digital flower art by Macoto Murayama

Check out Macoto Murayama's ethereal illustrations of flowers that seem to come straight out of Avatar. His process is remarkably craft-loaded: he uses a scalpel to dissect flowers, then gets to the microscope, photographs and sketches to digitally reproduce the flower in 3D, from which the final rendering is created. My, he could be the Ernst Haeckel of the 21st century.

So this is what can happen when plants go digital. These are definitely images that don't need to be described; you need to leave language behind and just look at it. Just look at it.

Art Forms of Nature

In 1904, biologist Ernst Haeckel published his work 'Art Forms of Nature', which contains 100 of among the most beautiful illustrations of natural forms, from monocellular amoebas to corals to bat heads. The good thing is: it is now freely available as a download, and however it is the original German version, only the opportunity of looking at the wonderful illustrations is well worth the 260 Mb of disk space it takes.

Here is the link to the download: Ernst Haeckel - Kunstformen Der Natur.

At the time it was published, Haeckel's work served to inspire designers, and the Art Nouveau movement. I hope that it at this time, the scope of design practice being in great expansion, can once again inspire designers with the beauty of evolution.

Head blob

What's more fun to do at one's birthday than a freestyle drawing...not much I figured, so here's my little multi-interpretable illustration of today. It's something I had in my mind for a while, which lately contains more and more surreal imagery. It probably says a lot about my psyche too, can anybody tell me about that?

Anyway, I'll leave it mostly up to you what this image would mean. I guess I would interpret it as multiple identities becoming holistically interconnected, as if our faces are becoming the synapses of the emerging global brain.

Just another liquid man

A little drawing I made while waiting for my machine to finish a 3D picture. Mostly we're one, but sometimes he needs time of his own and then we follow parallel creative tracks.

It was just an image in my head, that if man externalizes his reflective capabilities to the extent that he gets immediate control over his own body, he can transform it to live in any environment. In my view it is the next step of evolution of man and technology that the two converge and each conscious individual can find its ecological/functional/whatever-you-want-to-call-it niche, like a newly formed fully technologized and networked animal. Where in pre-medieval times man was in the process of conquering the liveable world, we will be able to greatly expand the notion of what liveable is, and enter a new, similar process, where we will roam new environments to occupy new niches, like the bottom of the ocean, the moon, or inside volcanoes.

The problem here though is the clash between our hardwired reptilian brain and our reflective neocortex, and I predict that this stage will take hundreds of years and in that I think I am less provoking and less technologically biased than Ray Kurzweil, who predicts full oneness of man and technology by the end of this century. I think that there is something fundamental which we need to overcome first as a species: the understanding, control and incorporation of our instincts with the thoughts and technologies we construct.