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Katsushika Hokusai. Mt.Fuji from Umezawa. From the series "Thirty-six views of Mt.Fuji", 1827.

More on this famed, extremely talented, and prolific Japanese artist here and here.

About a current Hokusai exhibition here.

Originally by Sughra Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 2, 2006, 11:07pm

"Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency — establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises."

David Brin KurzweilAI.net:

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 1, 2006, 6:03pm

"As Alzheimer’s stole his mind, painter William Utermohlen documented the change with self-portraits, helping neurologists to understand the disease."

Susan Boni in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his London studio.

But when his art historian wife, Patricia, finally got inside to see a canvas, she had an unpleasant revelation:

It was blank.

William Utermohlen had not produced a thing in all those trips to the studio. He was soon found to be suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

After his diagnosis in 1996 at the age of 61, Utermohlen, a South Philadelphia native who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, started to paint with purpose once again.

This time, the superb draftsman, who had always been able to capture the tiniest detail in his commissioned portraits, decided to paint himself.

His compelling series of 14 self-portraits, completed over a five-year period, documents a notable artist’s journey into dementia.

His art was the focus of a 2001 study in the Lancet, an international medical journal, that analyzed the changes in Utermohlen’s artistic ability.

Now, the portraits are on display at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and will be the topic of a free presentation tomorrow, "Alzheimer’s Disease: Neurology and the Visual Artist."

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 1, 2006, 5:36pm

"He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?"

Gavin Borchert in Seattle Weekly:

It’s Mozart’s 250th birthday, and almost as prevalent as concerts of his music are complaints by critics that everyone plays Mozart all the time anyway. How do you keep standard repertory fresh and bring in audiences in such a situation? With Mozart’s birth (1756) and death (1791) both celebrated every 50 years, we’ve barely had time to get over the 1991 party.

Any music festival’s first responsibility in programming, I suppose, is to justify itself—to convince concertgoers that saturation bombing of Composer X (or Period Y or Geographic Region Z) is warranted. Among a somewhat halfhearted collection of standard-repertory symphonies and concertos, the Seattle Symphony’s January Mozart festival took an oddly funereal tone with a performance of his Requiem. No doubt, there were some concertgoers puzzled that it was his birth, not his death, that was being observed—not to mention that the SSO plays the work every year anyway, and it’s only half by Mozart.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 2, 2006, 6:26pm

The paintings of Yvonne Jacquette are at once immensely likeable and seriously odd. There is a compelling sense of presentness in her density of color and form, quirky and chirpy, and yet they are weirdly alienating precisely thanks to the same manic qualities. Such dichotomies in Ms. Jacquette ultimately relate to a single contradiction at the heart of her enterprise: She is a realist who loves artifice.

You sense the artist’s hand in the personal, invested manner in which the picture is crafted from myriad little marks, for instance, in forms drawn with awkward feeling, and yet there is a peculiar perfunctoriness in the delivery, a depersonalization in the unrelenting alloverness, an outsider-like compulsion to fill. It is as if she has a horror vacui that leads her to pack her surfaces, and yet in her addiction to spatial complexities and fearless social explorations of land usage there is almost the opposite, an amor vacui.

tcritical here.

Originally by Morgan Meis from 3quarksdaily on April 2, 2006, 10:42am

From Science News:

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address the most difficult problems of science. Tellingly, he named this treatise A New Kind of Science. The book, which Wolfram sent to hundreds of journalists and influential scientists, sparked a firestorm of criticism. Detractors charged that the author was peddling speculations as discoveries, asserting that decades-old research was new, and pirating the research of others without giving due credit. Many commentators concluded that the author’s promise of a revolutionary upheaval in science was grandiose and unbelievable, even as they allowed that the book contained some incremental scientific discoveries, as well as intriguing ideas. Fast-forward to this summer: Wolfram’s book is in its fifth 50,000-copy printing, despite being a $45, 1,200-page, technically dense hardback.

At the heart of Wolfram’s work is the observation that extremely simple computer programs can generate patterns of extraordinary complexity.

More here.

Originally by Azra Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 2, 2006, 5:54am

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way…

HIV is also a retrovirus, meaning that it inserts its genes into our own. But it is not a live-in virus. It primarily infects one class of white blood cells, and then spreads to other people through shared needles, sex, and other forms of contact. HIV leads to the collapse of the immune system, otherwise known as AIDS. Growing evidence suggests that it does so not by killing cells directly, as once thought, but by chronically overactivating the immune system. As the immune cells divide madly, they eventually start malfunctioning and even committing suicide.

In an opinion piece in PLOS Pathogens, Viktor Muller and Rob J. De Boer point out that most of HIV’s cousins, which infect other primates, don’t do anything of the sort. I’ve reproduced a tree they put together, showing the relationship of HIV-like viruses in apes and monkeys. (Go here for a closer view.) HIV, marked in red, is not a single lineage of viruses. One form, HIV-2, jumped from sooty mangabey monkeys into people several times. The more common form, HIV-1, descends from chimpanzee viruses, which have moved into humans many more times. As the tree shows, lots of primates get infected by their own HIV relatives, and this appears to have been going on for millions of years. But if you look at sooty mangabeys or some other monkey, you generally find abundant amounts of the virus without any sign of an overactive immune system. It’s not that the virus carried by sooty mangabeys is weak. Scientists have injected it into other monkeys, and it has triggered a strong immune response. The blue arrows on the tree mark the rise of new virus strains in macaques that came from sooty mangabeys. This shift appears to have happened at primate research centers in the past few decades. In their new hosts, these viruses cause lots of nasty symptoms.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 2, 2006, 8:28pm

In Harvard Magazine:

Two years ago the New England Journal of Medicine published a commentary titled “Class—The Ignored Determinant of the Nation’s Health.” Its authors, a policy analyst and an academic physician, wrote: “[P]eople in lower classes die younger and are less healthy than people in higher classes. They behave in ways that ultimately damage their health and that take their lives prematurely (by smoking more, having poorer eating habits, and exercising less). They also have less health insurance coverage, live in worse neighborhoods, and are exposed to more environmental hazards. Beyond that, however, there is something about lower socioeconomic status itself that increases the risk of premature death.”

t “something” about being poor and getting sick has preoccupied Nancy Krieger ’80, Ph.D., professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health. It has also preoccupied her older brother, James Krieger ’78, M.D., chief of the epidemiology, planning, and evaluation unit at Public Health-Seattle and King County, his local public-health authority. Independent of each other, the Krieger siblings have transformed that fixation into the leading edge of public-health theory and practice. Nancy’s hypotheses and methods are called, by many colleagues, the most brilliant contributions to social epidemiology in a generation. Jim’s on-the-ground innovations are the envy of local health departments across the country. Sister and brother have set a standard for what public health can and should be in the United States; both are trying to steer the profession back to its roots in social justice. That few beyond their respective fields have heard of the Kriegers says as much about their modesty as about the battered profile of public health in America.

Originally by Robin Varghese from 3quarksdaily on March 31, 2006, 9:14pm

Infinite Smile (2005, 10.1MB, 2:43 min.)

Self-portrait of MTAA
(M.River & T.Whid Art Assoc.)

Originally by admin from DVblog on March 21, 2006, 11:00pm

Inside v.07 (2001, 6.7MB, 1:51 min)

Newbody v.01e (2004, 14.5MB, 3:32 min)

Two short animations from the series ‘Meat’ by José Carlos Casado.
In ‘Inside’, human heads fuse into one form.
‘Newbody’ is kind of Hieronymus Bosch does the Olympics,
the stuff of nightmares & transcendant beauty too . The score, by
Sophocles Papavasilopoulos, is also a small masterpiece:
complex, yet self-effacingly serving the totality.
Courtesy of postmasters gallery, NY.

Originally by admin from DVblog on March 22, 2006, 11:00pm

‘Serial Metaphysics’ (1984-86, clip, 6.4MB, 1:08 min)

‘Serial Metaphysics’ (1984-86, clip, 5.9MB, 1:08 min)

Wheeler Winston Dixon is now a professor of
film studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Before he did that he made a lot of (on the
evidence of these clips & others) really great short movies.
In particular these two clips from Serial Metaphysics,
apparently almost entirely constructed from TV ads,
whet the appetite for a viewing of the whole twenty minutes.
Dixon conjures fever dream magic from commercial banality.
Check in particular the end sequence of clip one:
David Lynch eat your heart out.

Originally by admin from DVblog on March 12, 2006, 11:00pm

It seems that researchers have discovered a way to make liquid droplets walk on their own in a controlled direction. Even uphill!

Illustration by The New York Times

In the phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect, or film boiling, liquid droplets on a surface heated above their boiling point form a layer of vapor underneath, suspending them above the surface like a hovercraft. Normally, the droplets would move about erratically. However, Professor Heiner Linke and his colleagues at the University of Oregon have found out that if “placed on asymmetrically structured surfaces, such as a piece of brass with periodic, saw-tooth shaped ridges” they would self-propel themselves in one direction. And quite literally using their own steam power.

You can see their movies for yourself.

Professor Heiner Linke is not yet certain where the propulsive forces come from, but he has already speculated on how it can be applied: “This method uses heat to pump liquid, and could therefore be used in pumps for coolants, for instance to cool microprocessors. Such a pump would need no additional power (it’s run by the heat that needs to be removed anyway), it would have no moving parts, and it wouldn’t require a thermostat.”

Of course I’d like to know if you can construct a landscape feature exploiting this phenomenon. Parks criscrossed by racheted channels simply heated by the Earth or the parking garage underneath. Giant film-boiling droplets racing past by, indifferent to gravity. If you turn on the heat, will the Chicago River re-reverses to its original course? Probably not, but I’d like that to happen as an annual event.

Originally from Pruned on April 3, 2006, 6:35am

[Image: 2012; see also their bit on Hollow Earth Cities].

“I declare that the earth is hollow,” U.S. Army Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. wrote in the early 1800s, “and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”
Somewhere along the line, Himalayan space ships, Nazi explorers, remnant Stone Age tribes, undersea caves, north-flowing Siberian rivers, and Edmund Halley all get involved… setting up BLDGBLOG’s upcoming pitch for Indiana Jones 5…

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 1, 2006, 11:29am

House of Cosbys (2005, 10MB, 5 min.)

from Channel 101.
This video should recieve lots of attention because it is really really funny.
Instead, it made the papers because Bill Cosby’s lawyers threatened Channel 101
and their video hosting service with cease and desist letters.

Originally by mica from DVblog on March 25, 2006, 11:00pm

from star w (2005, 3.1MB, 1:40 min.)

watched wire (2006, 6.1MB, 2:15 min.)

Compelling sound stuff from two different sources.
First a piece from projectsinge.net,
a kind of feedback carillon & the movement that
it engenders/engenders it totally absorbing -
comedic, touching, strange.
Secondly, work by Alan Sondheim, who needs
no introduction here. More delicate & austere
than the Larsener piece, it provides a sharp &
fascinating contrast in the, one would have hitherto
thought, relatively easily exhausted, genre of
work-made-by-having-microphones-or
-other-devices-attached-to-one’s-body.

Originally by admin from DVblog on March 23, 2006, 11:00pm

[Image: Mars, the alluvial fractalist/mineral hydrology; NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems].

(See also BLDGBLOG’s
Mars Rover: The Film).

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 2, 2006, 10:41am

[Image: California Academy of Sciences].

While BLDGBLOG just explored the possibility that reefs might actually be huge musical instruments, it turns out that a group of Scotsmen have been testing that exact hypothesis: “Stephen Simpson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues set up 24 artificial reefs, each with a speaker system, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. On six consecutive nights they played recordings of natural reefs at half the sites. A reef that was noisy one night was silent the next and vice versa. Reefs with the audio cue attracted four times as many cardinal fish and nearly twice as many damselfish.”
This “audio cue” is elsewhere described as the “‘frying bacon’ sound of snapping shrimps,” and it “can be picked up from 20 kilometres away.”
All of which is another way of saying that reefs already are musical instruments: vast landscape saxophones being played by shrimp underwater…

Having said that, what if you switched Simpson’s recordings and played, say, the sound of Madison Avenue along one of the reefs – what new ecosystems might result? Conversely, what if you played the sounds of a reef through speakers down Madison Avenue?
And could you imitate the sounds of a reef at a Hong Kong karaoke bar? Rather: what would happen in you did?
What is the future of abstract karaoke?
If you totally scramble the soundtracks of the world – what happens?

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 2, 2006, 10:59am

Reporting on Friday Late: Transvision.

Unfortunately I can’t remember what this piece was called or find any more details on it, but Jason Bruges Studio created this for the transvision event. A very long table top like surface contained a matrix of leds, with a video camera at one end. As the camera captured images it took rgb values and changed the leds at one end, travelling down the surface like a wave. Best explained by watching my video.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on April 1, 2006, 9:26am

Found a short AVI file while cleaning my archives. It’s from Crowd IT, a utility tool for 3d Studio Max that allows you to simulate very large crowds to give a bit of realism to your computer generated landscapes, cities, and buildings.

Probably there are better crowd-rendering tools out there, but for now, I’m more interested in this particular movie and its complete lack of context. Merely the crowd following some sort of external parameters imposed by the designer. And here I wonder: can you create a park without its trappings — no shrubs, no benches, no paths, but simply the pageantry of mass psychosis? No tectonic elements to program activities or direct traffic, only a flat terrain and its mass ornament, self-organizing (or even self-destructing) under its own internal logic.

Or do they already exist? Are streets in a way already a parkless park? How about prison courtyards — where the built environment always plays secondary to group dynamics? People-watching as if your life depends on it, and it does.

Meanwhile, I wonder what will the crowd actually do in a real parkless park? What Busby Berkeley musical formations will thousands of people enact? And what would happen if I throw in a screaming man infected with Avian flu? Or pedophiles? Would they keep their distance or swarm around and stone them? Or how about a zombie?

In the Archives:
Counting Crowds

Originally from Pruned on April 3, 2006, 6:01am

How could I have missed this!
Santiago Sierra is back. And, as usual, he’s creating a stir. If it seemed to you he’s been controversial enough, paying people to be tattooed or to carry stone squares around or to stay walled in during an exhibition, well, this time he seems to have outdone himself.
His project, called 245 Cubic Meters, was

to give people a sense of the Holocaust by pumping lethal car exhaust fumes into a former synagogue and letting visitors enter one by one with a breathing apparatus.

I suppose everything worked out as planned: huge outrage, criticism, and a public debate about art, it’s possible role in society and the way it can, should or does influence us.
The exhibition was suspended.

Here is my take on it.
1. I don’t agree with the critics that claim Sierra’s work is exactly what it claims to fight, i.e., “the trivialization of the Holocaust”, as the artist put it. I don’t think something becomes trivial just because you make a direct reference to it. Obviously, this isn’t Disneyland, and nobody going in there must have made it light-heartedly. This is a very serious, heavy matter. When death is near, it is really too simple to discard it as “trivial”.


2. Taking place in Germany, the work can be seen as a cleansing ritual, more than a gesture of rememberance. Many Germans I know never dared to ask their fathers or granfathers what they did during the war (Hans in his note to my last post notes the ever-present figure of the goo-bad uncle).
3. Part of the cleansing is certainly the aethetic aspect of the work. Walking in an abandoned synagogue is a strong emotion. Walking with a firefighter-guide makes it even more surreal.
4. The firefighter is a very strong element. It was misinterpreted by several commentators as the proof of how ridiculous an attempt at restaging the drama can be. Well, I think it rather shows that this is not a restaging. This is a work of art, and is to be treated as such. It tells a story which goes beyond itself. It is not about reliving the moment. It is, maybe, about the possibility of reliving the moment. About the power of a place. Authenticity - yes. But authenticity of a place, of a history, of an event. Authenticity of a gas and of our reaction to it. Of the precautions we take. Today.




5. If Sierra was actually after the creepy feeling that all this was real, if he wanted to “remember”, he could have simply made a trip to Auschwitz. It is a horrible, horrible place. I’m still not sure if I think it is a good thing for it to exist. Its struggle for memory gets scarily close to a fascination with death, the same one that makes us look at an accident or listen to a horrible story. Yes, it makes us remember. But I’m not sure if the cost is not, well, some sort of a pornography, if you may, an indecent exposure of something that really should have been put to rest. Nonetheless, it exists - it’s there to see for anyone unsure if his memory is correct, unsure if he has enough disgust for what people can do to other people. I don’t think we need Santiago Sierra to remind us of that.
6. The difference is that Sierra made his piece in a gallery space. In a synagogue. In Germany. I am really tired of having Poland associated with the Holocaust (I think I mentioned it some while ago). This work puts the finger to the wound. Right where it (still!) hurts.
7. How pretentious to seek to evoke their horror and fear of death in such a cheap way! In a cynical game which yields no insight whatsoever. - says a newspaper.
For some time, Santiago Sierra has been asking one question: “What if it were you?”. His works are exercices in empathy. They are often cruel exercices. In this sense, yes, they get cynical.
This reminds me of the famous Stanley Milgram, a scientist often accused of cynicism, who discovered that most people can be unhumanly cruel by creating simple conditions (orders coming from an authority) that made them do what they thought to be acts of great cruelty. Milgram was accused of turning people into murderers, as if they were toys to play with. Sierra is accused of “hurting the dignity of the victims”, as if they were toys to play with. I really don’t see how the dignity of the victims is being hurt. And, contrary to some of his other works, here Sierra doesn’t actually use anyone, he doesn’t turn people into something just (?) for art’s sake.
8. What he does play with is memory. And guilt. The synagogue is the sign, it is what made the difference when the selection was made during the war, it was what identified the victims and what differenciated them from the others (the killers, but also the by-standers). Here, the visitor becomes at once the victim, the perpetrator and the by-stander, the observer. Being the art spectator he is, he cannot help but have a distance. At the same time, he goes inside, he participates. He repeats history. As a victim, or as a re-creator?
9. To me, this last question is going too far. And not because it crosses some line of decency. Because from what I can imagine and see on the pictures (once again: what can I imagine and see on the picture? how far can imagination get me?), the conceptuality of the work is simply unbearable. Bluntly speaking: it seems boring. It is the second work by Sierra that I find interesting as a concept, but have difficulty finding strong as an actual work (The first one was 300 tons). I really don’t feel like walking through an empty synagogue with a fireman just so Santiago Sierra can make his point. And having a gas mask on would hardly change my stance.
But honestly, I think I still haven’t figured it all out quite yet.

Originally from New Art on April 2, 2006, 1:31pm