Art of Science 2021
Contents:
Image Gallery: 20 Finalists Showcased in a Traditional Gallery Format
Video Submissions: 5 Video Finalists Provide Experiences in Moving Picture
Awardees: See This Year's Art of Science Winners
Sponsors and Credits: Those Who Made this Possible
This piece evokes a physiological effect that requires specific acoustic conditions. Adjust the volume level until the described phenomenon is detected, and do not use headphones. Explore different head positions while listening, and for a stronger effect, extend your hands around your outer ears.
Difference tones are sounds produced in the ear and perceived as emerging from within the head. The simultaneous presentation of at least two tones in a specific ratio and amplitude will create difference tones in the inner ear and the auditory pathway.
On the Sensations of Tone is a series of compositions that explore the physicality of sound and spatial depth by stimulating the ears to generate sounds of their own. During the composition of On the Sensations of Tone VIII, a spectral analysis of the orchestral crotales revealed notes containing frequencies in the proper amplitude and ratio for eliciting difference tones. Sounding two notes produces as many as four or more difference tones. In the finished piece, pitch content from the acoustic space later returns exclusively in the listener’s ears. Microscopic and macroscopic listening is possible by shifting attention between the acoustic tones, the ear tones, and all audible sound.
Ice crystals have beautiful microscopic structures. This video shows the growth process of an ice crystal under an optical microscope. The ice crystal keeps growing on a nucleus when the temperature is gradually decreasing. It looks like a blossoming flower.
Alan Watts relates the tale of a man who approached Bodhidharma pleading “I have no peace of mind, please, pacify my mind,” wherein Bodhidharma replies “bring forth your mind so that I may pacify it”. So moral of the story goes, the man is to search for his mind, only to find that, somehow, the harder he tries, it's supposedly substantial and ever-present nature becomes increasingly ephemeral and illusory; that the dynamic effervescence between inside and out is but one more dimension to coalesce around; that divine intervention is more akin to a kite in the wind than this original sin of conviction that ours is the way; that we're often too blind to recognize the games that we play along this particularly practiced, skewed, and heavy sided axis of madness labeled "I," "Ego," and "Me" whose domain and range is the sole genesis of suffering; and that all we need to do is let go. Then, maybe, we'd come to believe, in Watts’ words, "that what you see during the experience of 'satori', 'awakening', or whatever you want to call it, is that this 'now moment', in which I’m talking, and you're listening, is eternity." My goal is to return to Bodhidharma before my bones are brittle and my soul is weak, bringing forth new, real-time neuro technologies to wake us from this dream. Then, bowing my head before his feet, plead, "Here is my mind. It can’t be ignored. Better yet, here's yours: show me wisdom, show me compassion, show me how to use my brain to be a more enlightened being because at this point the metaphors aint cutting it." We live in an era where machines can learn, and computers can see, in a time where we can rewrite the very code of biology. We are no longer bound by the fabric of reality, but rather by the extent of our imagination.
This video displays brain activity during meditation recorded with high-density electroencephalography. This visualization is an attempt to create a new type of meditation object by mapping wavelet transformed time-frequency neural data onto a virtual surface. Each 'pie slice' represents the brain activity of the entire cortex at a given frequency. Points closer to the center of the object map to frontal electrodes and those on the periphery map to occipital, or visual, electrodes. Low frequencies are in the upper portion of the display and higher frequencies are in the lower portion. The height of the surface represents the power of the signal at a given frequency and location, while the color represents the phase. The left-right mirror symmetry employed helps the observer recognize consistent patterns. While we have sat for millennia watching our breath, there is no reason why we can't create a more informative and engaging object for our attention. Through presenting a practitioner's brain activity to them in real-time, I believe we can accelerate the awakening process, especially if these systems are designed to help users approximate brain state patterns found in our living sages during deep states of meditation.
Awardees
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1st Place Prize:
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Streams of Dark Matter
Ralf Kaehler, Tom Abel
KIPAC
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2nd Place Prize:
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Lithium Nightmare
Xin Xu, Geoff McConohy
Materials Science
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3rd Place Prize:
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Microcosmos
Steven Boeynaems
Genetics
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People's Choice Award:
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The Aging Brain
Paloma Navarro, Ximena Fernandez
Genetics
Sponsors and Credits
Art of Science is sponsored by the Materials Science and Engineering Department, the School of Engineering, the Graduate Student Council, the Graduate Students in Electrical Engineering, and the Stanford Energy Club.
Art of Science would not be possible without our incredible judges.
Art of Science is organized by the Stanford Materials Research Society
Organizing Committee:
Elissa Klopfer, Risa Hocking, Pooja Reddy, Dante Zakhidov, Melody Wang, Harry Thaman, Emily Lindgren, Gabriel Lipkowitz and Andrew Lee