Space and Art


One of my earliest memories of the bridge between space and was the constellations.  I was fascinated with the story of Orion, his belt, and how the goddess Artemis placed him among the heavens as greek mythology was a childhood interest of mine.   A number of the constellations had religious reverence (Mullen, 2011).  Even in Christianity, there was a link between the space and the divine and the book Paradiso (part of the Divine Comedy by Dante) uses celestial spheres to outline the path a soul takes when ascending to God (Alighieri, 1952).


I’ve come to learn that farmers were some of the first people to appreciate constellations as they used them to tell the time of year in areas that did not have much of a differentiation between seasonal weather, which can effect agriculture (Dolan, 2018).  But I have a vivid memory of my second grade teacher explaining how the Big Dipper was used for navigation and its link to black history (Gooley, 2018).  Slaves created a negro spiritual called “Follow the Drinking Gourd” (or “Follow the Big Dipper”) as the northern star was apart of this constellation and allowed escaped slaves to maneuver the underground railroad (Hartcourt, 2018). 
 

References:

Mullen, Leslie. Space.com, 20 Jan 2011. < https://www.space.com/10656-astronomy-religion-cosmos-intersection.html>

Dante, Alighieri, and Laurence Binyon. Dante's Paradiso. London: Macmillan, 1952.

Dolan, Chris. What Are Constellation? < http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/constellations.html>

Gooley, Tristan.  How to navigate using the stars. < https://www.naturalnavigator.com/find-your-way-using/stars>

Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” – African American Spiritual. < http://www.eduplace.com/kids/socsci/nyc/books/bke/sources/bkc_template.jsp?name=spiritual&bk=bkc&state=ny>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dr. Doodles

Image
I can remember when I first started drawing I was obsessed with precision and making thing proportional when sketching a person.   I no long wanted to draw eyes too far up on the head like I did when I was a kid.   In my early 20s I discovered a book called “ Artistic Anatomy ” by Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (originally published in 1889) hoping to study it to become better at sketching the human form.   The book went into the particulars of the human body and it followed the same practices that da Vinci did when he merged artistic and scientific observation (Irving).   The artistic eye was used to further medical research as it did required great attention to detail.   Body Code is a collection of biomedical animation displayed in galleries to gain public interest in scientific knowledge.   The detail of the cellular phenomenon can be quite a vision when magnified from its molecular scale. In recent times, we have separated medical science from
Read more

Art and Robotics

Image
The industrial revolution changed the way in which goods were produced and the way people worked.   The emphasis on efficiency was considered counterintuitive to the rules of nature.  For example, the film Modern Times (1936) showed Charlie Chaplin so focused on his task on the assembly line that he lost perception of what his socket wrench could be used on.  He began to see human body parts as nuts that needed tightening.   Although, this was a comedic play on the difference between the mechanical and the natural, the film Metropolis (1927) had a bit of a darker take of this phenomenon.  The scene called “Maria’s Transformation,” was an eerie view of how mechanization can completely void an individual of their humanity.  The concern with the lack of authenticity was explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936).   His criticism focused on the film industry as the replication and distribution of visual conten
Read more