Colouring-in with pencil-crayons for Data

This here is the nice picture of rhododendrons I made last year with coloured pencils. It's a Rhododendron oreodexa var. oreodexa and a  Rhododendron oreodexa var. fargesii.

 

I got very interested in leaf scars, nodes, axial buds - places where differentiation happens, or happened, where cells decide to be one thing or another.  How do you know?  How do you make those decisions, if you are a rhododendron cell?

They ain't like us, you know, they are having their whole life cycles all over their bodies all the time. Sort of. Well it's a mind-boggler, to me, this business of having meristems, of never being finished....

Anyway the Data thing is a claim I made when I was asking someone for money recently; "botanical illustration is one of the last places on earth where colouring-in has been a useful way of presenting data" I claimed. (Words to that effect.)

Well that is perfectly true as far as it goes and I could support that claim if pushed and all that. What I am trying to feel my way around now is where we could possibly go with that stuff now...

I mean, you know, now we've got gel electrophoresis and x-ray crystallography and all that jazz.

And do these representations of the individuation of species correspond to my worldview?

Etc.  Meanwhile,

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

By the way, as I am writing this, my Beloved is "educating" his son about music. You have to imagine this post with a jolly soundtrack.

Intrepid plant hunting

It's all just an excuse, isn't it, to have exciting days out in interesting places. That's a good bike that is too.

Im looking for Hippophae rhamnoides,  Sea Buckthorn. Found it, too:

That's a good plant, that is.  

Then I come home and do lots of this sort of nonsense:

I'm going to enjoy this plant as it has a relationship with my lovely Frankia bacteria, who make beautiful orange nodules, they'll go lovely with the berries....

And the ubiquitous predatory spider mite makes an appearance. I don't know why I'm compelled to make a note of it, I'm always delighted to see them scampering about their business, but suspect it's a bit like those children who shout "DOGGIE!" every time they pass a hound of any sort, part of the fun is in the shouting itself.

...and gold for the slime mould

I don't think anyone has done this before. Why would they? (I was accused of being 'original' the other day by someone but I am not foiled by their silver tongue, I know that this doesn't amount to being anything other than an Odd Bugger, at least not until you are making 30K or have a status which you desperately need to defend, neither of which apply to me.)

Anyway that is real gold that is, 23K gold leaf. It's wonderful stuff to work with, beaten so thin it is transparent, beautiful. I like its properties of being actively inert. It seems to have a magical agency, the soul of a moth perhaps, (a thing it has in common with pencil sharpenings, who will flutter everywhere around your bin, but never go into it, preferring eventually to nestle and roost amongst the fibres of your carpet) all it wants to do is to fly away and stick to your eyelashes, or to crumple up into itself like tiny pieces of golden snot. There will be reasons for that of course, electrostatic charges and perhaps aerodynamics trumping gravity or something, none of which need detract from the magic and mothyness of things; in fact quite the reverse. Unless you believe in all that Two Cultures bolloxology and its adherent singular and oppositional narratives, in which case there isn't really anything I can do for you anyway.

I like the idea of making a thing really precious and then giving it to microorganisms to have their way with it. But I'm expecting the slime mould to not want to have anything to do with the gold, given their recent disdain for the copper. Though you never know, what is good as a substrate might not be what you want for dinner, you won't catch me munching on the bike lane, for instance.

Not sure how the gold blobs will survive the dunking either, especially as I've used a PVA size, they could just float off like the smashing orangey bits you work so hard to liberate from your Jaffa cake. I chose PVA as a non-toxic option, I hope...

fluorescent grey...

doing thinking with slime mould

Here's what Prof. Andy Adamatzky has to say about Physarum plasmodium doing thinking:
"Plasmodium’s foraging behaviour can be interpreted as computation, when data are represented by spatial configurations of attractants and repellents, and results by structures of protoplasmic network . Plasmodium satisfactory solves many computational problems with natural parallelism, including shortest path, implementation of storage modification machines, Voronoi diagram, logical computing, process algebra... "
 Read all about it in his nice paper "Slime mould computes planar shapes" here.

Well that's very nice for me that somebody has gone to the trouble of doing sums to prove that the thinking of bodies can indeed be thought of as thinking, that Ms. No-brain, No-symbolic language here is doing the math all over my pictures. Maths even.

More to the point for me is the slime mould's responsiveness to things in general. This is a much more complex adventure for the Physarum than the smooth laboratory agar. All the different patterns it is creating here are responses to changes in humidity, available nutrition, light, the textitily of the substrate and other things I don't know about, all at the same time. I'm not at all sure how much it notices or cares about the grease and dirt left by my hands and the ubiquitous cats paws, sneezes, coffee spills and so on. I don't know if it is happy enough on the paintings because when I soak them after they are painted they get a thin coating of the size that the paper is impregnated with. 

I don't know if it has any kind of memory. Or even what I think I might mean by memory here. 

I have no idea why it seems to be happy to forage endlessly across paintings carrying a burden of fluorescent powder with only the occaisional break with a clean oat flake on a bit of damp kitchen roll. But then I can't say I understand why I do, either.

When good paintings go bad

Another decompositionist work. Unintentional this time. Well it was only a matter of time before this happened.
The pretty greenish white fungus seems to have come on to the painting with the black paint, which I must have left sitting around for a bit too long. Then had a nice incubation as the painting lolled about damply waiting for the slime mould to finish with it. Dunno about the brown sugary-looking one but the white starry fungus belongs to the slime mould alone.

If anyone could identify any of these I would be very happy.

working from home

I'm moving studio this week, working from home in the meantime. How is a person supposed to do their work in a place where there is also a large orange cat hell-bent on doing his conviviality work? In a minute he gets up and starts playing Twister with the big circles. He is very good at his job.

bit of a wash-out

Prototype is a cheap print-out of a drawing by T. H. Huxley pinched from the net at very low resolution, I didn't seal if off well enough so it is growing on the inside instead...