I’d like to say that I’ve been a long-time follower of this award, but I’d be lying. The ISEVC (much easier than typing it out each time) is sponsored jointly by the journal Science, a nonprofit international science society, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is intended to “captivate and engage the viewer by revealing the hidden meaning and intricate details of our world in visual form.” The winners have just been announced! The competition is in its seventh year and is equally focused on science as it is on the visual arts. The criteria for judging the entries include “visual impact, effective communication, freshness and originality.”

The winner (pictured here on the February cover) was for Branching Morphogenesis, “an installation made from more than 75,000 interconnected cable zip ties, [and] illustrates the predicted forces generated by human lung endothelial cells as they form networks within an extracellular matrix over time.” As a example of the challenge, NPR explained “let’s say you want to know how human lung cells interact with their surroundings. You could take a picture of what you see through the microscope…what if you took 75,000 cable zip ties and used them to create an 11.5-foot-tall sculpture that represents those interactions in three dimensions?” That was exactly what Branching Morphogenesis did.

Yonder from Emilia on Vimeo.

My friend Al introduced me to a friend on his on Facebook (Scott) and so I did the obligatory digging around which led me to his blog, Destroy Your Computer. There I found an exquisite and inspiring piece on animation from a woman in Germany named Emelia Forstreuter. She uses Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D and Flash to create some of the most inspired work I’ve seen in a very long time. I am stunned, hope you are too. Fullscreen it!

This was an amazing piece that I discovered while still working @ Creative Asylum overseeing the development and launch of the Peer Squared Project. While this is not a new find, it’s a piece of work that warrants a rediscovery as it’s still one of the more amazing projects I’ve seen in recent years.

Brambilla’s work, entitled “Civilization,” is a continuous HD video collage, “taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven” (500 clips in all) as an installation inside of an elevator in New York’s Standard Hotel.

The Video moves up and down depending on the direction of the elevator car, and passes through hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven and upper heaven/lower hell (which is where the video collage ultimately loops to create the continuum).

The total size of the piece is in itself daunting: 1920 x 7500 pixels played back on a 42″ plasma screen.

To view the entire piece, read the details of the project along with an interview with Brambilla, please CLICK HERE: it’s well worth the time. You’re welcome!