Quick Sparks // "Thy Right Worship is Defiance"
Currently sparking my interest: Sugimoto’s Prisms // Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds // Illustrated Moby Dick
Quick sparks are short posts about what has my attention right now. I hope these fuel your curiosity, and I’d love to hear about your own finds in the comments!
“Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks?”
Hiroshi Sugimoto | Optical Allusions
Lisson Gallery, New York City | 2 May - 2 August 2024
“With the help of my prism, I created rainbows in the room and shot them every morning. This light had no shape or form. In a certain sense, it was pure. These were gradations of light that emerged out of the darkness and began to shift. Nothing is in focus, so there is this feeling of ecstasy or rapture.
…I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolors. Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks?”
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
(c) Hiroshi Sugimoto / Lisson Gallery
The Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds
A new paper in Nature suggests that “Interstellar Space Clouds Triggered the Ice Ages,” as crisply summarized by Gizmodo.
“The Pleistocene Epoch—with its glaciers, woolly mammoths, and Neanderthals—still looms large in Earth’s rearview mirror, having ended a mere 12,000 years ago. Now, a team of researchers posit that those hundreds of thousands of years of our planet’s history may have been chilly due to a cloud in space that briefly removed Earth from the safety of the Sun’s warm glow.”
Start with that article as an overview, but don’t skip the original paper itself, which is filled with evocative specifics about things like the wonderfully named Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds:
“The [Interstellar Medium (ISM)] in the vicinity of the Solar System also harbours a few, rare, dense, cold clouds that are called the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds (LRCC). … Note that these clouds are anomalous and unexplained structures in the ISM, and their origin and physics are not well understood.”
A cold molecular cloud, as seen by the Webb Space Telescope. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA). Image found and captioned by Gizmodo.
Thy Right Worship is Defiance
Enjoying this illustrated version of Moby-Dick with striking images by Evan Dahm.
You can see examples of his intricate, clean-lined work here.
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” Herman Melville // Chapter 119 The Candles // Moby-Dick
(c) Evan Dahm // https://mobydickillustrated.tumblr.com
That illustrated version of Moby Dick looks absolutely stunning! Moby Dick is always sparking my interest, it really feels like one of those endless books that once it roots itself in your memory never stops yielding fruit.
One thing that I'm really into right now is the film Angel's Egg (in fact I'm writing an essay about it). The more I watch it the more every shot is searing itself into my brain and it's very welcome to stay there as far as I'm concerned!