From BoingBoing.net:

This multi-screen video installation by British artist Marcus Coates is both hilarious and fascinating. To create the videos for the project, Coates took slowed-down birdcalls and taught various people to sing them in their slowed-down state. He then filmed them singing the songs in ordinary situations or ‘habitats’ and sped up the footage again so the birdcalls are at normal speed again. The result is remarkably similar to the original.

Click on the picture to see the entire installation in sequence and read a more detailed description of the process.

Coates’ collaborator on the project, wild-life sound recordist Geoff Sample has posted a bunch of great clips of the bird-songs slowed down by increasing factors here.

Sample explains: “Birds are thought to have a finer temporal discrimination of sounds than humans. This means they hear the individual elements of composite sounds that for us appear as a single blurred sound. Their hearing may have up to eight times the temporal resolution that ours can achieve. One way getting some impression of this is by slowing down bird sounds; the simple way of doing this also lowers the pitch of the sound by the same factor and this is a fascinating way of tuning in to the hidden depth of birdsong, a kind of transformation to a more human musical sensibility.”

Lectures + special events - Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Lots of cool stuff happening at the  The Harvard Museum of Natural History!!

Two events for those interested in the intersection of art and science.

1)

Thursday, March 18 – Melissa Milgrom. Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy. The Harvard Museum of Natural History is home to some of the country’s oldest and most varied collections of taxidermied animals.  Join us for a gallery social and talk by author Melissa Milgrom, whose new book, Still Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), delves into the colorful world of eccentric naturalists and gifted museum artisans who create the illusion of life through taxidermy.  Free for museum members, $20 for non-members.  Advance registration required.  RSVP to members@oeb.harvarededu

or 617 496-6972 .  

For full list of lectures, including Brain Aging by Bruce Yankner of the Harvard Medical School, Zombie Insects by Harvard’s David Hughes, more see,http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/lectures_and_special_events/index.php.

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2)

Bizarre Animals: An Evening of Contemporary Art Interventions

Organized by Carlin Wing, (Harvard ‘02) Artist-in-residence

FRIDAY, MARCH 26, ONGOING FROM 7:00 TO 9:30 PM

On the evening of March 26th artists will overrun the Harvard Museum of Natural History for a special evening of performance, sound, and video throughout the galleries. For two and half hours, twelve artists from across the country—including many Harvard alumni and several current students—will transform the museum into laboratory, library, exploratorium, and stage. Through thoughtful interventions and captivating experiments, viewers will experience new ways to engage with the museum’s spaces, its collections, and its history. Participating artists include: Lucky Dragons, Noah Feehan/AKA, Greg Gagnon, Liz Glynn, Jesse Aron Green, Lisa Haber-Thomson, Harlo Holmes, Rebecca Lieberman, Hanna Rose Shell, and Catherine Wing.

Two different guided tours will be offered.  On one tour, poet Catherine Wing will steer audiences through the twists and turns of Marianne Moore’s “The Pangolin” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Kingfisher” along with some words of her own.  On the other tour, new media artist Harlo Holmes will navigate the halls of the museum emanating the voice of Jules Verne’s from her costume.

Video works will be projected on walls and playing on monitors throughout the museum.  Hanna Rose Shell’s videos on camouflage will greet audiences in the Evolution Theater and Color Exhibition.  The artist herself will be found (or not) in full camouflage attire in and around the 42 foot-long Kronosaurus.  Noah Feehan/AKA will be found tending his camera, monitor and slowly cooking piece of steak in Classroom A.

In the first part of the evening, Lucky Dragons, an experimental music collective, will perform in the gem and mineral room with the aid of black lights and student instrumentalists. And then to conclude the event, Jesse Aron Green will present a new performance from the balcony of the Great Mammal Hall, To Draw Old Monuments from the Entrails of the Earth.

Admission: $6.00 at the door. Doors open at 6:30: galleries open at 7:00 pm. The event is free to HarvardMuseum of Natural History members and Harvard University ID holders.  Supported in part by Office for the Arts at Harvard through the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund, the Department of Visual, and Environmental Studies and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

For information, see www.bizarreanimals.blogspot.com.  For directions, parking info, seewww.hmnh.harvard.edu.

Synthetic Aesthetics.

We aim to bring creative practitioners and those who are expert at studying, analysing and designing the synthetic/natural interface together with the existing synthetic biology community to help with the work of designing, understanding and building the living world. We will organize 12 embedded residencies, during which artists and designers will spend time in bioengineering laboratories, and scientists and engineers in artistic and design studios and workspaces. It is our intention that balanced exchanges will foster exciting and productive work.

More specifically, we will bring together individuals from these two communities with the aim of catalyzing fruitful interactions, developing transferable knowledge and skills, and establishing a continuing network of collaborations. Synergetic work between these two broad fields has the potential to lead to new forms of engineering, new schools of art and design, a greater social scientific understanding of science and engineering, and new approaches to societal engagement with synthetic biology.

Participating

If you are interested in joining our work as a participating artist/designer or scientist/engineer, apply for one of the twelve residencies.