According to this article the Hadron particle accelerator failed this summer due to “a single, badly soldered electrical connection”.
This is awesome. And while I suspect the problem is a little more complex than what is described, it is still a completely relatable issue. Anyone who has ever used a soldering iron, or enjoyed the frustration of fixing older Christmas tree lights can empathize. I myself have witnessed and experienced the complete annoyance of going over an entire circuit board with one’s dinky voltmeter trying to locate that stupid failed connection under the pressure of having to present the work in short order. I can only begin to imagine the tedium of having to comb through the electronic innards of a particle accelerator. Yech.
Its been boingboinged already but I too must spread the robot word. Mr. Woo of China makes thoroughly lovely and charming robots from spare parts and ingenuity. It is projects like these that warm the cockles of my heart and gently push me back into the studio, humbled but hopeful.
This weekend I took the bus over to NYC to attend a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences titled: Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? I was initially hesitant to go as I have to be ready to install my thesis show in two weeks but I decided to go to refresh my brain a bit.
Highlights include:
Theo Jansen whose kinetic sculptures blew me away with their delicacy, enormous scale and charm.
Dr. Jonathan King’s discussion on how his students learn from visual representations of cellular proteins. King brought up the extremely important point that his students, despite being brilliant MIT kids, still had to be taught how to read images, or how to actually assimilate and understand what the electron microscope was telling them. I thought this was so important mainly because I was getting this vibe from the other scientists that they felt like art needed to be straightforward and easy to understand. But art is like any other image or language. You need to learn how to see before you actually start seeing it. Similarly science is also not that straight foward or easy to understand. Scientist may think some things obvious but it is becuase they are fully versed in the language and thinking of science.
I also enjoyed the talk of Dr. Andrew A. Bienwener on the kinetics of animal movement. I remember discussing in my Kant class last semester the amazing lack of consciousness in animal movement. It was astounding and beautiful to see mountain goats effortlessly climb and the resulting very creepy and uncanny robots built to mimic these movements.
I got the feeling that a lot of scientists with the exception of Dr. King felt that art was obligated to be within a certain aesthetic paradigm. If you are contemporary artist, generally the question of this type of aesthetic at this point is considered tacky and bourgeoisie. Interestingly I ran into a similar problem with a scientifically inclined friend of mine who also expressed concern about aesthetics. And I think this is a huge communication problem that probably cuts both ways. And there is going to have to be some learning on both sides as to what we can expect from art and what we can expect from science. Frankly I am always for pushing the envelope and forgetting old rules and forgetting what makes you feel happy and comfortable. For example the Cloaca art project, which is essentially a glorified shit making machine that mimics the digestive system. Utterly fantastic.
I am happy I went. It helped me reinforce why I like being an artist. There was this moment at the reception held afterwards where I was stuffing myself full of prosciutto and cheese and on my third glass of wine looking out into a fantastic view of the city (we were on the 40th floor of a brand new high-rise) chatting with a woman who was working with a neurologist, researching the 8 things that the brain and the human eye find pleasing and it was very affirming. I am doing the right thing.
I went to an artist lecture given by Sheila Pepe a couple weeks ago and something she said about the artist progress really stuck in my mind. Basically there is no better thing you can do for your art than go to your studio everyday. I forget that sometimes. But going in today reminded me of that basic good.
A work in progress:
My works in progress unfortunately tend to remain the “pile of wires” phase for a long time. This has made getting decent crits from profs a little hard. Because unless you understand electronics it is understandably difficult to imagine what is going on and why. But it is absolutely imperative to make sure you have all the ‘guts’ up and running reliably before delving too deeply into the aesthetics. I personally think wire work to be very beautiful and can inform the aesthetic outcome of a piece.
Also an article from the boston globe stresses that great things take time. Kind of a duh, but we live in an instant gratification society, so maybe we need a couple articles like this.
I used to work strictly with conceptual ideas of dress. But then I discovered electronics. People sometimes ask me if I will ever combine the two someday. For now the answer is “probably not”. Despite all the interesting stuff going on with wearable electronics it feels tacky to me. And the electronics have not evolved enough to truely combine effectively with fabric. This is not to say there aren’t some amazing fabric technologies out there. But we are still on the way. So unfortunately whenever anyone tries to make a wearable electronic piece, to me it just looks like a dress with a cumbersome PCB board tacked on. There is no real discussion between style and function, garment and technology. They just ram into eachother. I have some ideas but I would need to collaborate with someone who is far more technically skilled than I. Maybe even a whole group of people.
In either case thanks to boingboing I got to see some interesting animatronic dresses by one of my favorite designers Hussein Chalayan.
Video 1 shows the entire runway show. Which for me was a treat.
And Video 2 shows a little bit of the work in progress which is always fun to see.
Chalayan as you can see was blessed with a huge staff of talented people to realize his vision. I think the strongest point of his pieces was that the movements of the dresses were extremely subtle and organic. This is very difficult to do on such a small scale. However constructually they run into the same problem that I was discussing earlier. The dresses do not really embody the technology. It was a bit of a shame that he didn’t just keep the muslin and the exposed wire guts and armature.
