Lost Leonardo may be found with the help of Gamma Camera

From Mark Rodman Smith we get this update from the New York Times on the scientific help being given to Art History at UCSD:

FLORENCE — For decades scholars have labored to find a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, believed by many to be hidden behind a fresco by Giorgio Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio here. Now — thanks to an unusual marriage of art history and nuclear physics, partly arranged by an unassuming freelance photographer — the quest may soon be over.

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Better yet, it may end with a photographic image of the lost mural.

The complex tale begins in the 1970s, when the Florentine art historian Maurizio Seracini became convinced that the mural, “The Battle of Anghiari,” hailed by some in Leonardo’s era as his finest work, was lurking behind the wall-sized Vasari in the Hall of Five Hundred, for centuries the seat of Florence’s government.

With its violent, bucking horses and bloodthirsty soldiers brandishing swords in the scrum of warfare, “The Battle of Anghiari,” which Leonardo began in 1505 and appears to have abandoned the following year, was hailed as a triumph and copied by many artists until it mysteriously disappeared sometime in the mid-16th century. (A well-known Rubens drawing in the Louvre was inspired by an anonymous copy of the wall-size battle scene.)

A combination of historical sleuthing and scientific analysis led Mr. Seracini to venture that Vasari covered Leonardo’s oil painting with a protective wall, then painted his own fresco on top, where it remains today. (Vasari was commissioned to create the fresco in 1563 by members of the Medici family, who had returned to power after an interlude of republican government.)

In the 1970s Mr. Seracini, who runs the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a professor at its school of engineering, noticed the words “cerca trova” — “seek and you shall find” — painted on a battle standard in Vasari’s fresco, a tantalizing clue that first piqued his interest.

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When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists

Science and art are often considered opposites – so what happens when top practitioners in each field collaborate? The results, finds Stuart Jeffries can be seismic. This article comes from the guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 August 2011 21.30 BST

Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.

The artist and the geneticist

Just before 9/11, Marc Quinn did a portrait of Sir John Sulston, one of the genetic scientists who decoded the human genome. "At the moment this divisive attack happened, John's work and this portrait were suggesting that we are all connected – in fact that everything living is connected to everything else," Quinn says.

It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."

"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."

A decade after their collaboration, Quinn and Sulston are meeting in the artist's east London studio. Did the collaboration change each man's attitudes towards the other's discipline? "I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions," says Quinn.

"Science simply means finding out about stuff, but in that process science is the greatest driver of culture," says Sulston. "When you do something like decode the human genome, it changes your whole perspective. In terms of genetic manipulation we're not just looking for answers but modifying what's there."

That is very much the focus of Quinn's recent work. Last year, his White Cube show featured a sculpture called Catman, depicting Dennis Avner, who has been tattooed to look like a cat, and another of Allanah Starr, a transsexual woman who, according to the blurb, "has changed her body into the idealisation of femininity even though she also has a penis". Quinn says: "They're about the fantasy of being someone else – you can be a man or a woman, anything. We've always had those fantasies and now science is making them possible."

Quinn says Sulston's portrait was important to his later work. He shows us his painting of a human iris in the studio. "I've made a lot of work since, to do with eyes and fingerprints, because we are controlled so much more by scans of abstract data about ourselves." As for Sulston, since he finished working on the human genome, he has become concerned with ethical questions to do with the application of his work to police DNA databases and civil liberties.

The collaboration came about when Quinn was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, with the support of the Wellcome Trust, to do Sulston's portrait. "John did all the work," says Quinn. The artist, at least, decided on the portrait's frame. "People can see themselves in the reflective surround, which highlights that we're all connected – one of the great messages of the Human Genome Project.

"Because it's true, isn't it, that our DNA is 90% the same as bananas'?" asks Quinn. "Well, no, actually it's more like 50%," clarifies Sulston, who won the Nobel prize in

2002. "Our DNA is about 90% the same as other mammals." Our material connection with everything else, not just our world but in the universe, clearly appeals to Quinn: no wonder that his Iris painting from 2009 is subtitled We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars.

In Quinn's most famous work, Self (1991), he made a sculpture from a cast of his head filled with nine pints of his own deep-frozen blood. It is carefully maintained in a refrigeration unit, reminding us of the fragility of existence. Every five years since 1991, he has replaced what he calls a "frozen moment" on life support, with a new transfusion of his own blood. He calls it an ongoing project, while the portrait of Sulston is suspended in time for ever; once the Nobel laureate dies, there is something of him preserved in this picture, a code from which, perhaps, he could be cloned.

Go to the following link to read three more case studies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/21/collaborations-between-artists-and-scientists

The poet and the speech scientist

The photographer and the physiologist

The theatre director and the neuroscientist

Center for Innovation in Seattle

This report from Art Daily: The Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) today announced that it has received a generous gift of $10 million from Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive officer of Seattle-based Amazon.com. The grant will be used to establish the “Center for Innovation” at the new MOHAI opening in late fall of 2012 in the historic Naval Reserve Building (Armory) at Lake Union Park, a few blocks from the new Amazon.com campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Bezos’ contribution to MOHAI is the largest in the museum’s 59-year history.



"Look at the disproportionate number of extraordinary organizations founded in Seattle – Microsoft, Costco, Boeing, Fred Hutch, PACCAR—even UPS was founded here. These companies and their innovations have had a big impact on Seattle, the country, and the world,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “There’s something about Seattle that has made it an unusually good place to innovate, and the MOHAI Center for Innovation will help Seattle continue on that course by showcasing and teaching how industrial innovation can play an important role in human advancement. New treatments, affordable flight, a computer on every desk—the core activities of these Seattle organizations have created benefit for people at home and around the world.”



“We are deeply grateful for the support and inspiration from Jeff Bezos to open the new MOHAI Center for Innovation,” said Leonard Garfield, Executive Director of the Museum of History & Industry. “Jeff is one of the leading visionaries and inventors of our time, and we are fortunate to have him in our own backyard, helping continue Seattle's renown for large-scale innovation. This new initiative is perfectly aligned with the Museum of History & Industry's mission and we look forward to telling the story of how Seattle companies have played a role in human advancement and to educating thousands of young people and adults alike in the years to come on the past, present, and future of innovation in Seattle.”

Microtonal Music

Microtonal composer Harry Partch (above) was a Regents professor at UCSD during its inception year 1967 - I was his assistant at that time. His visionary concepts helped to shape my life . His 'just intonation' method was inspired by the Greeks and was scientifically based on the harmonic series, with the intervals based on integer ratios.  

I would like to share a website that may introduce you to the field of microtonal music. This is John Starrett's website which is a great source of information on microtonal music.  Here Other interesting sites are my site Here  and Joe Monzo's site Here

The sameness of organisms, cities and corporations: Q&A with Geoffrey West

Dr.Geoffrey West is lecturing at SDMA but you can read this Q&A from his Ted Lecture which touches on the DNA of Cities. Very interesting to think of cities and countries as well as companies as organisms. Mr. West if a Theoretical physicist and expert on the fundamental laws of cities,

The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: Q&A with Geoffrey West

You may also want to check out the article in the New York Times in which he is quoted:

West says. “What the data clearly shows, and what she (Jane Jacobs) was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.”

“It’s like being on a treadmill that keeps on getting faster,” West says. “We used to get a big revolution every few thousand years. And then it took us a century to go from the steam engine to the internal-­combustion engine. Now we’re down to about 15 years between big innovations. What this means is that, for the first time ever, people are living through multiple revolutions. And this all comes from cities. Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

West speaks of the impermanence of the corporation but unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”

This Is Real Not Hollywood