Hoopsnakeimages
hoopSnake image courtesy of Good Citizen Gallery
More than 30 years ago, when poet James Merrill channeled bat-angels through a teacup planchette, they barked at him: “UNHEEDFUL ONE / 3 MORE YEARES MORE WE WANT / WE MUST HAVE POEMS OF SCIENCE!” In the 1970s, culture was still in the throes of industrial-era specialization, and the only people actively writing “poems of science,” were weirdoes like May Swenson (e.g., “The DNA Molecule”). But the bats got their 560 pages of The Changing Light at Sandover, and now there’s even a dedicated Centre of Poetry and Science in the U.K.
Though visual artists are usually better at incorporating science into their work than poets—they need to know how to use a ruler and hopefully get down the basics of anatomy too—it’s rare to see them frolicking with physicists and botanists. However, this week you can see examples of both. On October 1, “Losing Paradise? Endangered Plants Here and Around the World,” opens at the Ridgeway Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden. The opening reception, on October 7 at 5:45, includes a chat with MoBot Prez Peter Raven, as well as artist Carol Woodin and conservation biologist Dr. Matthew Albrecht. On October 9, Good Citizen Gallery (have you seen their art billboard, by the way? it’s worth a drive down Gravois), opens “Reflective Territories,” a sound/sculpture installation created by arts collective hoopSnake, named after chemist Friedrich August Kekulé’s snake dream which led to the discovery of the benzene ring. HoopSnake is the project of artist and Sewanee art prof Greg Pond, who works with a rotating cast of artists and scientists. The crew for this project includes physicist Randolph Peterson, computer scientist Nels Oscar, photographer Tyler Cooney, and Stanislav Veselovskyi, a Ukrainian exchange student who is studying physics. Here’s a quick description of the show:
“‘Reflected Territories’ is comprised of two sound sculptures that work in concert with one another. One is a fractal system of stainless steel pyramids that make up a complex series of sound reflectors and baffles. The other is wooden sound sculpture. The pyramid generates a diffuse reflection of sound from iterative surfaces and boundaries to create complex sound fields that repeatedly reform the original sound and affect the perception of space in the spaces where it sits. The second sculpture collects the sounds reflected by the pyramid and reprocesses them into its own set of complimentary noise.”
As Niels Bohr once said, "We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections." Sounds to me like the sort of habitat where Merrill's poetic bat, Mirabell, would feel perfectly at home. --Stefene Russell
