art

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Giving and Taking: Images and Nature

Once again I’m promoting science writer Michelle Nijhuis, this time for a little piece in The New Yorker on the history of the daguerreotype, an early type of photographic technique.  What I like about the piece is it makes me imagine what it might have been like at that dawn of a new technology, to think about the possibilities of what could happen by merging observation, art, and technology.  It’s hard to say this early technology wa
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A Conversation on Art & Environment with Rafe Sagarin

Observation and Ecology author Rafe Sagarin discusses art and the environment with poet Eric Magrane from the University of Arizona. Eric Magrane: Rafe, you write and speak about observation, most pointedly in your bookObservation and Ecology, with Aníbal Pauchard. I’d like to discuss the way that observation interacts as a hinge between science—and particularly environmental science—as a way of seeing and understanding the world, and art as a way of seeing.
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The Art of Ecology and the Ecology of Art

Art interacts with observation and ecology on numerous planes. There is simply the aspect of personal inspiration, as when the creatures I observe in tidepool surveys or just hiking with friends who know the Sonoran desert become the basis for my Linozoic prints. Along these lines, I’m continually amazed at the diversity and quality of artwork produced by ecologists, samples of which I find myself auctioning off each year at a student benefit auction at the Western Society of Naturalists meeting.

The Art of Artful Places

You almost never see a cow in a tree. That's why I was so surprised that day in February when I encountered one at the Docklands, a new green redevelopment district in the City of Melbourne.