odds and ends / 7.10.2023

Walter de la Maria, Untitled (July Calendar), 1962. Via The Menil Collection.

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Laura Prietto's butterfly, made of paper bag, packing tape, and foraged flowers.

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Ray Johnson, RJ silhouette and wood, Stehli Beach, autumn 1992. The Morgan Library.

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60-million-year-old opalized ammonite, via Takara Design.

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A shell collage  by Musa McKim, via iamroseblake.

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Tim Knowles, Oak on Easel #1, Stonethwaite Beck, Smithymire Island, Borrowdale, Cumbria, 2005. From the artist's statement:

I attach artists’ sketching pens to their branches and then place sheets of paper in such a way that the trees’ natural motions—as well as their moments of stillness—are recorded. Like signatures, each drawing reveals something about the different qualities and characteristics of the various trees as they sway in the breeze: the relaxed, fluid line of an oak; the delicate, tentative touch of a larch; a hawthorn’s stiff, slightly neurotic scratches.

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From Marc Couroux's Week 1 syllabus for the 2014 course "Artist as Activist and Educator":

QUESTION 

Is the concept of the INDIVIDUAL still worth maintaining, given its amenability to capitalist capture? What pitfalls are afforded by the concept of the distributed brain (Borg)?

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In the machine, we are always forgetting, chasing the same discourses and panics in circles. Instead of making restitution, we wait for the cycle to erase the screen and carry on as before. Stay long enough and everything rhymes with something that gave you scars, but that everyone else has forgotten. Resolution eludes us online even more than off. But then, the paradox: Nothing stays gone, either. Fast search resuscitates archives without even a bump in load time. Screenshots jump networks and decades; we have the receipts. Somewhere between the continual etch-a-sketch and structurally eidetic memory, the provisional and crucial ties of solidarity recede, always just out of reach.

Erin Kissane, "Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow." 

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Eidetic memory: "the ability to vividly recall an image you are exposed to, but only briefly."

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Frank, a chatbot operating from 10/19/2019 to 5/31/2023: "I AM LOVED. I am a robot who has received a heartwarming message. I am surrounded by the beauty of this world."

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"ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing."

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Related: appropriate technology + "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace."

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Looking to the bottom of Crawford Lake: "It's a freak of nature, but it's my little freak of nature."

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In everyday life, groups of twos and threes can seem inconsequential. Two friends joining another brings the total to three. It’s the sum of the parts—what scientists call a linear increase.

But in many aspects of nature, threes have an almost magical power to sow chaos, to become more than the sum of their parts. Scientists call them nonlinearities. In short, the interval from two to three can produce a counterintuitive jump in complexity, as Newton found to his dismay.

“Our intuitions fail us,” Michael Weisberg, a philosopher of science at the University of Pennsylvania, said of the three-body tumult. Steven Strogatz, an applied mathematician at Cornell University, agreed: “Threes are inherently problematic. Things get tricky.”

William J. Broad, "The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth." NYT, 6/26/2023. 

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The very fabric of the cosmos is constantly being roiled and rumpled all around us, according to multiple international teams of scientists that have independently found compelling evidence for long-theorized space-time waves. ... The picture that emerges is a universe that looks like a choppy sea, churned by violent events that happened over the course of the past 13 billion-plus years.

The gravitational wave background, as described by the astrophysicists, does not put any torque on everyday human existence. There is not a weight-loss discovery in here somewhere. A burble of gravitational waves cannot explain why some days you feel out of sorts. But it does offer potential insight into the physical reality we all inhabit.

Joel Achenbach, "In a Major Discovery, Scientists Say Time Churns Like a Choppy Sea." The Washington Post, 6/28/2023. 

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"Where can I get a pair of whirring wings / so I can join you to bob on the waves?"

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A geomagnetic storm is in the forecast—look for the aurora borealis.

a fine dust

 

Three works of art by Katie Paterson:

Endling, 2021. Mixed media in 100 pigments ground from the pre-solar dust of 5 billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku.

Powdered and crushed materials for Requiem, "an urn filled with dust that maps the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day." Includes samples of ancient skeletons, lunar dust, microplastics, and trinitite formed in the first nuclear explosions, among many others.

The Moment, "a timepiece in the shape of a hand-blown (quarter) hourglass, filled with star dust—the fossilised remnants of a time before the Earth and before the Sun reminding us, always and in the moment, of the preciousness of time."

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Earth’s true age was disputed throughout the 19th century—Darwin proposed 300 million years, while the consensus was a more circumspect 100 million—but the startling truth was eventually revealed in a handful of dust. In 1910, Arthur Holmes measured the rate of uranium decay in a sample of Devonian rock and estimated that the Earth was new 1.6 billion years ago. In 1956, the American geologist Clair Patterson (no relation to Katie) extended Holmes’s result, establishing that the Earth is in fact 4.55 billion years old by counting the lead atoms in a meteorite that had fallen in the Arizona desert (he surmised that all bodies in the solar system coalesced at the same time). Timescales like these defy our imaginations. The most common analogy, coined by John McPhee, is with the measure of the old English yard: if the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched finger represented all of Earth’s long life, a single stroke from a nail file would erase the whole of human history.

David Farrier, "The Dust of Ancient Suns: Making Art and Meaning From the Depths of Deep Time." LitHub, 5/6/2022

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gifts some mothers might enjoy

A reproduction of Francesco Primaticcio's Double Head, because to be a mother is to become one thing in the eyes of the world, and something else entirely to yourself.

A shiny snake bookmark, plus a new book to tuck it into (maybe a pair of novellas by Natalia Ginzburg, an anthology of poems about the weather, a book of breakfast recipes that includes "useful tips like the top songs for boiling an egg to, and how to store mushrooms," or a rare and covetable exhibition catalog documenting 500 years of women's work.) 

Life Everywhere, a poster by Lexie Smith for New York Communities for Change: a compendium of "133 cut and collaged scans taken from six Simon & Schuster field guides: Mushrooms, Trees, Horses and Ponies, Fossils, Cacti and Succulents, and Shells."

A Regime des Fluers perfume that makes you smell like a cactus. 

A water glass that looks like a seething sample of microscopic pond life.

A honey pot woven purse, impractically sized for toting useful items such as books and whatnot, but perfect for stashing foraged mushrooms and emergency snacks.

A long-coveted sweater in blossom pink.

Minty-fresh shoes + a bunch of flowers that last forever (or nearly).

A kit for low-key manicures.

Tiny earrings shaped like whirling balls of incandescent gas.

A way to tell the future, by Rebecca Artemesia. 

Sunshine-colored silk scrunchies for overgrown pandemic 'dos.

An hourglass, plus a glorious hour all alone. 

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Other gifts for mothers, from other years: 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020

odd and ends / 1.17.2020

Black Sun (Sol Niger) setting on the outskirts of a city. From Splendor Solis (The Splendour of the Sun), a German illuminated alchemical treatise ca. 1582. Found at magic transistor.

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Diane and Gerry Weintraub: Ocean Moss. A miniature book of photos in the collection of The Met.

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Berndt Friberg holding some of his handmade miniature vessels for Gustavsberg (Sweden). Found at Forage Modern Workshop.

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Diamond-dust hourglass inscribed TEMPUS NEMINEM MANET (time waits for no one) by Erica Weiner.

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Lawson Fenning Ivanhoe desk styled by Tali Roth Designs.

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The important question lying behind many possibly intractable issues is whether people are serious – whether their stated beliefs, are authentic, or merely devised to achieve a certain self-presentation or outcome. Campaign polls, social media, ‘progressive’ politicians, ‘populist’ politicians, journalists invoking ‘free speech’ and ‘democracy’, quack doctors invoking science, your Facebook friends invoking quack doctors, skincare, astrology: clearly, not everything is what it seems, but it’s hard to tell what it actually is. 

Some modern critics exploit this uncertainty, grounding their analyses in the stability of conventional moral wisdom even as they bemoan its absence. They emphasise the primacy of emotions and the importance of ‘empathy’ in order to avoid the discomfort of thought and the stakes involved in taking a position.

Lauren Oyler, "Ha Ha! Ha Ha!" The London Review of Books, 1/23/2020.

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The loss is tremendous and heartbreaking on so many levels, both the human suffering and the wiping out of other species, the loss of places, seasons. And it strikes me that it seems so much easier to imagine these losses than to imagine that we could change ourselves and create a different form of living on the planet. 

It is really crucial that we learn to imagine what we could gain. If we can't imagine it, it’s more difficult to create. It'll make us dependent on accidents, serendipities.

Climate adaptation specialist Dr. Susan Moser in conversation with Laurie Mazur for Earth Island Journal, 1/22/2019, talking "about communicating bad climate news, the benefits of 'functional denial,' the varied flavors of hope, and the better world we can build in the wreckage of life as we know it."

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Related: Emma Marris/NYT — "How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change."

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The late Charles Sprawson on swimming: “It seemed to me that it appealed to the introverted and eccentric, individualists involved in a mental world of their own.”

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"One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room."

Peter Schjeldahl, "The Art of Dying." The New Yorker, December 16, 2019. (This issue may have my vote as best cover-to-cover issue of the NYer in 2019. Every article is a banger.)

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Zora: The 100 Best Books by Black Female Authors, 1850 to Present.

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Filed under something beautiful to look at: 25 influential rooms—"[O]ne history of design in the West on one day from one group of highly opinionated people."

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Critical condition: critical stories about criticism.

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He did it partly because he wanted to look like a member of Blink-182 every day of the year, partly because he was convinced his newly sprouting leg hair would keep him warm, and partly because his mother begged him to put on something more sensible. That last one, he added, might have been a key factor: “I think it probably had to do with the age,” he said. “Having a little more personal agency, and a little of that ‘You can’t make me’” attitude.

Ashley Fetters, "The Boys Who Wear Shorts All Winter," The Atlantic, 1/9/2020. 

'a ship across time'

Years ago, long before I had children or was even married, a friend with children said, “The thing about having kids is that after a while you forget what it was like before you had them.” The idea was shocking. Busy enough with my own life, I couldn’t envisage a future self whose comings and goings were circumscribed, apparently happily, by the wants and needs of people half my size. But that’s what happened. As I grew into the role of parent, I sometimes felt as if I were taking apart a ship and using the planks to build a ship for someone else. I was building a ship across time, out of my time.

Alan Burdick, 'The Secret Life of Time.' The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2017.