Sew: a longer way to go.

Work in progress on 'Henry VIII goes Racialist'.

It's a slow progress: it isn't that I don't think it's a good thing to dress the powerful in silly clothes, or say their bad words back in silly voices... (Ha! I'll show you not to go around implementing racist immigration policies Jack Straw! I'll dress you up in frilly pantaloons and give you a beaded codpiece - that'll learn you!")

Just that if I'm going around claiming that dehumanising any of us dehumanises the rest of us, well then I have to be very careful about rehumanising my barbie world. And I'm not happy with my script yet.

But I am happy with my lovely costumes:

A Fuller Picture

Here's carbon 86, hanging about with a sunken shopping trolley at the bottom of the Waters of Leith.
Made with pyMOL again, with thanks to TCC LAB for the fullerene coordinates.

These buckyballs are of special interest today as I believe they can be found in my pigment of the month, Lamp Black.

so what are you doing?

(Same molecule, different orientation, "cartoon" view. Same fish. Same caveat: it's not going to tell you anything useful.)

What I am doing is looking at ways of picturing as ways of combining ways of visualising. (It's taken me 5 years to work out how to say that - funny, isn't it, the work that has to go in to arriving at a point of being able to state the bleedin' obvious.)

Trying to get over the traumatic fragmentation of modernism, and around the horrid postmodernist fashion of slapping things together willy-nilly in a way that doesn't make sense. To present a unified view, that enfolds various viewpoints. And one that is a bit more satisfying than "well it's all connected really, innit."

Because it does all make plenty sense. ( This proto-oncogene tyrosine-protein kinase receptor is an integral part of this fish, the fish an integral part of this pond, the pond an integral part of my environment, my environment an integral part of yours. Statin' the bleedin' obvious again.)

Obviously if these pictures are going to make proper sense we'll need a few clues about exactly how, and where, and when these integrations probably occur. But that's all for later, all I'm doing now is playing with the integrity of the picture itself.

Do category errors lead to class wars?

More PyMOL fun.

Nobody should think for a minute that this is Science or makes any sense at all, it's a molecule chosen at random with a random bit of painting, it doesn't have any useful meaning at all except in a "well it's all connected really innit" way and "ah, ain't it pretty'. It's probably not even Art.

I'm loving PyMOL for its delightful combination of information and explanation - representation and diagram mixed together. (The cloud of numbers here is a view of the 'formal charge' on the molecule: which, I believe is problematic in its own right.)

Playing with PyMOL

Today I've been having fun with PyMOL , an open-source based molecular visualization system, which gives nice visual representations of protein-folding.

This is "Antibodies Specifically Targeting a Locally Misfolded Region of Tumor Associated EGFR" plonked on top of one of my paintings, I don't know exactly where I think I'm going with it - but then I very rarely do, sure I'll find out later.