Page 65-67, The Object Stares Back

…There are many ways of seeing aside from those that can be captured by pointing photofloods at an object and documenting it in Kodachrome.  A few years ago there was a special slide film called infared, which mixed visible light with near infared to produce unexpected colors.  Pictures of autumn leaves would come out partly the way they naturally look and partly glowing pink-and-turquoise.  A picture of a hand would look a little waxy, with the surgace veins showing through as if the skin had become transparent.  The color infared film was also a way to think about the vision of other animals.  Some animals see different wavelengths than we do; this raises curious questions about how they perceive the world.  Apparently frogs can see color but tadpoles can’t:  is the metamorphosis from tadpole to frog like the change from black-and-white Kansas to colorful Oz?  Bees can see some ultraviolet, so that they can look at flowers that appear perfectly white to us and discern patterns in them.  But at the same time, Bees cannot see the other end of the spectrum–they can’t perceive red, and so their vision begins in the ultraviolet, continues up through the spectrum of purple, blue, green, yellow, and stops at orange.

 To us, the two extreme ends of the spectrum look very similar: red on one end seems to blend well with violet on the other.  In terms of wavelengths they are opposites, but in our perception they seems like a good match.  This the reason why artists have been able to bend diagrams of the spectrum into color circles, connecting the red to the violet to make a continuous (and unscientific) cycle of color.  If you think of what happens when you mix the deepest red with the deepest violet, you can only imagine a color very much like red or violet.  Most colors mix to produce new colors, so that for example, blue and yellow make green; but red and violet seem to only produce more red and violet.  That’s odd if you think of the spectrum as a number line.  Violet at one end of the spectrum has a wavelength of around 420, and red is about 660.  You might think that if they were mixed, the result would be in between—say, about 540, which is the wavelength of green.  But red and violet do not mix to produce green. Bees are different, and they see mixtures of their two extreme colors (ultraviolet and orange) as a third color, which we cannot even begin to imagine.  It is called bee’s purple, though there is no reason to assume it looks anything like purple.  Perhaps to bees it is more like our yellow or our indigo…or perhaps it’s something entirely new. We have no capacity to imagine new colors.  No matter how hard you try, each color you imagine is going to be a color that exists and probably one you’ve seen before.  You can make up a new color—the philosopher Nelson Goodman made up “grue” and “bleen”—but you cannot imagine how a genuinely new color looks.  We are stuck with the spectrum and its mixtures, but we know that other animals may not be.

Figure 9.

And what about other ways of seeing form? Animals that can change their color, like flounders, octopi, and chameleons, provide a way to think about that.  A flounder will not only change its color to try to blend in with its surroundings; it will also change its pattern (figure 9).  The flounder in these pictures has a fairly good idea of what a dot pattern looks like, even though it ends up making dots that are several times too large.  But it messes up the large and small checkerboards.  Faced with a small checkerboard, it produces some small white patches, but there are too few of them and they are unevenly spaced.  For the large checkerboard it manages larger spots, but it cannot get the evenness of the pattern, and its silhouette remains clearly visible.  In describing things this way I am of course seeing as a human, and what these pictures may show is the way that the flounder sees those patterns.  It could be that, for the flounder, those are perfect matches, and a large checkerboard really is a mottled black surface with some blotches of white.  The flounder might be communicating its vision with its body, letting us glimpse the world through its eyes.

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AKT: If other animals had to examine human sight, what would they use to describe the way we envision the world? I realize this question is too big for a blog post and certainly too large for a comments thread. Even Eilkins didn’t seem completely finished with his contemplations on the “nature of [our] Seeing” when he ends this book. In his closing, he  writes, “this book could have been five hundred pages long or five thousand. Vision is inexhaustible…” …and the investigation of sight reminds us that life is not the same in every place; nor is it the same for every being.

The excerpt comes from Elkins’ book, The Object Stares Back .

Originally organized and conceived by Ryan Dean with the help of countless others around the world.

Participants in the Bird’s Eye View have a unique way of petitioning for the reduction of carbon emissions through collaborative installations built on rooftops across the world.  Upon these rooftops, collaborators unload pounds and pounds of plastics, paper, fabric, and other used materials, which they then arrange into the number, “350,” a massive 350 that can be seen from airplanes.

These installations call attention to the reduction of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, which is a level prominent scientists (i.e. NASA’s James Hansen) have identified as “the only safe level of carbon dioxide in the air.”

The following images come from Birds Eye View pieces around the globe:

Maine, USA

Australia

Democratic Republic of Congo

Brooklyn, USA

China

Bushwick, NY (Beta Spaces ‘09)

Ukraine

BEV installations are not just piles of material forming signage. Those working around the BEV think of these collaborations as “nests,” and like birds, these nests require a collection process.

For example, in the installation at Fairfield University, students started a campaign to collect old bed sheets from members of the community. At Beta Spaces, collaborators used recycled materials to create art pieces to form the numbers. In Maine, Ryan Dean (the original creator of BEV) organized lumber yards to donate tarp-like materials for the projects.  For the piece in the Congo, stalks of bark from Banana trees formed the numbers.  At Brooklyn College, people used recycled art work (old paintings) and tarps for the 350. In a sense, each of the nests reflect bits of the surrounding environment.

The Bird’s Eye View has also joined networks with other groups across the world. In China,  participants from an environmental effort known as Greening of the Beige created their own nest using old magazines. Another eco-minded group known as Reverse Garbage in Australia also collaborated with BEV.

These billboard-sized nests attract attention in a fashion similar to the desperate signaling employed by those trapped on uninhabited islands.  I find this very fascinating, but more importantly, the idea behind BEV is to capture 350 from a perspective that allows one to absorb the surrounding environment in such a way that we can actually see the spread of houses, buildings, and other human detritus growing across the Earth.

For many of us, this BEV portrait of Earth isn’t something we confront on a daily basis, for we approach the architecture of our cities and suburbs on the ground. We move in and out of buildings, across streets, and through one city’s end to another city’s end without that ever-present view from above.

In a recent email exchange, one of the collaborators wrote, “Sometimes you have to look at things from a broadened perspective to see them clearly. It is in a global perspective that we may begin to change things together.”

Bird’s Eye View originally began under the direction of Ryan Dean from Cranston, RI. Since its inception during the winter of 2008, people such as Laura Marie Marciano and a network of individuals  have assisted Dean by writing proposals for the project, traveling with him to spread the mission, and putting in hours to construct/document the installations.   I had the pleasure of meeting Laura Marie on a rooftop where she displayed a Bird’s Eye View piece during Beta Spaces ’09.

This next picture documents the sticky note around its younger days:

Tan Lin’s Chalk Playground (LitTwit Chalk) set about a dozen+  artists and writers to chalk their thoughts on the streets of NY last Saturday. Pieces chalked included a Futurist Manifesto, a Chinese Manifesto, and many other impromptu pieces of poetry. The following pictures catch the “poetry line” working away in a parking lot in Chinatown.

Here’s a favorite:

I only caught up with the poetry line downtown, but the entire performance actually traveled across Manhattan.

The gesture recalls a “commandment” from another favorite writer of mine, media critic Jay Rosen. According to Rosen’s commandment no. 4,those pinpointed by Your Dot would be “the people formerly known as the audience,” a.k.a. those who now live in the era of Web 2.0 and create media and disseminate knowledge instead of only consuming it.

My Full Disclosure: Revkin’s Dot Earth inspired the title of this blog.  Actually to be more specific, it was something Revkin said during a talk at NYU that inspired the title. He had been speaking to journalism students on covering science in the new media landscape, and someone asked a question about the origin of his blog’s title.  Revkin then pointed to the astronomer, Carl Sagan, and the wonderful, delicate, famous  phrase Sagan used to describe Earth as a “pale blue dot.” Although I didn’t remember Sagan’s name after the lecture, the words he used stayed with me for a long time.

I’m not much of a Bushwick expert, but  I felt pleasantly welcomed by the neighborhood’s energy as I trampled through BETA Spaces ‘09 on Sunday.

After last year’s festival, we saw some fine writing that delivered an overview of the event, but for BETA Spaces ‘09, I’d like to work on posts devoted to a few of the individual shows that made up this now annual event. Until then, here are some photos from the weekend.

It must be noted, though, that I still constantly use several post-it notes during work to effectively communicate with co-workers and label documents.  Still, there’s always some small task I’m finding each day that doesn’t require the use of an entire sticky note.

I enjoyed coming across these drawings and recalling  all the talks and amazing things people are doing in creative fields. That’s what the festival was really about–bringing together people from the Vietnamese community who work in creative fields in the hopes of inspiring future collaborations…only, I know that I’ve got to make more of an effort to connect with those wonderful folks.  Outside of the festival, I think I’ve only run into one other speaker briefly by coincidence last summer.

Well, if future Hay Qua! Festivals happen, I will definitely be a supporter.

A few of the themed collaborations caught my Artful Green eye:

Allyson Parker’s The Kotel, “(aka “The Western Wall”) will be reconstructed in Bushwick out of recycled fabrics. Paper and pens will be available for the public to write down their wishes and insert them into the “wall”. At the end of the show all wishes will be gathered and faxed to the Israeli Telephone Company a fax service directed to Jerusalem’s Western Wall.”

The Bird’s Eye-View, organized by Laura-Marie Marciano and supported by 350: “The Bird’s Eye View is a network of recycled art installations, constructed on rooftops, in collaboration and support of 350, an international grass-roots organization for the reduction of carbon emissions. Images of the installations will be taken to be spread by use of the media to the general public, raising awareness about global warming. The images send a message of green peace, global solidarity, and a broadened human perspective. “

Because of a very wonderful older sister, I now have a lovely digital camera to employ while covering this event.  Look out for more photos of the Bushwick arts scene in future posts.

Happy art-hopping, everyone!

Although I’ve seen plenty of public art pieces around New York, I’ve rarely seen such an enormous arena devoted to placing art in the environment.   The park seeks to create a dialogue between earth and art, but I wonder if Storm King actually accomplishes this. In many cases, I saw the artwork as an overly dominate force in the landscape while the natural surroundings in some parts seem primed just to fit the specific needs of the artwork. At other times, for example when I saw Sol Lewitt’s contribution to SK, I had to ask myself why such works require this setting. Perhaps the aethetics of the outdoors can be reason enough.

There are, of course, works at SK which definitely benefit when viewed in this unique park. Nam June Paik’s Waiting for U.F.O and Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall strike me as two good examples.

Here are a few photos from a trip to SK in September.

Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall '97-98

Sol Lewitt, Five Modular Units, 1966