The Forest

In [Samuel Beckett's] Endgame, Hamm periodically asks Clov to go look out of the window of their room, and each time he does so Clov reports that nothing has changed: the habitat lies wasted, devoid of trees or signs of life. At one point during the play Hamm falls asleep and his mind drifts back in thought to some mysterious recollection or fantasy. When he wakes up he mutters to himself: “Those forests!” These two words, left uncommented, refer to some impossible space beyond the world, beyond the wasteland that exists both inside and outside of the room.

That, and what follows are from Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison (1992). First, from the Preface:

… If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment. In other words, in the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscuous with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness. In the forest, the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw stands for justice, Rosalind appears as a boy, the virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man, the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous.

Next is a quote used by Harrison from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

You can’t understand. How could you? — with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums — how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages of man’s untrammelled feet may take him by the way of solitude — utter solitude without a policeman — by the way of silence — utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering public opinion? These little things make all the difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much a fool to go wrong . . . Or you may be such a thundering exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place — and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! — breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.

And, this is Harrison, from the end of the book:

… As the order of institutions follows its course, or as huts give way to villages and then to cities and finally to cosmopolitan academies, the forests move further and further away from the center of the clearings. At the center one eventually forgets that one is dwelling in a clearing. The center becomes utopic. The wider the circle of the clearing, the more the center is nowhere and the more the logos becomes reflective, abstract, universalistic, in essence ironic. Yet however wide the circle may get through the inertia of civic expansion, it presumably retains an edge of opacity where history meets the earth, where the human abode reaches its limits, and where the logos preserves its native grounding.

… The global problem of deforestation provokes unlikely reactions of concern these days among city dwellers, not only because of the enormity of the scale but also because in the depths of cultural memory forests remain the correlate of human transcendence. We call it the loss of nature, or the loss of wildlife habitat, or the loss of biodiversity, but underlying the ecological concern is perhaps a much deeper apprehension about the disappearance of boundaries, without which the human abode loses its grounding. Somewhere we still sense — who knows for how much longer? — that we make ourselves at home only in our estrangement, or in the logos of the finite. In the cultural memory of the West forests “correspond” to the exteriority of the logos. The outlaws, the heroes, the wanderers, the lovers, the saints, the persecuted, the outcasts, the bewildered, the ecstatic — these are among those who have sought out the forest’s asylum in the history we have followed throughout this book. Without such outside domains, there is no inside in which to dwell.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Snowflakes

Snowflakes are born in chaos. The delicate balance between order and disorder: in a growing ice crystal, diffusion pushes toward instability, breaking up the boundary; the contrary force of surface tension tries to smooth it again, make an even skin like s soap bubble’s. A competition emerges, one force trying to sharpen the crystal, another trying to flatten it. Like living organisms, the snowflake at once seeks and abhors an equilibrium. And all the while, this crystal, one object growing among millions in a storm, falls slowly downward through a turbulent wind.

 Cloud formations, Tesuque, New Mexico, August 1964

All of today’s quotes (and the two pictures) are from from Nature’s Chaos, a book with photographs by Eliot Porter and text by James Gleick. Below is the text that precedes my leading quote:

Structure implies history. History infiltrated and inspires any solid form, even one as seemingly shapeless and ephemeral as an assortment of grasses strewn like pickup sticks on a meadow’s floor. The past of a rock wall — the stable and unstable flows, the crystallization and the pressure that shaped it — reverberates in its visible layers and cracks. Gnarled shoulders of black lava reveal one sort of past. Other sorts may be harder to read: the history of dynamical and chemical changes in molten rock that lead one mineral to condense, another to crystallize.

Part of the movement toward understanding chaos has been an appreciation of pattern formation as a specialty in its own right. The laws of pattern formation seem to govern snowflakes as well as microscopic crystals in metal alloys, the banding of underground gneiss as well as the slow diffusion of lichen across a rock surface. Theoretical physicists are analyzing the delicate tension between order and disorder that creates such structures. There is a hierarchy of patterns, from small to large, that seems equally familiar to those studying the organization of computer networks or human societies. “All structures (whether of atoms, cells, philosophies, or societies) began from something that was without form and void,” Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an expert on structure, has said. “A nucleus of a definite structure somehow formed somewhere, and if it was a structure more desirable than chaos, it then proceeded to grow at the expense of chaos …”

A snowflake begins with a nucleus. A seed of ice imposes its order on the molecules nearby. Crystallization requires molecules to snap into alignment, forming the rows and facets along which a solid may later cleave. The substance communicates its order not just over the short range, neighbor influencing neighbor, but over long distances, almost mysteriously, creating patterns that echo one another on scales of hundreds or millions of atoms. Defects and misalignments break up the simple geometry. Ice crystals grow as dendrites, swordlike structures, the points branching and forming new needles. A complex shape arises out of featureless void. If a sixfold symmetry becomes visible to the naked eye, the water molecule has imposed a simple order on the whole. But the perfectly symmetrical snowflake of the standard rendering — of the schoolroom paper cutout or the textbook illustration — occurs rarely in nature.

A snowflake does not form instantaneously, but grows, its progress controlled by the diffusion of heat away from the center. The freezing releases heat at the boundary between solid and liquid, and the heat must ebb away. As the boundary moves, it wrinkles and breaks up. The surface is unstable. As any piece of the boundary pulls ahead of the rest, it gains an advantage in grabbing new water molecules. It becomes a bulge, then a point. If enough space opens up, it may wrinkle and branch again. A flash of lightning through stormy, electrified air branches in the same way; a fern on a dank forest floor, in the same way. Though the materials, the timing, the physical details are all different, some mathematical core must be shared.

Every so often, a television weather announcer reports that scientists — generally amid a “flurry of excitement” — have found two identical snowflakes. It is never true. The possibilities of this canonical form seem never to end. Snowflakes are born in chaos. The delicate balance between order and disorder: in a growing ice crystal, diffusion pushes toward instability, breaking up the boundary; the contrary force of surface tension tries to smooth it again, make an even skin like s soap bubble’s. A competition emerges, one force trying to sharpen the crystal, another trying to flatten it. Like living organisms, the snowflake at once seeks and abhors an equilibrium. And all the while, this crystal, one object growing among millions in a storm, falls slowly downward through a turbulent wind.

Flamingos on lake Natron, Tanzania, Africa, 1970

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Nerdgasm

Trivia is largely the purview of nerds. Often, after it’s discovered that social skills, sports, and a healthy grasp of what’s “cool” have eluded them, a nerd will turn inward, focusing on the realm in which they excel: learning. As trivia is learning for learning’s sake, it could be argued that it is the purest of the nerd arts, honed and brandished at comic-cons and internet message boards across the land. And when the subject of said trivia is comic books, one experiences a singularity of pure nerdgasm that can alter the very fabric of space-time.

– (above) from the beginning of a review, by Kyle Olso of the Hipster Book Club — of the book, Was Superman a Spy? by Brian Cronin

With that in mind, we turn to Peter’s Evil Overlord List: The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became an Evil Overlord. I’m not sure if this quaifies as true trivia, but since there are a hundred of whatever it is, I think it’s nerdgasmic. Here are a few that I enjoyed:

7. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”

33. I won’t require high-ranking female members of my organization to wear a stainless-steel bustier. Morale is better with a more casual dress-code. Similarly, outfits made entirely from black leather will be reserved for formal occasions.

40. I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

49. If I learn the whereabouts of the one artifact which can destroy me, I will not send all my troops out to seize it. Instead I will send them out to seize something else and quietly put a Want-Ad in the local paper.

56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

85. I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. “Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse.” Instead it will be more along the lines of “Push the button.”

If you have absolutely nothing more useful to do with yourself, take a look at the full list. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Self-Conscious Vegetable

… Warfare, chemical or otherwise, changes surviving plants much as it might animal survivors, according to research on the phenomenon of priming.

A poplar leaf once scarred by insect attack kicks its defense genes into high gear faster during the next attack than a naive leaf does, says De Moraes. “Memory comes with so much baggage,” she says, so she uses the term priming or preparedness. Karban, among other researchers, does compare this effect of past experience in plants to memory in animals.

And De Moraes’ work shows that even a rumor of war can create a state of preparedness in a naive leaf. The way poplars’ internal plumbing system is structured means that a leaf does not have a direct connection to its immediate neighbor. When De Moraes experimentally “attacks” leaf number one, volatiles waft to near neighbors, and those volatiles can constitute gossip about the nature of the attacker. Should she challenge those neighbors later with their own crisis, they rev up their defense genes faster than does a leaf prevented from receiving the informative volatiles. Biochemical gossip has its value.

That warnings waft over a plant’s own leaves may help explain how the volatile cues evolved, De Moraes says. Biochemical messages benefit the gossiping plant itself, rather than just its neighbors.

Neighboring plants may be listening in, but perhaps the wounded plant is getting big benefits just from talking to itself, De Moraes says. And plants may be able to distinguish self from nonself, according to Karban’s current research effort. He is finding evidence that a sagebrush plant shows signs of distinguishing its own airborne signals from those of other sagebrushes. A sagebrush plant that sniffed volatiles from wounded neighbors that are genetically identical to it was more resistant to attack than were sagebrush plants exposed to volatiles from genetically different plants, he and a colleague report in the June Ecology Letters. That plants have some powers of self-recognition opens a new arena of comparisons with animals.

– from No Brainer Behavior by Susan Milius (June 20, 2009) in Science News

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Berger With Flies

John Berger is a writer whom I enjoy reading because while I sometimes agree with his broad world view I frequently disagree rather vehemently with the particulars of his views.  I especially disagree with almost everything he has to say about photography. (I enjoy disagreement; it stimulates me to recognize and refine my own views.)

In today’s post I am going to extract two bits (with which I do agree, loosely) from two Berger essays and misappropriate them to my own purposes. I want to use them reference the ongoing discussions of sequential photographs (and more). They are also useful for more amorphous discussions of consciousness.

 This first bit is from an essay, Uses of Photography (which is about how public use of photography is different from private use but we’ll ignore that):

Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event.

In the book, Berger shows a starburst illustration to demonstrate. I will add that the one should think of the starburst as being three-dimensional with rays incoming, not outgoing and from all possible directions and angles.

… We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is.

… There are a few great photographs which practically achieve this by themselves. But any photograph may become such a ‘Now’ if an adequate context is created for it. In general the better the photograph, the fuller the context which can be created.

Such a context replaces the photograph in time — not its own original time for that is impossible — but in narrated time. Narrated time becomes historic time when it is assumed by social memory and social action. The constructed narrated time needs to respect the process of memory which it hopes to stimulate.

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.

If you consider the way sequential still photographs are generally presented — linearly, or, sometimes, as arrays, I think you can see how they are frustrated in their intent — by thus flattening rather than “rounding” our perception of time. A single image is also flat, but it’s less insistently so than a line or an array. The result of using a sequence can thus be exactly the opposite of what was desired: rather than expanding the moment a sequence strips it to a single vector or plane.

This next bit is from Berger’s essay, The Ideal Palace, and it’s not meant to be about imagery at all. But I find it interesting to think of reference photography:

The ideal urban surface is a brilliant one (e.g., chrome) which reflects what is in front of it, and seems to deny that there is anything visible behind it. Its antithesis is the flank of a body rising and falling as it breathes. Urban experience concentrates on recognizing what is outside for what it is, measuring it, testing it and treating it. When what is inside has to be explained (I am not talking now in terms of molecular biology but in terms of everyday life), it is explained as a mechanism, yet the measures of the mechanics used always belong to the outside. The outside, the exterior, is celebrated by continuous visual reproduction (duplication) and justified by empiricism.

To the peasant the empirical is naïve. He works with the never entirely predictable, the emergent. What is visible is usually a sign for him of the state of the invisible. He touches surfaces to form in his mind a better picture of what lies behind them. Above all, he is aware of following and modifying processes which are beyond him, or anybody, to start or stop: he is always aware of being within a process himself.

Finally, the next two extracts are from the essay, A Load of Shit, and have nothing to do with art or photography you’ll be happy to know:

In one of his books, Milan Kundera dismisses the idea of God because, according to him, no God would have designed a life in which shitting was necessary. The way Kundera asserts this makes one believe it’s more than a joke. He is expressing a deep affront. And such an affront is typically elitist. It transforms a natural repugnance into a moral shock. Elites have a habit of doing this. Courage, for instance, is a quality that all admire. But only elites condemn cowardice as vile. The dispossessed know very well that under certain circumstances everyone is capable of being a coward.

… The eighteenth-century picture of the noble savage was short-sighted. It confused a distant ancestor with the animals he hunted. All animals live with the law of their species. They know no pity (thought they know bereavement) but they are never perverse. This is why hunters dreamt of certain animals as being naturally noble — of having a spiritual grace which matched their physical grace. It was never the case with man.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature. The just-hatched cuckoo, still blind and featherless has a special hollow like a dimple on its back, so that it can hump out of the nest, one by one, its companion fledglings. Cruelty is the result of talking oneself into the infliction of pain or into the conscious ignoring of pain already inflicted. The cuckoo doesn’t talk itself into anything. Nor does the wolf.

Cuckoos are brood parasites, just like cowbirds.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Beauty

It would be rash of me to claim that this is art. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholden. (Find out what it is, here.)

This one, also, might be beautoeful.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

the rhythmical lunacy of the dialogue

I Will Love the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Strand

Dinner was getting cold. The guests, hoping for quick,
Impersonal, random encounters of the usual sort, were sprawled
In the bedrooms. The potatoes were hard, the beans soft, the meat –
There was no meat. The winter sun had turned the elms and houses
        yellow:
Deer were moving down the road like refugees, and in the
        driveway, cats
Were warming themselves on the hood of a car. Then you turned
And said to me: “Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more,
For in it I see someone in bathrobe and slippers, brown-eyed and poor,
Walking through snow without leaving so much as a footprint
        behind.”
                               “Oh,” I said, putting my hat on,”Oh.”

 

Here is Strand’s essay, Beginning to End, in its entirety, about the making of that poem. It’s found in the collection of essays, Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini:

There are no secrets in this poem, no allusions to little-known texts. There is an allusion to Virgil’s Fourth Ecologue, but that should be obvious. Attempts are made to be humorous throughout the poem, and I suppose this in itself casts a shadow over what we can expect from the twenty-first century despite the appearance of a divinity who seems either senile or on welfare. This, in some quarters, will be considered ironic. My reason for talking about/around this poem is its ending. I’ve never concluded a poem with such abruptness, nor with such a clear invitation to continue. An ending and a beginning at the same time strikes me as something to be grateful for. That is, the way is clear for me to write about the twenty-second century and to extend the rhythmical lunacy of the dialogue.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Con-Sequence vs Sequence

I was going to post anyway about this Art of Science contest, but Felix Grant’s post of today caused me to realize that, first, my two favorites from the contest were sequences, but second, they are fundamentally different kinds of sequences from those that have been the subject of our various ongoing posts about sequences (find links in Felix’s post).

His post, Passing the batôn (damn you, Felix, for making me spend five minutes digging out my AllChars key to do that ô) — is an excellent example of a typical use of sequencing with still photographs. Compare that to this entry from the Art of Science contest:

Social Evolution in Cell Groups

Carey Nadell, Joao Xavier, and Kevin Foster
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Expanding clusters of cells are commonplace in the natural world, and depending on the context, they may be beneficial or harmful to humans. Understanding the impact of cell groups on their environment requires that we understand evolution within such cell populations.

Some cell behaviors — especially those that give the cell group its ability to exploit environmental resources — are cooperative in nature, and whether or not such behaviors evolve depends on how the group is structured. When genetic relatives are clustered together, cooperative cell behaviors like extracellular enzyme secretion can evolve more easily. Secreted enzymes, in turn, may allow a pathogenic bacterial colony to become more virulent, or a nascent cancerous tumor to become malignant.　

Using a computer simulation framework that implements independent cells in explicit space, we have shown that the internal structure of cell groups can depend very heavily on the environment. In the three images shown here, the red and blue cell types do not differ in any way other than their color, which is used to determine whether a cell group remains well-mixed, or whether related cells tend to cluster together.　

From left to right, environmental nutrient concentration was decreased from ubiquitous, to moderate, to sparse. As nutrient concentration decreases, the tendency for different genetic lineages to spontaneously segregate increases, which favors the evolution of cooperation. This result may inform our understanding of pathogenic cell groups, in which cooperation between cells is harmful for their host.

Or, a compare this single still that contains, within the thing itself, a cause/effect time sequence:

Nimbus

Henry S. Horn (faculty)
Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

This is the basal disk from a Redcedar tree that was in competition with a neighboring White Ash. The annual growth rings show that the Redcedar grew well for about 45 years, and then slowed dramatically when the White Ash overtopped it. Markings on the disk record the sizes of roots heading toward neighboring trees and saplings of varied sizes. The heartwood calls to mind an angel, surrounded by a lighter nimbus of sapwood.

Because these are scientific images, they are strongly cause/effect; that’s the obvious reason for or connection between the pictures. What is the reason or “binding” in the sequences in Felix’s post, by comparison?

All of his photographic sequences have been one-thing-after-another, but they have not been cause > effect. The two science contest examples are cause > effect, or consequence as opposed to simple sequence. That would mean that what ties our photographic non-con-sequences together would be … what? Correlation or purely commonality of content? If so, what role does time play (which is a necessary qualifier for something to be a sequence).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

In a Scrum

All of the following is from an article in the July 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine, Top Ten StateFair Joys, by Garrison Keillor:

… Of the Ten Joys, the one that we Midwesterners are loath to cop to is number three, the mingling and jostling, a pleasure that Google and Facebook can’t provide. American life tends more and more to put you in front of a computer screen in a cubicle, then into a car and head you toward home in the suburbs, where you drive directly into the garage and step into your kitchen without brushing elbows with anybody. People seem to want this, as opposed to urban tumult and squalor. But we have needs we can’t admit, and one is to be in a scrum of thinly clad corpulence milling in brilliant sun in front of the deep-fried-ice-cream stand and feel the brush of wings, hip bumps, hands touching your arm (“Oh, excuse me!”), the heat of humanity with its many smells (citrus deodorant, sweat and musk, bouquet of beer, hair oil, stale cigar, methane), the solid, big-rump bodies of Brueghel peasants all around you like dogs in a pack, and you — yes, elegant you of the refined taste and the commitment to the arts — are one of these dogs. All your life you dreamed of attaining swanhood or equinity, but your fellow dogs know better. They sniff you and turn away, satisfied.

[ ... ]

The fair is gone the next day, the rides disassembled, the concessions boarded up, the streets swept clean. Dry leaves blow across the racing oval, brown squirrels den up in the ticket booths, the midway marquee sways in the wind. You drive past the fairgrounds a few days later on your way to work. It looks like the encampment of an invading army that got what booty it wanted and went home. And now you are yourself again, ambitious, disciplined, frugal, walking briskly, head held high, and nobody would ever associate you with that shameless person stuffing his face with bratwurst and kraut, mustard on his upper lip, and a half-eaten deep-fried Snickers in his other hand. That was not the real you. This is. This soldier of the simple declarative sentence. You have no need for cheap glitter and pig fat and pointless twirling. You have work to do. Onward.

There are also a lot of state fair photos that accompany the article. [ link ]

I can’t recall the last time I was “in a scrum” — and I can’t say that I feel any urge be anywhere near a crowd of people. Standing in line at the grocery store is close and crowded enough for me.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Living Dangerously

I’m an experienced cook who improvises plenty and is fairly good at it, but I view recipes like I do Mapquest directions: They’re a useful tool that generally take me where I want to go. Why would I want to “unchain” myself?

That’s from One Part Creativity: Zero Parts Recipe by Jennifer Reese in Slate (June 2, 2009).  It’s a review of a book, Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman about cooking by ratio rather than recipe.

In my case, “cooking” means making toast and boiling water. I’m proud to say I can do both without a recipe. In any case, Ms. Reese decides to risk life and limb and try cooking Ruhlman’s way:

… I decided to start with cookies (1 part sugar: 2 parts fat: 3 parts flour). Ruhlman advises beginning with an utterly plain sugar-butter-flour cookie, an exercise that will “instruct the thoughtful cook about … the nature of a cookie.” So-called essence of cookie took approximately 1 minute to mix, 20 minutes to bake, and tasted like the most boring shortbread you’ve ever eaten, which is to say, not too damned bad. Those were my thoughts about “the nature of a cookie.” Apparently, I’m not a very thoughtful cook.

To the next batch of dough I added vanilla and substituted palm sugar for white. Palm sugar: a misguided purchase that sat in my cupboard for months attracting ants. Not anymore! Palm sugar is the slightly funky-tasting granulated sap of the coconut palm, and it yielded swarthy, earthy, terrific shortbread. I was delighted. In the space of the next few manic hours I baked crispy Brazil nut shortbread (great), rye shortbread studded with candied ginger (not great), and brown sugar shortbread packed with dates (almost great). The defeats were as interesting as the failures, and my mind was whirring. Why weren’t those ginger cookies tastier? (Too much ginger.) How could I have made them better? (Less ginger; try brown sugar.) I found myself lying in bed that night mulling new cookie flavors. It was like playing with paper dolls, creating crazy new outfits for my naked cookie ratio.

I’m all for creativity, but I can’t say that I feel any urge to tinker with my toast or my boiling water.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/