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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Candy Minx has conducted and posted an excellent interview with AGO curator David Moos. Hats go off to David for participating, but more, fancier hats go off to Candy for her smart and fearless line of questioning!
Wired has a very good article about atheism in their current issue. The author talks to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel C. Dennett.
...Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong."
It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.
Hey what is that tiny little dot way over there by itself?
Crystal Mowry, Menagerie (after Versailles), 2006 (ongoing).
Polystyrene sheet, markers, pins. Dimensions variable.
Crystal Mowry, Constellation (after Walt Disney World), 2006 (ongoing).
Styrene sheet, plastic reclaimed from packaging, markers, pins. Dimensions variable.
These images are from Crystal Mowry's current exhibition, Ageographica, at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. More info here, inlcuding a pdf of the exhibition brochure with a goofy story by me that Crystal generously included as a companion text.
Quicktime version of White Rabbit by Justin Waddell, aka Bunny
(longish load time is worth it)...
JW/Bunny's notes copied from earlier post:
"Or, to go back from the simplified illustration to general relativity: A point in spacetime (an event) is defined only by what physically happens at it, not by its location according to some special set of coordinates. The physics does not depend on what lattice you choose."
"It is not the object used but rather the use of the object" - DW Winnicott
"I'm hunting wabbit. huh.huh.huh.huh." - E. Fudd
One might think with all the nationalism going round these days a little culture spending might slip under the radar, but apparently museums, especially the smallish regional ones, are as expendable as women's rights.
Dear Friends,
I have just read and signed the online petition:
"Save Museums!"
hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition
service, at:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/MapCuts/
I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.
Best wishes,
Sally McKay
My old friend Bunny sent me these video stills with the following note (he also sent me a quicktime version of the video and I love it a lot, but I'm not going to post it until I get off my butt and ask permission):
Here are my two cents on background. I made this video last year. it is called white rabbit.
"Or, to go back from the simplified illustration to general relativity: A point in spacetime (an event) is defined only by what physically happens at it, not by its location according to some special set of coordinates. The physics does not depend on what lattice you choose."
"It is not the object used but rather the use of the object" - DW Winnicott
"I'm hunting wabbit. huh.huh.huh.huh." - E. Fudd
Donna Kane has posted some great photos from our Muskwa-Kechika adventure on her site, including a painting by fellow participant Deryk Houston that totally rocks. I stared at that view from the top of that mountain, but it is a whole new experience, and stunning, to see it again through Deryk's eyes. I can't wait to see the real painting.
My friends James and Laurie sent me this link to "Make Love, not Warcraft," saying, "it is the best South Park Ever." I think they are right.
Speaking of Warcraft, I logged on to Second Life for the first time and probably last time this week. I didn't want to spend any money, which makes it pretty boring. Also my computer is a tad slow and so I was mostly wandering around in grey slabs of un-textured architecture trying to imagine how lovely the world would be if all the pretty colours and lighting effects were rendering properly. I amused myself by creating a fat guy my own age for an avatar. All the cute skinny people reacted pretty strongly, and I got lots of cat-calls and overheard lots of rude/puzzled comments. That was fun for awhile, but not fun enough.
US terror bill is a good name for it.
Above are attempts to draw states of background independence by myself and participants at the workshop "Full on Gall" organised by Pat Sullivan at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre yesterday afternoon. Not too many of us were brave enough to tackle the background independence problem, but at my activity table we also drew lots of pictures of neutrinos and of the universe. I will post more of these most excellent artworks in the days to come. Gordon Hicks had a very cool and puzzling plotter for making drawings that was programmed like a slightly bonkers etch-a-sketch. Rebecca Diederichs engineered a lushous interactive mural with overhead projectors and found thing-a-ma-bobs. There was also a black box collaborative sculpture experiment and of course, the ever popular Schrödinger's cat balloon. Art MacDonald from SNO lab had a table with great images and information about the project. It was super fun.
What do you like better...background dependence, or background independence?
What do you like better...vulnerability or invulnerability?
In case anyone was wondering about the state of string theory today, this review by Sean Carroll of Lee Smolin's new book, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, and the subsequent debate in the comment thread (in which Lee Smolin participates) gives a good picture. I gave myself permission to skip over the bits that read like this:
"The correlation function W(x,y) ~ |x-y|^-2h. is clearly not diffeomorphism invariant."and instead attempt to grasp the bits that read like this:
"[A fundamental theory] cannot-by definition-have a more fundamental underpinning. So it must stand up on its own. This means we must be able to formulate it cleanly and precisely and the important properties it enjoys should be theorems. It doesn’t mean physicists should all work at a rigorous level, but that rigorous framework must be there to refer to.
This is not an unrealizable ideal. Classical Newtonian mechanics satisfies it. So does classical statistical mechanics, ordinary non-relativisitic quantum mechanics and general relativity. In each of these cases there is a body of rigorous results and a community of mathematical physicists who work on them.
Is this too much to hope for theories of quantum gravity. No!"
 | I will be giving a free performative lecture at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ont. on Sunday, October 15th at 1:30pm, and then Rebecca Diederichs, Gordon Hicks and I, with participation from the Queen's Department of Physics, will be hosting a free workshop/lab at the gallery until 5pm. Please join us for the events and visit our exhibition, Neutrinos They Are Very Small (on display until December 10th). Note: Rumour has it our lovely catalogue designed by the inimitable Lisa Kiss might be delivered in time for the event. Agnes Etherington Art Centre University Avenue at Bader Lane Queen's University, Kingston, ON Tel: 613.533.2190 | Fax: 613.533.6765 Email: aeac@post.queensu.ca |
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I just deleted the post that was here. It was much too long and self-indulgent. The best bit was this: ...I've been worrying a lot about the preponderance of supernatural tv shows & movies. If it ain't reality tv, it's vampires, psychics, demons and zombies. I like some of this stuff a lot (especially the zombies) but why all the fantasy? Is it the culture-tainment industry's way of accepting and answering to the rise of the religious right to power in North America? Is it simply an escape? Are we playing at magic in an attempt to imbue a culture based on commodity and surface with some kind of mythic depth?
And this other bit: ...I've also just started reading Gwynne Dyer's revised edition of WAR, and the very first page of the first chapter gave me something concrete:
Soldiers often prefer to cloak the harsh realities of their trade in idealism or sentimentality, as much to protect themselves from the truth as to hide it from the rest of us, but at the professional level they have never lost sight of the fact that the key to military success is cost-effective killing. The relentless search for efficiency in killing that ultimately led to the development of nuclear weapons was just as methodical when the only means of introducing lethal bits of metal into an enemy's body was by muscle power.Just like urban planning, health care and education, war planning is something that society does by choice, and Canada is no exception.
NOW magazine this week has a piece by Dyer about Afghanistan:
The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained than anything seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in organized units with good light infantry weapons. In the past month, Britain and Canada have had about half as many soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the U.S. lost in Iraq in the same time, out of a combat force perhaps one-10th as big.How is this a good choice? After reading a bit of Dyer I understand better how our soldiers might genuinely feel un-supported by those of us who would prefer that they come home, because, like little children deciding not to clap their hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, we are failing to believe in the myths that sustain them, such as the oft-repeated (and insulting to our intelligence) rallying cry that they are protecting us from terrorists. Worrying that the military is perhaps not doing its job at cost-efficient killing in Afghanistan demonstrates a cultural lack of fantasy. We consumer-citizens are supposed to be eating up the narratives we are fed, not calling for accountability.