from The Whole Frog Project
© 1994 by Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory
(click on image to see more)
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Frog Reconstructions from The Whole Frog Project © 1994 by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (click on image to see more) |
How many ways can you look at a frog? Your options are greatly expanded if you visit The Whole Frog Project. This rich databank of anatomical pictures helps high school biology teachers use data from MRI imaging and mechanical sectioning, together with 3D surface and volume rendering software to visualize the anatomical structures of the intact animal. "Ultimately we intend to be able to 'enter the heart and fly down blood vessels, poking our head out at any point to see the structure of the surrounding anatomy'". A Virtual Frog Dissection Kit and frog movies are some of the highlights here.
Science for Art’s Sake
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Desert Iguana from Animalia series by Carol Selter © Carol Selter 1996 (click on image to see more) |
"My work is about the way humans objectify other species, especially the way science searches for the secret of life in dead organisms and isolated molecules." Carol Selter's dual life as photographer and biology lab technician gives her an unusual perspective on the animal world .In the series "Animalia," she has created images made by living animals as they move across a flatbed scanner. Selter won a 1996 SECA Electronic Media Award; her work was recently featured in Wired magazine (March 1998) and U-Turn Journal of Electronic Arts.
The result of the interaction between the moving organisms and the moving scanner bar is a time-lapse pattern unique to each species, a signature.... After each scan, I make a thermal-wax printout of the computer file. This turns the already unnatural colors even more lurid and "atomizes" the image into halftone dots. When I copy the printout onto negative film and print it twice life size, the halftone dots become a metaphor for the limitations of reductionist biology: The closer you look the less information you get about the image. Like the organism itself, the image emerges from the organization of its constituent parts. The most detailed examination of dots or molecules can never reveal the structures that emerge from their relationships.
