Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship
codification skin two
quicktime download
related recent studies:
codification skin
skin
Atelopus
Andrias japonicus
eyes
#35111
#34611
#34411
Moonlight Sonata
Dark Dream
skin 2
skin 1
patterns
pacing
tag
Ceratophrys
P. tarius
Phyllomedusa
Know
R. hecksheri
Breath to Breadth
Feet-Breath
Dancing Feet
Hands Eyes
Hand Hold
Xenopus 2.2
Xenopus 2
Xenopus
Abstract
music:
Palestrina; Agnus Dei From Missa Papae Marcelli
Note:
The tags, notes and hundreds of thousands of pages of detailed observations of life layered in the codification skin combine to comprise our knowledge. A most humble respect for nature easily overlooked by the emotional response to dead animals in jars. The sacrifice of life in this rare case feeds our ability to comprehend life.
Comments:
The codification and images of amphibians resonates deeply within me. Our attempt to identify and codify life...even as it passes through our fingers like moving our hand through water. We try to grab it up, try to give it a name, try to figure out what it "is" or what it "means"...and sometimes we only begin to understand that after it has gone extinct, only experiencing the vacuum left from the once-presence of this animal in its ecosystem.
~ Ron Skylstad
Although, like everyone else, I would rather see live frogs in the wild in their natural habitat, when I see preserved specimens in a jar, it does not make me at all sad or remorseful. When I look at a jar of specimens I see the evidence of what we have learned and the unknown potential to learn even more about life from those preserved specimens. I see a tradition of collecting and studying specimens that goes back hundreds of years. I see a direct link to the past, and to the future. Each generation of scientists builds on the work of the previous generation, while sowing the seeds of research that the next generation will get to harvest. I see the long days and nights of fieldwork, slogging along muddy trails, freezing in a swamp all night, tromping through dripping cloud forests or sweating in the lowlands, hours upon hours of tedious measurements and recording and photography, of trying to ignore illness and injury for the thrill of finding out new information and finding unknown species, untold hours spent writing field notes while exhausted, the careful preservation and packing of specimens, and the decades of care devoted to keeping museum collections in good condition. Each specimen in the jar is a case of energy trumping entropy, at least for a while; each specimen is a conundrum of unknown information that someone has to figure out how to decipher.
The only thing that makes me sad about seeing specimens in jars is when I see a collection that is neglected, specimens without data, collections that are not used (which is why I quit my dream job at KU to become a consultant, so I could focus my energies on helping improve collection care in other collections).
Few things could make me happier than seeing jars of dead frogs along with their tags and their field notes--the dead frogs that help us understand the living frogs. I would never have imagined that you would be able to capture this long history and tradition so well in such a short video, but you did.
~ John Simmons