KNOW THYSELF

All sorts of oddities in the current exhibition at the Wellcome Collection; a stuffed badger curled in the corner without explanation, video of Ming the tiger who lived in a New York apartment, the bill of a platypus ripped off in disbelief, diagrams of a dinner held in a Crystal Palace dinosaur, a 3D printed extinct lion's skull, various taxidermy efforts and dioramas.
I could go on, and maybe I should, because there were lots of lists, catalogues, and encyclopedias. The first edition of Carl Linnaeus' aesthetically pleasing Systema Natura was on display.
Also lots of lovely old illustrations and artefacts throughout to pore over.
A video installation of a modern fable narrated by an endangered amazon parrot, connecting the Big Bang, Om, the Great Silence and man's search for intelligent life in outer space via the Arecibo Observatory summed up the exhibition. Both were oddly profound, poetic, intriguing and inspiring.

INFO-GRAPHIC OR GRAPHIC INFO?

Above shows an info-graphic I produced for recently defunct classical music website Sinfini.
On the left is the initial idea, based on the look of the Ordnance Survey maps; as one of the facts is the mapping agency birthdate.

After a change in the facts, this map idea didn't really work and the whole thing really became less of an info-graphic and more of an illustrated fact-sheet.
I re-worked the idea (correcting the featured instrument shape, as it turns out I don't know my Basset Clarinet from my Basset Horn Clarinet), reverting to a colour palette I had come up with earlier for the same site, for another Clarinet Concerto feature.

My idea was to pull apart the instrument in the same way that the given facts reveal the separate parts of the Concerto itself. The result is quite Cubist, although Picasso wasn't in my thoughts as I was doing it, and maybe that is why I think, and hope, it doesn't appear as a pastiche. 

I prefer the second attempt, but can't help but feel the initial aim of producing an info-graphic was lost. It seems that too often any information with an image is labelled as such, whereas I feel it should represent the data in a way that wouldn't be clearly understood just by looking at the facts; the relationship between them, for example, from which new conclusions can be surmised.
This is a problem when the 'data' is really descriptive facts, and although I made some attempt in the map version, it doesn't quite work...so it was probably best to abandon any pretence and just produce a graphic-info, to coin a phrase.

To see the two pieces above in more detail, I have popped them up on Pinterest.

If anyone is interested in maps and the Ordnance Survey, I can recommend a documentary I watched recently on BBC4 - available here if you fancy.

MESSIAEN: QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

75 years ago, on 15th January 1941, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time was premiered in the prisoner-of-war camp where the composer was interned during World War II.

Classical music website Sinfini have produced an astonishing visualisation to accompany the first movement 'Crystal Liturgy', animated by Simon Russell.

There is a detailed explanation for the rationale behind this beautiful video explaining the importance of numbers and mathematics. This includes the Golden Ratio concept, which is what I took as the starting point to complete my accompanying info-graphic seen above.

The intention of the info-graphic was to place the piece in the context of the year 1941 and what was happening elsewhere in the world, in a visually attractive way that represents the facts in a memorable way, hopefully leading people to listen to the music.