Chris Tyrell

Is it art?

I have been creative since birth. I have never known life without a passion for making art, viewing it, or participating in its creation or execution. I live for colour, texture and design. I am a sensate  hedonist. The smell of jasmine, wall flower, gardenia, heliotrope or pinks are the fragrances of my memory; music and smell  underscores my most emotional memories. But my  brain, more than anything, loves science, and that has always surprised me because I did not like science in school.

I’ve read about nine books on aphasia, every book Oliver Sacks has written and I liked the journal of the New York Academy of Science, The Sciences, so much, I gave subscriptions to it to several friends. It seemed like the perfect magazine for me (except for the articles on physics that made me feel like I was rolling in broken glass to read them). It is full of incredibly interesting articles, extremely well written and totally engaging to lovers of lay science like me, and every issue and every article is illustrated with spectacular art. It is like a New Yorker of science illustrated by the best curator of contemporary art on the planet. 

And I love astronomy, geology and geography. Stories about the earth transfix me—about its creation and evolution, about its natural wonders and about the men who have revealed its secrets. Once Christmas holiday, I read fifteen non-fiction books about aphasia or geology/geography plus two fabulous books on the origins of the Oxford dictionary. Among my favourite books of all time are:

•  The Map That Changed the Word by Simon WInchester
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
• The Meaning of Everything by Bill Bryson
• An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• Evolution’s Captain by Peter Nichols
• The Man who Lost His Language by Sheila Hale
• Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
• Nathaniel’ Nutmeg by Giles Milton

So when a friend who knows me well sent this link to me (http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn14805-science-visualised) I went directly to the site. Two of the images really appealed to me: the one about the bible (see above) and another about Alice in Wonderland.

Visualizing the Bible (above) was awarded an Honorable Mention in Illustration in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. It depicts all 1189 chapters of the Bible as a bar graph with the length of each bar proportional to the number of verses in the chapter. Above this, arcs represent 63,779 cross references between chapters; different colours denote varying distances between connected chapters. The image was created by Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University and Christoph Römhild of North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Mad Hatter’s Tea, winner of the Informational Graphics award, is taken from a book called Alice’s Adventures in a Microscopic Wonderland. Seeing this image by Colleen Champ and Dennis Kunkel, of Concise Image Studios, made me want to run out and buy the book of carefully built scenes made from mages of insects and other small animals to tell Lewis Carroll’s famous story.