There will be an opening for my new solo show of light boxes at Cafe Racer...
Opening: Thursday November 20, 2008, 7-9 pm
Café Racer: 5828 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle
Show runs Nov 20 – Dec 16
About High Anxiety: I have a love/fear relationship with flying, and am continuously fascinated by the design of commercial jet aircraft, the airline industry, air security, pilots, flight attendants, and luggage. Most of my work in the past few years has pondered the act of climbing aboard what amounts to a time/space machine pipe bomb hurtling seven miles above the Earth's surface, while pretending to be on a big bus. I think about being inside the plane, and all the strange things that could happen there.
While studying in Berlin, Ed had a blog he posted to frequently, with his thoughts on his studies and his experience there. I finally converted the blog to a regular web page, so now it reads in chronological order as a record of that time.
It's great reading. Edward recounts getting attacked by little kids in Mitte, synagogues under guard, concentration camps in the suburbs advertising dance parties, coal-heated apartments, the Dresden goth scene, Hitler and Bush, an argument in a Mosque... it was an adventure.
I had been contemplating a tattoo of this equation, but when I found out I needed a crown, I thought it would be better in my mouth. I was inspired by a friend who has a nice Led Zep on one of her molars.
The equation is more typically written:
What does it mean?
It’s an identity with confounding implications. I was completely blown away when my calculus teacher wrote it on the board so long ago. In this simple statement, huge branches of mathematics came crashing together—natural logarithms, trigonometry, geometry, complex numbers, infinite series, and the concepts of one and zero. How the hell could an incredibly weird transcendental number be the same thing as negative one? No previous teacher had even hinted that the varied subjects in math were part of a larger whole. I was never the same after that—math became more than just random facts and puzzles. There was something very deep going on, and I ended up studying math seriously and going to grad school because of it. (Well that, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.)
What are the elements of the expression?
"e" is Euler's number, roughly equivalent to 2.71828183... It is an irrational and transcendental number, never repeating. It is fundamental to natural logarithms, and is related to growth of populations and radioactive decay, among other natural processes.
"i" is the imaginary unit number, otherwise known as the square root of negative one. It is the basis of complex analysis, fundamental to physics, number theory, fluid dynamics, and fractals.
"pi" is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly equivalent to 3.14159265... It is also an irrational and transcendental number, fundamental to geometry, music & sound, trigonometry, and waves of all kinds.
There are several ways to prove that e^(i*pi) = -1, but none of them are really satisfying to me. One involves infinite series, and another involves graphing on the complex plane. I can understand and accept the proofs, but the proofs don’t reveal everything that is going on, at least for me. (Maybe that’s part of why I didn’t finish my PhD...)
Regardless, Euler’s equation is a beautiful expression that binds together fundamental aspects of our world, and it will always be close to my heart, er gums.
"Dr. Norihiko Ishikawa of the Department of Telesurgery and Geomedicine at the University of Kanazawa demonstrates the precision of the daVinci Surgical System by using the device’s remote-control robot arms to fold a penny-sized origami crane."
That's pretty cool, but I knew I could do better, even with my giant human-sized fingers. So I did one that's about half the size of a dime.
Last weekend we headed out to Lind, WA (near Moses Lake) to see the Combine Demolition Derby. Our friends Heather and Chris knew the folks who own the Devore Motel, where a bunch of people were crashing. We had no idea what to expect.
It was an incredible time, burned into my memory... sweet, surreal, dangerous, dusty. Not wanting to impose (no open rooms at the Devore, but there was a school bus that might have extra space), we instead stayed at a little motel in Ritzville, a town about 15 minutes away from Lind, and rolled in Friday night. We knew we were off to a good start when we saw all the Harleys parked next to our room and the magic fingers machine next to the bed.
Saturday morning we awoke to brilliant sun. We headed to Lind, windows down, warm desert air blowing through our hair. The Devore Motel in Lind was home base. It has a main building on one side of the street, and a little ranch-style row of rooms on the other side of the street, ringing an empty lot with a bunch of living room furniture, a fully equipped sound stage, a school bus (extra beds), a cinderblock barbeque, and an old yellow lab named Jake. That morning people were just getting up after a long night of partying. Potatoes were sizzling in bacon fat on the outdoor griddle. We were offered hot cups of espresso, and encouraged to fry up whatever we wanted. Rick Klu was riding his bike around, as other friends emerged from their rooms, blinking, holding out empty cups to be filled with bloody marys.
(via beyond the beyond) Christopher Baker did a beautiful installation in Copenhagen, where viewers send SMS messages to a building and their questions and answers become part of the building and the sonic environment.
It does much more than simply projecting onto a large surface. The digital information interacts with the architectural features of the building, going around windows, with its own physics and gravity. Lately I've been thinking about the coming convergence of the digital and physical worlds (augmented reality, an internet of things, unmediated user interfaces). It's already starting to happen.
This installation is a great example of how it would feel to have digital data truly integrated with the environment, as opposed to being a self-contained projection or veneer. The next step would be enabling the data to change the physical structure...
I live for the day when Bladerunner is outdated, as long as we can unplug whenever we want to.
Last year we were in Brooklyn for New Year's, but this year we resumed our tradition of heading up to Vancouver on New Year's Eve, staying at the Sylvia Hotel, and diving into English Bay with a few hundred other silly people at the Vancouver Polar Bear swim.
Ed, not deterred by crutches, thought this might be the time to don the Captain Fantastic outfit in Canada. Waxy Photography (John Goldsmith) caught him as he emerged from the salty 44 degree water...
I'm working on our annual "holiday" card, which will be technically late for Christmas, but still within reason for the holidays in general (I have till Chinese New Year, right?). I try to come up with something amusing each year, some are better than others. Here are some from the last few years.
JOY - 2003
We got our fake pink xmas tree and wanted to celebrate. Our kitty was not pleased.
Christmas merry - 2004
This card was inspired by a trip to visit the studio of Werner Nekes, who has an extensive collection of illusions, magic lanterns, and artifacts from the evolution of animation and film.
His book Eyes, Lies, and Illusions: Masters of Deception is wonderful.
(flipped)
And inside... (this idea is stolen from Werner Nekes business card)
The hint is to tilt the card away from you and close one eye. There are two messages.*
We weren't planning on it, but we stumbled onto Fasching at the Köln Dom. People from all over the world pilgrimage to the Cologne Cathedral for the start of Carnival at 11:11am on November 11. I recorded some audio on my Edirol/Roland stereo digital recorder. It's a good sound recording, but you'd never know it because it's compressed and uploaded to Youtube. (Whatever happened to high-fidelity?)
The middle of November might seem like an odd time to travel to Germany--more than one person has said so. The weather is cold, but not so cold to snow. The Winter Markets that Americans find so adorable compared to the crap we're served in the local mall aren't open yet. Many of the tourist attractions are closed for the season. So why go in the middle of November? Well, I like travelling when nobody else wants to. The lines are shorter at the airport. The locals have forgiven the trespasses of summer tourists and so are friendlier. These are all good reasons, but of course the real reason we picked November for travel was because it just worked out that way with our schedules.
Now, however, we can tell people we travelled to Germany in the middle of Novemeber so we could participate in Fasching.
