Liz Lee writes chapter for new book on biologically-inspired computing

Photography Professor Liz Lee is author of the chapter, "A New Leaf," which appears in the book, "Biologically Inspired Computing for the Arts: Scientific Data through Graphics," to be released in April by IGI Global.

Photography professor Liz Lee has contributed a chapter, “A New Leaf,” to a new book, “Biologically Inspired Computing for the Arts: Scientific Data Through Graphics,” to be released in April by IGI Global, an international publishing company that covers all aspects of information science, technology utilization and management.

The new book contains a collection of authors’ individual approaches to the relationship between nature, science and art created with the use of computers. Lee’s chapter is one of three contained in section 4 of the book, “Tools for Metaphors: Nature Described with the Use of Mathematics and Computing.” Authors of the section’s remaining two chapters are from Germany and Taiwan.

In “A New Leaf,” her latest digital image series, Lee discusses how contemporary electronic imaging has returned to its photographic origins through nature-related subject matter. She explores the context of early photographic imaging and its connection to science and biology by investigating and connecting to the works of Thomas Wedgewood, William Henry Fox-Talbot and other pioneers of photographic technologies.

Lee cites Hippolyte Bayard’s “Arrangement of Specimens” and Anna Atkins’ photographs of “British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions” as early examples of the scientific fundamentals of photography, and notes that technological advances of the medium still draw on the same subject matter to reveal the same structure of conceptual and aesthetic investigation.