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Although they may look computer-generated, the micro-images created by Maria Ferreira at the Rhode Island School of Design, examine a very real world ordinarily imperceptible to the human eye. In her short video Lattice, Ferreira uses a polarising filter under an inverted microscope to transform growing crystalline masses into otherworldly prismatic landscapes, revealing the striking beauty and complex geometry of crystal formation.
Director: Maria Constanza Ferreira
video
Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
video
Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
video
Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes