Megan May Daalder’s Mirrorbox is an amazing example of real scientific, exploratory art.
Watch her TEDx talk about it, HERE.
Posts tagged Buckminster Fuller.
“9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Fact”
via Upworthy.
Please Watch. It’s interesting.
Why is it like this?” [she asked him]. “There’s never been a plan,” [he replied]. … “We’re always dealing with the crisis of the moment. And old ways die hard. Everyone on Earth could have lived at an adequate level for at least the last five centuries. We’ve had the power and resources relative to the needs, we could have done it. But that was never the project, so it’s never happened.
2312, Kim Stanley Robinsonread more —›
Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.
…
a big minority of Earth’s population did robot work, and that had never gone away, no matter what political theories said. Of the eleven billion people on Earth, at least three billion were in fear when it came to housing and feeding themselves—even with all the cheap power pouring down from space, even with the farmworlds growing and sending down a big percentage of their food. No—off in the sky they were bashing out new worlds, while on old Earth people still suffered. It never got less shocking to see it. And things aren’t fun anymore when you know that there are people starving while you play around.
…
Why is it like this?” [she asked him]. “There’s never been a plan,” [he replied]. … “We’re always dealing with the crisis of the moment. And old ways die hard. Everyone on Earth could have lived at an adequate level for at least the last five centuries. We’ve had the power and resources relative to the needs, we could have done it. But that was never the project, so it’s never happened.
2312,
While FDR believed in the elementary principles of justice and fairness, he also expressed disdain for doling out welfare to otherwise able workers. So, in return for monetary aid, WPA workers built highways, schools, hospitals, airports and playgrounds. They restored theaters—such as the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, S.C.—and built the ski lodge at Oregon’s Mt. Hood. The WPA also put actors, writers and other creative arts professionals back to work by sponsoring federally funded plays, [and] art projects …
… By 1940, the economy was roaring back to life with a surge in defense-industry production and, in 1943, Congress suspended many of the programs under the ERA Act, including the WPA.
While walking in the street, I was approached by an older woman who mumbled incomprehensibly to me in a hoarse voice. I thought she needed directions or something, so I stopped. She proceeded,
“You have a very strong aura! I have messages for you! I’m a fortune teller…”
“Oh; No, thank you,” I said, and she hurried away.
There were plenty of other auras walking around on that sidewalk, but this woman made a bee-line towards me. By “strong aura”, you mean, “you’re wearing some artsy, “weird” shit and gold shoes so I’m going to target you as someone likely to be interested in supernatural messages”? Because I’m fairly certain that’s exactly what it was.
However, I’m not interested in supernatural messages. Nor in having my future revealed, palm read, mind read, horoscope told, soul cleansed, etc.
Still, I can thank this lady for giving me some inspiration to write, again, about scientific literacy. Point being:
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Irrational Appearance =/= Irrational Mind.
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It’s not always true, and it might often be false. But to think this through: Nature — the Universe — does not give a damn about one’s clothing. It’s entirely arbitrary, except in the physical ways it might help one keep or release energy and interact with the environment.
Any other rules about it are culturally imposed, and remain arbitrary because of that. Anything/one non-human — and anyone human who hasn’t been taught ideas about specific cultural rules — doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether you’re wearing a suit and tie or Prada F/W 2012 or a bustle skirt with pink hair or rags or a monk’s robe or a powdered wig and breeches.
Ergo, aside from the ways in which it might be a good idea to look a certain way in a socio-cultural context for manipulating the ways one interacts with other humans, it means nothing. To be scientifically literate is to understand this.
To take it one step further, so long as we have an idea of the arbitrary, of { how small and inconsequential we are }, that { “if Nature allows it, it’s Natural” }, an idea of { context }, a sense of { perspective }…
Why not embrace the absurd? It’s already all silly anyway.
••••••
Image: Vivienne Westwood x Melissa: Anglomania Wing in Gold,
over Hubble’s { Jet in Carina }.
Relevant.
P.S.
I’m sure some will re-blog this just for the image and will delete all of this nasty, TL;DR text. Of course, you’re free to. But to do so is to miss the point entirely and to deprive others of stumbling upon something which should be considered — not only looked at, “liked” and “wanted”.
Asobi by Yasutoki Kariya
••••••
This is beautiful.
And I have something to say.
It’s easy* enough to make art with a scientific aesthetic. That’s what the above is. That’s what artists like Brendan Monroe do. I‘ve done it. I’ve even complained about it.
It’s also easy enough to make art that teaches well-known scientific principles. For example, this photograph, from Caleb Charland’s { “Demonstrations” }, quite literally demonstrating a known phenomenon in a creative way:
However, the most difficult is, often, to make art that is filled with a sense of Scientific Literacy. Meaning: not art that shows scientific concepts in some way, but that is a result of them. A result of what happens when one’s entire philosophy (the way one sees the world, therefore how one proceeds in it) changes due to an (even basic) understanding of what the world is, of how it works. It is not art that “knows everything”, but art that comes from awe, from not knowing but also not inventing filler stuff for the gaps, and from the curiosity of an explorer.
Closer to this is work like that of Yayoi Kusama (although usually attributed to her disease rather than any deliberate scientific goal, her personal idea of the Infinite is relevant) and of Buckminster Fuller (whose works were created with a conscious understanding of natural philosophy).
I’m always thinking about this last. How can it be done? What needs to be done? Because Art is really the only arena where something so “far out” can be done.
But for now, back to studying pendulum motion for real. Sometimes the path ahead seems so impossibly long and clouded.
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*When I say easy, I don’t mean that it’s easy to create those works in a way that’s original, interesting, beautiful, powerful, etc. A way that stays with you. Monroe is a great artist, as is Charland — as simple as that magnet & nails image is, I’ve never forgotten it. That’s something, and worthy of respect.
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
{ “The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” }
by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
via { somewhatclever }
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Reblogging as text:
for search optimization & because that blue, compressed jpg was awful.
(via somewhatclever-er)
God, you people and your multi-cellular privilege. Ever since I became a primordial soupist, my IBS has totally cleared up (mainly because I don’t have intestines anymore—just cytoplasm).
Lindy West,
{ “Stop Using Cavemen as an Excuse for Your Fad Diet” }
{ “Stop Using Cavemen as an Excuse for Your Fad Diet” }
Design Science ›
Design Science is a problem solving approach which entails a rigorous, systematic study of the deliberate ordering of the components in our Universe. Fuller believed that this study needs to be comprehensive to gain a global perspective when pursuing solutions to problems humanity is facing.
“The function of what I call design science is to solve problems by introducing into the environment new artifacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus, coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviors and devices. For example, when humans have a vital need to cross the roaring rapids of a river, as a design scientist I would design them a bridge, causing them, I am sure, to abandon spontaneously and forever the risking of their lives by trying to swim to the other shore.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller from Cosmography…
And people often used to ask Buckminster Fuller just what exactly he was and did? Sometimes he would respond to the first part of the question with the now oft-quoted statement, “I am not a noun - I seem to be a verb.” In answering the second part he would most importantly insist that he was not a specialist and would put forward his alternative, that he was a comprehensivist. Just as often he would refer to himself as a Design Scientist.
I feel that most scientists are still in the dark ages. In 1953, when I lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty club, there were about 300 scientists in the room and I asked, “Is there anyone present who has not seen the sun go down?” There were no hands raised and I was shocked. I said, “You have known for 500 years that the sun does not go down and yet you have done absolutely nothing as educators to coordinate your senses with your knowledge. When you tell your children to look at the sun going down, you are deceiving them. What kind of educators are you?
Buckminster Fuller, from an interview with Jamie Snyder.
We are biological bodies, but we are often accelerated, augmented and enhanced by technology. … We can no longer think of the body as simplistically bound by its skin and containing a single self.
{ Stelarc }, a { Future Mrs. Murphy } in the Present.
the Operating System ›
“All things dissolved into a field of moving lights, energetic and dancing in their constructions, appearing, dissipating, floating, and coming together again, circles of motions. The Great System breathes into eternity; operating, operating.”
Olena Shmahalo, 2011.
What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose.
Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p655
Tomás Saraceno, Air-Port-City, 2009
“…is a huge mural he has created which is a whimsical depiction of a possible floating city of the future. It’s part Victorian etching and part scientific drawing. Walker associate curator Yasmil Raymond says in a time of hyper-specialization in art, Saraceno is comfortable in many different worlds.
…
Real floating cities may be far in the future. Saraceno certainly hasn’t found all the answers.
Yet he hopes other people will help fill in the blanks. He quotes the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky about how he just told part of a story in his movies.
‘Like Tarkovsky was always saying, ‘I will only give you 50 percent, the other 50 percent you have to build it by yourself.’ Without your imagination we will not do anything.’”
via { MPRnews }
Brief Inquiry into Vice, Balance, Motion
Why is Nature predisposed to indulging in vices? We hold on to that which gives us pleasure, even though it subtracts from our physical life. A system seeking life most pertinently would not engage in activities that negate it, so life doesn’t seem to be the top priority for our system. In looking to Physics for an answer, it’s deductible that the pleasure vice grants is actually excitement, which is energy — motion.
That means that vice puts the system into a state of instability; why would we seek instability? Instability, as the motion of energy as physical matter, is simply energy transfer, meaning that energy cannot be concentrated in one place for too long. If energy is concentrated, it “brews”, it creates an extremely volatile center which is another kind of instability. Therefore, is it possible to say that instability cures instability? That there is no stagnant state of balance, only ever a balancing act. There must always be motion within our Universe system.
