Xarg blog Archive

I finally made it to Shine Gallery to pick out my christmas present. A picture of a bug! But not just any picture, these are amazingly detailed photos constructed from a mosiac of hundreds of scans from an electron microscope. They capture the essence of bugness and are astonishingly detailed. The artist who makes them is Giles Revell and there are a couple nice articles at scicult and The Manchester Museum about his work.

I have always been fascinated by electron microscopy ever since I saw a real electron microscope at the exploratorium in San Francisco when I was a kid and it always seemed strange to me that you could not get more images like this. Going to Shine gallery, they showed me the works in progress and artists proofs and I now realize why there are not more images like this around. It's an incredible amount of work to create one. One thing they have is all the individual scans on one page as thumbnails and when you realize each one takes a while to do properly and the stitching of the images is time consuming and there really are hundreds in each image, it's amazing that Mr. Revell has had the patience and vision to create these.

I am excited to get my prints and I think it's about the best Christmas present I have ever gotten. The most amazing thing about all this (besides the prints themselves) is that Shine Gallery is about a block from my house. My only regret is that I don't have space for the large images which are typically a meter or two across, although maybe I could put one over the dining room table :)