DNA Sculpture Constructed with Shopping Carts

Roland Piquepaille writes "The U.K. supermarket chain Somerfield decided last year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA in an original way. It commissioned British artist Abigail Fallis to create a sculpture of a DNA double helix made of shopping carts and to display it during the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign of 2004. The sculpture, named DNA DL90, is 31 feet high and weighs more than three tons. It is on display since April 2004 at "Sculpture at Goodwood," the 21st century British sculpture park in Surrey. This photo gallery contains several pictures of this original artwork."

Comments

Not a Double Helix!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a single helix with two sides. DNA is a double helix, which is different.

Mike

Boring, uninspired, first year art student project

[Jtheletter]

Not to get into an argument on what is art, or start some pretentious troll, but as a work of art this thing sucks.

I mean seriously, she was given an interesting project (DNA representation) and certainly an original and interesting medium, and all we get is shopping carts welded to a stick-figure style double helix frame. It's boring and unimaginative as hell.

On the whole, yes it came out nice and it is engaging visually, but I feel like there could have been a lot more interesting variations on this. Perhaps build the helix itself out of carts, rather than just stick them on a prebuilt frame. Maybe use cables to create a self-supporting tension structure. Actually cut up some of the carts with a plasma torch and use the pieces to create individual molecules (G T C A) on the helix, there's lots of interesting structures to be built with the steel grids and wheels and legs, etc.

To me it seems like the end-result of this project was something that could have been built by any welder given the task "make a DNA helix from shopping carts." It was interpretted 100% literally by the artist and doesn't seem to convey any sense of insight, elaboration, or conceptual development.

Re:Helix Sculpture @ Linus Pauling House, Portland

[Anonymous Coward]

That is meant, of course, to represent the protein alpha-helix structure (which Pauling discovered), and not an artistic impression of the DNA double-helix.

Piquepaille == spammer == scammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not "his site"

Its Radio Userland's site AKA radio.weblogs.com AKA the company that Dave Winer founded. Winer is the RSS / OPML / XML guy who is now at Harvard.

Piquepaille == spammer. Instead of using email to spam, he spams sites like Slashdot (and many others) using his blog.

Piquepaille == scammer

Here is a direct quote from Piquepaille's Blogads advertising entry:

My stories are often mentioned by Slashdot, BoingBoing or Nanodot. Smart Mobs and Mindjack Daily Relay are also sites where I put summaries of my stories, giving this blog a traffic of 150,000 visits per month. So if you have an interesting technology to promote, put your ads on this blog.

Why doesn't he just say "So if you want to associate yourself with a spammer, give me your money."?

Ignore the fact that he has no "stories" of his own, offers no original content and zero insight.

Like most spammers, he has no incentive to stop because it's profitable for him to spam Slashdot and other sites.

Make it unprofitable. Stop visiting his weblog. Express your displeasure to the editors. Express your displeasure to Radio Userland (they are a quiet participant in his spamming since Userland has a small ad on the blog). Express your displeasure to the advertisers. Let them know you won't buy products they advertise there. Last of all, express your displeasure about his spam to Piquepaille himself.

You make Piquepaille's continued spamming possible with your traffic.

(As for all the spam references in this post, some might call it poetic justice. Maybe Google will pick it up and let everyone know.)