips, Klein bottles, fractal curves and helices. Then, Segerman uploads his designs to Shapeways.com, one of a few 3D printing services online. “It is really easy,” he says. “You upload the design to their Web site. You hit the ‘add to cart’ button and a few weeks later it arrives.”

Developing Fractal Curves, by Henry Segerman. The artist explains the sculpture, in the center, in this YouTube video.

Before 3D printing, Segerman built knots and other shapes in the virtual world, Second Life, by writing little bits of programming. “What cool things can I make in 3D?” he recalls asking himself. “I had never played around with a 3D program before.” But, after a few years, he reached the limit of what he could do within that system. If he wanted to show someone a complicated geometric shape, that person needed to download it to his or her computer, which seemed to take ages.

“That is the big advantage of 3D printing. There is an awful lot of data in there, but the real world has excellent bandwidth,” says Segerman. “Give someone a thing, and they see it immediately, with all its complexity. There is no wait time.”

There is also something to holding the shape in your hand. Generally speaking, Segerman designs his sculptures to fit in someone’s palm. Shapeways then prints them in nylon plastic or a costlier steel bronze composite. The artist describes the 3D printing process, for his white plastic pieces:

“The 3D printer lays down a thin layer of plastic dust. Then, it’s heated up so that it is just under the melting point of plastic. A laser comes along and melts the plastic. The machine lays down another layer of dust and zaps it with a laser. Do that again and again and again. At the end, you get this vat filled with dust, and inside the dust is your solid object.”

While his primary interest is in the mathematical idea driving each sculpture, and in conveying that idea in as simple and clean a way as possible (“I tend towards a minimalist aesthetic,” he says), Segerman admits that the shape has to look good. A Hilbert curve, the 3-sphere—these are esoteric mathematical concepts. But, Segerman says, “You don’t need to understand all of the complicated stuff in order to appreciate the object.”

If viewers find a sculpture visually appealing, then Segerman has something to work with. “You’ve got them,” he says, “and you can start telling them about the mathematics behind it.”

Here are a few selections from Segerman’s large body of work:

Sphere Autologlyph, by Henry Segerman. Watch this YouTube video of the artist describing this piece.

Segerman made up the word “autologlyph” to describe sculptures, such as “Bunny” Bunny, pictured at the very top, and this sphere, above. By the artist’s definition, an autologlyph “a word, which is written in a way that is described by the word itself.” With “Bunny” Bunny, Segerman used the word “bunny,” repeated many times over, to form a sculpture of the Stanford Bunny, a standard test model for 3D computer graphics. Then, in the case of this sphere autologlyph, block letters spelling the word “sphere” create the sphere. Minus the bunny, many of Segerman’s autologlyphs have a mathematical slant, in that he tends to use words that describe a shape or some sort of geometric feature.

Hilbert Curve, by Henry Segerman. Watch this video explainer.

This cube, shown above, is Segerman’s take on a Hilbert curve, a space-filling curve named for David Hilbert, the German mathematician who first wrote about the shape in 1891. “You start with a curve, really a straight line that turns right angle corners,” says the artist. “Then, you change the curve, and you make it squigglier.” Remember: Segerman does these manipulations in a modeling software program. “You do this infinitely many times and what you get at the end is still some sense a one dimensional object. You can trace along it [the line] from one end to the other,” he says. “But, in another sense, it looks like a three-dimensional object, because it hits every point in a cube. What does dimension mean anymore?” Hilbert and other mathematicians became interested in curves like these in the late 19th century, since the geometries called into question their assumptions about dimensions.

“I had been looking at this thing on a computer screen for a year, and when I first got it from Shapeways, and picked it up, it was only then that I realized it was flexible. It is really springy,” says Segerman. “Sometimes the physical object surprises you. It has properties that you didn’t imagine.”

Round Klein Bottle, by Henry Segerman and Saul Schleimer.

Round Klein Bottle is a sculpture, much larger than Segerman’s typical pieces, that hangs in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne. (The artist applied a red spray dye to the nylon plastic material for effect.) The object itself was designed in something called the 3-sphere. Segerman explains:

“The usual sphere that you think of, the surface of the earth, is what I would call the 2-sphere. There are two directions you can move. You can move north-south or east-west. The 2-sphere is the unit sphere in three-dimensional space. The 3-sphere is the unit sphere in four-dimensional space.”

In the 3-sphere, all the squares in the grid patterning of this Klein bottle are equal in size. Yet, when Segerman translates this data from the 3-sphere to our ordinary three-dimensional space (Euclidean space) things get distorted. “The standard Mercator map has Greenland being huge. Greenland is the same size as Africa [in the map], whereas in reality, Greenland is much smaller than Africa. You are taking a sphere and trying to lay it flat. You have to stretch things. That is why you can’t have a map of the world which is accurate, unless you have a globe,” says Segerman. “It is exactly the same thing here.”

Triple Gear, by Henry Segerman and Saul Schleimer. Listen to the artist describe this sculpture on YouTube.

Segerman is now toying with the idea of moving sculptures. Triple Gear, shown here, consists of three rings, each with gear teeth. The way it is set up, no single ring can turn on its own; all three have to be moving simultaneously. As far as Segerman knows, no one has done this before.

“It is a physical mechanism that would have been very difficult to make before 3D printing,” says the artist. “Even if someone had the idea that this was possible, it would have been a nightmare to try to build such a thing.”

For Nathalie Miebach, the stars aligned with this sculpture, inspired by a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. © Nathalie Miebach

In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall.

Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found. “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach. “You can’t go out and touch a star.”

Soon, something in the budding artist clicked. Her solution? Turn space data into visual art, so that she and other learners like her could grasp it.

Miebach’s final project for her basket weaving class was a sculpture based on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a well-known astronomy scatter plot measuring stars’ luminosities against their surface temperatures. Temperature readings travel downward from left to right, and the wider the diameter of the star, the higher the luminosity. The graph is used to track stars as they evolve, showing how they move along the diagram as shifts in their structure cause changes in temperature, size and luminosity.

Miebach translated the relationship between star luminosity and temperature into a thick, funnel-shaped sculpture (shown above) with tightly interwoven reeds. She uses the temperature and luminosity values of specific stars on the diagram to inform the manner in which she weaves  the reeds.

Basket weaving involves a three-dimensional grid with vertical spokes that create structure and horizontal weavers that fill in the sides of the work. The sculpture achieves its shape through the interaction of the materials—usually, straw, grass or reeds—and the amount of pressure exerted on the grid by the artist’s hand.

“Antarctic Explorer – Darkness to Lightness” © Nathalie Miebach

Miebach’s next project involved transforming scientific data of solar and lunar cycles into sculpture. In the piece pictured above, the artist transferred three months of moon, twilight and sun data from Antarctica into layers of woven reeds. She assigned the vertical and horizontal reeds of the basket grid specific variables, such as temperature, wind and barometric pressure. Changes in these variables naturally altered the tension exerted on the reeds, and the varying tensions created bulges within the piece. The changing values of these variables distorted the tension between the reeds, driving the warped shapes that emerged in the piece.

Reeds are not unbreakable; if too much pressure is exerted, they snap. If Miebach used wire, she’d be completely in charge of the process, and no tension would exist to guide the piece into its final shape.

“Because these cycles change every day, you are working this grid in different ways,” she says.

The thick, ribbon-like blue lines circumventing each bulge are segmented into hours of the day. The naturally colored reeds representmoon data, the yellow reeds sun data and the green reeds twilight.

The yellow spheres on the exterior of the shape signify sunrise and the smaller navy balls represent moon phases. The orange spokes protruding from each bulge of the sculpture represent solar azimuth, or the spherical angle of the sun, and solar hours, which measure the passage of time based on the sun’s position in the sky. Red spokes designate the ocean’s high tide and yellow spokes, the low tide. The basket grid becomes a pattern representing the changes of these variables.

How elements like wind, temperature and barometric pressure, assigned to vertical spokes based on values from low to high, look in a woven representation of two months of Cape Cod weather. © Nathalie Miebach

This weaving process remained the same when Miebach’s subject changed from sky to sea during an artist residence on Cape Cod several years ago. Armed with basic measuring tools like thermometers purchased at the hardware store, Miebach studied the Gulf of Maine every day for 18 months, checking and recording temperature, wind speeds, barometric pressure and other climate indicators. She gleaned additional data from weather stations, satellites and anchored buoys bobbing up and down in open water.

“Changing Waters” portrays meteorological and oceanic interactions within the Gulf of Maine. © Nathalie Miebach

The result was multiple woven sculptures examining different aspects of the Gulf of Maine. A 33-foot-wide wall installation called “Changing Waters” (pictured above) depicts the geography of the gulf. The blue material represents its currents, streams and basins, delineated by changes in the water that Miebach recorded and assigned to each tiny segment.

“To Hear an Ocean in a Whisper” (pictured below) examines the effects of currents, temperature and tidal patterns on krill living in the Georges Bank of the Gulf of Maine. The roller coaster represents the Labrador Current, which flows from the Arctic Ocean and along Nova Scotia’s eastern coast. The merry-go-round inside shows how krill activity changes as temperature, salinity and wave height vary, and the Ferris wheel tracks the diurnal cycle of the tiny crustaceans. A swinging ship-style ride follows the tidal patterns of the Bay of Fundy on the northeast end of the gulf and nearby whale sightings.

“Everything is some sort of data point,” Miebach says. “There’s nothing there just for whimsy or aesthetic purpose only.”

“To Hear an Ocean in a Whisper.” © Nathalie Miebach

The artist has taken this same approach with her latest project: translating scientific data into musical scores. When Miebach relocated from the coast of Maine to Omaha and then Boston in 2006, she realized the cityscape influenced weather dramatically, and not in the same way that the shoreline did.

“In an urban environment, you have infrastructure, you have heat bubbles that hover over cities, you have the lack of vegetation, and all these create very localized fluctuations in weather data that the weather instruments are very sensitive in picking up,” she says.

Miebach found that she could not accurately express in her basket weaving the subtle fluctuations in weather that cities foster. Instead, she began experimenting with musical notation as a medium, which she says provided the flexibility she needed in artistically representing weather data at the street level.

“Navigating Into a New Night” © Nathalie Miebach

In the score pictured above, the royal blue squiggly lines represent cloud cover. The notes signify weather variables: orange is humidity, red is temperature and green is barometric pressure. The sky blue lines zigzagging across the sheet indicate wind direction, and the pink shading represents tempo for musicians to interpret.

Interpreting scientific data in this way allowed Miebach to translate the nuance of weather she felt was present in a city environment without altering the information in any way. “One thing that has been very dear to my heart from the very beginning is that I don’t change information for any aesthetic purpose,” she says. “I want the information to stay true, so that when you look at the sculpture, you’re still seeing the weather.”

Musical score for Hurricane Noel. © Nathalie Miebach

In her musical score for Hurricane Noel, which swept along the Atlantic Ocean in 2007, Miebach correlated each change in a given weather variable she had measured with a note on the piano keyboard. The piano scale is drawn as black-and-white column on the left-hand side of the sheet music (pictured above). Shaded regions represent shifting cloud cover during the storm.

Miebach says she transposed wind speed into the upper two octaves because howling winds are a dominant aspect of any storm. Each note on the scale receives a range, from zero to two miles per hour, two to four miles per hour and so on. The same goes for temperature and barometric pressure readings.

The Nineteen Thirteen, a group of cellists and percussionists, performed Hurricane Noel at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2011 (listen to the ominous-sounding song here). Another cellist group offered up a different interpretation.

But transforming the musical scores into live performances isn’t the end. Once she feels that she has captured the nuances of weather data from urban settings, Miebach then uses her melodious blueprints to create woven sculptures such as the one pictured below.

What Hurricane Noel looks like in three-dimensional music. © Nathalie Miebach

The amusement-park themed “To Hear an Ocean in a Whisper” that Miebach made in collaboration with Jon Fincke, an oceanography graduate student at MIT, is on display in “Ocean Stories: A Synergy of Art and Science,” an exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Science through June 2. Her latest piece, “The Last Ride,” translates weather and ocean data from Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed the Jersey Shore’s Star Jet roller coaster. It will be featured in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s annual art auction on April 13.

“This project was inspired by the universe of unseen organisms that inhabit our bodies,” author William Myers says of Julia Lohmann’s mural Co-Existence exhibited in 2009 in London. Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Trust.

When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: the female body. But where Lohmann broke from tradition was her medium. The German designer created her large-scale portrait of two reclining nudes using 9,000 petri dishes, each containing an image of live bacteria.

Suzanne Lee, a British fashion designer, is attempting to grow clothes. She cultivates bacteria in vats of sugary green tea and then harvests the cellulose that forms on the mixture’s surface. The durable film serves as a pleatherlike fabric.

Thousands of petri dishes contain images of colored gels and actual colonies of microbes from a female body that were grown in a laboratory. Photo courtesy of Julia Lohmann Studio.

The Italian artist Giuliano Mauri planted 80 hornbeam trees amid columns of bundled branches in Arte Sella, a sculpture garden in northern Italy. The trees inch up the columns to form Cattedrale Vegetale, a Gothic cathedral complete with naves.

All these works are prominent examples of a nascent aesthetic movement called biodesign, which integrates living things, including bacteria, plants and animals, into installations, products and artworks. “Designers and architects, more and more, want to design objects and buildings that grow by themselves,” says Paola Antonelli, design curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Photo courtesy of Julia Lohmann Studio.

Biodesign takes advantage of the “tremendous power and potential utility of organisms and their natural interaction with ecosystems around them,” says William Myers, a New York City design historian and author of the new book Bio Design: Nature + Science + Creativity. “It can be a means of communication and discovery, a way to provoke debate and explore the potential opportunities and dangers of manipulating life for human purposes.”

Some ventures are very down-to-earth. Microbiologist Henk Jonkers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is developing self-repairing “bio-concrete”; he adds limestone-producing bacteria to cement and, over time, they fill in cracks. If adopted widely, the material could benefit the environment, since concrete production is a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Giuliano Mauri’s Cattedrale Vegetale is organic architecture in more ways than one. Eighty columns, fashioned from branches, outline a Gothic cathedral. Photo courtesy of Aldo Fedele / Arte Sella.

Other proposals read more like science fiction. Alberto Estévez, an architect based in Barcelona, wants to replace streetlights with glowing trees created by inserting a bioluminescent jellyfish gene into the plants’ DNA.

The biodesign movement builds on ideas in Janine Benyus’ trailblazing 1997 book Biomimicry, which urges designers to look to nature for inspiration. But instead of copying living things biodesigners make use of them.

Hornbeam trees planted within the columns will eventually form the roof, nearly 70 feet high. Then, in time, the columns will disintegrate, becoming fertilizer that will nourish the living structure. Photo courtesy of Aldo Fedele / Arte Sella.

The effort brings artists and scientists together. “These novel collaborations are often joyous contaminations in which scientists feel, even just for a moment, liberated from the rigor of peer review and free to attempt intuitive leaps,” Antonelli writes in a foreword to Bio Design.

Julia Lohmann teamed up with Michael Wilson, a microbiologist at University College London Eastman Dental Institute. Wilson, who studies the bacteria that inhabit people, grew common bacteria from the female body and photographed the colonies under a microscope. Lohmann affixed these photographs to actual petri dishes and positioned each type of bacteria where it would occur on or in a woman’s body—pictures of the scalp microbe Propionibacteria, for instance, cover the head.

“The petri dish is a magnifying glass into this other world,” says Lohmann, who was inspired by the mind-bending fact that only one in ten cells in the human body is actually human. The rest are microbes. “There is so much advertising out there that tells you that all bacteria are bad, and it is simply not true. We couldn’t live without bacteria, and they couldn’t live without us,” says Lohmann. She considers her mural Co-existence to be part of the counter propaganda.

E. coli, by Luke Jerram.

Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus bacteria from the HIV virus under a microscope. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses pathogens. He is intrigued by them, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate.

Clearly adept at scientific work—as an undergraduate, the Brit was offered a spot on a university engineering program—Jerram chose to pursue art instead. “Scientists and artists start by asking similar questions about the natural world,” he told SEED magazine in a 2009 interview. “They just end up with completely different answers.”

HIV (series 2), by Luke Jerram.

To create a body of work he calls “Glass Microbiology,” Jerram has enlisted the help of virologist Andrew Davidson from the University of Bristol and the expertise of professional glassblowers Kim George, Brian George and Norman Veitch. Together, the cross-disciplinary team brings hazardous pathogens, such as the H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent glass forms.

The artist  insists that his sculptures be colorless, in contrast to the images scientists sometimes disseminate that are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses have no color as they are smaller than the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in an email. “So the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially colored imagery we receive through the media.” Jerram and Davidson create sketches, which they then take to the glassblowers, to see whether the intricate structures of the diseases can be replicated in glass, at approximately one million times their original size.

Swine Flu, by Luke Jerram.

These glass sculptures require extreme attention to detail. “I consult virologists at the University of Bristol about the details of each artwork,” says Jerram. “Often I’m asking a question about how a particular part of the virion looks, and they don’t know the answer. We have to piece together our understanding by comparing grainy electron microscope images with abstract chemical models and existing diagrams.”

Yet, to physically create these structures in glass, the design may have to be tweaked. Some viruses, in their true form, would simply be too delicate and wouldn’t hold up. Jerram’s representation of the H1N1 (or Swine Flu) virus, for instance, looks far spikier than it might in reality. This was done, not to add to the ferocity of the virus’ image, but to prevent the artwork from crumbling or breaking.

Malaria, by Luke Jerram.

Jerram has to decide what to do when new research suggests different forms for the structures of viruses. “Over time, scientific understanding of the virus improves and so I have to amend my models accordingly,” explains the artist. For example, “I’m currently in dialogue with a scientist at the University of Florida about the structure of the smallpox virus. He has published papers that show a very different understanding of the internal structure. I now need to consider whether to create a new model or wait until his model has become more widely accepted by the scientific community.” Jerram’s art is often used in scientific journals as an alternative to colorful simulations, so being as up-to-date as possible is definitely in his best interest.

Enterovirus 71, involved in hand, foot and mouth disease, by Luke Jerram.

Jerram’s marvelous glass sculptures bring awareness to some of the worst killers of our age. “The pieces are made for people to contemplate the global impact of each disease,” he says. “I’m interested in sharing the tension that has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”

Jerram’s microbial sculptures are on display in “Playing with Fire: 50 Years of Contemporary Glass,” an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Art and Design through April 7, 2013, and “Pulse: Art and Medicine,” opening at Strathmore Fine Art in Bethesda, Maryland, on February 16. “Pulse” runs through April 13, 2013.

Editor’s Note, February 15, 2013: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly stated or implied that E. coli and malaria are viruses. They are not–E. coli is a bacteria and malaria is a malaise caused by microorganisms. Errors in the first paragraph were fixed and the title of the post was changed.

A leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis). Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.”

As a kid, I was an avid bug collector. I had one of those screen-covered bug boxes, and I carried it with me on backyard adventures and forays into the woods behind my house. I have fond memories of the first nights of summer when the fireflies came out–I’d cup the air and catch one, put it in my box and lie belly in the grass, with the box at my nose, watching the little thing light up.

My brother and I had ant farms, sea-monkeys and kits to grow monarch butterflies from caterpillars and frogs from tadpoles. Seeing little critters up-close was fascinating.

Now, about 20 years later, Lorenzo Possenti‘s sculptures reignite that passion in me. The Italian artist, based in Pisa, creates detailed sculptures of insects—from beetles and grasshoppers to dragonflies and butterflies—modeled after actual museum specimens. Possenti is remarkably accurate, according to entomologists, but he does take one liberty. His inanimate bugs are up to 200 times larger than life. Some of the beetles are four feet long, and the butterflies have five-feet wingspans!

A giant cicada (Formotosena seebohmi), on left; a stick insect (Megacrania tsudai), in center; and a leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis), on right. Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.”

“Like other children, I grew up thinking about monsters, extraterrestrials, dinosaurs…and huge bugs,” said Possenti, in an email. “When I was about 12 years old, I started to study insects and their biology, and I got a lot of books related to them. At the age of 15, I started drawing my own comics. Many dinosaurs, monsters and insects entered the stories.” Soon enough, insects took priority, and the artist transitioned from drawing to sculpture. “At the age of 25, I had the dream to produce my own exhibit about enlarged insect models, to show people how beautiful some of them (especially beetles) are,” he added.

Possenti builds his creatures piecemeal. Using museum specimens as reference, he sculpts each part of an insect from DAS modeling clay. Once the clay air dries, he uses sandpaper, knives and mini-drills to carve more details into the piece. This is his so-called “master copy.” The artist then covers the master copy with silicone rubber gum to form a mold. He removes the clay from the mold, pours a polyurethane resin into the mold and then, after the resin dries, extracts the resulting piece, be it a claw or an antennae, from the mold. Possenti cleans the part, joins it to other ones, paints the resulting critter and adds a special finish to the top, to give it a waxy-like surface similar to live insects.

“I can say that more than scientific issues, I am attracted by the art contained in insect body shapes, which comes from nature,” said Possenti. “That is why my models must be absolutely scientifically correct. The art shown in my models is not from me, it is from nature. My job is just to keep that safe, with as few changes as possible.”

Long-armed beetle (Cheirotonus macleayi), on left. Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.”

The fact that Possenti has a degree in natural science, with a strong interest in entomology, helps as he strives for accuracy.

“He does a very good job at picking up on the details that usually an artist would miss,” said Katrina Menard, an entomologist and curator of recent invertebrates at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. The museum, located at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, is exhibiting 16 of the gargantuan insects in “Bugs…Outside the Box,” on display through May 12, 2013.

The herd of bugs includes a Hercules beetle (Dynastes hercules), a leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis), a stick insect (Megacrania tsudai), a jumbo dragonfly (Anotogaster sieboldii) and a giant cicada (Formotosena seebohmi), among others. But, Menard is particularly impressed by Possenti’s stag beetles.

“Along a lot of the different joints of these insects, they have large rows of hairs, called setae, so they are able to sense their position and movement,” explained Menard. “Usually, when you see pictures done by artists they sort of disregard these distinct little structures. In this case, he glued individual paintbrush hairs all along the joints that you would see only if you really looked at the insect very closely.”

A jumbo dragonfly (Anotogaster sieboldii), on left, and a watanabe’s lanternfly (Fulgora watanabe), on right. Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.”

The artist also pays special attention to the scales and venation of butterfly wings. He has created panels that allow museum visitors to feel the individual scales and how they lay across a wing. For the sake of the Sam Noble Museum exhibition, Possenti also made a dynamic sculpture of a beetle that allows teachers and students to remove certain parts of the bug—like in an autopsy, says the artist—to reveal its internal anatomy.

“He does a very good job translating not only the science but doing it in a very aesthetically pleasing and inclusive way,” Menard said. “People who normally wouldn’t be interested in looking at bugs up close actually want to look at the details and see the fine characteristics.”

Possenti’s mission is simple: “I would love for people to discover the art and the beauty of nature everywhere.”

This origami structure, called “Green Cycles,” by Erik Demaine and his father Martin required a week of improvisation to assemble. Credit: Renwick Gallery

The shape of a Pringle, mathematically speaking, is called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Artists have been folding paper into this shape for years. The twist? Hyperbolic paraboloids shouldn’t exist in origami—it’s impossible to make such a 3D shape using only the creases pressed into paper by hand.

By that logic, some of Erik Demaine’s artwork shouldn’t exist either.

Demaine, the world’s top computational origami theorist, has created a series of sculptures by folding concentric squares into square pieces of paper, alternating mountain and valley, and folding the diagonals. With each sculpture, the paper pops into a saddle shape called a hyperbolic paraboloid and stays there. Its accordion-like folds are pretty to look at, but Demaine, a computer science professor at MIT, isn’t sure how it works.

A paper structure featuring multiple hyperbolic paraboloids. Credit: Erik Demaine

Once the paper is folded, the entire structure settles into a natural form. “Physics finds that balance,” Demaine says. But, the mechanisms of the Pringle-like shape are still poorly understood. Demaine posits there must be little creases in the paper invisible to the naked eye, as handmade folds alone can’t account for the end shape.

Trying to solve this mystery means marrying sculpture and mathematics.

“We’ve come up with a math problem that inspires new art—and an art problem that inspires new math,” says Demaine. The 31-year-old artist creates his origami sculptures with his father Martin.

The final product, “Green Cycles” (pictured at top), was created using two different colored sheets of French-made Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, bonded together. Using a ball burnisher, which is essentially a ballpoint pen without the ink, the Demaines pushed the two-layer sheet into rings of concentric circles carved into a wood template. The paper is scored along the circular creases and cut into a donut shape, before it springs into a three-dimensional form. The artist creates several of these models and loops them together into an interlocking paper sculpture. The younger Demaine says the hardest part is assembly, which takes up to a week, because they can’t predict if the resulting shapes will twist around one another to create a solid, aesthetically pleasing piece.

“We get them to interlock, let go and let them relax, sometimes overnight, if we think we have a candidate sculpture,” he says. If the structure droops or falls apart, the pair tries again.

“Natural Cycles” by Erik and Martin Demaine

Written instructions for paper folding first appeared in 1797 in Japan. Akisato Rito published a book, Sembazuru Orikata, with lessons for 1,000 paper cranes. Adachi Kazuyuki published a more comprehensive how-to collection in 1845. By the late 1800s, kindergarteners across Europe began folding colored squares in class.

The concept was simple: no scissors, no glue, no tape—just nimble fingers bending and twisting paper into novel shapes. Origami became a modern art form in the 1950s, when Akira Yoshizawa, a Japanese artist, combined the mechanics of the craft with the aesthetic of sculpture. He created more than 50,000 paper models, never selling one. Since then, artist Eric Joisel’s crinkled lifelike animal and human figures appeared on display at the Louvre and physicist-artist Robert Lang’s detailed compositions have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

But paper folding doesn’t just create something we can ooh and aah at. It also plays a role in answering long-standing questions in math, like the fold-and-cut problem.

The first known record of the problem appeared in 1721 in a Japanese book of brain teasers, one of which asked the reader to fold a rectangular piece of paper flat and make only one straight cut to produce a Japanese crest called sangaibisi, which translates to “three-folded rhombics.” The author offered a solution through a diagram, but the problem remained an open question for centuries—how many shapes are possible?—until Demaine solved it.

As it turns out, any shape is possible—swans, horses, five-pointed stars. All that’s needed is a geometric blueprint, a guide about folding here and bending there.

“Hugging Circles” by Erik and Martin Demaine

The use of such blueprints added complexity to origami. In the 1960s, folding diagrams involved 20 to 30 steps. Now, a model could require 200 to 300 steps from start to finish. That’s a lot of folding for a single piece of paper. But, the trick is using super thin paper with long fibers, which give it strength to withstand all the pulling and tugging.

Computer programs have only added to the fun. TreeMaker, a free software program created by artist Robert Lang, takes user-generated line drawing and churns out patterns that can be printed out and folded to create the shapes. Origamizer allows users to design a 3D model and alter its crease patterns on the screen, exploring different shapes and forms.

With the help of computer software, origami has expanded beyond the art world. Scientists and engineers have found practical applications for paper folding. Car manufacturers, for instance, use origami mathematics to compute a crease pattern for folding airbags into flattened shapes. Demaine says origami structures could influence nanomanufacture, spurring the creation of flat intel chips that can spring into 3D shapes. He also met with members of the National Institutes of Health last year to discuss how the craft could help design synthetic virus-fighting proteins.

Linking mathematics and art does carry some occupational hazards, though.

“A few paper cuts a year,” Demaine says.

Three works by the father-son team are on display in “4o Under 40: Craft Futures,” an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery through February 3, 2013.

Amazon parrot and macaw feathers. © Chris Maynard.

Chris Maynard is obsessed with feathers. The artist, based in Olympia, Wash., thinks feathers show “life’s perfection,” in the way that they overlap and contour to a bird’s body. “Their complexity as a covering beats any clothing we make,” he writes on his Web site.

Turkey feather. © Chris Maynard.

Going back a few years, Maynard started by photographing feathers. Then, he arranged them in shadow boxes. But, in his experiments in showcasing feathers, Maynard eventually came up with his own unique art form. The artist creates fascinating, feather-light sculptures, by cutting the silhouettes of various types of birds from actual plumage.

Crow feather. © Chris Maynard.

Maynard collects molted feathers from generous zoos, private aviaries and nonprofit bird rescue organizations. “Sometimes finding the right feather is the hard part,” he says. The artist may go into a design with a particular color or size of feather in mind. He uses pheasant and parrot feathers mostly, and, from them, he has cut out a whole slew of birds—hummingbirds, woodpeckers, cranes, swans, cockatoos, macaws, peacocks, turkeys, grouse, bitterns, crows and pigeons. Maynard sketches possible designs in notebooks, but to really nail one, he says, “I need to have a feeling about the bird I am portraying.” Maynard, an active member of his local Audubon group and supporter of a land trust that buys property for conservation, balances work in his studio with quality time in the outdoors. “I go out and observe a woodpecker whacking away at a snag or watch crows relating to each other,” he says.

Great Argus pheasant wing feathers. © Chris Maynard.

Next comes the cutting. ”When I work, I put on big nerdy magnifying glasses to see the feathers’ details,” Maynard says on his Web site. He also uses fine eye surgery tools he inherited from his father, an ophthalmologist. The scalpels and forceps are not completely foreign to Maynard, whose academic background is in entomology–the study of insects.

Great Argus pheasant feather and two small macaw feathers. © Chris Maynard.

The artist is certainly clever in the execution of his designs. Maynard will sometimes use the shaft of the feather as a branch or a tree trunk, perching one or more birds on it. When he wants to portray a singing bird, he takes fluffy down and makes a speech bubble coming out of its open beak. As shown in a couple of photographs here, the artist has also made some of his feathers appear as if flocks of birds are flying out of them. Maynard is a perfectionist (“I am pretty mathematical about it,” he says. “I want each piece to be in the right place.”), and it shows. In total, he has created more than 80 extremely detailed works of feather art.

“I hope that seeing birds in a different light through my artwork will encourage appreciation of avian life and hence a desire to conserve it,” says Maynard.

Mute swan feathers. © Chris Maynard.

Maynard’s exhibition “Feather’s Second Flight,” including 25 of his works, is on display through January 20 at the Row House Cafe in Seattle. From January 25 to February 15, his feather art will be shown at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts in Olympia. Maynard and Thor Hanson, a conservation biologist and author of the new book Feathers, will be giving a lecture at the center on February 2.

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year.

The Water Tank Project

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling attention to water conservation. Artists, including Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Lawrence Weiner, and even Jay-Z, have agreed to participate in the project. Their original designs will be printed on vinyl, which will be wrapped around the mostly wood tanks, which typically measure 12 feet high and 13 feet in diameter, perched on top of buildings. The art will be a welcome addition to the city’s rooftops, while also providing more awareness of the global water crisis.

Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, From Copley, Eakins, and Rimmer to Contemporary Artists

Female torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Naomi Slipp, a PhD candidate in art history at Boston University, is organizing an ambitious exhibition of more than 80 sketches, models, prints, books, paintings and other works that tell a full story of artistic renderings of human anatomy in America. On display at the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery, from January 31 to March 31, the exhibition spans two and half centuries, from the very first anatomy text by painter John Singleton Copley, dating to 1756, to works by contemporary artists, such as Lisa Nilsson, who creates paper sculptures depicting cross sections of the human body. ”This exhibition examines both what that study of artistic anatomy meant for these artists and for the way we, today, think about our own bodies and how they work,” said Slipp, in her successful bid to raise funds for the project on Kickstarter. ”In looking at artworks created by artists and doctors, I hope to unite this diverse audience, bringing together people who are interested in art and those who are interested in medicine for a rich, shared conversation about what it means to occupy, treat and picture our own bodies.”

Portraits of Planet Ocean: The Photography of Brian Skerry

Harp seal, by Brian Skerry.

“I believe my most important role remains as artistic interpreter of all that I see. I need to understand the science, but I want to capture the poetry,” writes Brian Skerry, in his book, Ocean Soul. A National Geographic wildlife photographer with decades of experience, Skerry has captured enchanting portraits of harp seals, Atlantic bluefin tuna, hammerhead sharks, beluga whales, manatees and other creatures of the deep. His line of work requires loads of equipment—underwater housings for his cameras, strobes, lenses, wetsuits, drysuits, fins—to get the perfect shot. “While no single image can capture everything, in my own work I am most pleased when I make pictures that reveal something special about a specific animal or ecosystem, pictures that give viewers a sense of the mysterious or in effect bring them into the sea with me,” says Skerry, in a dispatch on Ocean Portal. Earlier this fall, Ocean Portal asked the public to vote for a favorite among 11 of Skerry’s photographs. The viewers’ choice and other images by the underwater photographer will be on display at D.C.’s National Museum of Natural History beginning April 5.

American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount St. Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin

Inside Mount St. Helens Crater, Base of Lava Dome on the Left (detail), by Frank Gohlke, 1983. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

On May 18, 1980, stirred by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, Mount St. Helens in Washington state’s Cascade Range erupted, forever changing the landscape surrounding it. Separate from one another, American photographers Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke documented the devastation (and in Gohlke’s case, the gradual rebirth) of the area. The Cleveland Museum of Art is bringing the photographers’ series together, side by side, in an exhibit, on display from January 13 to May 12.

Interestingly, the museum will also play host to “The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection,” looking at art by masters ranging from the 18th and 19th century artists Piranesi and Ingres to more modern contributions from Duchamp, Rothko and Warhol, all inspired by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The exhibit will be on display from February 24 to May 19.

Gogo: Nature Transformed

Maine seaweed cuff, 2008. Designed by Gogo Ferguson and Hannah Sayre-Thomas. Photo by Peter Harholdt.

Gogo Ferguson and her daughter, Hannah Sayre-Thomas, live on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. Morning, noon and night, the pair walks the beach, collecting interesting skeletons, seaweed and seashells brought in by the tide. “Nature has perfected her designs over millions of years,” writes Ferguson, on her Web site. And so, the artist incorporates these organic designs into jewelry, sculptures and housewares. Her first museum exhibition, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from January 19 to July 7, features more than 60 works, including a six-foot by eight-foot wall sculpture modeled after seaweed from New England and an ottoman fashioned after a sea urchin.

View of the solar corona and magnetic loops during an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. Solar Dynamics Observatory, April 2, 2011. Credit: NASA GSFC/Michael Benson/Kinetikon Pictures.

Michael Benson

Photographer Michael Benson takes raw images collected on NASA and European Space Agency missions and enhances them digitally. The results are brilliant, colorful views of dust storms on Mars and Saturn’s rings, among other sights. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. will be exhibiting images from Planetfall, Benson’s latest book, as well as his other titles, including Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle (2009) and Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (2003), from mid-February through the end of April.

Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence

(Left) Firefly signals captured in slow-shutter speed photos. © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu. (Right) A re-creation of New Zealand’s Waitomo cave system, with sticky “fishing lines” dropped from the ceiling by glowworms. © AMNH\D. Finnin.

If you missed it at New York’s American Museum of Natural History this past year, there is still time to see “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” at its next stop, Chicago’s Field Museum, from March 7 to September 8. The exhibition highlights the diversity of animals, from fireflies and glowworms to jellyfish and fluorescent corals found upwards of a half-mile deep in the ocean, that use bioluminescence, and the variety of different reasons for which they do. A firefly, for instance, glows to catch the attention of a mate. An anglerfish, meanwhile, attracts prey with a bioluminescent lure dangling in front of its mouth; a vampire squid releases a cloud of bioluminescence to befuddle its predators. The show also explains the chemical reaction that causes the animals to glow. “The one real weakness,” wrote the New York Times, at the opening of the exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, “is that with only a few exceptions—like the tanks of blinking ‘splitfin flashlight fish’ found in deep reefs of the South Pacific—this is not an exhibition of specimens but of simulations.”

Female Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing trip three or four years ago when a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The cross was crafted using a Renaissance-era technique called quilling, where thin paper is rolled to form different shapes and patterns.

“I thought it was really beautiful, so I made a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts. She incorporated these first forays in quilling into her mixed media assemblages.

Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was teaching herself to mold and shape the strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend sent her a century-old, hand-colored photograph of a cross section of a human torso from a French medical book. “I have always been interested in scientific and biological imagery,” says the artist. “This image was really inspiring.”

Abdomen, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

In the cross section, Nilsson saw many of the shapes that she had already been coiling and building. The quilling technique, she thought, with its “squeezing shapes into a cavity,” certainly lent itself to her subject matter. She could make tiny tubes and squish them together to fill the many different spaces in the body—lungs, vertebrae, pelvic bones and muscles.

Her first anatomical paper sculpture, Female Torso (shown at top), is a near-direct translation of the French medical image.

Head II, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Nilsson went on to create an entire Tissue Series, which offers artistic slices, literally, of male and female bodies: a cross section of a head at eye level (above), another of a chest just above a man’s arm pits (below) and one of an abdomen at navel height, to name a few.

Nilsson began exhibiting her paper sculptures at galleries and museums. “The two words that I heard most often to describe the work were ‘beautiful,’ which is always nice to hear, and…’creepy,’ ” she said in a talk at TEDMED, an annual conference focusing on health and medicine. The artist admits that she never found the project disturbing. “I was so enthralled with the aesthetic possibilities I saw in cross sections, I had kind of overlooked the idea that viewing the body in this sort of ‘slice of deli meat’ fashion could be a bit unsettling to people,” she said.

Thorax, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Viewers come in close, at first, she says. “They would see the piece as an intriguing handmade object and put their noses up to the glass and enjoy the subtle surprise that it is made of paper,” she says, in the TEDMED lecture. Up close, a portion of the lacy, intricate sculpture appears abstract. “Then, people would typically back away, and they would be curious about what region of the body they were looking at….They would usually start to identify familiar anatomical landmarks.” The heart, perhaps, or the ribcage.

When making a paper sculpture, Nilsson starts with medical images, often culled from the Visible Human Project, a National Library of Medicine initiative that collected anatomical images from one male and one female cadaver. She usually consults illustrations of specific parts of the body in medical textbooks as well, to better understand what it is she is seeing in the Visible Human cross sections. “My background is in illustration”—she has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design—”so I am used to combining sources and just being resourceful in getting all of the visual information I need to say what I want to say,” she says.

Head and Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Nilsson creates a composite image from these sources and adheres it to a base of styrofoam insulation. The two-dimensional image serves as a guide for her three-dimensional paper sculpture; she quills in between the lines, much like one colors in a coloring book.

“I often start in the center and work out,” says Nilsson. She builds a small quilling unit, pins it to the styrofoam base and then glues it to its neighbor. “It is almost like putting a puzzle together, where each new piece is connected to its predecessor,” she adds. Working in this “tweezery” technique, as the artist calls it, requires some serious patience. A sculpture can take anywhere from two weeks to two months to complete. But, Nilsson says, “It is so addictive. It is really neat to see it grow and fill in.”

There is a basic vocabulary of shapes in quilling. “I have really tried to push that,” says Nilsson. “One of the things I don’t like about a lot of quilling that I see is that the mark is too repetitious. It is curlicue, curlicue, curlicue. I really try to mix that up.” Follow the individual strands of paper in one of her sculptures and you will see tubes, spirals, crinkled fans and teardrops.

Male Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

When the sculpture is finished, and all the pins have migrated to the periphery, Nilsson paints the back with a bookbinder’s glue to reinforce it. She displays her cross sections in velvet-lined shadow boxes. “I really like them to read as objects rather than images. I like the trompe-l’oeil effect, that you think you might be actually looking at a 1/4-inch slice of a body,” says Nilsson. “The box, to me, suggests object and frame would suggest an image. The decorative boxes also say that this is a precious object.”

Many medical professionals have taken an interest in Nilsson’s work. “It feels like an homage, I think, to them, rather than that I am trivializing something that they do that is so much more important,” she says, with a humble laugh. Doctors have sent her images, and anatomists have invited her to their labs. She even has a new pen pal—a dissector for Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds, a touring (and somewhat startling!) exhibition of preserved human bodies.

Angelico, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

The connections Nilsson has made in the medical community have proven to be quite helpful. “Where does this particular anatomical structure end and where does the next one begin? Sometimes it is not all that clear-cut,” says the artist. As she works, questions inevitably arise, and she seeks out anatomists for answers. “Sometimes I want to know what is a general anatomical structure and what is an idiosyncrasy of the particular individual I am looking at. Rib cages. How much variance in shape is there? Am I overemphasizing this [part]? I am always wondering, am I seeing this accurately? Am I reading this right?”

Ultimately, Nilsson hopes that her works familiarize people with the internal landscape of the human body—the “basic lay of the land,” she says. “Everything is tidily squished in there in this package that is graphically beautiful and also highly functional,” she adds. “To me, the shapes are endlessly interesting. There is just the right amount of symmetry and asymmetry.”

Two of Nilsson’s latest pieces will be featured in “Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, from Copley, Rimmer and Eakins to Contemporary Artists,” a three-month exhibition opening at the Boston University Art Gallery at the Stone Gallery on January 31. 

The Retail Reef, by Helle Jorgensen. Image courtesy of AAAS.

Helle Jorgensen walks the beaches near her home in Sydney, collecting trash that the tide brings ashore. Her bycatch is varied: ropes, cigarette lighters, even toothbrushes. And, plastic bags—the real catch she is after—are bountiful.

According to the artist, white, gray, blue and green bags are abundant in Australian waters. She also supplements her supply with imports. “I get lots of bags from all over the world,” says Jorgensen, in an audio slideshow produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). When she is traveling in the United Kingdom, for instance, Jorgensen snags fantastic orange bags from the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s and can count on the retail giant Marks and Spencer doling out beautiful chartreuse bags. “I have a bit of an eye for collecting really colorful bags,” she says. In the meantime, she also has friends sending her red, purple and pink ones from around the world.

Diploria, by Helle Jorgensen. Image Courtesy of AAAS.

Jorgensen puts the bags, that might otherwise end up tangled in a tree or floating in the ocean, to good use. She flattens each bag and folds it lengthwise several times to from a strip about an inch wide. Using scissors, she lops off the bag’s handles and bottom seam and repeatedly cuts across the strip’s width to form small bands. These bands are actually loops, when unfolded. (If it helps, the process is shown here, in pictures.) The artist then knots these loops together to construct a skein of double-stranded plastic yarn.

“It’s very time consuming, but strangely cathartic,” writes Jorgensen, on her personal Web site.

Actinia, by Helle Jorgensen. Image courtesy of AAAS.

This homespun plastic yarn is Jorgensen’s artistic medium. Improvising as she goes, Jorgensen crochets fabulous sculptures of colorful brain, tube and pillar corals. Her tightly stitched coral colonies, some of which are currently on exhibition at the AAAS Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., incorporate many of the shapes—wrinkles, pipes and tentacles—seen in living coral reefs.

Jorgensen, who lived in Denmark until her teenage years, learned how to crochet as a child; her paternal grandmother, Agnes Jorgensen, taught her. Having picked up different tricks and techniques along the way, she is now able to stray from patterns and essentially free-form crochet sculptures to her liking. In her art making, Jorgensen draws on her professional experience in the sciences. With a degree in biology, she was a research geneticist for some time, before training to be a horticulturist. She stills spends a few days a week operating a small horticulture business. “All my skills and interests have merged to create these and I finally feel as if I have found my niche,” Jorgensen has said, about her crocheted corals.

Echino, by Helle Jorgensen. Image courtesy of AAAS.

Margaret and Christine Wertheim, fellow Australians and (surprisingly) fellow crocheters of coral, recruited Jorgensen to help with the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a massive participatory science and art project that kicked off in 2005. Communities around the world joined forces to crochet (using a special mathematics-inspired technique called “hyperbolic crochet“) an expansive reef, which then traveled with much fanfare to numerous art and science museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

“Disposable Culture,” an exhibition at the AAAS Art Gallery through November 30, features a selection of Jorgensen’s coral sculptures, as well as works by other artists who depict and incorporate cast-off materials in their art.

On a recent visit to the gallery, I admired Jorgensen’s delicate corals. With such tiny stitches, the sculptures are so refined. I was particularly awed by a piece called “The Retail Reef,” which weaves together bright oranges, greens and yellows with some sprouting purples and creeping reds. As evidenced by the sculpture’s name, Jorgensen’s mind is never far from her source material–plastic bags and other trash that continues to collect in places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a rubbish pile nearly twice the size of Texas floating in the North Pacific Ocean.

“I guess I would really like to get the message across that I am concerned about the amount of pollution in the ocean, plastic pollution in particular,” says Jorgensen, in the audio slideshow. “These pieces are a reflection of creating something evocative, hopefully, and beautiful to look at, from discarded plastic.”

“Disposable Culture” is on display at the AAAS Art Gallery through November 30, 2012. The gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The artist’s studio. Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

Perched on a stool in her studio in northwest Washington, D.C., artist Joan Danziger pages through the book Living Jewels. “This one influenced me,” she says, pointing to Phaedimus jagori, a green-and-gold beetle from the Philippines. The book contains flattering portraits of beetles taken by photographer Poul Beckmann. “See this one?” Danziger asks, showing me a yellow-and-black striped beetle from Mexico called Gymnetis stellata. “It became the ‘Tiger Beetle’ up there.”

Clinging to a white wall in front of us are dozens of beetles—sculpted in all different shapes, sizes and colors. “They are real beetles, adapted,” says Danziger. The artist pores over books and other research on the Coleoptera order of insects so that she can apply some of the patterning and anatomy of real beetles to her sculpted ones; yet, the artist also exercises creative freedom. For instance, Danziger hasn’t made any of her beetles actual size. “That would be too realistic. The whole idea, in my mind, is to elongate and exaggerate them and make them beautiful,” she says. Her sculptures range from one to six feet in length.

“Golden Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

This Saturday, Danziger’s swarm descends on the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. All 72 of her giant beetles will be crawling up the gallery’s 50-foot walls in an exhibition titled “Inside the Underworld: Beetle Magic,” on display through December 16, 2012.

“Retro Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

Danziger brings over 40 years of experience as a working artist to this project. She earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting from Cornell University and then went on to study at the Art Students Leagues in New York City and the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She also attended artist residencies in Greece and France. Her public art can be seen in D.C., Maryland and New Jersey, and museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Susquehanna Art Museum and the New Jersey State Museum, have acquired her pieces for their permanent collections.

In the late 1960s, Danziger transitioned from painting to sculpture. “I got tired of being confined by the canvas,” she says. Nature and animals figure strongly in her work—a result, she says, of lots of time spent living outdoors, backpacking in the western United States and summering in Idaho. But the artist has a particular fondness for exotic animals not found in those parts—rhinos, giraffes, zebras and parrots—and a definite flair for the whimsical. She has sculpted figures, half human and half animal, performing acrobatics, cycling and playing in bands.

Now, says Danziger, “Everyone wants to know, why beetles?”

“Blackeyed Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

Since discovering Beckmann’s book Living Jewels, Danziger has done quite a bit of research on the insects. “There are 350,000 beetles in 160 families,” she reports. “You kind of get addicted.” At first, it was the beetles’ iridescent colors that drew her in. But, now, Danziger is enamored with all the mythology surrounding the bugs.

The scarab beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) symbolized great power and immortality to ancient Egyptians, Danziger says. The beetles are known to roll balls of dung and drop them into burrows in the ground. Female scarabs then lay eggs in the dung. The larvae, believe it or not, eat their way through the dung ball and then emerge from the ground.

“I like beetles, because they are survivors,” says Danziger. “Through all kinds of traumas of life, they are the ones that are going to survive.”

“Upside Down Ash Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

Danziger’s sculptures capture, in a sense, the full life cycle of beetles. Each of her beetles starts with an intricately woven wire armature. “They are kind of born in the wire,” she says, showing me some sculptures made strictly of wire. “Then, they roll out and get covered with ash, which is the gray material that I have up there.” She points to a gray beetle, flipped on its back and hanging on the wall; its wire foundation is completely covered in celluclay, a type of papier-mache. “And then they get reborn into color,” she explains. With this project, Danziger reinvented herself as a fused glass artist. She essentially builds mosaics of cut glass within the beetles’ wire frames. For the insects’ shells, she melts glass decorated with frit, or little pieces of colored glass, in a large kiln; the glass slumps over a mold, which gives the shell its curvature.

“Blue Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

“Metamorphosis is the key,” writes Lenore Miller, director of George Washington University’s Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, in the exhibition catalog, “as these sculptures transform into creatures not found in nature, having evolved out of the artist’s imagination.”

“Red Devil Beetle.” Courtesy of Joan Danziger.

Danziger leads me around her studio to introduce me to her beetle babies. “They all have names,” she says. “That is Spider. That is Retro. This is Copper Wing.” I meander through a herd of monstrous beetles laid out on the floor, taking great care not to step on a leg, antenna or wing. She hunts down a “little fellow” modeled after an actual rhinoceros beetle and an “interesting guy” inspired by a Hercules beetle. A Hercules beetle, Danziger says, can carry more weight for its size than almost any other species. After sharing the tidbit, she carries on. “This is Midnight Beetle. That is Bumblebee. This is Red Devil Beetle,” she adds. Red Devil Beetle has sharp red horns protruding from its head.

“Some people think they are absolutely beautiful, and others think, oh my God, beetles, creepy crawlies,” says Danziger. “I kind of like that dual reaction, between beauty and horror. When people think of beetles, they think of them as tiny things. But here they are magnified. They are beautiful, but strange.”

Courtesy of Flickr user wwarby.

The other day, I called Thomas Andres, a researcher at the New York Botanical Garden, with a clear agenda. What advice, I asked, do you have when it comes to pumpkin carving? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to keep jack o’lanterns in good condition through Halloween?

Andres is a cucurbitologist. Translation: He is a pumpkin expert. And, in the first five minutes of speaking with him, the man had me convinced that the pumpkin is a work of art, even before you get to the carving.

Cucurbitaceae is the family of gourds, pumpkins, watermelons and cucumbers, explained Andres, and within that family is the genus Cucurbita, his expertise. All of the pumpkins we display on our doorsteps at Halloween are from this genus, and most of them are one species. “The typical jack o’lantern is Cucurbita pepo,” he says.

Squash breeders have cultivated five species, Cucurbita pepo included, to fit our notions of the perfect pumpkin. “They have bred for the thickness of the fruit stem. Wild pumpkins are very spiny plants. So, they have tried to breed out and get rid of the spinyness,” says Andres. Cultivators also select for a bright orange fruit and nice, dark green stems. “That seems to attract people,” he says.

When Andres carves pumpkins, he personally does not take any measures to prevent them from rotting. “It gives them character,” he says. That said, if you’d like to keep your jack o’lantern from slumping and growing a little fur, he does have a few tips:

1. First and foremost, pick a pumpkin that is hard. Also, make sure that it has no blemishes. “You don’t want them to have any frost damage,” says Andres. “You can tell that by looking at the fruit.” Watery dark spots on the top of the pumpkin are an indication of frost damage.

2. “You want to wait until the last moment before carving pumpkins,” says Andres, since they tend to rot within a week or so. “But once you carve them, there are a few tricks to making them last a little bit longer.”  You can squirt lemon juice on the exterior of the pumpkin, for instance. Lemon juice, as you may know, prevents the browning of fruits, such as apples and avocados (and pumpkins!). The browning is a result of phenols and enzymes in the fruits reacting with oxygen, but acidic lemon juice blocks the enzymes and thereby inhibits the reaction. Vaseline or vegetable oil can also be applied to preserve the pumpkin once it is cut.

3. Spray the jack o’lantern with a bleach solution, to stave off fungus growth.

4. Keep the pumpkin away from freezing temperatures. If it freezes, the pumpkin will thaw and inevitably rot.

5. Temperatures from the upper 50s to lower 60s (in degrees Fahrenheit) are ideal. When outdoor temperatures stray too far from this, think about bringing your pumpkin indoors. “If you really have a prize-winning carving, and it is not too big a fruit, you could put it in the refrigerator when it is not on display,” says Andres.

Ray Villafane and one of his pumpkin sculptures from 2011. Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.

Last weekend, master pumpkin carver Ray Villafane turned some massive pumpkins on display at the New York Botanical Garden into zombies. Staff are refrigerating some of the sculptures’ removable parts, at times, to keep the carvings fresh during the ten days they are on exhibition.

6. Keep the pumpkin away from extreme heat. “As nice as candles in jack o’lanterns are, they really do shorten the lifespan of the pumpkin since the heat from the flame ends up cooking the flesh,” says Andres. “A flickering lightbulb or glow-stick can be used instead.”

Mark Perez tours around the country with his large-scale version of the board game Mouse Trap. Courtesy of Mark Perez.

For a few consecutive years, as a kid, I put the board game Mouse Trap on my Christmas wish list. Hasbro’s commercials from the early 1990s made the game look outrageously fun. First, you build an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, with a crane, a crooked staircase and an elevated bath tub. Then, once that is pieced together and in working condition, you use the contraption to trap your opponents’ miniature mice game pieces under a descending plastic cage.

I can hear the ad’s catchy jingle now: “Just turn the crank, and snap the plant, and boot the marble right down the chute, now watch it roll and hit the pole, and knock the ball in the rub-a-dub tub, which hits the man into the pan. The trap is set, here comes the net! Mouse trap, I guarantee, it’s the craziest trap you’ll ever see.”

Unfortunately (for me), Santa thought the game had “too many parts.” He was somehow convinced that my brother and I would misplace enough of the pieces to render the game unplayable.

Where was Mark Perez when I needed him?

Perez, a general contractor in San Francisco, believes the game of Mouse Trap is an important educational tool. He and a troupe of performers actually tour the country with a life-sized version of the board game, using its many levers, pulleys, gears, wheels, counter weights, screws and incline planes to teach audiences about Newtonian physics.

“I used to play the game a lot as a kid,” says Perez, when I catch the nomadic carnival man on the phone. “I used to put several of the games together and just kind of hack the game, not even knowing what I was doing. Then, that interest just sort of made its way into adulthood.”

Carpenter and performer Moses Grubb with the actual Hasbro board game. Courtesy of Mark Perez.

In 1995, Perez began to tinker. At the outset, the self-described “maker” thought of his giant board game as a large-scale art installation. He scrapped his initial attempt a year in but returned to the project in 1998, this time renting a workspace in a reclaimed boat-building barn on San Francisco Bay. “I worked every day for eight hours and came home and worked for two to four hours more in my shop fabricating the Mouse Trap,” he says.

The crane alone took two years to construct. But by 2005, Perez had 2o sculptures, weighing a total of 25 tons, that when interconnected created a completely recognizable—and, more importantly, working—model of the popular board game.

With the “Life Size Mousetrap” complete, Perez and his motley crew of carnival-type performers took to the road, staging at times up to six shows a day at museums, science centers and festivals around the country. Prior to his construction career, Perez did some production work for bands and nightclubs in San Francisco, so he has a flair for the dramatic. He stars as the enthusiastic ringleader, and the show includes clowns, tap-dancing mice and a one-woman band (she sings and plays the drums and accordion) who sets the whole thing to music. This past summer at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the goal of the Mouse Trap was not to catch a mouse (or a tap-dancing mouse, for that matter) but to instead drop a two-ton safe onto a car.
“I find that kids and adults both like it,” says Perez. “And when you get 400 people cheering for what you are doing, it becomes something that you want to do. I knew that I was on to something.”

At first, Perez was in it for the spectacle. Oh, and for bragging rights too. “I am the first person in the world who has done it on this scale,” he says. But, over time, he has incorporated science lessons into the act. “It sort of turned me into a physics person,” he says.

As the Rube Goldberg machine is set in motion, Perez and the other performers explain certain terms and laws of physics. For instance, when a spring that is cranked backwards is released and pulls on a cable, which then swings a hammer to hit a boot, the cast discusses potential and kinetic energy. There are also fulcrum points at play in the system. Then, when a bowling ball rolls down stairs, Perez points out that the staircase is an example of an incline plane. There are also opportune moments to talk about gravity, the workings of a screw and the mechanical advantage one can achieve by rigging several pulleys together. Esmerelda Strange, the one-woman band I mentioned earlier, has even released an album, How to Defy Gravity with 6 Simple Machines, with the rollicking explainers she sings during the show.

The show’s musician Esmerelda Strange (center) and dancing mice Rose Harden (left) and Spy Emerson (right). Courtesy of Mark Perez.

The whole endeavor is a real labor of love. The show’s cast doubles as its crew, assembling and disassembling the Mouse Trap at each site. Perez’s wife is a dancing mouse. She does all the costuming and a lot of the choreography—and drives a forklift too. Then, there are the production costs. “Just traveling with a semi-trailer costs $3 a mile. I bought a crew bus and that bus costs at least $1 a mile,” says Perez, who is working on getting funding through grants. “Then, you tack on all the extraordinary amount of insurances you need for these events. It just gets crazy.”

But the efforts and expenses are worth it, says Perez, if the Mouse Trap can provide real-life, unplugged encounters with scientific principles.

“You can go online and see all of these simple machines, but actually seeing it in person, watching a compressed coil spring release its energy to push a push rod to make a bowling ball roll down an incline plane, when you experience it and hear the clanging of the metal, it is different,” says Perez. “We make it fun.”