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I devote a chapter in my book to showing how insignificant art seems when compared with cosmic time scales, before going on to justify why we do it as a species, all told with easy in a way thats easy to understand, supported by graphical illustrations and diagrams.

New Book!

Hey hey!

I'm working on a book right now, due for publishing in around 2 weeks, so thought I'd share a couple of pictures from it. One of the key themes throughout the book is looking at art & design from a universal perspective - how does it fit into this universe?

Stroll through a forest

There had just been a fire in this small bit of woodland not far from where I live, and when I went to check it out, everything was quiet - the air warmed with the smell of ash and morning dew. I was pretty hungry, so I snapped a few pictures before lunch.

Tree-frog biodiversity warning for Amazon

BBC Nature article here.

So it looks as though some species groups can take tens of millions of years to develop. This is not the kind of news any naturalist wants to hear considering the rate at which we seem to be adding creatures to 'extinction' lists.

If we continue to damage our environment and do the bare minimum to alleviate climate change then some areas of the planet will take, quite literally, millions of years to recover. In fact, by the time some species groups have stablised again, chances are we might not even be around anymore.

Wouldn't it be nice if the natural world had a global, politically backed protection system in place - one that supported and safeguarded the creatures we live with, and that is adhered to.

SA485

One of the outcomes of my final 2nd Year project was a short film about a lightbulb. Pretty lame I know, but one of the interesting things about it was the approach I had taken to "contextualising" it.



I usually avoid focusing on the context of the stuff I make and try and keep it fun and interesting, but this project required me to look at how I would locate it and contextualise it - making it pretty difficult to sidestep.

Rather than focus on how location can affect context, I chose to investigate time itself as a location. The lightbulb emerged from this cool idea of looking back in time at things and seeing how their context changes. Think of any relic of the ancient world, be it an Egyptian vase, a Greek bowl or Stone Age flint. How we think about these objects now is completely different from how they were seen by the people that owned them back in their own timeframes.




I took this approach and applied it to a lightbulb - by pretending to be a scientist/archaeologist from thousands (millions?) of years in the future I invented a whole fictional world to place my lightbulb. If you are wondering why I picked a lightbulb: it was the first thing I found in my bin at home. The object didn't matter so much, just the ideas behind it.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, a counterpart to my website at www.livingonsaturn.co.uk.

First things first. I'm Chris, 23, from the UK and just finished my 2nd year of a BA degree in Visual Studies. I look at art & design from the point of view of a scientist and philosopher and this means I get to look at everything from Picasso to the latest developments in particle physics and see how it all fits into the world.

My aim with this blog is to collect articles and information on this theme of exploring art and culture from a different angle. This includes looking at science from the point of view of an artist, but mindful of the technicalities and academia behind both disciplines.

I hope you will all enjoy reading what should turn out to be a broad, yet fascinating blog.

Chris