The Cognitive Science of Vik Muniz

Some of you may have seen my Friendster profile. Under “Who do you want to meet” I list: ex-smokers, fencers, janet cardiff, cooking stars, vik muniz.

I can now scratch Vik off the list, though I wouldn't mind meeting him again. Last night he gave a talk at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble to push his latest book “Reflex, a Vik Muniz Primer”

Though the talk started off with a slow story of how the book came to be, he eventually got into a groove with a Keynote (like Powerpoint, but better) presentation that went from early work to some current work not yet presented.

A couple points were very fascinating. The first, which explains how he approaches his work is his interest in how our minds are really only able to handle seeing one thing at a time, especially for various optical illusions, such as the old and young woman. Thus he recreates images out of string, syrup, diamonds, sugar, toy, junk, and then photographs them with large format. Then, like recent Chuck Close work, one can shift from seeing the larger picture, to the elemental.

He also likes to play with perspective… on hand doing homage to earth artists like Robert Smithson, to working with Intel to etch pictures of castles on a single grain of sand.

The other point I loved was a discussion of the nature of education. How we are so focused on Math and Language arts. On one hand they have been the bedrock of our culture, and so by learning you free yourself from a tyranny, such as, by learning to read, you’re freed from the tyranny of those who write. But as an artist, he is troubled by how we short our visual literacy, especially now, when visual media has taken over the written word, and branding is more powerful than copy.

I had a great night last night.

If Dynamo needs a shell repair, this might come in handy

This (via Boing Boing, via Fark), tells the tale of a desert tortoise getting a fiberglass shell repair after surgury. "Cactus" had three enormous bladder stones removed. In order to mend the wound, the vet sealed the fiberglass with 5-minute epoxy.

This was particularly interesting towards the end:

The surgery hasn't seemed to faze him.

"He came around within 24 hours. He's a mellow little guy," said Fitting, a fan of all desert tortoises.

"These are really very wonderful animals," he said. "They're very gentle and curious, and orange and red are their favorite colors -- in the wild their best and most succulent food is the red and yellow flowers on cactus."

Desert tortoises are also extremely imperturbable.

"You know the tale of the hare and the tortoise?" Fitting said. "These guys don't consider themselves in the race. They couldn't care less. They've been around 200 million years. They've seen dinosaurs come and go, and they're one of the reptile lines that survived the wipeout 65 million years ago. They're very laid-back."

It's, like, plastic

It pervades every other sentence seemingly, this filler, "like" that one often hears a sentence such as "This is, like, totally a tree" when referring to living breathing tree. How does language develop or devolve so ludicrously?

I've been reading Plastic: the making of a synthetic century by Stephen Fenichell lately, and came across an interesting passage towards the end:

The most depressing thing about this brave new synthetic universe was that every thing in I seemed to set off by quotation marks: trees had become “trees” and leaves “leaves.” Nothing was what it was, but some spiritually impoverished simulacrum of what it was supposed to be. (276)

By this time in commerce, there had been decades of “like silk,” “like wood,” “like glass” It’s no wonder that “like” lost much of it’s real meaning, becoming a filler one’s vocabulary. Because plastic seemingly could be made in to anything, resemblance melted away and all we have is synthetics...

There are many great stories, particularly how the Leo Baekeland first made his forturne with inventing photo developing paper, sold to George Eastman. He then when on to develop bakelite, the first real ubiquitous plastic... from ash trays to telephones.

The chapters on Cellophane and Saran are interesting for any foodie who wonders why we eat such shitty processed food. It's all about the perception of freshness and sanitation.

Digital tapestries and Google Maps

This week's New Yorker has a fascinating article on how two mathmaticians helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art stitch some 200 cds worth of digital pictures of one of the Unicorn tapestries at the cloisters into a single composite digital image.

It begins with the common analogy that tapestry stitches are analogous to digital pixals, and therein lies the problem. The digital shoot happened while the tapestries were being restored in '98. After a bath in distilled water, and some time off the wall, the tapestry warped enough to make a composite picture difficult. (note: they were shooting at a resolution of 50 microns, or half the width of a hair). Even the process of shooting created inconsistancies, the ref. paper that slid on top as they captured each segment, the camera's sliding mechanism being off by millemetres and so on.

Without meaning to, this segways nicely into Google's news of the week: satellite imaging in maps. Again, we're talking about stitching many thousands of images together to create a compsite, a small fraction of which the searcher sees in their window. High in the blogdex is this man's annotation of Google Maps to indicate various sites from his childhood. Here are some instructions to do one yourself. I just did a brief tour from 409 Wilmers to Lincoln High School.

If my kid got this word during a spelling bee...

Whitney and Meeta didn't believe me when I told them of this chemical that has over 64,000 letters in it.

A chemical name for enaptin begins with "methionylalanylthreonyl...", ends in "...leucine", and is a total of 64,060 letters long. See the full chemical name of enaptin.