art in science

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week author Matt Wedel has two recent posts about the artistic reconstruction of sauropods. The one about head anatomy is especially perceptive.

I think these are dynamite, because they show that you can avoid “shrink-wrapped dinosaur syndrome” (SWDS) and still make an anatomically detailed, realistic-looking life restoration. SWDS is what I call the common convention in paleo-art of simply draping the skeleton–and especially the skull–in Spandex and calling that a life restoration. I think it’s a popular technique because you can show off the skeleton inside the animal and thereby demonstrate that you’ve done your homework (especially to an audience that already knows the skeletons*). It gives artists an easy way to add detail to their critters; if you actually slab on realistic soft tissues and lose most of those skeletal and cranial landmarks, you have to come up with something else to make your animals look detailed and visually interesting. And by now it’s been going strong for several decades, so people expect it.

Yes, hominin reconstructions are also subject to shrink-wrapped syndrome. I'm less critical of that than the "thousand-mile stare" pose that many reconstructions are given. There's more emotion in the Lincoln Memorial.

Wedel's earlier post, "Pimp my pod" discusses the idea of "too big for camouflage".

The Guardian is running an interview with Pauline Fowler, whose company Animated Extras has been involved in many film and television projects where apes and hominins are part of the cast. It's an interesting interview, and I like to get this behind the scenes look at the artistic and technical process. As many may know, I'm one of the most irascible critics of the results, but I very much appreciate the challenges of realism in portraying ancient hominins.

I asked Fowler how she would go about animating an Ardipithecus ramidus, who lived 4.4m years ago. The 45% complete fossil, known as "Ardi" was discovered in Ethiopia by Tim White's team in 1992 just 75km from the location of the famous "Lucy" fossil. "Well Ardi was short, stood about three and half to four feet tall. She had long arms. If you are going to make suits you need small people and arm extensions. Children are hard to work with so you need adult midgets, not dwarfs, you need average human proportions, but smaller. But finding enough midgets who can act is tough. You could blue screen Ardi and put in the environment later or have it as a CGI construct. There's several ways you could animate Ardi. But the colour of Ardi, her hair and size and shape of the soft tissue is informed guesswork, soft tissue doesn't usually fossilise. I always liaise with an expert and we find a realistic compromise."

Not so different from R2D2, really.

A new film to debut at the Toronto Film Festival is a 90-minute 3-D exploration of Chauvet Cave, directed by Werner Herzog. The LA Times reports on the film: "Is Werner Herzog's new 3-D documentary a huge forward leap or total folly?"

For Herzog, 3-D was the perfect tool to capture the drawings, since after all, the cave that held the drawings was akin to a modern-day theater or gallery where primitive people could view, by torchlight, this mysterious new form of art. "Once you see the cave with your own eyes, you realize it had to be filmed in 3-D," Herzog says. "I've never used the process in the 58 films I made before and I have no plans to do it ever again, but it was important to capture the intentions of the painters. Once you saw the crazy niches and bulges and rock pendants in the walls, it was obvious it had to be in 3-D."

I really hope it comes to Madison. I think this is a great use for 3-D. Truly some aspects of the cave art depend on the actual 3-dimensional form of the underlying rock. Ninety minutes is a long tour, and I hope that the film uses the time to explore the place -- not jam it with speculative narration.

Nature has Martin Kemp review an art exhibition by Walton Ford ("Monkey business"), of interest because of the fine watercolor depictions of animals -- reminiscent of 19th century illustration -- in anthropomorphic contexts. I'm pointing to it because I like the art, which has been described as "Audubon on Viagra". PBS has a nice online profile of Ford.