UbuWeb

One of the internet's best resources, UbuWeb encompasses the work of hundreds of artists with an immense library of audio, text, photo, and video all available for free. This post is merely to acknowledge their continued success at making accessible the work of countless minds upon many platforms. Last week they revamped their film & video hosting to now run more smoothly and to permit clip embedding. From their vaults, I offer a BBC program, The South Bank Show, airing in 1985 and consisting in an interview with one of 20th century-painting history's wonderful eccentrics: Francis Bacon. In a series of conversations, Bacon discusses his taste in art, ideas, influences, and fixations with interviewer Melvyn Bragg.

Quiet American

Whether it be for a professional attempt at art or an amateur preservation of memories, it is not uncommon to find the commitment of our memories and imagination to the spatio-visual snare of photography. Neglected has been the capture of strictly audio (beyond musical intentions). I find it interesting to shift the hegemonic means by which we have come to document places and times. Experimentation with field recordings as an art and documentation ought not supplant photo or video, but stand alongside as a deservedly appreciated medium. Quiet American is a website featuring field recordings taken to document the evocative aural textures experienced in one's travels, both foreign and domestic - as near or far as they may be.

Book From The Ground (excerpt) by Xu Bing

"Book from the Ground is a novel written in a 'language of icons' that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life."
-Xu Bing

Optron

I finally found the photovoltaic cells I've been looking for to finish building an instrument inspired by Atsuhiro Ito's optron.



EDIT 04/02: It works.

American Boy by Martin Scorsese (1978)

Accelerating evolution

Multiplex-automated genomic engineering, or MAGE, is a revolutionary technique in genome sequencing pioneered by George Church, PhD at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and University of Cambridge. Rather than step-by-step alterations to a genetic code, MAGE enacts numerous changes throughout the genome simultaneously. The experiments on bacteria thus far have accelerated genome sequencing exponentially, condensing work that would take months into a turnaround of a few days. This innovation holds promise to genetically modify bacteria instrumental in pharmaceuticals and biofuels to be more productive. MIT's Technology Review offers more details.

Reinventing the wheel

Theo Jansen, Dutch artist famed for his kinetic sculptures, has been preoccupied for a period nearing two decades with his concept of creating a new form of "life." He envisions a Dutch coastline inhabited by his "strandbeests" and other structures of yellow piping that move with the power of the wind, outfitted to detect and change direction in the presence of water. In so doing, he engineered a mechanism by which his sculptures would be motile. This mechanism is more efficient than the wheel (i.e. less friction/resistance). Theoretically, the mechanism should be compatible with our current vehicle paradigm as they function on a stationary axle or "hip", all while having a much greater load carrying capacity. Product developers may begin to take notice now that students at the University of Louisiana created what they call the "Cajun Crawler" - a Segwey type of vehicle outfitted with the Jansen mechanism.

Ungulate magnetoreception

Last year, an article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggesting that cattle and deer grazing and at rest are ubiquitously oriented North-South. The initial tip-off came from researchers analyzing Satellite images from Google Earth. Further findings suggest that low-level magnetic field emissions from the likes of power lines show a disruption in cattle herd orientation. While the methods are inconclusive, the findings warrant further research. Though it does not follow that these animals have a sense of magnetoreception (they could merely be exposing their elongated sides to the warmth of the East-West "traveling" Sun), it is an intriguing notion. Of course it wouldn't be too far fetched considering we have the sensory percept apparatuses to detect electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. However, we have evolved such a mechanism due to its pertinence to our well-being. Being a motile creature, it is useful to navigate the world we live in. Stationary organisms like a sea sponge have no use for eyes; natural selection would not favor the evolution of such a sense organ. So then, a logical question to ask: for what reason might ungulates develop a sensory mechanism by which they detect magnetic fields? Further, what might this mechanism be? I cannot think of any (scientifically acredited) sensory perceptual mechanism that is not manifested anatomically. This leads me to think that either magnetoreception capabilities are in stark contrast to the evolutionary model we have all come to know, certain organs have eluded verterinary sciences, or geomagnetic fields affect certain known sensory mechanisms in a manner we do not yet understand.

New life

Last month, I posted about some ideas that occurred to me; one of those concerned the possibility of more than one biological origin on Earth. This week, a great article in NewScientist discusses this notion (called "shadow life") as well as biochemists on the verge of producing life from scratch in the laboratory.

Read the article here.

I Eye Aye - Rahsaan Roland Kirk live in Montreux (1972)

A statement with which I wholeheartedly agree appearing at the end of this film reads: "He had no precedent or competition. Since his death in 1977, no one has come along to claim his mantle. It should be safe until the end of time. - jd"

Even if you're not one much for jazz, it is difficult not to recognize that Columbus's own Rahsaan Roland Kirk was not only a talented musician, but gifted in the musical innovations he devised to humbly "just recreate the sounds in [his] head." This footage captures him in his inimitable style as not only a multi-instrumentalist, but a mulit-simultaneous instrumentalist. Often playing upward of three saxophones at a time or harmonizing the flute along with a recorder played with his nose, I hope everyone can appreciate one of the oft forgotten greats of music. Also noteworthy of his career are his experimentations with electronic noise music in the 1950s, which he abandoned so as to not be subject to the whims of the electric companies. Highlights in the film aside from his regular bag of tricks include him dishing out bumps of cocaine to the audience and later wandering into the crowd (he was blind) whilst sustaining a single note through circular breathing. Anyhow, enjoy.

A neurologist's notebook

I became acquainted with the writings of Oliver Sacks about five years ago studying cognitive science as part of my degree program. I am presently reading his latest, Musicophilia, and I thought it appropriate to note something about his work.

To anyone unfamiliar, Sacks is a preeminent neurologist and author of many works detailing particularly odd and interesting neurological (or when neurology fails to explain, simply phenomenological conditions) he has found in his patients. He came to notoriety with Awakenings, an autobiographical work chronicling his success in the late 60s at treating the catatonic victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica "sleeping sickness" epidemic. The book was adapted for both the stage as well as an Academy Award-nominated film (starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams) in 1990. He has published several other highly acclaimed works including: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and The Island of the Color Blind, among others. In addition to his books, he is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Some of his articles can be found online:

The Mind's Eye: What The Blind See

The Abyss

J'adore Mimi

Clean energy out of mud

Dutch designer Marieke Staps harnesses the energy of our Earth's soil. The metabolism of microbial life coupled with the conductive metals naturally present in soil have the capacity to convert electrolytes into usable energy. Embedded in the ground, the Soil Lamp runs purely off of the "earth battery" with enough energy to power an LED bulb. It only requires a bit of watering now and then.

Engineering a lettuce, engineering a cure

Type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas, is a widespread life-threatening disease that requires daily injections of insulin to maintain the proper levels of blood sugar. A professor at University of Central Florida, Henry Daniell, believes he has found the cure in the form of a GMO.

Using genetically engineered lettuce containing the insulin gene, Daniell believes he is able to train the body to once again produce insulin. Using GMO lettuce freeze-dried, he forms a capsule. When the lettuce cells break down in the intestines exposing the insulin, the immune system responds by producing its own.

Thus far, on the experimental front, Daniell has succeeded in bringing diabetic mice to produce their own insulin after only eight weeks of treatment.

À bout de souffle by Jean Luc Godard (1960)

Сталкер by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979)