NCI's VizLab, known around the world for its expertise in producing beautiful and valuable scientific visualisations, has had a successful few weeks.
NCI would like to congratulate long-time user and artist Dr Erica Seccombe for winning the 2018 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, Australia's premier prize for art reflecting natural science and the environment. Dr Seccombe has been a user of NCI's visualisation tools and expertise for many years, developing her own expertise in manipulating the NCI-developed Drishti visualisation software. This award-winning work relied heavily on Drishti, along with NCI's data processing capabilities, to come to fruition.
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith says, "This work is a great example of science and art coming together to provide new perspectives on the world. We are very glad that we could provide Dr Seccombe with the tools she needed to produce this award-winning work."
The art work was a video named Metamorphosis, documenting the metamorphosis of a fly larva from maggot to fully-formed insect. The judges were struck by the beauty and mystery of the work.
They said, "In the unanimous view of the judging panel, Seccombe profoundly captured the spirit of the prize with a work that took as its foundation the ordinarily unseen intersection between science and art. Metamorphosis represents a deep collaboration between scientific and aesthetic enquiry, with the tools of one being instrumental to the realisation of the other."
Click here to view the video: https://vimeo.com/166897648.
Dr Seccombe also presented a new collaboration with NCI's VizLab at a group exhibition titled Connections in Canberra's Megalo Print Studio and Gallery in August 2018. This work involved algorithmically generated curves layered together and screen printed on paper. NCI's Stu Ramsden says, "It is stage one of a longer collaboration exploring these algorithms and print techniques."
In other exciting news, the Drishti software that is currently being used by the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne will be taught to associated researchers at the national synchrotron in Thailand. It is great to see this NCI innovation being used so widely by researchers around the world.
