Week 9 - Art in the Time of Pandemic

Here is some Art in the Time of Pandemic.

Viruses can be deadly. And beautiful. And have inspired so many artists and scientists (a loose term to include virologists, epidemiologists, microbiologists, coders, computer scientists ...) to collaborate and create wonderful art.

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1. Glass Sculptures of pathogens by Luke Jerram

HIV glass sculpture by Luke Jerram

In this beautiful combination of science and art, Luke Jerram's collection titled "Glass Microbiology" features a series of beautiful, and accurate glass sculptures of deadly viruses.

“The problem is that you end up with a percentage of the public believing that viruses are these brightly coloured objects. These are often portrayed in newspapers as having an air of scientific authenticity and objective truth, whereas actually that isn’t the case. Viruses are so small they have no colour. They’re smaller than the wavelength of light,” Luke Jerram

Here is an article on Interalia Magazine, with links to videos on how they blow these beautiful glass sculptures.

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2.

Hepatitis C Virus on Huffpost

I never thought I would link to a Huffington Post article - but here I am. Here is a slideshow of 13 beautiful, deadly viruses.

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3. Another kind of Virus - The human created kind

Bredo Variant Virus, Alex Dragelescu - The Bredo botnet virus sends malicious emails that includes malware attachments, that turns the machine into a zombie controlled by the botnet.

Viruses are not just the domain of biology. Alex Dragelescu, in his work series titled 'Malwarez' turns viruses and worms into beautiful visualizations.

This fascinating article on Wired talks about how he creates these: