For the Love of Art

It is amazing what people will do for the love of art (and maybe a cash payout)...

A Real Bird's Eye View

Technology marches on with fancy new airborne platforms for fancy camera shots...

Dotty Art

This guy puts Pointillists to shame. He's in a whole league by himself in his devotion to the dots:

Math & Art & Science

Here's a nice video that combines humour and math with a little mythical earth history:



I especially enjoy the little bits of realism, like getting eaten by the Pythagasaurus. The problem with nerdy kids is that they don't have a healthy fear of the real world. Their math & science gives them a false sense of power and authority. The nice thing about art is that is can reintroduce these aspiring minds to the fact that math kills, like the Pythagasaurus. A little healthy fear is good for the budding scientist. And only the magic of art can help groom that fear.

OWS in Song & Dance

What social movement worth its salt doesn't give birth to creative arts? I find this interesting as a blend of gospel and high opera music with a gritty visual realism:



I like this poster by Lalo Alcaraz because it is playful. It has a serious message but it tempers it by using the humourous image of the prototypical "capitalist" from the Monopoly game:

Click to Enlarge
In this post he deals with a commenter who tries to take him to task for being anti-corporations when his very job depends on them and that he should be grateful to the corporations. His reply was excellent:

Corporations and Wall St. are not doing us any favors, they are making money off of US. If you believe otherwise, you are not clear on the Occupy Wall St. issue or any of the recent economic disasters going on for the past 30 years!

I want Wall Street and all who benefit from our economy to give up their monopolistic control of the economy so that it is more equitable for all. YOU are suggesting some kind of shadow “communist” critique, no one is calling for the destruction of capitalism, the rich have perverted it enough. We want fairness.

This is the perfect rejoinder to someone who would twist the protest into an "anti-capitalist rant". He points out that he has no problem with corporations. He objects to how they have corrupted the political system and stolen the voice from the people. The goal of the OWS movement is political renewal and economic justice.

And documentary film makers are having a field day "getting out the message" in so many ways:

Arizona Scenes

I have a weakness for Arizona landscapes. Here is a panorama from the Sedona area:



And here's an Arizona desert landscape with some Teddy Bear Cholla in the foreground:



From Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.

A New Board Game for the New Economic Reality

Here is the re-designed "Monopoly" game updating it from the 1920s to reflect the 2010s. From William Banzai's blog at The Village Voice:

Click to Enlarge

There's more at William Banzai's personal blog site:

Click to Enlarge

Art & Science

A nice video of some visual effects by Kim Pimmel:



Here's her commentary:

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

Step Aside Black Velvet Painting!

Here's a new popular art form that I can see taking a chunk out of the black velvet "art" market: pour painting.



I must admit it is mesmerizing to watch this stuff dribble. And if you get your colours right and time it right, the result is gorgeous. But I don't think it will replace serious art, the kind of art that requires a technical education and an appreciation of art history, composition, technique, etc.

R. P. Wolff Puzzles over a Liberal Education

I keep an eye on Robert Paul Wolff's blog The Philosopher's Stone and stumbled upon his meditation on "What Good is a Liberal Education?". He poses three transitional justifications for a liberal education:

as the stigmata of the upper classes, as the royal road to upward mobility, and as the entree into the Great Conversation

He rejects these, but I still have a very soft spot for the last of the three.

Here's the key bit that captures my foolish infatuation with higher education:

The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.

A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.

I was lucky enough as a dewy-eyed youth to go to an "experimental" college of the 1960s that was ungraded and focused on a "liberal education" and not merely the churning out of technical experts for the factories and offices of the future. I was in nirvana. I blossomed.

But then I went to graduate school and discovered myself back in a "high school environment" of grades and classes and even roll call! I withered. My joy in learning disappeared along with the lack of access to excited and interesting scholars. I had been spoiled as a youth at a college where classes were seminars and not lectures, where professors enjoyed their topics and would linger after class to answer questions. In graduate school I was reintroduced to "education" as a factory for stamping out graded and standardized minds. Needless to say, I dropped out of grad school and went and got a job in "the real world". But my joy in learning continues, but not in an academic setting. I still hold my ideals, I just recognize that contemporary institutions mouth one set of values but lives by another.

It is interesting that R. P. Wolff rejects my rationale and joy.

Here is his view of the purpose of a liberal education:

The true rationale for liberal education, in my considered and passionate judgment, is our society's desperate need for a reservoir of negative thought -and for some protected place in which young men and women can explore what my sons, some years ago, would have called the dark side of the force.

Here is an example from baby training:

One day, something inexplicable, terrible, frustrating, painful happens. The baby makes its demanding noise, with the cookie in full view just outside its reach, and the parent, instead of immediately handing it over, as has happened every day for as long as the baby can remember, now picks up the cookie, holds it tantalizingly before the baby, and says in what can only be construed as a deliberately sadistic voice, "Can you say 'cookie'?" Well, all of us know the rest of this story, for all of us have lived through it. The acquisition of language, the mastery of one's bowels, the control of one's temper - all of the stages in development that make one an adult human being who is recognizably a member of a society - all have a negative side, a side associated with shame, rage, pain, frustration, resentment, a backside, as we learn to think of it, as well as a positive side associated with praise, self-esteem, public reward, power, satisfaction - a front, which, as our language very nicely suggests, is both an officially good side and also a pretense, a fake.

By and large, we do not forget the frustration, the pain, the rage. We repress it, drive it out of consciousness, deny it, put it behind us, as we like to say. But, like our own backsides, and the feces which issue from them, they remain, and exercise a secret, shameful attraction for us.

This brief reminder of our common heritage makes it clear that the repression of "unacceptable" wishes - as Freud so quaintly and aptly labeled them in his earlier writings - is an essential precondition for our development of the ability to interact effectively with the world, and with one another. Mastery of our own bodies, mastery of language, the psychic ability, and willingness, to defer gratification long enough to perform necessary work, the ability to control destructive, and self-destructive, rages or desires - civilization, society, culture, survival depend upon them. But necessary though they are, they are painful; throughout our lives, we carry, repressed, the delicious, illicit fantasies of total, immediate, uncompromised gratification, of instantaneous, magical fulfillment, of the permission to indulge the desires that have been stigmatized as negative.

Personally I think that is a perverse presentation of the facts. The negative (Freudian) aspects are overplayed. Freud wasn't a scientist. He was more a novelist telling "just so" stories that sound credible but really aren't.

My experience of higher education had nothing to do with repressing desires. If anything, it was a romp, a joy, a discovery of an arena of pleasure that was far away from the demands of the workaday world.

As for high culture, I totally disagree with Wolff.

In this project, the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential, and rather surprising, role. Regardless of their manifest content and apparent purpose, these works, which we customarily consider the appropriate content of a liberal education, play a continuingly subversive role. They keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds.

They don't convey any sense of subversive enjoyment and prod me with an "anger at necessary repression". Nope. I enjoy some high art for the sheer aesthetics. Some I don't care for. Similarly, I enjoy some low art for the sheer joy it brings me while I don't care for other aspects of low art. I get my pleasure from my interaction. I'm not some cog in some grand mechanistic psycho-drama that Marcuse or Wolff want to squeeze me into.

Playing "by the rules" is not some psychological repression. It is simply the game (or work or social environment). If I want to play I am required to play by the rules. But I'm free to reject the game or create my own game. But most people realize that if they "don't play by the rules, they will play alone". That isn't repression. That is just a fact of life. It causes no more anguish than to realize that I can't kick a 500 pound rock and expect to send it over the goalpost. I'm not repressed or compelled by the rock. It is just a fact. If I accept the fact, my life goes more smoothly. If I reject the fact, I'm in for a world of pain. It is my choice.

I just don't buy his argument:

In all seriousness, I suggest to you that this is the real justification for keeping alive the great tradition of liberal arts and letters in our colleges and universities. Not as a patina for modern aristocrats, not as an instrument of upward mobility, not even as an introduction to the Great Conversation, but as a way of putting young men and women in touch with their repressed fantasies of gratification, in such a fashion as to awaken in them the hope, the dream, the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.

But I enjoyed reading it. I didn't feel the least repressed by the thoughts nor did they invoke an "unquenchable thirst for liberation". Nope. That is a fantasy. A fun thought. But it is much like thinking I can punt a 500 pound rock over a goal post. I can enjoy thinking it. But it doesn't make up the reality of the world in which I live.

I do agree with the closing story that Wolff provides, i.e. great art or ideas can reach across decades and centuries and seize a person by the scruff of the neck, and given him a shaking that can liberate him from a lifetime of unthinking subservience to received authority. But that is exactly the joy of ideas without all the fussy nonsense about Freud and Marcuse. It is a chance to knock up against a great mind and realize a new thought, a new perception, a new theory, or a new aesthetic.

Don't take my word for any of this. Go read Robert Paul Wolff for yourself!

A Little New York Centric History

I've been to NY city once 45 years ago for roughly 18 hours spent mostly sleeping in a car parked on the street in the middle of the night, so this will will have to pass for my "best tour so far" of that city...



Notice the bits about crooks, pirates, and wheeler-dealers. Not my kind of town.

During my short visit many years ago, I remember insulting "my host" when shown his home in a brownstone building with bars and locks everywhere. I insulted him when I comments "so this is what the slums of New York look like". I was then lectured about how brownstones were upscale and not slums. Needless to say, I was not invited to shelter overnight in his domicile, but pointed to the streets where I bedded down.

By the way... if you want a little nostalgia, here is a wonderful article with embedded videos that show the evolution of the song "Try a Little Tenderness" (and here is the Wikipedia article). The article is a lot more fun because you can listen to the recordings that show how this song went from saccharin to soulful to camp.

Architecture of the Future?

Who wants a staid old building that just keeps you out of the rain and warm? Not when you can have one that puts on a light show and makes frightening faces at you!



The 1024 architecture web site says:

Perspective Lyrique

En référence aux arts lyriques, qui tenaient bonne place dans le “Grand Théâtre” à ses débuts, Perspective Lyrique est dispositif interactif basé sur la voix et le chant du public: un systéme de déformations visuelles à commande vocale.

A voir sur la façade du théatre des Celestins pour la Fète des lumières de Lyon, du 8 au 11 décembre 2010…

Yep... just as it says, you can use vocal control to run the light show.

Now... how do we implement a system which lets the electorate control the politicians as effectively as these art consumers controlled that light show?

A Little Light Entertainment

I find that films have evolved over time. If you watch films for 100 years ago the plot plods along. Fifty years ago techniques like flashbacks and changing point of view helped "liven" up the films. And the cutting and splicing continues to increase the pace in film plots. Are we heading toward a singularity? I offer this as evidence that we are on the threshhold of a singularity event...



The point at which the slicing and dicing come so fast and furious that we drop the plot and simply go for the "action" as attention spans shinks to that of a gnat.

How to Appreciate Classic Literature

Most of us don't have time to real all of the great classics of literature. We feel guilty. We feel uncultured.

Now I have a cure. Here is a site that lets you instantly feel superior and recognize what a waste of time it would be to read the greats. Instead, you can read a quick review of one literary great by another literary great, realize what a waste of time reading the former would be, and maybe start to question whether it would be a similar waste of time to read the "great works" of the latter. Examples?

William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)

“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen

“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)

“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)

“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”

Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger

“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

There. You can now thank me. You can now refuse to read any more of the "classic literature" because even the classic authors agree it is just a big waste of your time!

Ya Gotta Love Those Flash Mobs

Here's kNOTDance doing a flash mob at Pittsburgh's Gay Pride 2011:



My favourite continues to be this flash mob in 2009 in Antwerp, Belgium dancing to the songs of The Sound of Music:



My second favourite is this Christmas flash mob singing Handel's Messiah in Welland, Ontario:



Here's Wikipedia on "flash mobs".

Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human"

This was an amazingly entertaining book. It was a grand tour of knowledge dressed up as reportage about competing at the Turing Prize as a contestant trying to convince judges you are human while computers do their best to convince the judges that they are in fact "the humans". Like a good Hollywood move, the guys in the white hats win, Cristian comes out... spoiler alert!... triumphant and wins the "most human human" prize.

As a tale of prepping to present himself as a "genuine human" in the Turing test for the Loebner Prize, this book presents an interesting and entertaining tale. The author delves into a richness of subject matter that is unexpected. He explores what it means to be a real person and just how you could use language to try to convince a blind judge that your are really a "human". Getting there involves many detours into arcane specialized knowledge.

What I liked about the book was the amazing depth of knowledge of many fields served up as a charming story in the context of prepping and competing in the Turing test. I actually learned many new things in philosophy and computers, my two fields of expertise, from reading this book. I also learned interesting bits about psychology, linguistics, chess, poetics, and poetry. All this learning while being cleverly entertained!

I learned of entropy, lossless and lossy compression, of aposiopesis, synecdoche, and enthymemes. of computability and complexity theory, of the chatterbots ELIZA and PARRY, and so on. Delightful stuff.

By the way, he points us at the "Shannon Game" and invites us to play it (click here). I can honestly say it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. It humiliates you because you think you know language and what letters to expect when, but as confident as I was, I came out a loser, a humbling experience.

Like a delightful musical composition, this book ends with a coda, an epilogue where he looks at another field of computers -- computer graphics -- and in less than a dozen pages riffs a variation on the theme of the book how the effort to present "real stuff" makes you much more critical and appreciative of the reality:

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author's intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said "UK Minister's Charm Offensive." This to me was hilarious. Of course they mean "offensive" as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister's creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can't enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it's alarms and extinguishers.

...

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called "caustics," the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that's a lot of ping-pong,and way beyond the where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

...

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it's important to know these things, to know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined -- and to seek it.

Try the book. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable it is.

Bill Bryson's "At Home"

I've enjoyed all the books by Bill Bryson that I've read. He has a style that is both delightful and very readable. He loves detail. And he can tell a good story.

This book uses the 18th century parson's house that Bryson owns in the UK and builds wonderfully descriptive stories about architecture, people, history, objects, and customs. The book is an absolute delight.

Here's a sample where he talks of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's homes:

Monticello's celebrated contraptions -- its silent dumbwaiters, dual-action doors, and the like -- are sometimes dismissed as gimmicks, but in fact they anticipated by 150 years or so the American love for labor-saving devices, and helped make Monticello not just the most stylish house ever built in America but also the first modern one. But it is Mount Vernon that has been the more influential of the two. It became the ideal from which countless other houses, as well as drive-through banks, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions, derive. Probably no other single building in America has been more widely copied -- almost always, alas, with a certain robust kitschiness, but that is hardly Washington's fault and decidedly unfair to his reputation. Not incidentally, Washington also introduced the first ha-ha into America and can reasonably claim to be the father of the American lawn; among all else he did, he devoted years to meticulous effort to trying to create the perfect bowling green, and in so doing became a leading authority in the New World on grass seed and grass.

And this about beds and Shakespeare:

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare's day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare's will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations. Why Shakespeare singled out that particular bed for mention is a separate mystery, since Anne would in the normal course of things have inherited all the household beds, but it was by no means the certain snub that some interpretations have made it.

The above is most interesting as an insight into 16th century customs as is this bit:

In one of his works, John Aubrey,the seventeenth-century historian relates an anecdote concerning the marriage of Thomas More's daughter Margaret to a man named William Roper. In the story Roper calls one morning and tells More that he wishes to marry one of More's daughters -- either one will do -- upon which More takes Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters are asleep in a truckle bed wheeled out from beneath the parental bed. Leaning over, More deftly takes "the sheet by the corner and suddenly whippes it off," Aubrey relates with words that all but glisten lustily, revealing the girls to be fundamentally naked. Groggily protesting at the disturbance, they roll onto their stomachs, and after a moment's admiring reflection Sir William announces that he as seen both sides now and with his stick lightly taps the bottom of the sixteen-year-old Margaret. "Here was all the trouble of the wooeing," writes Aubrey with clear admiration.

A few quotes from the book can't do it justice. You have to read it. It is a delight.

Food You Have to Chase to Eat

Here's how to put a little "zip" into your next meal...


by Alexandre DUBOSC
This is a very sweet presentation of the zoetrope effect.

A Little Math Expression

Truth through mathematics...



Who said beauty is truth and truth is beauty? Truth is math and math is beauty.

Fun with Zoetropes

If you want to see more of this Jim Le Fevre's work, then click here to go to his web page. He has much better animations there plus a discussion of what he does.