Alcohol & Art

Just in time for the weekend, right here. And no, this has nothing to do with the stupid mythopoeia regarding mostly-in-the-minority self-destructive artists and addiction. Florida State University chemistry labs has been whipping up some gorgeous work for a company called Bevshots, whom quite literally ferment art out of your favorite alcohol and/or cocktail. Below, for instance, is what a little bit of Chablis would look like hung up on one of your walls. Pretty, huh? Right. And tasty. So now you can sip on some Chablis whilst admiring your hung mural of Chablis, discussing with friends both how good this Chablis is in your hand and also how you managed to procure an artistic expression of Chablis, getting all meta in the 21st century and subsequently blowing the rickety minds of everyone within thirty feet of you. 

How they do it: taken at 1000x magnification on old school 35 mm. cameras, this is a labor of love, folks, one in which patience goes beyond virtue into simply a part of the process. In order to get the perfect shot, this can take up to three months and upwards of 300 camera clicks.

Your standard red table wine, looking like fluorescent stems of some kind of beautiful faunal growth.
What we're seeing here are basically crystallized carbohydrates. Now that they've crystallized, they've become full-on sugars and glucose. After squeezing from a pipette a droplet of liquor or cocktail or lager onto a slide, the liquid is then allowed to dry on this airtight container, the drying of which can take up to four weeks alone; once dry, it's then placed for examination under a high-powered microscope with an old school 35 mm. attached. Depending on the number of impurities (pure vodka, for instance, has very few impurities, as compared to a pina colada, which is naturally chockfull of them), the dried constituent parts may fall apart or not dehydrate properly, which accounts for some samples requiring so many attempts.

The Piña Colada, due to its inherent complex sugars and citric acids, behaves like a doll and dries out well, thus it looks spectral when glimpsed through a microscope--winding up here resembling a very alien, very twisted, and very trippy butterfly pattern. Check out how there's almost an origin of left-to-right movement here, the dark brown spot in the top left-hand corner from which the rest of the image sprawls out.

The intense, florid, breezy, wild shapes and kaleidoscopic colors come from the chemists shining light on top and through the bottom of the slide, both of which seem to ignite these potent samples into a whole other realm of colorization, a sinewy world of molecularly psychotropic pigments capable of pleasing both your Fink Floyd-fan friend of your abstract art-fan friend. 
A tasty and refreshing White Russian, languid-streaked and bleary; a devastatingly disoriented image of a planet and its outer atmosphere.

The Irish pale lager is traumatizing in a way, alien and raining apocalyptical brecciated coal.

Check out the rest of them, and there are plenty more fascinating ones, here at Art. Distilled. Oh, and I hope wherever you are you were able to catch the lunar eclipse tonight. I was hoping for the fog to keep away for one night but no such luck. It's a dense topo of ghosts out there right now, murky and pale, foghorns and all. Major solar eclipse coming up in about a month, though, so let's keep our eyes on the skies.