Life is art

Art imitates life, life imitates art. Not surprisingly, artists tend to say that art has more influence on life than the other way around.

As Oscar Wilde put it: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life... Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by a painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction."

Dostoevsky put art on higher pedestal: "At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts."

I've tended to go with "life is art", or at least a life lived fully. But even in saying that, I'm suggesting that one has some creative influence in their own lives and that life isn't something that merely happens to them. There's no room to be artistically creative in a deterministic universe.

But... I was surprised to find that many of the guys who would think of life as deterministic, ie. not something you create in any sort of artistic way, physicists no less, are profoundly influenced by art. Example, one of my favorite physicists, Niels Bohr, who applied his love of cubism in creating his model of the inner workings of the atom. Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." [Read "The Future of Science... Is Art?"]

So there you have it. If the people who delve so far into how the universe works are forced to come away describing it in poetic terms, I guess life and art are so intermeshed as to be indistinguishable after all. Life is art.

In the stormy east-wind straining

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in its banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower'd Camelot;

Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And round and round the prow she wrote
The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance —
With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.

At the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.

Excerpt from Lord Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1833). The painting (also called "The Lady of Shalott") is by John William Waterhouse (1888).

One Nation Under CCTV

There's a fine line between vandalism, which I am totally against, and graffiti-as-murals, which I totally support as a form of artistic expression, though technically illegal. Below is one such graffiti-mural that I think is completely awesome.



The graffiti artist known as "Banksy" was able to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence and paint this mural of small boy, watched by a security guard, painting the words: 'One nation under CCTV' (closed-circuit television) -- all the while an actual CCTV camera was watching nearby. Banksy got away without being detected, having completed his biggest piece yet in central London.



Nice. George Orwell would be proud.

Auguries of innocence

My niece likes fairies, so I drew her as one. To the right is a quote from "Auguries of Innocence", by William Blake (one of my favorite poems). It reads:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Happy birthday peace symbol

OK, I'm a few days late, but in my defense I didn't realize that the peace symbol was turning 50 this year! Amazing. It was designed by Gerald Holtom for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC), in Britain, and completed February 21, 1958, in time for the Easter march planned by DAC from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England. Of course it later became the internationally recognized icon for the 1960s anti-war movement and the general counterculture of the time.

A bit of geeky trivia: The symbol does not represent a bird's foot as is often suggested. It's actually semaphoric signals (flag signaling) for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament.

Semaphore 'N'

Semaphore 'D'

These two signals imposed over each other, surrounded by a circle, form the shape of the peace symbol.

Holtom later told the editor of Peace News that there was also an intent to convey dispair through the symbol. "I was in despair. Deep despair," he wrote. "I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."

Peace out ☮

Translating disruptive innovation

A new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called "Design and the Elastic Mind" opens Feb. 24th. The exhibit explores how minds have adapted to the massive, often disruptive, changes occuring in science and technology in recent decades, changes that have challenged the dimensions of "time, space, matter, and individuality," and the role design plays in translating these developments into something consumable.

I like this quote from the exhibit summary:

One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve... [The exhibit] focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use... to translate disruptive innovation.

That's such an insightful way to put it, and it's exactly correct. The measure of a designer is their ability to translate disruptive innovation. I think I'll add that to my business card.

"Jeremy: A translator of disruptive innovation."

Is realism dead?

Actually, the question is based on an article in Newsweek titled, "Is Photography Dead?"

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Of course photography the medium is still around, and prominent; what the article is pointing out is that it's lost it's realism. Is realism dead?

If so, it's been dying for a long time. Art as representational or imitative is the simplest and oldest view of what art is all about. Plato talked about this view of art in The Republic, using the example of a bed. A painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed (which is itself a copy of the ideal Form of a bed). Both Plato and Aristotle referred to the representation of nature through art as mimesis. Though later art became increasingly less and less "real," it was still meant to be representative of something real, just less concrete (instead of a concrete bed, an abstract thought or emotion for example). The Form is what's become increasingly removed from something more concretely familiar. A realistic Da Vinci eventually becomes an abstract Rothko.

Photography is broadly used here, meant to include other realism mediums as well, like film and video in which the outside world is exactly reproduced before any manipulation occurs. Photography as an artisitic medium, one in which concrete realism is a given (point and shoot), was perhaps the last hold out in which an imitative depiction of familiar reality mattered. What's left is still real; it's just not your present obvious real.

Unfortunately technology hasn't gotten around to offering new "real" representative mediums (where's my holodeck already?), so maybe realism is dead. In the least, it's definitely comatose for the time being, awaiting technology to catch up and provide us something new to manipulate.

If the scanner sees only darkly

I finally got a chance to watch A Scanner Darkly, and wasn't disappointed. I started watching it for the art, because that's what everyone hyped up. It's animated, but based on live action. I watched for the art, but stayed for the plot. I must have missed that it was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick or I would have seen it sooner, definitely.

Since it was art that motivated me, let me cover that first. What makes this form of animation unique is that they start with actual live action footage of actual actors actually doing stuff -- Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson in this movie. They then run that film through a bunch of filters that create blotches of color and strong outlines, similar to what you'd see in a graphic novel. It's a neat, surreal effect but a little hard to follow. That is, your mind is constantly switching back and forth between what it thinks is live action and what it knows is animation. It's a few minutes into the film before your mind compensates and you can comfortably watch it.

I don't know why they billed it as a breakthrough animation technique. You can easily copy the basic idea using Adobe Flash's trace bitmap feature. It'd still require some post production, but the point is it's not that much different. It's also been done before. A few years back they used a similar technique to create the movie Waking Life, a film about the bizarre state of lucid dreaming, or being conscious and aware while dreaming (I'll have to come back to lucid dreaming later because it's something I'm really into). It's been done before, but not as well, so I guess in that sense it was a breakthrough. It did look awesome.

So I think the style of the film, animated, was actually a plot device as well. The story takes place in a not-too-distant totalitarian future where every aspect of people's lives is monitored in a 1984 sort of way. There's an ultra-addictive drug that's seeped into society, simply called "Substance D", and the main character, Bob Arctor (Reeves), is both an undercover detective working to stop the spread of Substance D, and a dealer/addict to it as well. As the story progresses, Arctor begins to lose his own identity and display schizophrenic behavior. A main theme of the movie is identity. As the main character finds himself in a surreal world and mind that he is increasingly unable to identify with, the similarly surreal style of the film becomes all the more brilliant.

Like I said, the movie is strongly about the main character's struggle and ultimate inability in understanding his own identity, all the while feeling a lack of control over the events that are happening to him, and being constantly watched by electronic scanners embedded everywhere. It is in this despair we get the best line of the well-written screenplay:

Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Good stuff. Go rent it.

How to distinguish humans from machines

Allow me to borrow from the now immortal Vonnegut, as he explains in the novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) the motivation behind abstract expressionism. He's talking about a painting by the fictional artist Rabo Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The painting was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. It was simple: a field of "Hawaiian Avocado" with a single vertical stripe of dayglo orange reflecting tape.



As the story goes, the painting was sold to an arts center for a whopping price tag of $50,000. The towns people were outraged. They were pissed that the chairman of the center paid so much for such a simple piece of art.

Karabekian was in a cocktail lounge and made some remark that a waitress found offensive. She replied: "Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."

And here is Karabekian's brilliant response, from the book:

------------

"I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."

This embarrassed people some.

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal -- the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us -- in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

"I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown. Very well -- let a five-year-old paint a sacred interpretation of that encounter. Let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and the meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light."

------------
-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast Of Champions

20 x 16 foot canvas with avocado paint and a strip of dayglo orange tape: $50,000
Illustrating the awareness in individuals that distinguish them from machines: Priceless

Fantasy art, then and now

Some recent 3-D work for clients of mine have left my computer littered with modeling programs. I figured I might use them to create some fantasy art, because there's so much you can do in that genre with today's software — just look at the Lord of the Rings movies. Fantasy art is the sci-fi, magical genre of dragons, wizards, fairies and other fantastical and mythical creatures. For an example of a computer gen fairy I've made, check out the home page of iSprites.com, my severely neglected software development company.

So anyway, I was thinking about different projects to work on, and looking at other people's work for ideas, when it donned on me that fantasy art goes way back. In fact, I think John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) is the grandaddy of fantasy art. Waterhouse was most known for his paintings of female characters from mythology and literature. Many of his paintings, including A Mermaid (1901, pictured left) would certainly be considered fantasy art if presented as such today. The Sorceress (1913) could grace any Dungeons and Dragons novel. Many of his paintings share similar qualities.

The fantasy aspect in Waterhouse's work obviously comes from the mythological subject matter and his focus on the feminine. Fantasy art shouldn't be confused with sexual fantasy. It's more about dragons, fairies, mythology and folklore. Still, actual mythology is full of the feminine, and isn't shy about sex. Likewise, modern fantasy art, especially work by Luis Royo and others, is among the more popular pop-art erotic paintings.

I don't think any of John William Waterhouse's contemporaries were doing anything remotely similar. I think his work is pretty unique for the period and certainly contributes to modern fantasy art.

John William Waterhouse Gallery

Art is temporary if it imitates life

My friends and I were sitting around bored one day, years ago, and this boredom somehow led to the strange idea that we should paint a mural deep inside the culverts near the school. We didn't give it any thought. We just woke up one day, bought a bunch of candles, $40 worth of spray paint, and snuck down into the ground when no one was looking. Not sure how much the fumes from the spray paint contributed, but it was a jolly good time. The odd thing is that we knew it wouldn't last. It was a drainage tunnel which meant the water would eventually wash away all the dragons and nifty quotes and bizarre symbols we painted. I thought of that when I came across the much more interesting 337 Project.



I'm a fan of remodeling projects involving old buildings. My parents own a three-story building in downtown Maysville, Kentucky, and given enough time and money I'd have that place completely tricked out. It was built some time in the 1800s and is still solid, but let's face it, some buildings are destined for the wrecking ball no matter what. The old Oquirrh School, at 337 South 400 East in Salt Lake City, Utah, is such a place. It's scheduled for demolition in July to make way for Utah's first all-green, mixed-use loft-style condominiums. Rather than letting the building go quietly into the Good Night, officials turned it over to 144 local artists to have their way with it. The result: A 20,000 square foot canvas, with no inch left untouched (see slideshow above).

It's beautiful. It's temporary. Such is art if it imitates life.

I am so turning my own home over to volunteer artists if and when I ever get settled.

Check it out: 337 Project

Internet voyeurism was born 329 years ago today

Lady Godiva by John Collier, ca 1897

On this day in history, May 31, 1678, a Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry, England, to protest her husband's taxation on the people. She had begged him again and again to lift the toll. He finally told her that he would grant her request if she would ride naked through the streets of the town.

Godiva issued a proclamation that all the townsfolk should keep in doors and shut their windows. According to legend, only the town tailor, Tom, disobeyed her order. He was known thereafter as "Peeping Tom".

And not much has changed in 329 years.

Poignant guides to computer languages

So RTFM stands for "Read the Fucking Manual," implying that not many do. Can you blame them? Most manuals and computer books are ultra-stuffy and boring. Well, here's one you'll actually enjoy reading. It's poignant. The freely available book, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, is part programming manual, part comic book, part journal, and all art. I've never seen a computer book like this, but I hope I'll see a lot more of them in the future. In-depth coverage of the Ruby programming language coupled with an almost punk zine story telling.

Check it out, it's free!

Excerpt:

My conscience won’t let me call Ruby a computer language. That would imply that the language works primarily on the computer’s terms. That the language is designed to accomodate the computer, first and foremost. That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer’s locale. It’s the computer’s language and we are translators for the world.

But what do you call the language when your brain begins to think in that language? When you start to use the language’s own words and colloquialisms to express yourself. Say, the computer can’t do that. How can it be the computer’s language? It is ours, we speak it natively!

We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. It is coderspeak. It is the language of our thoughts.

I don't want to run a coffee house, but if I did...

I sometimes toy with the idea of opening a coffee house. I wouldn't do it around here. It would have to be in a place that would attract the kind of people I'd want to hang around for eight hours a day. I'm not exactly sure where that would be, but it's definitely not here. I'm only half into the idea as well. Like Gary Trudeau, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." That's why I'm in the web biz. You don't actually have to be there for that. Most of my clients lately are in California.

Still, I've had a love of coffee houses long before everyone wanted one, long before Starbucks took over. I used to hang out at Sitwell's on Ludlow Ave. in the Clifton Gaslight District of Cincinnati, back when they were in the basement, back when they were dingy -er. I would hop the Metro just to hang out at Sitwell's and visit the New World Bookshop down the street.

I l-o-v-e coffee. I was totally Seattle in the '90s though I've never actually been there. I did work as a barista briefly, but that was just for a couple of days. I tried to get a job at Sitwell's once, but I don't think I had enough piercings. All my tattoos are boringly covered.

Some possible names for the coffee house [never] to be:

Revolutions - because every modern revolution came from a bunch of disgruntled guys sitting around a cafe, plotting over black coffee. The decor would be all beatnik and have at least a few black and white photos of... well, disgruntled guys plotting over black coffee. I probably wouldn't go this route. It's all a little too Marxist. Obviously if I'm running a coffee house where I'm charging $3 for a cappuccino, I'm no Marxist.

The Bodhi Tree - named for the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. This would be awesome because I'd settle for no less than a huge fig tree growing in the middle of the room, like twenty feet high at least, in a solarium with the coffee house built around it. Around the tree would be a carpet of floor pillows. Scratch that. That's my ideal house!

Geeked Internet Cafe - No one I know likes this name but me, and I don't know why. It's a great name for an internet cafe because you've got all the geeky toys, computers, games, whatever, and everyone's getting geeked out on coffee. Every night there'd be a LAN party. I would personally drive hours to visit a place called Geeked, but then again, I am a geek.

All of the above was to explain my obsession with coffee so I can link it to my obsession with art. I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to create latte art like these:



It's harder than it looks. I've got a decent espresso machine, but like any other art it requires a pesky thing called skill.

view more latte art / learn how to make your own

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Some sketches I remembered to scan

I don't spend nearly enough time creating paper art as I'd like to. I do get around to creating a few sketches every now and then, but they're almost always for other people and I give them away as soon as they're done. As such, I don't actually have that many laying around to scan. Here's the pathetically few sketches that I've done over the last few years that I did remember to scan. I'll post more if I find any or create new ones.


Woman Sleeping - Never quite finished this one.


Fairy in the Grass - Very simple water color pencil drawing for my niece who loves fairies.


Dave and Annmarie Fultz - These are my in-laws.


Mr. and Mrs. Downing - Friends of mine from Maysville Kentucky.


Sean and Lisa Callahan - My brother-in-law and niece.


Lisa and Mochaccino - My niece and my dog (she wanted a portrait with my dog).

Again, I'll try to create/find more. This is a sad sampling considering how many drawings I've actually done over the years : ) If anyone out there has received a drawing by me, please do me the favor of scanning it and sending it to me so I can add it here.

Snakes on a plain

So it's springtime, and I'll probably head up to Serpent Mound soon. I like to go up there when I get a chance. The Serpent Mound is the 1,330 foot long, three foot high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau in Adams County, Ohio, about 45 minutes or so from where I live. It's America's boondocks version of Stonehenge. That is, it has all the trappings of Stonehenge — a prehistoric effigy shrouded in mystery and mysticism — but it is Ohio. I mean, the place just happens to be down the road from a literal junkyard. It attracts people from around the world, as far off as Japan, and I can only imagine them flying into Columbus or Cincinnati and driving two hours out to find rows and rows of junked up cars. "Welcome to America! Ya'll want a carburetor with that there prehistoric mystery?" Um, yeah. So anyway, I like to go up there when I get a chance.

The term "cryptoexplosive" structure is used to describe impact craters caused by a variety of reasons. Mostly it's an anomalous circular structure, or circular deformation of rock, assumed to be caused by explosive volcanism or the impact of a meteor. The famed Serpent Mound just happens to sit on the top of one of these mysterious structures. Conforming to the curve of the hill on which it rests with its head near the point, the serpent winds back and forth for seven hundred feet and ends with a triple coiled tail. The neck is stretched out in a gentle curve, ending with open jaws around the end of a one hundred sixty foot oval, thought variously to be either an egg, the sun or the body of a frog. It is the largest effigy earthwork in the world.

It's believed to have been constructed somewhere around 800 BC - AD 100 by Hopewell Indians. That's what the textbooks say, though archaeologists readily admit that they aren't completely sure who built it, when, and why. There's some strange things mixed up in the structure from a symbolic sense. For one thing, it's best viewed from the sky. There's no surrounding hills to get that vantage point. I mean really, it seems to be a lot about the sky. The head of the serpent, for example, is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the snake’s coils align with the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise. Carbon dating of the mound coincides with two major astronomical events: the appearance of Halley's Comet and the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. The light was visible day and night for two weeks. Some believe that the snake was created to emulate a comet, slithering across the night sky like a snake. Quite a bit of sky stuff there for an earthwork. That's part of the mystery.

Practitioners of Kundalini Yoga have an entirely different view. They see the coiled part of the snake as kundalini (spiritual energy) rising through six chakras (the curved part of the snake) and ultimately reaching the crown chakra (the head of the effigy, often described as a snake eating an egg). That's a little more mysterious because chakra systems and spiritual energy being visualized as a coiled snake unfolding originated in India, all the way on the other side of the world. It's just one interpretation, of course, but it's a pretty slick one.

UFO sightings, ghosts, and other weird, paranormal phenomena have been seen around Serpent Mound as well, including this crop circle which appeared in the soybean field across from the park in 2003:



I actually got to check that one out since I was living here at the time. It was night when we got there and we had to go looking for it in the dark, but we got a few pictures and an adventure out of it.

I'm not one who subscribes to the whole crop circle/aliens theory. I mean, you know, who really knows. Instead, I appreciate crop circle art for what it is, regardless of who or what made it. These really complicated and intricate designs are somehow constructed, at night, in one night, and often much larger and more complex than the one pictured above. That's art. Who wouldn't look at that as amazing? Well, maybe not the farmer, but you get the idea.

In any case, the place is completely boring unless you take the above insight along with you. There's a small skipable museum with some artifacts, a tower you can climb to view the effigy, but better is the hike through the woods that leads down the hill and past a small river.

Still, when you take all of the above into account, it's worth the trip. I don't want to overhype it, but you can sense that the place has importance when you're out there. Think of it this way: The place has got to be important if it attracts Halley's Comet, aliens, ancient hindus, crop circle artists, the Japanese, and your's truly. I mean, this is Ohio after all.

Life as vortices in the Ohio River

The Ohio River has bested the Hercules, a once mighty barge with a crane that could lift sunken vessels.

Sapped of its strength, the Hercules rests at the bottom of the river,
only its crane and two steel beams jutting above water near the shoreline.

Next to it, a towboat lies partially submerged, its pilothouse listing
like a drunken sailor. And next to that, the rusting hull of an old Navy
minesweeper breaks the river's surface like the belly of a dead whale.

Cincinnati Enquirer, 1998

"Vortices" - Jeremy Parnell

The story of the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River began in 1992 when a barge sank near the Kentucky shoreline outside Maysville, Kentucky. A subsequent salvage operation in 1994 tried to raise the barge with two Navy minesweepers. The minesweepers were the next victim as they too became stuck in the mud. Next came a towboat trying to free the minesweepers. Damage to its engines quickly rendered it crippled.

Finally came the salvage barge named "The Hercules" and its towering crane. The triangle made short work of it as well. While hoisting the original barge, the crane aboard the Hercules broke as the barge reached the surface, and down it sank again. Then the Hercules itself sank, coming to rest on top of the barge it was supposed to save. Eventually the minesweepers and the towboat sank as well. The entire salvage operation was caught in what an Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson would later call "'The Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River".

Today, you can still see remnants of the wreckage peaking out of the Ohio River. Some local residents have called it a junkyard and feel that it blights the shoreline. I completely disagree. It's actually quite a remarkable addition to Maysville, especially when coupled with the story behind the wreckage.

I understand why some people may want it removed. It's old and rusty and doesn't look like it belongs there — your typical junkyard. That's all true. But I believe that if you look at it in a certain way, it really is beautiful. Even without dressing up the photo, it looks like a forgotton grave marker, a symbol of finality, especially with the city behind it that may represent life and the continuation of things. The story itself is a story of the power of the Ohio River. We build dams to control the height of it. We build bridges over it. We build walls to change the shape of it. But sometimes the river just doesn't want to let things go.

It's Life as a River. The metaphor goes way back, but I first read it in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. It fits. You know countless little things are going on in the city in the distance, but the river brings it to a final point in these strange vortices.

Life is a process until death. You never actually see the same river twice. The water you saw a moment ago has already moved on. Likewise, life is continually unfolding. The product of life, like the river, is that at some point it will draw you in to a final resting place. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, and all of mankind's inventions (engines and cranes, science and medicine) do little to prevent it. Sometimes the end is just a little spot off to the side of the Ohio River where you're watching life go on in the distance.

You can't profile a prophet

I figured that if I'm going to go around saying that I know a thing or two about web design, I can't really get away with a minimalistic profile. So I set out to create a unique MySpace design that I can call my own. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and update my personal site as well.

Personal site. MySpace. Both are all about identity. So I got to thinking about identity in general and how one defines it. I came up blank. I can no more say what it is that makes me me than I can say what it is that makes you you. Heck if I know who I am. So I scrapped that line of thought.

I finally ended up thinking about identity like people do today, as records in a database, as a percentage chance that we'll fit some mold. Much of who we are is defined by statistics. I imagined going to a club and getting scanned, and all that information being right there on the computer screen. The bouncer's trying to decide whether to let me in. You know, Future Shock. The design also plays with today's ideas of privacy and the conflict between creating a personal site and trying to remain a private person.



The hand was a gimme. What's more personal than a hand? I was orginally going to go with just a fingerprint, but changed my mind after I put my hand through the scanner (the hand and face were shot separately). The lines on a hand are perfect for the metaphor. Fingerprints are truly unique because there are no two alike. But most of how people are identified has nothing to do with uniqueness. It's all about educated guesses. Predictions made on assumptions. In short, it's a lot like palmistry. It looks personal, but really it's nothing more than demographics. You've got a nice Heart Line there Jeremy. We'll put you on the A-list.

Fingerprints never change, and they've been there since birth. I like these "Life Etchings" better because you earn them.

When you get right down to it, profiles are a categorization of people. People that are truly unique (not saying I am one of them, of course) can't be profiled because they can't be categorized. You can't profile a prophet.

Entanglement: a love story

Poets, painters, writers, musicians - all have tried to express love. Not just love, but enduring love. The kind that haunts you forever. How odd is it, then, that the most beautiful expression of romance comes not from artists, but instead from the love-is-biochemical-processes crowd of scientists.

Soulmate love, aptly put:



From the artist, Justin Mullins:

ENTANGLEMENT
The connections between ordinary objects are fleeting and superficial. Two atoms may collide and separate, never to meet again. Others can stick together by virtue of the chemical bonds they form, until the day that bond is broken.

But there is another type of connection that is far more powerful and romantic. Certain objects can become linked by a mysterious process called entanglement. Particles that become entangled are deeply connected regardless of the distance between them. If they become separated by the width of the Universe, the bond between them remains intact. These particles are so deeply linked that it's as if they somehow share the same existence.

Physicists do not yet fully understand the nature of entanglement but there is growing evidence that it is a fundamental property of the universe. Unfettered by the restrictions of space, entanglement may be the ghostly bedrock upon which reality is built.

Exactly.