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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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This is my latest, and my favourite, drawing of Schroedinger's cat. It's copied from a hand-drawn graphic shown during a lecture by quantum cosmologist James Hartle that I just attended this afternoon at the grand opening of The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. (Thanks to friend GH for taking me!) Hartle's thing is a single, manageable equation that describes the wave function of the entire universe. Extreme. I couldn't tell exactly if he has this equation, or if he is working towards having this equation. His lecture was excellent, however, especially because of his use of very, very cool magic-marker graphs and diagrams that he shuffled on and off the overhead projector with professorial aplomb. No cookie-cutter power point presentation for this guy! Check out some of his more advanced level artwork here. I couldn't resist stealing this one below. I believe the little stick figure is busy conducting the double split experiment which is foundational to quantum theory and which still befuddles me despite the fact that I've been led through it many many times. I believe the gist is this: fire a beam of light at an opaque surface with two little holes in it. Photons will go through the tiny holes and make a random seeming dot pattern on the surface behind. Fire enough photons, however, and you invariably get an interference pattern, like a bunch of waves. Photons are behaving like particles and like waves at the same time. Now the spooky part: if you try to measure which hole the photon goes through, it will go through the hole you test for. ...I can describe it...sort of...but I don't get it.
There aren't any cat drawings on the website, so you'll have to be content with my little rendition above. I think Hartle rolled out the felines today cause they're crowd-pleasers, and the lecture was aimed at a general, walk-in audience like me. I find Schroedinger's cat is easier to grasp than the double split experiment, even though the latter is a bonafide, empirical experiment conducted in reality and the former is just a mental model. You all know the story: the cat is in the box and an atom in the box might decay and if it does it will release a hammer which will smash open the bottle of cyanide and the cat will then die. Or the atom won't decay and the cat will live. You don't look in the box and so you don't know. The cat is alive/dead, a state called a superposition. Says Hartle: "Quantum reality consists of complementary views, mutually exclusive, but equally necessary for a complete description."
I believe his drawing below also includes some familiar astrological bodies, being the earth and sun, and all that stuff is in a box, like maybe the cat-box, and there is an eye that can't see into it. Meaning....uh....I have no idea...but based on what he said today, something about how all of reality can be represented by a master wave function. Unfortunately the web lecture seems to be offline.
Keven Stevens (in Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive world of Frank Zappa) quoting Greil Marcus (in Mystery Train):
"...The Puritans came here with a utopian vision they could not maintain; their idea was to do God's work, and they knew that if they failed, it would mean that their work had been the devil's. As they panicked at their failures, the devil was all they saw...America is a trap: that its promises and dreams, all mixed up as love and politics and landscape, are too much to live up to and too much to escape." The American political landscape, embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts, is deeply rooted in this Puritan heritage. Yet America's best music, movies, and paintings have always been an attempt to escape it.
Robert Matas, writing in todays Globe and Mail about doctor assisted suicide in Oregon, quotes oncologist Kenneth Stevens, who opposes the practice:
Most people do it because they are tired of living or as an autonomy issue: They want to control death. They feel they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do.
I have so far succeeded in keeping my cats off this blog, but recent sad events have broken the seal. Cat sculptures such as this will no longer bless my home. These impressive litter-box newsprint towers were a truly collaborative effort and now that one cat, Grog, has passed on out of this life, the cat art scene in my kitchen is on hiatus. Surviving Beulah may find a way to produce her art without the pee-soaked paper as a medium, although like most cats she really is more of writer.
 | This photograph is one of the few art works (aside from artists' books, of which I have many) that I've ever purchased. It is by a young photographer from Barrie, ON, named Ryan Foerster. I purchased it in February at Clint Roenisch gallery in Toronto. It was part of a group show called "Little Stabs at Happiness." I think the piece is untitled, and I don't know the date. My friends either don't remark on it, or they tell me they "don't get it." I like it for several reasons: 1) I still find testosterone-induced mania infectious (even after Jackass), 2) I am interested in depictions of monsters, 3) The pink panther is a cool art icon, employed by Jeff Koons in 1988.  |
Steve Reinke launched a new book last night in Toronto. I've been a fan of his since I saw "The Hundred Videos" (which was just like it sounds) at the Power Plant in 1997. At the launch Reinke and Mike Holbloom (a Toronto filmmaker and longtime collaborator with Reinke) chatted on stage, and then screened some video. Reinke is deadpan in the extreme. His style has elements in common with both autism and psychosis, as he inhabits a voice that is clinical, abject and detached, while working with "hot" sexual and emotional content. This presence made for a great screening, and an awkward interview. Hoolbloom seemed to be pushing for a kind of boyish intimacy in his questions and Reinke's responses came across, in parts, as evasive and coy. It's my impression, however, that despite appearances Reinke is completely sincere. When asked why he is interested in Jeffrey Dahmer, his response "It's not so much the cannibalism as the zombification" could be taken as a quip (I admit that I guffawed), but it also bears the mark of much consideration.
In the interview, Hoolbloom prodded at Reinke's obvious lineage to Vito Acconci, for which I was grateful. Reinke's favourite Acconci video is also my favourite, Theme Song, in which Acconci is lying on the floor, smoking cigarettes and looking into the camera, attempting to seduce the viewer to join him. His voice silky and drowsy, his body spooning and curling on the rug, he tirelessly croons, "Come in here with me... I know you want to, come on in. Just come on in." The EAI catalogue describes this work as "perversely intimate" which applies as easily to Reinke.
Video itself comes across as perverse in Reinke's work. This is a world in which we can take pictures of anything at any time. His oeuvre ranges between sophisticated graphic animations to hand-held home-style footage, but always there is a narrative of investigation, as if every single thing in the world, including our own shames and desires, is an object to be picked up and turned over. And, in a tragic existential tradeoff, this renders the world, while infinitely interesting, a lonely and alienating place.
| This image is from one of my favourite of Reinke's works, "Afternoon, March 23, 1999," in which he verbally describes his involvement with making balls of rubber bands and his interest in following their elucidatory trajectories as they bounce in unpredicatble patterns about the room. I took the image from this page at Nach Dem Film, where there is an excellent essay by Laura U. Marks. |
