For my third event I went to the Art and Hammer Museum, knowing it was a museum for modern art I expected to find art pieces that involved science or technology, and thanks to this class I found them everywhere.
Artistic bridge built after a past president of the museum.
Jeremy Deller's English Magic had a symphony covering David Bowie
One thing that pops out immediately is the way the whole building is really an art piece. This is sort of a mixture of art and technology, maybe beyond just architecture in that they really seem to put art into everything. There were odd chairs to sit in that swiveled like tops and make for a fun interaction, there was a small bridge built after a president of the museum that evoked many of the feelings of a modern art piece, as well as walls made like puzzle pieces, and ping pong tables in the most serine setting.
Mary Reid Kelly's take on the story of the Minotaur
Another surprising third culture feature was that many of the exhibits were movies. Ed Atkins' "Even Pricks" was a highly rendered animation of a number of surreal events including monkeys talking, thumbs inflating like balloons, and beds collapsing in flames, all thrown together haphazardly with intense sounds like knocks and explosions to try and express the craziness of anxiety and depression. Another movie by Mary Reid Kelly was a feminine take on the story of the Minotaur, which was beyond bizarre but strangely watchable with all women actors having fake eyes, curves, and hair to name just a few. A third movie featured beautiful shots of birds along with parade routes and other odd scenes, set to David Bowie covers (who doesn't love Bowie right?).
Even Pricks' highly rendered monkey that was more than a little freaky.
Even Pricks' surreal thumb deflation that gives the odd feeling of anxiety.
In all, it was an interesting and enjoyable experience that I would recommend to anyone, and it made me realize how much the third culture is really everywhere. To me it seems almost everything is art in some way, buildings, paintings, movies, cars even; and technology and science are really just subsets of the spectrum of art.
Robert Gero's "Infinity Structures: Paradoxical Spaces" was a pleasent and interesting look into the imagination of an artist who grapples with mathematical questions. His exhibit was a small room with highly angular styrofoam structures folding and protruding from all the walls. Projections of similar angular shapes flashed across the structures, walls, and people. An erie yet calming soundtrack played in the background consisting of white noise, long sustained tones, and odd clicks and bleeps. Pillows rested on the styrofoam structures and Gero stood in the middle of the room and explained his ideas. The room was supposed to feel like one of his mysterious infinity structures. As an art exhibit I thought it was interesting but mathematically, although raising interesting questions, I felt it was laking in structure.
His idea is an interesting one; he believes there exists the infinity structures which are paradoxical in that they have solid non-expanding walls while the insides have some sort of infinity expanding material. I'm not quite sure where he got this idea from, he seems to have drawn from something Libinez said, although he admits there is no proof or even tractable suggestion that these structures exist, besides apparently his own imagination. To me it seems to not be thought out very well; what are these structures made from? Where will we find them? But there are really two big problems I have with his idea, and maybe he has a response for these but I did not have a chance to ask him.
Gero (middle) explains his exhibit.
Pillows that are supposed to bring a sense of reality.
Firstly I don't believe it's wise to start with a mathematical idea and then extrapolate it to a physical reality. Mathematics and Physics work the opposite way, you start with an observation and then develop the Math to describe it. Math on it's own is not science, it's just a language, and those who study Math usually deal with abstract ideas for purely the purpose of developing abstract ideas, or describing some physical phenomena, not for discovering a new unobserved physical phenomena. The one exception I can think of is String Theory which is a mathematical theory (that the universe is made of super tiny objects that can be described by wave equations) which predicts the fundamental laws of physics. String Theory is far from being accepted by everyone and may never be confirmed because of it abstraction. Second, if this object does exist, then it's not a paradox. I suppose that's rather subjective, but I believe that calling something a paradox implies that the situation cannot exist in real life, other wise you would be breaking some physical or logical law (or our physical/logical laws are flawed, which would be a big stretch for him to imply based on the fact that we don't know if this structure exists). Besides all these gripes it was still an interesting exhibit and I would recommend it to a friend.
For me, Kathy High's "Waste Matters: You are my future" was an odd experience that left me feeling slightly alienated and a little sick. Her exhibit focused on the medical benifits of a procedure called a fecal transplanting which has been used to treat an intestinal disease called Clostridium difficile, and could be become even more useful in the future (possibly for treating her own case of Chron's disease) as the procedure as it is still a relatively new one and not completely understood. The idea is that there are certain beneficial microbes from a healthy person's intestine, contained in their stool, which could be beneficial to people with certain deficiencies in those microbes (usually a result of antibiotics).
A Photo of Kathy High Impersonating David Bowie on his Album Aladdin Sane
What High does in this exhibit however is display fecal matter suspended in honey in feces shaped jars in the center of the room, while also showing photos of herself imitating David Bowie and lecturing on the benefits of this new procedure. I believe the idea of showing us the poop is to desensitize us or alter our perspective on what most see as toxic waste so that we might be more inclined to accept this new procedure (and possibly related others) as beneficial. The David Bowie references might be a tribute to the way he changed people's views on gay and transgender people, and thus validation of her purpose of changing peoples mind on poop.
Fecal Matter Suspended in Honey
The problem with this exhibit is that she is trying to alter our perspectives on poop so we might think of it as beneficial, but poop is gross, hands down, it's literally toxic waste, and I don't need or want to change that view to realize the beneficial aspects of it. Just because it's gross medicine doesn't make it bad medicine, and I think that very few people would disagree, despite what High thinks. The scientists in the video she showed even admitted they find the procedure gross and wouldn't talk about it around the dinner table. Coincidentally as I watched that part of the video someone was bringing out appetizers. In the end I felt physically unconfortable and a little off put by how other students seemed so interested in this art exhibit.
The idea of a space elevator is a truly fascinating idea, of which I spent many hours
Physical Diagram from Wikipedia
pondering the
feasibility. The basic idea is that there would be a “counterweight” or huge
mass (like an asteroid) in space (twice the circumference of the earth in distance
from the surface), attached to earth by an ultra-strong cable so that it would
spin in line with the earth (same angular velocity), and there would be enough
tension in the cable so that an elevator could climb up it like a rope (Aravind,
2007). Think of a balloon tied to the ground and an ant climbing up it, the
balloon being the counterweight, and the ant being elevator and cargo. The
buoyant force of the balloon is analogous to the centrifugal force experienced by
the counterweight, which comes from an object being spun in circles and wanting
to fly outwards (think of swinging a ball on a rope in circles and then letting
it go). The impact of a space elevator would be unimaginable, as space travel would be much less
costly and dangerous.
The issues in construction and
maintenance of such an evaluator are numerous and not fully understood. The
biggest issue and reason why it has been truly impossible for more than 100
years since the idea's conception is that there is no cable material strong
enough to withstand the tension of supporting the counterweight, cable, and
cargo/elevator system (and light enough to not compress itself) (Fleming, 2015).
The reason for the interest in the idea of the elevator recently, has been the
development of carbon nanotubes, which some believe could be strong and light
enough to support the tension of the elevator system (Fleming, 2015). There are
also similar structures being developed out of Penn State called diamond nanothreads
that some believe could be strong enough as well (Kennedy). Both these
materials can only be made in small amounts (~1m) and thus we are still many
years from the possibility of a realistic cable (Fleming, 2015).
Other practical issues of serious
concern, summarized well by Dvorsky, are waves and vibrations in the cable
causing violent effects (possibly exaggerated in the video above), small perturbations from vertical causing feedbacks
and divergent motion, huge shearing effects from wind and storms, grounding the
entire atmosphere, impacts from debris and aircraft, terrorist attacks, and
then of coarse the enormous cost and effort needed to construct and maintain a
structure more than twice the circumference of the earth (never been done for any
object). I also pondered the idea of whether it would pull the earth out of
orbit slightly, but was unable to confirm or deny that with much certainty.
Given all these issues and concerns
I would say that it is unlikely that we could ever build, maintain, and protect
such an ambitious project, but I would love to be proven wrong.
Works Cited
Aravind, P. K. "The physics of the space elevator." American
Journal of Physics 75.2 (2007): 125-130.
Dvorsky, George. "Why We'll Probably Never Build a Space
Elevator." Io9. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 June 2015.
"File:Space Elevator Structural Diagram--corrected for
Scale+CM+etc--regenerated as SVG.svg." Wikipedia. Wikimedia
Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 June 2015.
Fleming, Nic. "Should We Give up on the Dream of Space
Elevators?" BBC. BBC, 19 Feb. 2015. Web. 01 June 2015.
Kennedy, Barbara K. "Smallest Possible Diamonds Form Ultra-thin
Nanothreads." — Eberly College of Science. Penn State, 21 Sept.
2014. Web
