land art

Land art is a movement that began in the 1960's, when artists sought to place sculpture outside of the commercial gallery, and instead created works using the landscape itself. Such works utilized materials present in the environment, and were subject to the environment; blown by the wind or eroded by water. Here you see Spiral Jetty, a very famous piece of land art by Robert Smithson.

Andy Goldsworthy is my personal favorite of all the land artists I've looked into. What appeals to me, I think, is how his artwork is much like something I myself would have made as a little girl. All that free time wandering around in the desert wilderness, inspecting rocks and plants and making things out of them - I wish I'd known then that I could have called it art! I suggest that you borrow the book Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990 from the library, and view the documentary film Rivers and Tides to see how he works.







(Goldsworthy uses autumn leaves around a hole, pieces of ice slowly frozen together with water, rocks and branches, and dandelions woven together with grass stems)



My own attempt at making land art was entertaining. I wanted to try several types of sculpture, all of them using a single theme. In an attempt to subvert my overly enthusiastic maternal drive, I decided the theme would be infant related.

Initially, I wanted to sculpt an earthen baby, perhaps from mud. I drew pictures of what I wanted it to look like. I scouted out locations, and finally found the perfect hollow tree, into which I built an elevated platform from stones. I covered the platform with moss to soften it and give it color. When I went to find mud from which to sculpt the baby, however, none of it had the right consistency. Rocks and sand for hundreds of miles.

After conferring with my teacher, I decided to try suet (like Joseph Beuys). We pictured wild birds as they symbolically ate the baby, returning it to the earth. Perhaps I could make a mold of a baby and cast it in suet. That seemed artsy, right? In actuality, no one sold the quantity of suet that I needed, save for the butcher. Suet from the butcher is not like the suet you feed birds. It is big hunks of hard pig fat, which, I discovered, take years to render into grease, which then has to be cooled into lard. I gave up. I had no intention of suffering that smell for the sake of art.

In the end, I made a clay baby. Clay is still earth, I figured, even if it didn't come from that exact location. Having become attached to the idea of how the fat baby would look, I wanted to cover the clay in a similar substance. I used beeswax, which smelled much better than the fat, and looked much the same. I had fun melting the wax in a double burner on my stove and pouring it all over the clay baby.

I took the baby to the woods, and with great internal fanfare, placed it onto the platform, scattering birdseed all around it. It looked peaceful and protected sleeping there.

A few weeks later I went back, and someone had put up a sign that said "Rock Garden," and there were balanced stacks of stones all around the area. I felt very glad that someone had come across the baby and been inspired to add to it's surroundings.

Since then the snow has slowly been melting the baby. First all the wax cracked, and now the head has nearly entirely disappeared. I look forward to seeing if there is any of it left by spring.

crayon physics deluxe

I'm growing to love independent games more and more. Like some others, I suspect that they will save the PC gaming market through their sheer ingenuity. Pretty soon, I'll post on Armageddon Empires, my current favorite that was developed and marketed by one person. It's an astonishingly good game.

But for now, here's another example of indie-borne creativity. It's called Crayon Physics Deluxe, and while it's not quite finished and I'm not sure I would even buy it, it's just so clever that you have to be impressed. The basic idea is that you go through a series of puzzles, increasing in difficulty, in which you must make a marble touch a star. The only way to get the marble to move is by drawing objects and taking advantage of the physics of motion (using weights, levers, pulleys, etc.). To get a feel for this, you have to watch it in action:



Pretty damn cool. I love how there are going to be an infinite number of solutions for each puzzle, limited only by your own imagination and desire for complexity. You can go the simple route (like the guy in the video) or you can try out some crazy contraption just to see if it works (see image above, which a reviewer of the game posted and claimed actually worked). I can definitely see the potential for educational value here, and a children's game that adults will obsess over too. Someone suggested that Crayon Physics Deluxe would be perfect for the Nintendo DS, with its stylus and touchscreen. You couldn't be entirely displeased if your kids were playing this in the backseat on a long roadtrip, right?

As it stands now, it's being developed for PC by a single person, Petri Purho, a student at Helsinki Polytechnic in Finland (you can read his blog here). If you spend some time looking at what this guy does, it'll blow your mind. Most of his games are "done-in-under-a-week," which is a goal he often sets for himself, but they're consistently creative. For example, here are screenshots of two of his other games. The one on the left is a "tribute to the rolling boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark." You play the boulder and have to squash archaeologists before they touch the gold statues. The game on the right is called "SM Word" and you score points for typing in the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over. Annoying Windoze error messages keep popping up to interrupt you, which you can close by shouting into a microphone and banging on your keyboard. I'm not joking.










People like this kid either get swallowed up by larger gaming companies, or try to create and develop on their own terms. You can imagine which pays more.

juno

Aili and I saw Juno last night, a quirky comedy written by Diablo Cody (famous in the blogosphere for her candid journal, the Pussy Ranch) and directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking). We both enjoyed it and recommend it, although if you feel like waiting till it comes out on DVD, you're not missing anything on a big screen. If you don't want to know anything about the plot, don't read any further and just take our word that it's funny, imbued with indie spirit, and full of endearing characters and clever dialog.

The plot centers around a sarcastic, intelligent high school girl (Juno, played by an almost too pretty Ellen Page) who gets pregnant and after briefly considering an abortion, decides to carry through the pregnancy and give up her baby for adoption to a hyper-yuppie couple (Jennifer Garner & Jason Bateman). Both Aili and I were turned off at the beginning of the movie by the unrealistic, slangy, too-clever dialog of Juno and her best friend - but if you give it some time, the movie stops trying to impress you and just does. For me, the turning point was when they successfully transformed Garner's character from a freakish perfectionist and desperate wanna-be mommy into one worthy of sympathy. You suddenly realize that the movie really isn't saying anything (significant) about teenage pregnancy, specifically, but is instead trying to comment more broadly on parental responsibility. A responsibility that not only Juno lacks, due to her age, but also Bateman's character lacks due to his refusal to mature. It's an effective theme and turns an otherwise Napoleon Dynamite-esque movie into something more interesting and thoughtful.

The movie features a fair amount of peripheral "indie" content (that while currently trendy is still great) like comics, horror flicks, and cool music (The Melvins and Sonic Youth are mentioned several times, and Juno's three favorite bands are The Stooges, Patti Smith, and The Runaways). This is one of those movies that wouldn't have been nearly as emotion-provoking without its soundtrack, which is excellent from beginning to end. Aili was thrilled to see and hear that Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches was the music director for the film, and the soundtrack includes several of her childlike, silly, but strangely powerful songs. To read an interview with her, go here.

For those of you that got off on the dark humor of Welcome to the Dollhouse, or even Ghost World, it's possible that Juno will be too light and fluffy. There's hardly any teen-angst here, as Juno seems amazingly mature and confident, has a trustworthy and dependable best friend, a dorky/cool "boyfriend" that loves her, and a supportive family. She's not particularly angry or depressed about her world or humanity. But I think that after seeing that plot-line all too many times, the bouncy happiness of Juno was simply refreshing.

monkey-controlled robot destroys los angeles

This story was printed today in the New York Times science section: "Monkey's thoughts propel robot, a step that may help humans." I'm always on the lookout for anything neuroscience-related that seems to fuck with our notion of what's science fact and what's science fiction, and this one certainly fits the bill. As I understand it, the scientists implanted some recording electrodes into the motor cortex of a monkey, somehow translated this code of electrical activity into a set of instructions for a robot (?) such that when the monkey walked, the robot walked in a similar fashion. This, by itself, is pretty impressive. But the experimenters were also able to get the monkey to make the robot walk by using only its thoughts (and some clever operant conditioning), even when it wasn't walking on the treadmill. Here's a schematic that will help you make sense of what I just said (and visit the link for full details):


I am actually astounded by this. I really had no idea we, as a scientific community, had the knowledge necessary to make this possible. There are a couple of issues here that really stand out and beg for further information:

1. Where exactly in the motor cortex were these electrodes? It sounds like the team was trying to capture the neural code of not movement itself, but motor-planning. That's premotor cortex, rather than primary motor cortex. Premotor cortex is also where you find lots of mirror neurons, which fire when an animal either does something or watches another animal engage in the same behavior.

2. How the hell did they translate this neural code into a set of motor instructions for the robot? Quoting from the article:

"The video and brain cell activity were then combined and translated into a format that a computer could read. This format is able to predict with 90 percent accuracy all permutations of Idoya’s leg movements three to four seconds before the movement takes place."

Ummm, ok, but... what? FP/MC, got any thoughts here? Cracking the neural code in this fashion is perhaps the defining problem in computational neuroscience, and it seems like these guys have done it (at least with motion). Am I just naive to what's going on in my field? (probably)

If you're wondering why you'd even want to do something like this, well... I'm a little disappointed by your lack of imagination. Besides the eventuality described in the title of this post, you could use this technology to 1) provide people who are paralyzed with robotic helpers, 2) control robotic movements in dangerous environments (e.g. mining delithium crystals on asteroids), 3) play a much cooler version of Team Fortress 2.