Tag Archives: aboriginal art

Fun Science: Art Resembling Science

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Can you tell the two below pictures apart? Which of the following two images is a modern aboriginal painting, and which is a picture of an oscillatory chemical reaction?

      

The left image is of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) chemical reaction. The right image is a painting from Western Australia using aboriginal techniques. They are strikingly similar. Could it just be a coincidence? I believe some models with bacteria growing competitively yield similar patterns; perhaps such patterns existed in nature. (EDIT: traveling wavefronts like above have been shown in slime molds. A search on “cAMP spiral waves” reveals many examples.)

Art: Aboriginal designs from Western Australia

The image on the right above came from a book about Aboriginal art called Balgo-4-04 that I found at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal collection in Charlottesville, VA. Unfortunately, I did not think to write down the title of the exact work, or its info (hopefully I will go back soon and retrieve it).

The collection was put together by Warlayirti artists from Western Australia. I don’t know the year of this painting, but I think it is modern and based upon older sand painting techniques. Unfortunately I am not enough of an expert on this topic to provide any deep insights. If anyone else is, I’d love to learn more.

Science: Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction

The image on the left is an image of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction (photo credit: Brandeis U Chemistry). For a more technical overview, check out the Scholarpedia page. Transition metals at different oxidation states lead to these colors; the particular metal can be varied to give different properties. Cerium and manganese, as well as many others, can be used in the reaction. The curling waves in the dish are traveling oscillations. The video below shows the patterns in time.

Another good youtube video showing how the BZ reaction is set up is here. The behaviors observed in the BZ reaction occur in other oscillatory systems. The spiral waves are 2D analogies to the 3D scroll waves that occur in the heart during ventricular fibrillation (VF). VF causes the heart to quiver and is deadly. In this link, wave-propagation in the heart is shown under several conditions (using a java plug-in). If you click “java applets” on the left, under the “introduction” header, you can choose VF, VT (ventricular tachycardia), and normal heart rhythm. You can then apply defibrillation to these rhythms and see what happens. The website is maintained by a scientist, Flavio Fenton, who researches nonlinear dynamics in hearts and biological systems.

For more discussion on oscillatory dynamics, check out my post on synchrony.

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I like to use different art styles for my various different stories. Lately there is nothing better than trying to find attractive illustrations of various origins. A few months ago, I found a children’s book at a library sale, very much by accident–Enora and the Black Crane. Enora is a lovely story, and the illustrations are beautiful. Before happening upon this book, I had seen little aboriginal art.

I wanted to incorporate aboriginal designs into my in-progress short story collection. Luckily, I live near the only dedicated aboriginal art museum in the United States, The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Virginia. This was a nice resource for additional inspiration. The illustrations for the collection are black and white woodblock style (as I mentioned in my previous entry). Aboriginal design uses a lot of color. I tried to capture some of the spirit while maintaining consistency with the woodblock theme. I ended up with the featured image for this entry. I ended up knowing a bit more about aboriginal design, and my final design was richer for it.