SciArt Magazine - All Issues | Page 35

of nature’s microscopic structures and patterns to the planet’s surface in ways that create landscapes create macroscopic designs, such as incorporating that have been captured in various forms of digital the pattern of fish gills in building artificial habitat artwork. Recent interest in emulating these structures for oysters. Her artwork serves a valuable natural patterns to design sustainable and ecoscientific purpose in uniting cultural and biological compatible creations (e.g., green roofs, artificial evolution through so-called geotherapy. wetlands) relates to their influencing hydrologic regimes, temperature dynamics, and aesthetics Wave Rhythms: Researchers are now able to of a landscape. Perhaps the world’s most famous transpose the vibrational signatures of chemical green roof lies atop the School of Art, Design & mixtures, marine algae, and even DNA molecules Media at NTU in Singapore, where the top of a into the hearing range five-story building serves of humans to create as a gathering place for “nature-based” music. A students, blends seamlessly functional form of this into the surrounding music was composed topography, insulates from the sonification of the entire structure, and ocean wave dynamics, harvests rainwater for which created audible irrigation. versions of the graphical data and revealed Water Flowforms: Sonuances that were not called water flowforms are visible in the graphics constructed with different alone. Composer Bob shapes, lengths, materials, Sturm mapped the and designed flow rates. temporal spectrum Cascading down a stairof ocean buoy data, stepped series of vessels, characterized by the the water vortices possess infrasonic frequencies distinct patterns and (0.025 to 0.058 hertz) rhythms that are evident in of ocean waves, into the designs of John Wilkes. the audible frequencies Once considered strictly (20 to 20,000 hertz) for architectural features, humans. In doing so, flowforms were studied he was able to produce by a group of European stereo sonifications by na