ABOVE: detail from Driven, by Anton Darhuber, Benjamin Fischer and Sandra Troian, in the Microfluidic Research and Engineering Laboratory of Princeton University, who got second place in Princeton’s Art of Science exhibit. They wuz robbed, clearly.

Wired News posted a story yesterday about the first annual Art of Science competition at Princeton University, which was organized by the pointy-headed school—it’s where Albert “king of the pencilnecks” Einstein taught—to expand the aesthetic horizons of its profoundly left-brained student body. The second-place entry (superior, we feel, to the best in show) appears in part above, some groovy photo of stuff oozing on silicon. The artistes describe it thusly:

This image illustrates evolving dynamical patterns formed during the spreading of a surface-active substance (surfactant) over a thin liquid film on a silicon wafer. After spin-coating of glycerol, small droplets of oleic acid were deposited. The usually slow spreading process was highly accelerated by the surface tension imbalance that triggered a cascade of hydrodynamic instabilities.

Suck on that, Artforum. You’re not the only ones with a massive vocabulary of obscure and impenetrable exegetical nomenclature. But it’s nice to see some mixing of the slide-rule and black turtleneck set.

The Wired News article on the contest is the usual Wired hyperventilating enthusiasm. And note to the Art of Science organizing committee: your poster is terrible. It comes from the “SEX: now that we have your attention…” school of postery. Thumbs down.

Wired News > Enthralling art leaps out of labs