Mindport Musings

The Art and Science of Bread

2012-01-18T17:12:00.000-08:00

A year ago, my sister sent me a book called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoe Francois, which I squeezed into our amply stocked shelf of cookbooks and promptly forgot. But recently, the idea of baking bread came as a logical conclusion to my growing interest in food-growing and cooking as comforting counterpoints to my witnessing the ongoing economic and political disaster unfolding around us. The fact that one consequence of the latter is severely escalating bread prices certainly contributed to my interest in doing my own baking.

Herzberg and Francois's book advocates mixing batches of dough sufficient for three or more loaves at a time, then storing it in the refrigerator until you're ready to bake a fresh loaf. At that time you divide off a portion of the refrigerated dough, form it into a loaf, and allow it to rise for an hour or two, depending on temperature. No kneading is necessary, and many of the recipes call for baking without a pan, on a baking stone, which is a slab of ceramic material that gets preheated in the oven before you slide the bread on top of it. There are a few details to attend to, such as scoring the top of the loaf previous to baking, and making provision for steam in the oven over the first few minutes of baking time to help develop the bread's crispy crust.

Not long after successfully baking my first loaf, I ran across a book in the library, 52 Loaves, A Half-Baked Adventure, by William Alexander. The author spent a year, baking one loaf of bread a week, in a quest to discover the perfect "peasant loaf," which is the bread style I'd just been experimenting with myself. This book proved to be a fascinating and entertaining read. The author includes considerable information on the history, chemistry, and custom of baking bread. At the end of the year he describes at length five days that he spent living in a French monastery, teaching the monks to do their own baking, in the process managing finally to attain his own "perfect" loaf.

I bring up bread in the context of Mindport since formal or informal science plays such a large part in enabling the baker to create an object conferring such aesthetic and gustatory delight. The authors of both the books I've mentioned here, plus another book on the subject of no-knead bread that's worth a look, My Bread, by Jim Lahey (with Rick Flaste), have done a tremendous amount of research and experimentation to develop their recipes, delving into the physics and chemistry of bread, which is doubly complex due to the fact it depends on yeast, a living organism, for many of its dynamic properties. William Alexander, for his part, sings the praise of the aesthetic and sensual pleasure of bread-making. A loaf of bread, hence, seems to me to be the perfect embodiment of art and science combined in one beautiful and tasty object, the ideal metaphor to express Mindport's avowed aim of integrating two ways of understanding the world that are frequently juxtaposed in opposition to one another.

Bread, serving as a ritual object or metaphorical idea, has a long history. "Breaking bread" with someone signifies a form of personal communion in taking sustenance together; the Lord's Prayer uses bread as a metaphor, as in "Give us this day our daily bread." The wafer used in Christian communion, symbolizing the body of Christ, is a special bread. In the Jewish tradition "showbread" is a form of bread or cake presented as an offering to God. Grains, made into bread, have provided a basic food staple for millennia. It's no wonder that bread is so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness.

Perhaps the growing interest in good food and bread that I detect in the air might be serving as compensation for our excessive preoccupation with technology and the virtual world of cyberspace, which have alienated us from our roots in the physical earth and our own manual skills. That's a cause for hope. Our main reminders of our biological and physical origins nowadays seem to be birth, sex, and death. I would include eating and food with these basic connections, but many of us no longer prepare our own food, and we often distract ourselves during meals with TV and iGadgets, to the point that eating has become just another chore to hurry through. Personally, as a gesture of revolt against that, I've begun to experience growing, preparing, and eating food as reassuring activities affirming my fundamental rootedness in the soil of this planet. The ritual of creating a aesthetically beautiful and sensually delicious loaf of bread from the basic materials of flour, salt, water, and yeast is a satisfaction crowning the many other social and physical rewards that come with cultivating a more mindful connection to the food I eat.

Kevin Jones

Mail Art Workshop

2012-01-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

The text on this image is a bit hard to read, so I'll spell it out for you!

Mindport is offering its second mail art workshop, Sunday, January 29th from 1 to 4 pm. If you're tired of receiving bills and ads in an otherwise empty mailbox, this workshop's for you. Learn to make postal art, and turn your mailbox into a museum as you connect with a network of creative folks who enjoy a good mail day. $10 fee includes all materials. No experience needed.

To register, please contact Tallie@mindport.org or call (360) 441-7162. Limited space, so sign up early!

Introducing Bella Stella!

2012-01-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

Mindport's latest exhibit is on the floor. Exhibit designer/builder John Ito has created another wonder - this time a giant windup toy inspired by the crosswalks of our fair city.

To celebrate, we'll be open until 8:00 tonight, January 6th. Stop by to visit Bella and congratulate John. We'll see you there!

New Gallery Window and Holiday Hours

2011-12-16T11:08:00.000-08:00

Our Art Director, AnMorgan Curry has posted her latest editorial comment in the gallery window. Come have a look, and while you're at it, there's a few new photographs by Kevin Jones hanging in the gallery.

Meantime, John Ito is working away on an intriguing exhibit that he's hoping to have on the gallery floor sometime in January. Hint: His inspiration for this exhibit was found on the streets of Bellingham. It has certain features that might remind you of a vintage 1930 grandfather clock, writ large.

Holiday reminder: We'll be closed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, December 23, 24, and 25; also on January 31 we'll close at 3PM, and will be closed all day on January 1, New Years day.

What are we?

2011-12-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

A local media organization asked to interview us for a short video production. We requested that they send us some specific questions that they might care to have answered during their interview. Since we often have difficulty generating off-the-cuff answers to such questions, three of us sat down for a half hour to discuss the questions proffered, in the process discovering responses that might not otherwise have occurred to us.

1. What is Mindport?

This is one of the questions asked us frequently by people who haven't been here. We've never been comfortable calling ourselves a "museum" or "gallery," (though we do have a space we refer to as a "gallery") because these terms don't quite fit how we understand ourselves. Usually we tell people that it's best if they come and see what they think we are. In a sense, we're a "work in progress," because the work that appears here depends a lot on who happens to be on the staff at any given time. The majority of us have been here for quite awhile, so where we go creatively also depends on where our personal explorations are taking us at the moment. We assume that whatever interests us will likely interest our visitors, which has proven to be true nearly all the time.

2. What sets your "museum" apart from other history/art museums?

One important factor that distinguishes us from other "museums" is the fact that we're not a government-defined "non-profit" organization, hence we on the staff entirely set our own direction. We are not responsible to a board of directors or other outside forces. This gives us great freedom, not enjoyed by most other public organizations who display artistic work.

3. How many exhibits are built at Mindport?

Almost all exhibits at Mindport are built by staff members. Occasionally we find something we like "out there" and either display it as-is, or incorporate it into exhibits we build. We've discovered that in-house exhibit-building is a rarity in the museum world, possibly because most such organizations have more money than time, whereas we have more time than money.

4. How long has Mindport been open?

Mindport opened in 1995 at our previous location at 111 Grand Avenue in Bellingham, right across from Henderson Books. In 2000 we acquired our present building and spent a year remodeling it before reopening in 2001.

5. What exhibits are most popular?

We avoid any measurement of exhibit popularity. Such measurements tend to force all exhibits to fit some average or standard, which eliminates the surprise factor and dampens a spirit of creative exploration. There's nearly always someone who likes any particular exhibit, and we believe that the average should not receive too much favor over the exceptional. Many people like many or our exhibits, and a few like even the ones that are less popular with the masses.

6. What kinds of reactions do you get from visitors?

Reactions run the gamut from those who stick their heads in then run the other way, to some who get hooked after a few minutes of exploration, stay for a couple hours, then write us a donation check for $50, telling us how much they appreciate what we're doing. Some visitors engage our docents in long conversations, others walk around checking out the exhibits, then leave without further ado. Some spend an hour here then tell us they'll be back with friends or family members.

7. What do you hope people take away from their experience here?

In answer to that, I'll respond by describing my own reaction when viewing the creative work of others: Creative work and beauty always raise my spirits and give me hope. They remind me, especially during an era when things are looking pretty grim in the world at large, that human beings are capable of doing wonderful things, and amidst ample examples of humanly created ugliness, there's also the possibility of beauty. We hope visitors leave Mindport with renewed curiosity, calmer minds, and greater optimism about human possibility.

Tools

2011-11-16T10:50:00.000-08:00

My co-worker, John Ito, our exhibit designer/builder, sent me this link to a short video describing a shop in New England that sells used tools. Watching it set me to reflecting about tools and the part they've played in my life. It's an appropriate thing to be contemplating during this era of consumerism that has culminated in our being swamped with goods that are non-repairable and must be thrown away when they fail. When I was growing up in the fifties, a do-it-yourself (DIY) movement was in full flower. In the decades following the seventies DIY seemed to disappear into the woodwork, so to speak. You began to get the feeling that only nerds and losers bothered to fix anything, much less build anything from scratch.

The picture above was shot in my father's workshop. He's 94 years old now and doesn't spend much time there any longer, sad to say. But seeing those tools, some of them the same ones I used when he first started teaching me to use them, when I was age eight or ten, stirs my nostalgia. At the time he was very active with Do It Yourself projects. He always had a well-organized workbench in the house where he operated on ailing appliances and built various projects, some of them for my own entertainment. For that reason using tools, repairing and building things seemed an ordinary part of life, one which I completely took for granted and which skills I absorbed by osmosis.

Here's photo of my drawer of electronics tools and another of my woodworking tools, all of which were instrumental in building every exhibit I've contributed to Mindport's collection. With the woodworking tools you'll notice a certain father-son resemblance in the means of their organization, if you compare to the earlier photo of of my father's shop. Most of my tools visible in these photos have been with me for over 40 years and are as much a part of me as my own hands. I own one set of chisels that my mother gave to me. When I was about seven years old, she took a carving class from an old German woodcarver, and bought these chisels from him. It's pleasing to me to use tools that have a history of known human connections, as these do. These photos remind me of the contrast between the throw-away values of today, and the values of a time when many household objects, especially tools, served us well for years, during which time we grew increasingly attached to them, to the point where we'd only part with them regretfully.

During the past few decades, there's been a growing cultural tendency in the US to value abstract mental work over manual skills. If you were a machinist, carpenter, or practitioner of any other trade that involved using physical tools (outside of computers. . . which are only semi-physical) your pay rate betrayed the fact that your profession was valued less than that of someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling paper or bytes and thinking for a living. This despite the fact that your work was the last step in a chain of activities culminating in creations that were actually necessary and useful, in the physical sense of the word.

Now that the activities of an elite group of paper and byte shufflers has brought the world's economy to its knees, and the possibility of the collapse of industrial civilization has begun to hit the mainstream press as a distinct possibility, we're suddenly hearing that certain physical skills and the tools necessary to put them into action might be coming back in demand. Various groups around the country are beginning to ask what steps we might take to re-industrialize America and get us producing useful things again, not only useful, but repairable and recyclable. Hallelujah!

Having done an assortment of jobs as a self-employed person, that included both mental/paper-shuffling work and physical design and construction, I've increasingly come to appreciate the latter. For a long time, I've noticed that the best medicine for anxiety and unease is to build something with my hands. There's something deeply reassuring about seeing things that I've only imagined come together in the physical world, and that satisfaction serves to remind me of my deep appreciation for the tools that make that possible.

Kevin Jones

Occupy Yourself

2011-10-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

This title is not to be construed as my being unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In truth, I'm at least 60% sympathetic to it. Not having yet seen a hard list of demands by the protesters, I can't tell you exactly what positions I completely agree with, but the point I intend to make is that Wall Street greed is not the only culprit behind this cascading economic collapse we're presently suffering. My title (suggested by my co-worker, AnMorgan Curry) speaks to the part the "99%" have played in creating this debacle. I bring this up because when revolutions occur, it's too frequently true that, because the revolutionaries have ignored the part they played in the dysfunctional system, the new system they install is as bad or worse than the one they replace. I'd hate to see that happen.

"Occupy Yourself" says it's important to put yourself into the driver's seat, pay attention, educate yourself, and don't waste all your energy blaming corrupt government, and corporate CEOs for what has happened. They're a large part of the problem and the culprits should have been prosecuted years ago, however, throwing them in jail and making new laws or reviving old ones that have been ignored will not deliver us from our current predicament.

We're in trouble because we've been attempting to defy the law energy conservation. This physical law is inviolable and cannot be countermanded by congress, the president, or anyone else. It states, in lay terms, that you can't get something for nothing.** Sadly, a large proportion of the American populace has been seduced into believing the opposite, via a storm of corporate advertising and the blandishments of self-serving politicians, not to speak of their own reluctance to face reality. A belief in the possibility of getting something for nothing shows up in many guises, including a reluctance to pay taxes, the embrace of a consumerist throw-away culture, and a general willingness to blame somebody else for whatever is wrong. This, in other words, means to embody an attitude whereby I have permission to do whatever I want and, if there are unpleasant consequences, to blame it on something THEY did.

By the way, if you believe a bank officer who tells you can afford to buy a house worth a half-million dollars when your income is $20,000 per year, do the math, or get a disinterested party to do it for you. This is part of what I term, "educating yourself," or "putting yourself in the driver's seat."

The sad fact is, any system that defies the law of energy conservation must sooner or later collapse. Our system was brought to the edge more quickly by greed and ignorance, but it actually was doomed from the start. It worked well when there was plenty of low-cost energy available in the form of oil, plenty of other natural resources, such as minerals, vitamins (oops, I mean forests), fish in the sea, unpolluted water, air, etc. But we're to the point that the availability of low-cost hydrocarbons is on the wane, and this, beyond anything, means we're in big trouble. It means that our economic system, whose functioning has been predicated on growth, CANNOT continue in its present form. You can't grow without fuel, and the fuel supplies, along with other resources (water being of prime importance) are getting tight. And for numerous reasons, alternative energy sources are unlikely to be able to take up the slack as oil depletes. See This link.

"Occupy Yourself" also asks us to start getting in touch with our creativity. That's because it's going to require a huge amount of that human resource, along with other types of human energy to dream up a new and sustainable way of living on this earth. It will have to involve recycling materials 100%, for one thing. Take a look at this site: for ideas about how that might be accomplished. The new system will not be based on consumption, unless it involves somehow funneling all our waste back into producing the next generation of stuff. Even then, it will be a much lower key style of living than what we're used to.

If the Wall Street protesters indeed have been vague or confused about their demands, it may be because they haven't quite yet discovered that much of what needs to be demanded is inside themselves, and not available from the empty husks personified by Bankers, Wall Street, corporate manipulators and their government lackeys. Protesters, and all of us, must begin to demand from ourselves the aforementioned creative energy to devise a whole new culture that is both kind to people and does not require infinite economic growth and continuously increasing energy input for its perpetuation.

Here's a film whose story is an exact allegory for the state in which we currently find ourselves, and which suggests symbolically, and possibly in actuality, a direction we might follow: "The Milagro Beanfield War." Even better, read john Nichol's book by the same title, along with its two sequels.

Kevin Jones

**
You might not immediately see how the law of energy conservation is equivalent to "you can't get something for nothing," Let's take unwillingness to pay taxes as an example of an attempt to defy the law of energy conservation:

First, you have to understand that money has no inherent value. It's paper that we've arbitrarily assigned value. Useful things like food, oil, clothes, a car, a bicycle have real value, and we assign an amount of money to the value of any of these things. Then we can trade the money instead of the things, which is very convenient, because it means you can buy a bag of groceries without dragging in a barrel of crude oil to pay for them.

Now the law of energy conservation says that you can't destroy energy or create it from nothing. You can only change its form. If you drag a weight up a hill, it takes energy to do the job. The energy you expend, say, riding your bike to the top of a hill is stored in the earth's gravitational field as "potential energy." When you coast back down the hill, it's the release of potential energy that keeps you moving. You don't have to put any more energy into pedaling because of that. A fraction of the energy you put into riding up and down the hill is not lost, but dissipated into space through heating your tires, heating your body, and warming the air that flows by you as you ride up and down the hill.

Roads are a necessity for the perpetuation of our present civilization. Creating and repairing them requires energy, lots of it, and materials such as gravel and asphalt, derived from crude oil. It takes energy to run the machinery, grow the food that feeds the workers who operate it, transport that food, keep the workers warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Someone digs the oil out of the ground that supplies that energy. The digging itself requires energy, usually supplied by oil. Oil is full of potential energy held in the chemical bonds of the oil's hydrocarbons, which were originally cemented together by the energy of sunlight. The same energy is conserved through the entire chain of its conversions from one form to another.

Much of the oil we burn today comes from foreign countries. We exchange dollars for it, which implies that the foreign country taking our dollars will eventually be able to get something of real physical value back by sending back the dollars we traded them for oil. If we've been printing a lot more dollars than we have valuable things for them to represent, then we can't very well pay back the oil-producing countries with material goods of value equivalent to the oil we got for the bucks in the first place. We don't have them. Hence, in the future, those countries are not likely to trust the value of or our dollars and are likely to want a lot more of them for the same amount of oil, which indeed has real, measurable value.

If you don't want to pay taxes, then the roads can't be built or fixed because to do so requires a finite and measurable amount of energy. We trade tax dollars for that energy. Because of the law of conservation of energy, we can't create the energy needed to build or fix the roads out of thin air. It has to be dug out of the ground, and we need to trade dollars that are still worth something for that energy, otherwise we won't get it.

Hence money, when a monetary system hasn't been abused, is equivalent to energy, in that it can't (or shouldn't be able to) be created or destroyed. Money is actually LENT into existence, and the money that is lent must be paid back to its creator, namely the government. If you aren't willing to pay for what you get, or pay with dollars that have been inflated by a government that has created more dollars than there is true value for them to stand for, then basically you're attempting to defy the energy conservation law. The consequence is systemic collapse, which is right were we are just now.

Dial "G" for Gator

2011-09-24T13:37:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago. I posted a picture and wrote a blog entry about a piece of obsolete telephone technology- the rotary phone relay. At the time I mentioned my plans to turn it into an exhibit for Mindport, which I've finally accomplished. See a picture above. I've christened this creation, "Dial G for Gator." It's not that you'll necessarily see the gator when you dial "G." The name refers to a fifties Hitchcock thriller, "Dial M for Murder," the perfect vintage for this technology. But when you manipulate the dial you will occasionally call up an ominously toothy character hiding behind the left hand window.

Through the window on the right you can see two views of the telephone dial mechanism. We've had push-button dialing for so long that younger people have probably never even seen a dial telephone, except perhaps in old movies. When you dial a digit a train of electrical pulses is generated, one pulse for each digit traversed by the dial as it returns to its resting position. Looking through the window you can watch the operation of this clever mechanism, which includes a "worm drive," a speed regulator, and a pair of contacts that generate the dialing pulses.

Through the two left-hand windows you see front and side views of the rotary relay. As it receives dialing pulses from the dial, its main commutator rotates, making a new contact for every pulse sent from the dial. In the days before the advent of solid state electronics, there were huge rooms of these rotary relays, which were linked in such a way that pulses coming from the dial of your phone triggered a series of them, thereby selecting your desired party from thousands of others. Needless to say these rooms full of rotary relays generated quite a din!

Having been born just before the era of the dial telephone, in the days when we had multiple parties sharing one line, and you had to ask an operator to connect you to the number you wanted, I feel a certain nostalgia for such visually accessible technology. The way it worked was fascinating, and you could actually SEE it, not to speak of take it apart and learn something from it. As I touched on in my 2010 entry, the down side of today's complex, micro-miniature electronic technology is that the details of its operation are no longer visually apparent. No matter what the function, all that young eyes can see upon inspecting, say, a modern cordless phone's guts, is a lot of tiny, static components on a circuit board. Some of the components have become so small you can hardly see them at all.

The irony of miniaturization and complexity is that technology has become so inaccessible that it no longer has the ability to inspire the interest of young people who might eventually grow up to be engineers, scientist, and technologists, the very sorts who create new technology in the first place. I've read that we're now suffering a dearth of technical skills in this country, which necessitates the importation of engineers from overseas. There are political and economic reasons for this, to be sure, but I suspect that it's also true that the complex miniaturization of technology could become partially responsible for its own downfall. Hence, one reason we at Mindport have avoided including computers and other visually inaccessible technology (with one or two exceptions) in our exhibits, is that we believe that relatively low-tech exhibits are inherently more interesting, especially to young people who nowadays are rarely exposed to the mechanically intriguing mechanisms of earlier eras.

Come in and visit "Gator." It should be up in our gallery by the second week of October.

Kevin Jones

New Shows

2011-09-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

There’s a new collection of my photos hanging in the Gallery. Some will be up until September 14th, at which point they will be replaced by a group of paintings from the 6th Annual Downtown Bellingham Plein Air Paint Out.

I’ve chosen the currently displayed images from those I’ve shot over the last couple years, a few from longer ago than that. When images I’ve recorded have only been in existence for a short time, I often have difficulty judging which of them effectively express something of substance, and which are “flashes in the pan” so-to-speak. At times I discover a photo from many years ago which, at the time, held no particular interest, but which I suddenly see with new eyes, thereby noticing significance that had never been apparent to me previously. For this reason, I find an occasional perusal of old photos to be an entertaining pastime, a little like panning for gold, or perhaps reminiscent of my childhood memories associated with hunting Easter eggs.

My computer screen-saver has brought to attention another phenomenon relating to archived photographic work. It’s set up to run a slide show of the images stored on my hard drive, picked at random. There are a couple thousand of these images available, and the effect is that images pop up on the screen juxtaposed completely out of time and subject sequence. Since I normally view them in the order they were recorded, this accentuates the “new eyes” perspective on each image.

We have a large collection of my photographic prints stored at Mindport, which I add to periodically. Sometimes I choose a group of images which Art Director, AnMorgan Curry, hangs in the gallery. When there isn’t a specific group to be shown, I encourage staff members who spend time in the display area to chose photos from the reserves and hang them as they please. It’s always interesting to me to see which ones get chosen, and in what combinations they show up on the walls.

The current batch on the walls of the gallery, as mentioned earlier, were my choice, a few of them grouped according to my specification, the rest hung to suit AnMorgan’s excellent taste. If you wish to see them all, please visit before September 14th, when AnMorgan will be hanging the work of the Plein Air painters in our gallery. About a third of the photos in this show will remain up for some unspecified time beyond the 14th, and there are also a number of my other photos on the wall in the interactive exhibits area.

Kevin Jones

Travelogs

2011-08-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched a thirty-minute travelog on Greece and the Cyclades. Beautiful photography and a tolerable soundtrack, but as always, the two impose a reality on the scene that tends to trivialize the true aura of the place. Instead of a place it becomes a tourist destination, a spectacle to be see in passing, which is what tourism too often is. It reminds me of the sort of disorientation and cognitive dissonance that sometimes makes travel an uneasy process for me. I can’t reconcile the passing-through, spectator mentality with my knowledge that those rooted in a spot perceive a much different reality, as I would as well if I stayed there for a week, a month, a year, or longer. A traveler who stays in a place for a day or two is always separate from it, alienated by an invisible bubble that prevents any authentic commingling of his spirit with that of the local culture. He leaves saying, well, I’ve been to such-and-such. But he hasn’t actually BEEN there, he’s just passed through.

Southeast Utah is one distant place where I’ve spent a great deal of time compared to any other temporary destination I’ve visited. Most of that time has been concentrated in the choice two or three weeks of the year, the last week of April and the first week of May. The place is usually a paradise then, budding out in vivid green, contrasting to the omnipresent pink sandstone cliffs and canyons. Potholes brim with water, with the only down side being those biting bugs which swarm at this short-term spell of abundant moisture. When I’m there, I often remind myself that at other times of the year paradise becomes hell, or at least purgatory. I’ve driven through the area in winter, when it’s cheerless and bleak, and at the height of summer when the sandstone roasts under the solar glare. Even though I remind myself of the fuller reality of the place, I tend only to imagine it in its spring garb when I need somewhere for an imaginary retreat.

As I watch a Greek video travelog, shot under blue skies and in the warmth of summer, I imagine how it must be in the dead of winter. Having never traveled in Greece in either winter OR summer, imagination is all I can muster, embellished by the writings of those who have been there. Trouble is, most of those descriptions leave out the harsh parts. Similarly, I remember traveling to the South of France as a youth. At the time it was spring and the weather was beautiful, which is the way I still picture it. But I've also read much about winters in Provence, when the Mistral blows from the north, creating conditions similar to the dreaded Nor'easter that plague the area where I live. People who visit me here in the sunny midsummer say they can hardly imagine icy winds, rains, and the general damp chill of winter here.

I’ve at times considered the fact that so many of the beauties of Europe are actually the product of horror. Witness the architectural beauties commissioned by King Leopold of Belgium, all financed by the exploitation of the African Congo. The narrator of this Greek travelog mentioned that those lovely convoluted streets of some harbor hillside villages were constructed that way to confuse invading pirates. It’s another case where horror begets beauty, that is, once the horror has been buried in the past. To me, the virtual tourist reality created for us by the forces of commerce and the imagination of ad agencies becomes disturbing when I manage to penetrate the illusion of the glittering ads for tropical winter havens in the back pages of the New Yorker and the picturesque travel videos I find at the local library.

Despite that, I still like to watch the travelogs sometimes, taking the hype with a large granule of rock salt. Or maybe one of those cubic-foot salt blocks the ranchers in Utah set out at watering holes for their cattle.

Perhaps all manmade beauty is a product of or a reaction against grimness of one sort or another. Grimness or despair. So it’s best to appreciate whatever beauty unpleasant experience begets as an expression of that which is best within the human spirit and try to temporarily ignore the darker reflections of truth.

Kevin Jones

Exhibits: Rolling Marbles

2011-08-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

A question I get frequently get from visitors, and to which I’m hard-pressed to formulate a quick answer is, “Where do you get your ideas for exhibits?”. . . or simply, “how do you THINK of these things?”

The answer to that is complicated, since I’ve built over thirty major exhibits since we opened in 1995, and the idea for each one came from a different source. Some exhibits are all my own idea, others are modified versions of something I saw elsewhere, or they incorporate elements of something I ran across in anywhere from a magazine article to another museum.

For the sake of relative brevity, I’ll pick examples of several exhibits which I find most interesting or satisfying, and, over time, write a blog entry to describe the origins of each.

Let’s start with the Marble Pump and “Marbellous Indeterminacy”:

When I was in my twenties I went through a stage where I had grown tired of doing electronics work at the University of Colorado and had decided that maybe I’d start a business making wooden toys.

As a kid I’d loved playing in water, and I knew most children are similarly attracted. The problem with water and kids is that when you combine them, they make a mess. Hence I thought, why not dream up a toy with elements equally alluring to children as those afforded by water play, but without the mess. If you can pump water, why not pump marbles? My first marble pump was born.

Marble Pump 1

As it happened, this “toy” took me so long to create that I quickly realized that if I spent that much time on all such efforts, I’d never earn a living. After building a few more “toys,” I concluded that I’d probably be happier doing electronics work for much higher pay, while building gadgets like this in my spare time. Furthermore, rather than defining them as “toys,” I thought it would be better to think of them as kinetic sculpture, since I seemed to be at least as interested in their aesthetics, function, and the sort of indirect statements they made, as I was in entertaining children. In fact, having appreciated the fact that good children’s stories entertained me as much as they did my daughter, I was challenged by the idea of creating these “sculptures” as objects which anyone could enjoy, not just children.

When Mindport materialized in ‘95, I’d already spent a year exploring my own fascination with water through the process of creating the Wave Music exhibit. This was a device I’d designed partly with the idea of manufacturing it. As had been true with the first marble pump, building a version that was commercially viable seemed impractical, or, to be honest, much less fun than putting together the first units. However, the one I’d built did seem perfectly suited as a first exhibit for Mindport.

Not long after Wave Music was installed at the newly-opened Mindport, my old interest in marble pumping re-awakened. The version you find displayed today is one of our oldest exhibits, and, to my amazement (knock on wood), it’s still going strong.

Marble Pump 2

The marble pump theme cropped up again in Marbellous Indeterminacy. For that exhibit I dreamed up five other ways to get marbles from a lower level to a higher one. . . and I literally mean DREAMED. Much of that exhibit grew from 3 AM, half-waking imagination. It took about 15 months to build, and it cost me endless anxiety. The “indeterminacy” part originated from an idea I have about consciousness originating from “quantum indeterminacy.” No, I’m not going to attempt to articulate what I mean by that, but the exhibit has definitely lived up to its name, which was the source of my anxiety during its construction, and continues to be today. We’ve come to refer to Marbellous as “she” (and ladies, don’t take that as a sexist pronouncement), but once you get to know her. . . I’ll just say she has certain traits that I’d characterize as loveably mischievous in a distinctly feminine style.

Marbellous Indeterminacy

The Marble Pump and Marbellous are likely not the last exhibits you’ll see at Mindport incorporating rolling balls or marbles. John Ito and I have been discussing yet another exhibit incorporating this theme. Don’t’ hold you breath, but one of these days it will turn up. Rolling marbles, if anything, are even more entertaining, than water. Stay tuned!

Kevin Jones

Curiosity Killed the Cat?

2011-08-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

Fully alive. . . and enjoying the catnip!

Whose curiosity are we talking about? The cat’s? According to Wikipedia, one origin of this term was English villagers whose cats were being killed by the experiments of the local scientist. It was the scientist’s curiosity that killed the cat, not the cat’s. Interesting the way this phrase been turned around so as to imply that allowing your own curiosity free rein might bring you to a sorry end.

I wonder if this bit of mythology has accounted for what appears to be an astounding lack of curiosity in so many citizens of “developed” countries, especially including our own. It seems it’s become unfashionable for the average citizen to harbor curiosity about what goes on around us, where we all came from, what makes our universe tick, or even mundane matters, like how the shelves of our local food market get stocked. We might be curious about what’s going on behind a neighbor’s closed curtains, or about who was in the car wreck down the street. But beyond that, it’s almost as though there’s a fear that if we look too closely, something scary might emerge from the shadows and devour us.

Indeed, there’s merit to that fear. Donald Rumsfeld talked about “the things we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s true that once curiosity gets a grip on us we might learn a lot of things we didn’t want to know. On the other hand, if we knew about them, maybe that would render them harmless, or at least accessible to consideration.

Somehow, any fears that I might have associated with gratifying curiosity didn’t inhibit it, even though, at age eight, I used to get myself into a slightly spooky frame of mind by wondering what was outside the universe. The first phenomenon I observed, which sparked a passionate fascination with science, and especially electronics, was the mystery of magnetic attraction. When I was five or six years old, my uncle, whom I admired for his esoteric knowledge of electronics, gave me a little cylindrical magnet that came from a radio loudspeaker. It set my curiosity alight about the invisible and unfathomable force emanating from this bit of metal. It's not surprising that I should wonder about it, because nobody knows really what magnetism is, even now, though we know a great deal about what it does. Sixty years later, it’s still an absorbing mystery to me.

A friend of mine, trained as a scientist, once told me he hated the word “mystery.” That surprised me because personally I love it. Our neighbor, the American Museum of Radio and Electricity has adopted the slogan: “Where discovery sparks imagination.” I like to consider their slogan in reversed form, as in, “imagination sparks discovery.” Even better, try, “mystery sparks imagination and discovery.” The mystery of magnetic force stimulated my imagination and a passionate interest in science and, beyond that, a curiosity about how on earth did we and all this amazing world around us come to be. . . and how did we get to be in such a mess these days?

What bothers me most about today’s state of political, economic, and every other kind of unrest, is that it betrays not only a lack of curiosity, but a lack of general interest in just about everything, except the fact we can’t find a job. Sorry, I don’t mean to say that’s a trivial concern, but, if you delve deeply enough, you find out the reasons for that. . . and they ultimately have to do with the physical realities of energy, pollution, resource depletion, complexity, overpopulation, and various inadequacies of the industrial system that has held us in its sway for over 100 years. Oh yes, greed and politics play a big part as well.

We’ve become preoccupied with abstractions. . .unexamined assumptions taught by rote, like “the invisible hand of the free market.” (See this essay and its sequel, by John Michael Greer ) We’ve lost sight of crucial physical realities, like the source of our daily ration of food, about how natural ecosystems are essential to our continued well-being and very existence. Instead, too many of us are breathlessly awaiting the release of the latest iGadget, and distracting ourselves with other trivialities, like political sex scandals, in the face of climate change and economic catastrophe.

Curiosity can lead us to delve into physical reality, to look into what is actually going on. Once we overcome our anxieties, and get a grip on actuality, then we’re much less likely to be mislead by those to whose advantage it is to foster our ignorance by indoctrinating us with abstract slogans. Greer’s comments in his essay cited above address the part education plays in this “wising up” process. All too frequently, the sort of education we get in officially certified schools does not wise us up in ways that might actually bring about real change in the predominate beliefs that are now leading us, like lemmings, over a cliff.

Curiosity is a quality to be both fostered and followed. It can be an educational guide, and educational opportunities are everywhere once you commence looking for them. There’s the Internet, especially sites like TED, where you can watch all sorts of talks by thinkers and scientists that will open up a world of possible explorations. Besides Mindport, I suggest visiting our neighbor, right around the corner, The American Museum of Radio and Electricity. Just reading or exploring such web sites as TED is only a start. Hands-on involvement with one’s fascinations is essential, whether done via manual artwork, or, say, by taking one of the Radio Museum’s courses in Amateur Radio or building crystal sets. Physical exploration leads us in unexpected directions that we’d never anticipate if we restricted ourselves to simply reading or watching video.

One of my greatest hopes for Mindport is that it will inspire curiosity in those for whom curiosity might have been numbed, regardless of age. If we succeed, we hope curiosity won’t stop here. Liberation from the tedium of ingrained and unexamined beliefs comes to those whose curiosity inspires them to take their education in their own hands, moving away from abstract theory and toward the sort of concrete knowledge that might serve in the long term to deliver us from the severe predicaments we now face.

Kevin Jones

Starting Something New

2011-07-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

Recently three of my adult cello students here at Mindport –who’ve been playing between 10 months and 3 years- have become proficient enough for us to play cello quartets together. It’s a milestone of sorts, to go from having just enough facility with the instrument and reading notes on a page to play alone or with just one other person, to playing with three other people, all with their own parts. Watching these students transition to being ensemble players, I’ve been reconsidering the experience of starting something new, and the fears that can be associated with beginnings- the not knowing whether one will succeed, the idea that it’s somehow “too late” and maybe even silly to try.

What these students have really reminded me of though, is how determination, commitment, and passion in the face of a new venture really can take a person where they want to go (given they have or can find some essential resources to put at their disposal.) Initially, each of them showed up to the classroom saying, “I love this instrument, and I want to learn to play it – even if I’m nervous about it, and even if it’s just for myself,” and they’ve struggled, and have had doubts, and have been frustrated. But they’ve also noted their accomplishments, worked out their strategies, and have kept at it. The series of small "failures" that are a part of learning an instrument have not soured them on the process or themselves.

Now, one Saturday morning a month, these students and I gather here at Mindport and sit down to tackle Mozart, Handel, Bruckner, and some folk tunes. And though this is the first ensemble experience they’ve had as cellists, with some effort the pitches and the rhythms get played – together and in time. Music happens, but beyond music, and perhaps this is integral to music’s power and beauty, what happens also is a testament to these students’ optimism, patience, self-acceptance, persistence, and love for this instrument. They were brave enough to start something new, and determined to stick with it, and here we are – making music together.

Tallie Jones

The Allella

2011-07-07T15:41:00.000-07:00

John Ito, our newest exhibit designer/fabricator, has just finished a new piece that he's been working on down in Mindport's basement shop for the last several months. Here's what he has to say about it:

"To me the Allella is something of a sound travel device... if an instrument can be called that. I was going for kind of a Queen Anne furniture made for a DJ from Atlantis look.

My intent was to create something experimental that utilized a planetary gear system to drive an instrument that anyone could play, one in which all of the operative components could be seen in action. Such gearing allows for a variety of speed and oscillating directional movement. I figured something with strings could reflect the movements of the device.

I built two sound boxes, something in the fashion of a rectangular harp or guitar, with rounded bridges mounted on each side for consistent 360 degree rotation of all 24 strings.

I didn't know how the instrument would sound until it was entirely finished, as there was nothing in existence to compare it to. The end result, a surprise awaited during the three months it took me to build it, is more complex than I had imagined. The sound can be controlled in many ways, but there's a distinct aspect of chaos as well.

Simple movements can produce unexpected melodies and rhythms, as the placement of the string plucking is intentionally non-incremental in location. As speed builds, the cacophony of sound develops its own shifting attributes. It can be melodic and atonal at the same time, a paradox.

The music that it makes is certainly strange, and does not conform to any style. If expectations are let go of, interesting and pleasant surprises abound.

The only way to play it, is to play it. "

There's a video of John playing the instrument here.

Engineering Art from 1928

2011-06-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received a set of large drawings from my cousin that were executed by our great grandfather in 1928. He was an engineer, and these are designs for a sewage plant in Florida, drawn in colored inks on paper-covered canvas. They must be seen in person to be fully appreciated, but I've included the photo above so you can get an idea what they look like.

Having viewed little graphic work of this sort from that era, I don't know whether it's typical of the times, or whether this was exceptional. I do know that I've never seen any comparable contemporary work that comes anywhere close to these in visual impact. This man was clearly an artist, as well as an engineer, and he must have been exceptionally dedicated to his work, since these certainly took months and extreme patience to complete.

Viewing these drawings, I find myself comparing the manual process that brought them into being with the process employed currently by draftsmen and engineers, inevitably involving computers. Obviously our way of doing things now is quicker and possibly easier. I say “possibly,” because the overhead expense and labor involved in maintaining computer systems, and keeping workers up to date on software changes, has a way of at least partially canceling out supposed advances in efficiency.

Beyond the consideration of overhead expenses, when I compare the process that begot these 1928 graphics with the current graphic processes, both of which I’ve had personal experience with, I become acutely aware of what we’re losing and have already lost as we replace manual and mental skills with computer expertise. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be making such changes, but I do believe we should be thinking carefully about what exactly is being lost, asking ourselves whether we’re OK with losing it, and, if not, how we can preserve at least some of the traditional qualities of mind and talent that brought these manually generated drawings into existence.

We’re planning a gallery show whose theme will be the presentation of information. These drawings of my great-grandfather's will be included in the show. No doubt we will include provocative material comparing traditional methods of production with current ones. Check back with us later for more specifics.

Kevin Jones

Oasis

2011-06-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

"Clean Coal'" by AnMorgan Curry

I usually avoid political commentary in Mindport's blog, aside from my occasional semi-political rants about noise, or computers, etc. But, as you may have surmised by our display windows, mostly created by AnMorgan Curry, we're not politically unconscious. Far from it. Not a day goes by that I don't read of the horrors being perpetrated in the outside world. It gets to a point that I have to go on vacations from the news. . . although I'm not too successful at it. It's like trying to tear my eyes away from an ongoing train wreck.

The reason I mention this now is because it seems, from observing the publications of many institutions, you'd think business was proceeding as usual, since there's hardly passing reference to this "train wreck" proceeding right in front of our noses. I find myself wondering on a daily basis what small thing can I do to counter the catastrophe. The best answer I come up with is to simply continue our attempt to provide an island of calm and beauty at Mindport, so our visitors can be reminded that better things are possible.

Our society has a way of cutting funding to the arts before anything else, which is perhaps the very reverse from the way things should be. The arts are, in large part, about ideas, beauty and raising consciousness of our shared humanity. We Americans have a cultural tendency let economic expedience take precedence over such values, which can be blamed to a large extent for the economic and environmental catastrophe we see unwinding currently.

Anyone who questions the importance of art should, for example, consider the cinema's ability to educate us about other lives and cultures and to promote conciliation between opposed cultures. Such films as Rana's Wedding and The Syrian Bride, to name two I've viewed recently, highlight cultural differences and suggest how governments contribute to the unhappiness of individuals, not to speak of pursuing frivolous wars instead of helping the citizenry they should be serving. If the political leaders and the CEOs of weapons corporations were the first to march off to war, I suspect the cause of peace would take on a new priority.

I've noticed that when I'm feeling down, one thing that can lighten my spirits is exposure to fine art: music, dance, painting, photography. Witnessing fine art reassures me that someone cares enough about beauty to put creativity first in his or her life, before money or any other consideration. This sort of dedication inspires me to believe that, beyond the deepening disaster, there's possibility for the rebirth of a new regime, motivated by something grander than the bottom line.

Kevin Jones

Introducing John Ito, Exhibit Designer & Builder

2011-05-20T15:23:00.000-07:00

We feel both lucky and happy to have had John Ito join Mindport’s staff this January. A former employee of the Children’s Museum of Boston, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and the Lawrence Hall of Science, John is now calling Mindport (and Bellingham) home. Though he currently spends most of his work time in Mindport’s basement building what he calls a “people and sound convergence device,” Kevin and I lured him up from the depths for a conversation. Here’s some of what we discovered:

John grew up outside of Boston in a suburb called Norwood, home his parents’ ice cream shop and a terrific scrap metal yard. Access to “junk,” the inventions of Dr. Who, and encouragement from his grandfather and an uncle -builders themselves- led to a childhood spent taking things apart and putting them back together, carving bows and arrows, and fixing bikes.

After high school, where he focused on art and was voted “Most Radical Senior,” John attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He initially thought he might want to be an animator, but at 17 “had way too much energy to do something that required sitting down.” John turned to metal sculpture instead, but continued to “focus on everything” finding that not being limited to one area resulted in a much bigger and interesting perspective.

Following stints working for a photo developer, a video store, a hospital laundry room, and a coffee shop, John found his way to museum work, starting out in Visitor Services at the Children’s Museum of Boston at the age of 22. He then moved into exhibit designing and building at this and other institutions before joining the staff of Mindport.

When I ask him what he likes about what he’s doing now, John laughs and says, “Well, it’s exactly what I want to be doing, and that’s an impossibility for most people. I get to build what I want to build – there’s no one giving me directions or telling me what to make, and that’s just not normal for most people. It’s wonderful.”

Questioned about how he came to have such a varied and interesting set of skills, John admits that he was not studious ever, noting that, “not focusing on what I was supposed to focus on to be a ‘success’ led me to where I am. When you let go of expectation – especially expectations for yourself – a lot of interesting things can happen.”

Carol, another MP staffer, had some additional questions for Mr. Ito.

Q. How many pens do you have on you at the moment?

A. Six fountain pens, one ball-point, two mechanical pencils, and one standard issue pencil.

Q. What is your favorite bike?

A. A Schwinn Corvette cantilever frame with 2-speed kickback coaster brake hub, moustache bars, leather saddle, BMX pedals with mavic rims and slick tires. It should also be black and have a milk crate on the front.

Q. What was the first thing you took apart and put together?

A. My grandparents’ clock. It was broken and I accidentally fixed it – leading me to believe I could fix anything.

Tallie Jones

Gallery Window by AnMorgan Curry and Carol Oberton

2011-04-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

Do You Have Any Homework?

2011-04-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

After spending twenty-two of my thirty-four years going to school, I finally get to answer, “No!” to that question. It’s been five years since I’ve been assigned homework and three years since I’ve worked in a traditional school setting where I’ve designed, assigned, and graded large amounts of the stuff myself.

It feels good to be done – lovely and very freeing, in fact. Outside of work and family, my time is now my own, and I have no problem figuring out how to spend it. But homework is still on my mind. Puttering around the house, I run into literal piles of spiral bound notebooks filled with notes, double-spaced essays with comments lurking on the back pages, even a report titled The Desert that I wrote in fifth grade. Talking with my coworkers, I discover that at least half of them also have stashes of homework from 20 to 50 years ago. Even my father, who hated the majority of his homework assignments and who says that even after 40 years of not doing homework, he still feels relieved not to have any, brought in a couple of typed essays from his freshmen year of college when asked.

Despite the freedom I feel now, and the feeling of dread and anxiety I associated with much of the homework I had through those twenty-two years, being assigned homework certainly wasn’t all bad. Homework offered me a reason to sit quietly with my thoughts outside of the tumult of school. I took it seriously – and luckily much of it was worth taking seriously, and as a result I learned plenty from what I was assigned. But I also wonder if there was a cost. Thinking back, I rarely had anyone ask me what I would like to pursue, what homework might be useful and interesting. As a result, I didn’t really learn to follow my own curiosity – or rather attempted to do so in the limited time available after homework was done.

Working with young people through Mindport’s education program, I continue to consider the value of homework. How does it affect an individual’s desire to learn? What are its effects on a person’s life and the life of their family? Is it useful? What kind is useful? Why? When a student and I make a plan for what they might do between our meetings, should we even call it homework? Or is that too loaded a term?

To help me look for answers, I’m starting to put together a show for Mindport’s gallery on this very theme, and I’d love to have your thoughts – and/or to see your homework (returned to you if a SASE is included). What was the best homework assignment you ever had? The worst? What homework would you give yourself? What homework do you wish you’d been given?

Comment on this blog, or write to me at 210 W. Holly St. Bellingham, WA 98225 or talithamdj at yahoo dot com. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Tallie Jones

Something to Try

2011-04-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with digital cameras from nearly the first day they appeared on the market. The early models had a resolution comparable to the old VGA video monitor standard, of 640 by 480 pixels. Enlarged to over snapshot size, the images looked terrible, full of "jaggies" and JPEG artifacts, which were distortions inherent in the process of compressing photos to sizes compatible with the amount of computer memory available at the time.

Those early cameras did have one odd advantage, which was the fact that their image sensors were tiny and focusing an image on them required very short focal-length lenses. Due to the physics of the situation, this meant that the cameras possessed huge depth-of-field, much like a pinhole camera. In other words, the lens would bring any object from a few inches away to infinity into focus simultaneously. This made it possible to shoot interesting photos that would be difficult to capture with a conventional 35mm film camera.

One of the illuminating aspects of my switch to digital was that, with no film to buy, I could experiment freely in order to understand better how a camera sees, and how to make use of the unique qualities of a particular type of camera. Of course the computer and camera cost money, but unless I made prints it cost nothing extra to shoot as many images as I desired. With digital cameras the possibilities of what a camera can record are considerably beyond what was possible with film cameras. In the process of playing with digital images I learned some lessons, as I did with depth-of-field, above, that have not only expanded my repertoire of possible imagery, but have encouraged me to create images that would have been difficult or impossible to attain with film.

Here's an example of a technique I've tried with my digital camera that often brings interesting and surprising results, while educating my eyes to see subtleties that were previously not apparent.

In the first example, I shot pictures of intriguing marks left on a concrete breakwater by the wooden forms in which they were poured. The concrete was dull grey and the resulting image hardly interesting to look at. I loaded the picture into my image processing program and greatly enhanced its contrast until it began to bring out colors and textures that were nearly invisible in the object or the original photograph of it. There were hidden blues, browns, reds, and shades of texture you'd hardly notice if you glanced casually at the original surface.

After I'd experimented with this technique for awhile, I began to see all sorts of possibilities for creating striking images from subject matter I previously would have ignored. Such transformed imagery reminds me of my pottery-making days and the excitement of opening a kiln after a firing, then inspecting the surfaces of ware after their colorful transformation by heat.

If you try this, it's best to choose low-contrast, minimally colored subjects. However look for any patterns and textures that might not be apparent due to the low contrast inherent in the scene. Boulders, rocks, and geological formations are good possibilities to investigate. The soft light of a cloudy sky makes for the right sort of illumination. It's color neutral and just the opposite of the sort of lighting you might conventionally wish for such subjects. When you increase the contrast of the image, you may have to tone down the brightness in order for the highlights not to "burn out," that is go completely white.

After playing with this or other means of digital transformation you might ponder this question: What do you think are the advantages and liabilities of digital photographic process compared to the old days of film and chemistry, and how do you feel about digitally modified images as an art form? These are ideas I still contemplate quite a lot and will probably discuss in future postings, along with a few other ideas for modifying digital images. Meantime, have fun experimenting.

Kevin Jones

Harbingers of Spring

2011-04-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Spring has sprung. . . barely, it seems. When I awakened this morning there was frost on the roof below my bedroom. But the frogs are in full din in the several wetlands around where I live. In the past they've often begun to pipe up toward the end of the first week in March, but they've begun their song a week or two later in the two or three most recent years. Early on, cold nights apparently inhibit their ardor, though once they've gained momentum a frosty night doesn't seem to curb their enthusiastic song.

Above is a photo of one of these characters, a different species, I believe, from the more common variety who raise their multitudinous voices in the wetlands every spring. This particular variety I've observed occasionally perched on leaves in the flower beds around our house. One of them, in fact, actually paid us a more intimate visit than that a couple years ago. I was sitting in our kitchen enjoying a cup of tea. The silence of the kitchen was suddenly interrupted by a subdued CREEAAK issuing from somewhere behind me. The sound was so sporadic that it took me some time to discover its source, which turned out to be beneath the dish drainer. Upon lifting the drainer's rubber base, I spotted the green vocalist, an individual just like the one pictured. Thinking his chances of finding a mate in this venue were limited, I gently carried him outside, all the way to the opposite end of the house, and set him on a leaf.

That wasn't the end of the story, however. A week later, again while sipping tea in the kitchen, I heard the selfsame CREEAAK as before. Sure enough, there was my green friend, once again under the dish drainer. Now, I can't prove it was the same critter because I hadn't banded a leg or anything, but I don't see these frogs around very often, so I like to think that he somehow made his way around the house, climbed through the kitchen window, which was cracked open only an inch, as had been true the previous week, and reclaimed his hiding spot in the damp cave under the drainer.

The other harbinger of spring in the many wetlands on Lummi Island is the skunk cabbage. They're one of the first flowers to show their faces, usually just a week or so before we hear the first frogs commence their song. Over the years I've watched one patch on the west side of Lummi expand, now covering a good quarter acre on a wooded, swampy hillside. When the flowers first poke up their heads, they're irresistible to photographers like myself. I must have accumulated a couple hundred photos, captured as I slogged around in the mud, now and then losing a boot to its grip after becoming immersed in it to well above the ankles.

The skunk cabbage is an unusual plant. It's reputed to generate enough heat of its own to be able to melt its way through a snowbank. Check out this article on the web site of the Nature Institute for more information. While you're at it, explore their site farther. It's one that I've visited periodically for years, and which I discovered after becoming a subscriber to Steve Talbott's Netfuture series of essays.

In closing, best wishes for a happy spring to all our readers and visitors.

Kevin Jones

Graphic Design

2011-03-31T16:16:00.000-07:00

Graphic design is a field that has interested me for years. I first became conscious of its effect on me in my twenties, when I began to notice that I was buying quite a few books that I never bothered to finish reading. Eventually it dawned on me that I bought them not so much because of their informational content but because of the beauty of their layout and text and/or the quality of included photographs and other graphic material. It was a pleasure to look at them, in other words.

During my early thirties I abandoned photography for a few years and set about teaching myself to draw. Needless to say, that raised my consciousness about graphic design even more, and had quite a salutary effect on my photography when I eventually went back to it.

Around the time we opened Mindport in 1995, I stumbled across the books of Edward Tufte, perhaps some of the most beautiful books I've ever encountered. Tufte, among other activities, taught in the Department of Graphic design at Yale University, and has written at least four books on the visual presentation of data, the first being entitled, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. These books have asserted an influence on me in my effort to make the instructions accompanying Mindport's exhibits clear and comprehensible.

The task of writing instructions and other documentation I find enjoyable. There's a fascination in the attempt to view a familiar exhibit from the point of view of a total stranger seeing it for the first time, then in devising a way to explain as succinctly as possible how to make it do something. This involves organizing diagrams, photos, and text on a page in a manner that makes instructions easy to understand and follow, and choosing minimally ambiguous language in order that instructions and labels not be misinterpreted. I consider myself an amateur at this process, but I hope I have succeeded at it to some degree.

In the world outside, of course, the most obvious venue for graphic design is in advertising. We delve into that at Mindport to the extent that we put considerable effort into the design of our posters and other publicity materials. That's not my domain, personally. Staff members AnMorgan, Carol, Karen, and Tallie have been the main contributors to that department, though I do put in my two-cents-worth from time to time.

We all swim in a sea of graphic design, and, like fish swimming the ocean, most of us are scarcely conscious of its atmospheric presence or its effect on us. I've heard plenty of people complain bitterly after having struggled through the assembly of some consumer item labeled, "some assembly required." Right there is an example of what happens when an item and/or its instructions are NOT well designed. With well-designed objects and instructions, you're likely to finish with the comment, "well, that was fun," possibly never realizing that the work of some designer eased your way through the process.

If the subject of graphic design interests you, I recommend having a look at Edward Tufte's books, or watch the documentary film, Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. Glaser is a well known graphic designer from New York, who was responsible for the "I [heart] NY" graphic, and by extension, the "I [heart] . . . [whatever you can imagine], visible everywhere. Glaser, incidentally, claims that he made not a cent off the design of this graphic. The film about him provides an outline of what the finest graphic design is all about and might awaken you to a new appreciation for ways in which we're influenced by it.

Kevin Jones

Contrast: A Look at Silence

2011-03-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

I know, I've written quite a few entries here on the subject of noise, but I've neglected to comment on its opposite, so please indulge me in one more reading suggestion:

In Pursuit of Silence, Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise , by George Prochnik

This book comes at the noise problem from a different and useful direction, namely by defining noise as any sound that keeps us from hearing what we want to hear, whether it's the voice of the person sitting across the table from us, the birds singing in the spring, or the silence of our own thoughts. Then it explores the sounds and silences beneath the noise, what they mean and why they are important.

Prochnik pays considerable attention to silence, but also takes an interesting look at the meaning behind purposeful noise. He includes a chapter of interviews with "boom car" devotees; you know, those people who soup up car stereos so you can hear them a block away. There's a cadre of serious boomers who push beyond the 160 decibel noise level, loud enough to blow the windshield out of a car. He also covers another favorite noise-maker, Harley motorcycles, with their copyrighted resonance and what's behind that. Purposeful noise is a means by which disempowered people make their presence felt.

To me the most interesting and important part of the book deals with the subject of silence and its spiritual implications. In fact the book focuses on the lives of monks, meditation, and the idea of "quiet mind," which Prochnik suggests is essential to the creative process. Without the respite of silence we lose track of the very depths of our being, which, in a culture as awash in noise as ours, it appears to be just what many of us want to do.

Prochnik mentions research implicating excess noise in cardiovascular problems and as a possible causative factor in autism. It seems that young children brought up in very loud environments take longer than normal to process speech, which is an important aspect of this disorder.

The book ultimately makes the point that efforts have been made for years, even centuries, to address the noise plague. But as one source is eliminated, others have a way of popping up like the marching broom fragments that threatened to inundate the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Rather than campaigning against noisemakers, it turns out to be more useful to educate ourselves about the importance of those sounds and silences we do want to hear. If enough of us come to recognize them, then there's hope that the noise may fall by the wayside of its own accord.

Kevin Jones

Sound Recommendations

2011-03-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

I imagine most visitors to this blog have spent at least a little time looking at webcams around the world. There are thousands of them these days, pointed at everything from beautiful ocean or mountain scenes, to private dressing rooms. It can be fun to explore these cameras when one has the urge to vicariously visit exotic spots. Unfortunately, the one thing that all of the ones I've visited lack is the added dimension of sound.

As you may have gathered from reading my previous postings on the subject, sound has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. I spent the year before Mindport opened building what has become our WaveMusic exhibit, which creates music from the movement of water waves. During that period I also occupied myself recording local ambient sounds, then computer processing them in various ways. This all served to increase my awareness of the power of sound to affect our lives in both positively and negatively.

From time to time I search the web for sources of live "streaming" audio, and I don't mean podcasts or other sources of "canned" audio files, of which there are overwhelmingly many. What interest me is ambient local sound, preferably nature sounds, though almost any would interest me. Considering the fact that sound can be far more emotionally evocative than pictures, it surprises me that there aren't as many live ambient audio sites as there are webcams. . . or at least webcams that broadcast accompanying sound.

It's this evocative power of sound which has sent me on a quest for audio Internet sites, and has inspired me to collect quite a library of ambient sound CDs, featuring mostly nature sounds from various places around the United States and the world. When I want to escape some of the less pleasant sounds that afflict the neighborhood where I live, such as car traffic, chain saws, lawn mowers, aircrart, etc, I put one of these CDs in my player, don my sound-canceling headphones, and travel. . .

During a recent unsuccessful search on the web for live ambient sound, I did come across a wonderful site that was new to me, and which I recommend you visit if you find the subject of sound and "soundscapes" at all interesting. This site is maintained by the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriot Library, and it includes a large selection of animal sounds, ambient natural sounds, and several interviews, many of them downloadable for private use. I found some great recordings, captured in the Canyons of SE Utah, an area where I've spent extended periods hiking and camping over the last 40 years. Listening to these recordings puts me back there in imagination more surely than do the many photographs I've taken during my visits.

In closing, let me recommend the book that originally sparked my interest in sound: R. Murray Schafer's, The Tuning of the World. Schafer is a Canadian author and composer who has written a number of books on the subject of music education, music and sound, any of which is worth a read. He's developed techniques for what he calls "ear cleaning," a process of cultivating one's awareness of sound and exploring the effect it has on our lives and consciousness. Such exercises can help you become aware of ways in which various "soundscapes" may be affecting you adversely without your knowledge, but more important, can be a great source of relaxation and pleasure.

Oh, and if you run across any live streaming "web-ears," please drop me a note and let me know. You'll find my e-mail address on my personal staff page at www.mindport.org.

Kevin Jones

Exhibit updates: Sonoluce, Theremin and Rhythmo

2011-03-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

Remember Sonoluce, with the spinning lights dancing to music? Through a chain of associations, it occurred to me that if I added a theremin to the input of Sonoluce, then visitors could control the light patterns directly by moving their bodies.

In case you're not acquainted with the theremin, it's a musical instrument that was invented by a Russian, Leon Theremin, in the 1920s. It's played by spatial movements of the hands; the left hand controlling loudness and the right hand controlling pitch. The first models were made with vacuum tubes, since that's all that was available during that distant dawn of electronic technology. Note that vintage vacuum tube theremins are now valuable collector's items, and some people go to great lengths, even today, to create replicas of the originals. They produce a beautiful tone quality that modern theremins are hard put to emulate.

I toyed with the idea of building a vacuum tube replica of the original theremin, but decided that the time it would take to build one, plus its maintenance demands, would make the project impractical. So I bought a kit theremin, designed by Bob Moog, the inventor of the Moog Synthesizer. It works very well and produces quite a satisfactory tone quality. . . and it only took a couple days to assemble.

Currently I'm building a junction box for the theremin that includes a headphone and speaker amplifier, since this model does not include one. The instrument will be mounted on a swinging arm near Sonoluce, so it can be used either in conjunction with that exhibit, or swung out of the way and used on its own. The junction box/amplifier is still in progress, but should be done before long. We'll post a note here to let you know when everything is together and working.

~~~~

In other exhibit news, visitors have been asking the whereabouts of Rhythmo. She's been off the floor some time for a revamp. We'd been having trouble with the turntable sticking, due to warping of the masonite from which it's fabricated. Also, the plating was wearing off the magnets, graying the scale markings and making them difficult to read. We've replaced the masonite with an aluminum disk, which Bill Lee has painstakingly drilled and re-fitted to the bicycle hub that serves as a bearing. We're hoping to have that project finished in the next couple weeks. We'll let you know when it's ready again for public view.

Kevin Jones

Organ

2011-02-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

The pipe organ I've been working on for a year is finally installed in Mindport's gallery. Like many people who have built organs, I'm not an accomplished keyboard player, so it's really a treat when someone with the requisite musical skill comes in and plays for us, as has happened a time or two now.

If you're interested in a more in-depth account of the organ's construction, please follow this link. You'll need to download Adobe Reader software to access it if you don't have it installed on your machine already.

Kevin Jones

The Inner Life of Cats

2011-02-08T15:31:00.000-08:00

This is the part of Lenny's life that ISN'T inner. His exterior carcass is hogging my chair. Some nights there's a cat on BOTH of our favorite chairs. Why do we put up with this? Well, my theory is that we keep cats around to remind us how we should be living ourselves. I probably haven't slept with such reckless abandon since I was four, but at least now I can remember what it must have been like.

The Inner Life of Cats, a Valentine's Day exhibition depicting six years of life with our feline friends, Lenny and Madeleine, goes up in Mindport's Gallery this week. Come and vicariously enjoy the good life.

Kevin Jones

In the Gallery: Recommended Reading Links

2011-01-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

I found quite a few interesting articles about letter writing, the postal service, and on-line forms of communication in the process of putting together the mail show currently at Mindport. All the articles are available to be read here at MP, but I recognize that all that reading usually takes more time than most visitors have during a trip to the museum. Here are the links, so you can read as you will!

Please, Mr. Postman: Reclaiming the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Elizabeth Ryan

On Practice: Letter to Holly from Cougar Ridge by Brenda Miller

Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz

Pushing the Envelope by David Henkin

Three Ways to Disconnect from the Internet and Engage the Present by Jeff Severns Guntzel

A Family, a Nation in 200 Years of Letters by Kirk Johnson

Eight or Nine Words About Letter Writing by Lewis Carroll

In the Gallery

2011-01-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

The mail show is up! Write On: Going Postal in the Age of E-mail is on display through February 6. Come enjoy this varied collection of mail – old and new – and send some of your own.

Envelopes and postcards by Pamela Gerard, Kelly Pocci, Fane Jones, Kevin Jones

For more information about the show, check out this interview in the Bellingham Herald, or this article in the Cascadia Weekly. If you're local, the latest copy of "What's Up" magazine also features a great piece by Marie Biondililo.

Nipper Prints out his Wish List

2010-12-23T20:00:00.000-08:00

“Nipper,” the RCA Victor dog, now visiting in Mindport's gallery window, was one of the most famous advertising icons of the early 20th century. Nipper (1884-1895), born in England, served as the model for a painting by Francis Barraud titled His Late Master’s Voice (1898)

This image was based on an earlier photo of Nipper looking into and puzzling over the sounds coming from a phonograph.

We thank the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, right around the corner from Mindport, at 1312 Bay Street, for their gracious loan of this historic figure to grace our window. Be sure to drop by and visit them.

Looking Up

2010-12-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

Winter in the Northwest is traditionally a time of clouds. Like bird watchers in the summer, we cloud watchers find our heyday during the season of storms and atmospheric ferment. In these days of economic disaster what better strategy for forgetting earthbound cares than to gaze toward the skies?

When I was in my Junior year of college, I was still undecided what I wanted to study. For a bit, I considered meteorology. After all, it's a field in which my father had been trained, and growing up under his tutelage I was kept informed of the collision of the fronts, the moist breath of the fog, the tower of the cumulus and the feathery loft of the cirrus. Nowadays my wife and I joke about the "upper level low-lying stratus deck." I never pursued meteorology academically, as it turned out. I quickly discovered it was all math, a subject for which I'd never been enthusiastic. Math, after all, is only an artificial, secondary expression of the poetic forms expressed by the clouds. That's where the magic is for me.

So I became a cloud watcher and a cloud photographer. I know a little about the physics of weather and, from that perspective, why some clouds look the way they do. But I also believe cloud forms relate directly to emotion, that the flow and turbulence of the atmosphere parallel the flow and turbulence of water and furthermore, to patterns of mental process within our own psyche. After all, we are, in large part, fluid. Our physical motion is constrained by the same forces that move and constrain the atmospheric gasses and the motions of flowing water. In the clouds we see dance. The experience of motion, modified by the forces of momentum, inertia and gravity lay the grounding structure in our consciousness for the later arrival of verbal language and thought. Consider also that from the earliest days of human existence, our survival must often have depended on an evolved intuitive ability to read the message written in the clouds.

In our culture, we speak derogatorily of someone whose "head is in the clouds." But angels sit on clouds, so why would we think less of someone whose head occupies the domain of the angels?

Kevin Jones

"A Book About Noise"

2010-11-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

I've just finished another book dealing with one of my pet gripes, noise: The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, by Garret Keiser. It approaches the subject from a perspective that has barely been touched upon by other books dealing with it, namely its social and economic implications. To me, Keiser's most important point is that there's a direct relationship between the amount of noise we encounter and economic inequality. He asserts that an egalitarian culture is a quiet culture, and vice-versa, an idea that I find intriguing because it leads my thinking on the subject of noise into a whole new realm.

Keiser points out a paradox, namely that anyone who objects to noise is often characterized as a crank, yet there's a premium associated with living in a quiet place. Which is to say, property values decline in the vicinity of airports, race car tracks, and freeways. Read the classified real estate ads and notice how often a home's location in a "quiet neighborhood" is included as an important selling point. The implication of this paradox is that those who are most subject to noise are the most powerless. If you're poor, good luck at getting anyone to respond to your complaints about excess noise.

The word "noise" is itself open to interpretation. As Keiser notes, the general definition of noise is the sounds you don't want to hear. On Lummi Island, where I live, the sound of breezes stirring the leaves on a summer day is a sweet sound. On the other hand, the constant dull roar of a winter nor'easter becomes a maddening noise in quick order. Being a water lover and a boat person, the sound of loud boats bothers me less than the continuous passage of propeller-driven aircraft overhead. The airplanes are an irritation, whereas the boats stir my nostalgia. They usually are not nearly as loud as the aircraft, either.

Keiser devotes a chapter to the subject of a Harley rally that he attended in the town of Sturgis, South Dakota. He said one thing that surprised him was the high level of politeness he observed amongst the riders present. One of them saw him standing by the street edge, actually stopped, and yelled over the roar of his vehicle, "Would you like to cross the street."

The beauty of the beast

Later in the book Keiser defines "silliness" as knowing perfectly well that something you're doing is wrong, or doesn't make sense, but you do it anyway. He uses the noise of the aforementioned motorcycle rally as an example. As I interpret his view, politeness of the crowd there can be understood as a compensatory act to distract from behavior that in most circles is unacceptable . Which is to say, you offend everyone within 100 yards with your racket, then act super polite. . . or raise money for charitable causes, as Harley clubs have been known to do, in order to defuse anyone's annoyance at your obvious transgression of normal standards of social consideration.

An example of this "silliness" from my own life similarly concerns the intrusive racket of loud motorcycles roaring up the hill next to my house. One day I observed a neighbor of mine mounting his "rig," and plugging earplugs into his ears before donning his cycle helmet. (This is an otherwise considerate, pleasant and public-spirited guy) I wanted to ask him, but didn't, "If you need ear plugs to handle the roar of the vehicle you're riding, why would you think your neighbors would enjoy it as you pass by? He knows that noise is annoying, can damage his hearing, or raise his (and your) blood pressure, and he knows it well enough to bother protecting himself, yet does not offer the same consideration to his neighbors. This, if I understand Keiser's view correctly, is "silliness," paralleling accusations mothers make of their kids when they do thoughtless things.

In case I've offended any motorcycle buffs, let me add that my driver's license carries a motorcycle endorsement, and I have nothing whatever against motorcycles in general or Harleys in particular, other than when their racket intrudes on my property and peace.

Absorbing Keiser's book took concentration on my part because he arrives at his conclusions by sometimes circuitous reasoning interjected at unexpected times with humorous asides. These would catch me off guard so that I needed to stop and think about whether that was a subtle dig or a straight statement. He's someone who obviously hates noise but is attempting to be fair and objective about it. (Personally, I don't even want to be fair, I want them to shut up!) But, it's a rewarding read, especially if you're a noise "crank." It opened my mind to aspects of the subject that heretofore have only lurked on the wings of my musings. If noise is an issue in your life, or you'd just enjoy a new perspective on it, give this book a try.

Kevin Jones

The Island Quilters

2010-11-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

The latest work of The Island Quilters opens tonight in Mindport's gallery and runs until December 31th. These three women from Lummi Island have been meeting together to share ideas and humor since 2004. Their last show in Mindport's gallery, in 2006, was great success and we're most happy to have our space graced once again by the cheering colors of their newest efforts.

What We're Reading Now

2010-10-28T15:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes books come along that, like a wise, sympathetic, and inspiring friend, let you know you are not alone in your beliefs, preferences, or habits. Open the cover, read a few lines, and suddenly you’re part of a collective rather than being a loner. Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler’s book Good Mail Day: A Primer for Making Eye-Popping Postal Art has been the most recent of my “good friend” books.*

More than a year ago, frustrated with the mass audience of facebook, I tried to renew letter-writing relationships with far flung friends and family. It was slow going, and I began to wonder if a need to send and receive letters was just another strange quirk, like not liking the feel of wood decking on bare feet, or believing there is such a thing as “too sweet.” However, just as I was waning in my commitment to the post, Good Mail Day appeared to cheer me on and reassure me that a small, dedicated, and sane (or at least not any weirder than anyone else) group of people still communicate through the mail.

Good Mail Day has kept me writing to friends (new and old) and family, and it’s also inspired me to start making mail art.** My husband says he’s noticed that I am cheerier and more focused since I decided to keep the computer screen dark at night and turn my attention to pen, paper, scissors, glue, and stamps. So here's to the authors, my pen pals, and the USPS.

Envelopes/postcards (clockwise from upper left) by: Carolee W. of SF, Kevin J. of Lummi Island, Pamela G. of SF (center and lower right), Stephanie B. of NYC, and Bryan K. of Long Beach

*Other fairly recent books on the “good friend” list include The Introvert Advantage: How to Survive in an Extroverted World by Marti Olson Laney and Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do.

**Mail art is a decades-long tradition comprised of an interesting and egalitarian network of folks sending art through the mail.

-T. Jones

Organ Progress

2010-10-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the organ set up on sawhorses in my shop at home, where I construct most of my exhibits for Mindport. The cover is off the keyboard console and in the process of being varnished. On the floor, just to the right of the organ is the blower box, which includes an air pressure regulator. This keeps the pressure to the pipes more or less constant no matter how many keys are pressed. On top of the box is an air filter (the round black thing) to keep dust and debris out of the organ's valves and pipes. That black hose going into the right side of the keyboard console is the main air hose, bringing air from the blower/regulator to the "wind chest" where all the key valves reside. The smaller hoses from the valves are now all connected to the pipes, which I've temporarily tuned up. A couple valves had to be revamped because they leaked, but everything seems to work OK now, and I've even been hacking out a few tunes with my very inadequate keyboard skills.

Next job is to install set screws on the tuning slides at the top of the pipes so they can be locked in position once they're set to the correct pitch. At the moment, the slides are held in position with tape. Installing the set screws involves drilling holes in the slides, tapping them, and screwing in set screws with locking nuts. This job that will be done concurrently with applying oil finish to the pipes, which all will take a couple days. The final task is to design and construct a table to hold The pipes and the keyboard console. Then the organ will be ready for its public debut.

Kevin Jones

The Waste Stream

2010-10-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

In Cairo, Egypt, an under-recognized group called the Zaballeen have been responsible over the last hundred years or more for the city's garbage collection. Not only do they collect from door to door, but they recycle 80 percent of the garbage they process, recapturing materials such a plastic, fiber, and metals to be sold within their own country and exported to Europe.

The lives of this remarkable group are explored in a documentary film by Mai Iskander, called Garbage Dreams. In watching it, I marveled at the creativity and ingenuity of these people, who live under marginal conditions in a slum area of Cairo. They've set up a safe recycling school for their youngsters and even sent a couple of them to study the recycling industry in Wales, where, as it happens, only 27 per cent of the refuse collected is actually recycled. The country is striving to raise the percentage another ten per cent in the future. If so, they'll still be far behind to 80 per cent claimed by the Zaballeen, who manage it with human labor and extremely primitive equipment.

The down side of the Zaballeen's story is the fact that they're considered to be what might be known as in India as "untouchables." They tend to be shunned and their essential contribution to society has been locally ignored. Consequently, the powers-that-be in Cairo, anxious for the city to be viewed as "world class," have contracted with foreign-based companies to collect the city's refuse. No effort is apparently made by these companies to recycle. Instead, the trash is buried in a desert landfill.

The film set me thinking about the generally low status accorded to those who deal with our trash and our sewage, despite both functions being essential to our comfortable survival. I speculate that this is due to the fact that in a consumption-based culture, we can't afford to notice either where our plenty comes from, or where it goes when we're done with it. To blindly consume without fear of guilt or consequence, we must believe that it magically appears on our store shelves, then just as quickly evaporates into thin air once we've used it up or grown tired of it.

I urge you to see this film. It's reviewed on Netflix, but not currently available there. For readers local to this area, you can find it across the street from Mindport at Film-is-Truth.

Kevin Jones

The Invasion of the Mindsnatchers

2010-09-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book that gives voice to many of my own misgivings about computers and the Internet: The Shallows- What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan warned us that "The Medium is the Message," which is to say that the media we use to express ourselves carry their own strong message, of which we may not be conscious. In other words, the means by which the communication is presented affects what we're able to be aware of and how we think. Carr argues that despite the access the Internet gives us to information, it may not be making us smarter, and it likely is having a deleterious affect on our ability to think clearly or deeply, and even to read.

Periodically my own preoccupation with the subject of computers, the Internet, and their effects on us inspires yet another rant on that subject. Carr's book confirms much of what I've noticed myself in my daily wandering on the web, namely how it fosters a condition that I term "infoblitz," a consequence of the flood of information, much of it that we don't even want, that assaults us any time we visit almost any website. As such web composition tools as Javascript become more sophisticated, so do the assaults. Have you encountered those ads that pop up right in the middle of the text you're reading and then follow you down the page until you either click on them or manually close them? It's no wonder that our ability to think coherently is suffering.

I notice now that practically every commercial website I visit carries the message, "Follow us on Facebook or Twitter." My reaction is, why would I want to follow you? If I need something you sell, then I'll visit your site and buy it. I've categorically rebelled against Facebook, Twitter, and even Flickr. There was a time when I was quite active on Fotolog.com, which was (and presumably still is) a kind of photographic social networking site. Eventually it was taken over by teenagers from Brazil. At that point, I vacated to Flickr, which seemed to be the favored site of more serious photographers. But my interest has lagged. One reason for this is that the nature of the Internet medium dictates to a large degree what sort of pictures do well when posted on Flickr's pages. I find my eye being attracted to what know will be noticed, then neglecting everything else. This is how the "message of the medium" asserts itself.

Flickr is a more complex site than was Fotolog, with many more social options. Increasingly, I'm finding that I just can't be bothered to indulge in the social networking aspect of the site. there are too many options. Exercising them all can come to rule your life. I'd rather spend my time building exhibits for Mindport, reading, writing, or even watching movies. This has become my reaction to the Internet in general. My interest in "Doomer" sites, concerned with economic and societal collapse is waning, not because I don't believe we're in deep trouble, but because I question whether there's any point in being preoccupied with it. I have enough information on that subject, thank you all the same. Yes, I still glance at the headlines, but the advertising and an infinite number of other annoyances associated with computers and the web have become so overwhelming that the rewards have diminished to nearly zero.

One of the effects of the Internet medium that Carr discusses in his book is its tendency not only to truncate our reading, but to actually diminish our ability to concentrate on long passages. He cites research indicating that visits to any particular page on the web run to less than a minute, and often only a few seconds. Data about this blog from Sitemeter bear that out. In fact, you probably haven't even read this far, so why do I even bother to carry on? Well, because I write these entries more to discover what I'm thinking, than for any other reason. If I were writing according to what the experts have determined is the best style for the Web, I wouldn't be writing at all.

Just now, a window pops up telling me that Mindport has one new message from an electronics supplier. It pops up right on top of where the cursor rests, interrupting my writing and my flow of thought . I can't get the window to close. Is it any wonder that I increasingly dream of the day when I can abandon computers altogether and live a normal life like I did twenty years ago? As it stands, I reverted to writing in my personal journal with pen on paper. For some time, I attempted my journal writing via computer, thinking how it would simplify life when I wanted to search for the date of some detail in the past. But I abandoned it, and not on principle, but because I found manual writing a more satisfactory way to keep a journal than was keyboarding. It's such a pleasure to be able to alternately mull and scribble with no message popping up telling me the battery is getting low, or that Microsoft wants to download its one-hundredth update to Windows XP, or that the word-processing program with which I'm writing wants me to upgrade to a new version that will probably require me to learn all over how to use it.

Kevin Jones

Can you hear me now?

2010-08-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

Drop by our gallery window and view AnMorgan Curry's latest work, this time on the subject of the cell phone revolution. Have you ever noticed how cell phones perfectly resemble the ideal skipping stone?

Photography as Meditation

2010-08-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

What IS meditation, anyway? It's a term bandied about, applied to many areas of endeavor, but, aside from specific forms, such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) it's a term that has a way of floating around and lighting on seemingly unrelated things like a wilting helium balloon.

I've practiced a couple formally-taught types of meditation myself. Such formal practices don't pin down all the mental processes to which the term might be applied. Upon contemplating the idea, I think a good blanket way of defining meditation is simply that it's a process of mindfully paying attention. By mindful, I mean learning to consciously note where your mind is going. The Buddhists speak of "monkey mind," which refers to the way that the mind has a way of drifting off in all directions, hardly controllable at all. Some forms of meditation involve noticing when the mind has drifted off, then pulling it back to focus on one thing, which can be an internally-repeated sound (mantra), on body sensations, or on something in the visual field, such as a candle flame.

For many years I've enjoyed the practice of photography. I refer to it here both as practice, in the sense of simply doing it, but also in the sense of meditative practice, which is doing photography while paying conscious attention to where it takes me and where I take it.

There was a time when I considered the possibility of a career as a professional photographer. From present perspective, I feel very fortunate not to have taken that path, because it's left me free to photograph whatever I want or not to photograph at all if I'm not moved to do so. It's been interesting to notice where photography has taken me over the nearly sixty years that I've been shooting photos.

Having just written that phrase "shooting photos" brings me to an area of photographic awareness that only came to consciousness for me within the last two years. Somewhere on the web I encountered an essay about photography in which the writer pointed out that we use many terms of aggression when we describe the process of recording photos. We take, shoot, capture, grab, catch, snap, or steal, photos, to name a few examples. Ads in photo magazines often picture photographers using cameras with long, phallic-looking telephoto lenses, or they represent photographic subject matter with images that emphasize the giant staring-eye quality of a camera lens.

The essay set me to thinking about my own relationship to photography. Never having been forced by professional necessity to photograph anything in particular, or to photograph at all, I realized that most of the time photos actually capture me. I'll be walking along and the subject of a photo kinda clicks into view, which sends me reaching for my camera. At times I'll actively stalk photos, but even in that case, it involves walking around with camera in hand and no specific ideas, waiting to be grabbed by something.

Part of what makes photography a meditative pursuit for me is that it encourages me to pay attention to what grabs me.

Approaching the meditative aspect of photography from another direction, I believe it's useful to discuss what I view as the most important aspects of shooting arresting images. Or maybe it would be better to say, the most important qualities of mind and vision to cultivate in order to be arrested by scenes that capture attention.

Years ago I took a couple quarters of photography courses at the University of Colorado. My teacher, Charles Roitz used to talk about photos with a quality of "otherness." It took me years before I began to understand what that meant.

In practicing meditative photography I gradually learned two important and mutually allied skills, which extend to many other areas of life beside photography. One is learning to see the whole frame at once, and the second is learning to stop naming things.

Conventionally, when we "shoot" photos, the tendency is to take a picture of something, some named object: "Here's a picture of my car, my mother, my house, the rose in the garden," etc. We frame things, i.e. pick a named thing, put a frame around it, and call it a rose. The truth is, a photo is a pattern of color, light, and dark on a piece of paper. In a picture of a rose, there's a rose, then there's all the things around the rose, including the things that are outside the frame. If you stop naming the rose, see it as a blob of color and pattern, and let it fit into all the color and pattern around it, the subject of the image may become something other and quite possibly more interesting than what you expect. You might not even be able to name it because it's a feeling quality or something completely inexpressible, except as its own expression.

Similarly, in ordinary life we often trip ourselves up by naming something, stuffing it into a box, mentally speaking, then not noticing how it fits the big picture of all the things going on around it. To give an example, which happens to be uppermost in my mind in these times of economic disaster, a tendency in our culture has been to focus on the "bottom line" to the exclusion of all else. We've generally come to judge transactions by whether or not they make a profit for someone, with no consideration as to the effect the transaction has on the people involved or anyone else in proximity. It's a destructive and limiting way of living.

Hence, I assert that photography, practiced mindfully, can teach us many important lessons about ourselves and life, perhaps one of the most important being to become more sensitive to where our own feelings and interests carry us, rather than allowing ourselves to be seduced by ideas of what may currently be "cool" or acceptable.

Suggested reading: The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing by Philippe L. Gross and S.I. Shapiro
For more photos see my Flickr site

Kevin Jones

Information Overload

2010-08-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

There's a useful editorial by Mark Morford on the SFGate website this morning, discussing a subject I've thought a great deal about lately, namely information overload. Morford comes at the subject from a particular direction, upon which he pins the acronym "FOMO," or Fear of Missing Out. By coincidence, John Michael Greer, on his Archdruid Report website (July 28, 2010 entry) touched on the same subject with a discussion about what information IS. He quotes Gregory Bateson thus: information is "a difference that makes a difference."

In contemplating the subject of information myself, I came up with the following definition: "Information is guidance." The hidden implication of that definition is that floods of information are useless unless they inform something, i.e. you gotta have an idea about where you're going in order for information to be of any use to you. If you're prone to randomly surfing the web, eyes glazed, sliding down breaking waves of raw data, chances are you'll find something that catches your eye here and there, and you'll while away hours tripping through a maze of links leading to who-knows-where. Before you know it, it's dinnertime, you're exhausted by the flood, and, after dinner can hardly muster the energy to watch a movie, much less to spend a couple hours reading a book.

Twitter and Facebook are probably the worst tweakers of Morford's FOMO syndrome. Has anyone organized Facebooker's Anonymous yet? From all I read, it seems like a ripe time for it. Nearly every business site I visit sports a logo somewhere: "Follow us on Facebook." "Follow us on Twitter." Thanks, but why should I want to? What will I be missing if I don't bother?

For a short time Mindport appeared on Facebook. We shut down our Facebook page after a few weeks because nobody wanted to keep thinking up trivial new nothings to post on it. As it stands, our blog postings demand a couple hours of thought and energy from one of us every week or two. I figure, if you're going to post something, it might as well be something that you put enough energy into to make it worth your reader's time.

Once I'd defined information as guidance, it clarified my relationship to the Web and alleviated the problem of information overload. You can surf the web out of boredom, looking for diversion. It can provide that for hours at a time, but what are you left with when you're done? Mostly fatigue. On the other hand, if you go at it with the idea in mind that information is guidance, then ask yourself the obvious question is, "guidance for what?" Or if you ask, "where do I want to be guided?" it lends focus to one's relationship with the Internet. In other words, in order not to become a victim of info-blitz, it's helpful to approach the Web with filters in place, with intention in mind. For me, the process of determining a direction is best accomplished off-line, by paying mindful attention to my own internal workings. That leads to approaching the web in a similar spirit, with a focus on my own center rather than indulging in a diffuse tumble, eyes glazed, over undifferentiated waves of data.

Kevin Jones

A Plea for Silence

2010-07-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two weeks since the Fourth of July holiday, yet loud explosions still rent the silence every evening, echoing across the mile of water between my home on Lummi Island and the Lummi Indian Reservation to the northeast of us. During the day, especially on weekends, motorcycles, some seeming not to be fitted with mufflers at all, roar up and down the hill in front of my house. Other times, I'm treated to a constant background symphony of chain saws, weed eaters, lawn mowers, aircraft, and passing cars broadcasting booming bass notes from their open windows, sometimes audible from a half-mile away.

Why should I care? It's because I don't have earlids. The racket comes through whether I want to hear it or not. In an era obsessed with "property rights," I seem not to be permitted to enjoy the natural sounds emitted by the creatures on my property, the sounds of waves washing over the beach below my house, or even a conversation in my back yard, without interference from other people's noise.

When I was a kid my mother used to comment that so-and-so was making so much noise she couldn't hear herself think. Some might argue that this is just a figure of speech. . . but is it really? Maybe there's something to the idea that our thought processes cannot go on properly when interrupted by a constant cacophony of racket. Studies have proven that noise has a deleterious effect on our immune systems, on blood pressure, and generally increases our stress level. And this is true whether we're conscious of the noise or not. Our bodies react negatively to noise even when we're asleep.

Gordon Hempton, a well-known professional sound recordist who makes his home on the Olympic Peninsula, has written a book, in company with co-author John Grossman, on the subject of noise, or rather silence, which I heartily recommend to your attention: One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet. Hempton advocates preserving silence at a special spot within the Olympic National Park, the implication being that it will effectively control sound over a large surrounding area. The book is mostly an account of Hempton's pilgrimage in a VW van to Washington D.C. to meet with various government officials in order to convince them that the preservation of silence in at least one place in the United States is a worthwhile goal.

For me, the most interesting part of Hempton's book is the record of his progress across the U.S., with camping stops at a number of places I've visited myself, the most notable being the Red Rock country of Southeastern Utah. When I first visited there forty years ago, it was a quiet place indeed, probably one of the quietest places I'd ever visited. Nowadays the silence there is shattered by off-road vehicles, tourist fly-overs, and high altitude passages of jet aircraft. Hempton's comments about the impact of excess noise on these places is highly vindicating to me. Sometimes the campaign against noise has seemed like a lonely one, and it's good to know that there are others who fight this battle as well.

Hempton does a far more thorough job of making the case for silence in his book than I'm able to in this short blog entry. But I do encourage you to pay more attention to the sounds around you and the sort of impact they make on your consciousness. It's been my experience that anyone who objects to noise tends to be branded as a crank. The ability to endure noise without complaint seems to be a badge of manliness for some, to the point that I've become reluctant to object to rackets any longer, since it frequently has little or no effect, and usually creates more tension than it alleviates. My solution is to retreat behind a high-quality pair of noise-canceling headphones and listen to the nature recordings of Gordon Hempton and other sound recordists, many of whom can be discovered by searching for "Nature Sounds" on such sources as Amazon.com.

Outside of Gordon Hempton, one source of such sounds I especially recommend is Listening Earth - the website of Andrew Skeoch, sound recordist and Sara Koschak, photographer. They specialize in the sounds of the Australian bush, and other recordings made on their world travels. I recommend them because they document their work beautifully with both text and Koschak's fine photography. Also, they maintain a blog, complete with sound samples, which allows you to vicariously accompany them on their travels.

Check on my book list for references to "sound" for more suggested reading on the subject.

Kevin Jones

Big Problem

2010-07-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

AnMorgan Curry

Contemplating the Exploratorium

2010-06-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

I've been reading K.C. Cole's, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up. Oppenheimer was the founder of the Exploratorium, a San Francisco institution devoted to the exhibition of art and science. The book makes for absorbing reading, both because I admire the Exploratorium and because I met Frank Oppenheimer a couple times, mostly through having been friends with his son, Michael for over 40 years. (Michael contributed our "LightWriter" exhibit.)

In my introduction to Mindport on the home page of our website, I mention the Exploratorium as having been one inspiration for Mindport. In reading Cole's book, I was intrigued to discover that some of Frank's stated intentions when he started the Exploratorium were startlingly similar to many of the ideas that we discussed when Joe Edwards, Robin Burnett (both since moved on to greener pastures), and I were forming the nascent Mindport in 1995. On one hand, I regret that I never had much conversation with Frank, but on the other, maybe it's well that I didn't, because he was a powerful personality and his influence might have derailed me from my own direction.

Michael Oppenheimer and I met in mid-60s, the two of us then employed as technicians at the University of Colorado, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). He and I have done a great deal of talking about our childhood experiences, museums and education. He has worked for the Exploratorium and for a number of exploration-style museums in various parts of the country. Our mutual experience in this area over the years has provided endless material for discussion, and has no doubt had its influence on Mindport.

Ultimately, reading Cole's book led me to a re-examination of Mindport, born of very similar intentions to those which led to the Exploratorium. It interested me that the two organizations have evolved into radically different sorts of places, and I found myself once again curiously contemplating what Mindport has become, how we got here, where we might go in the future. . . and why.

One important factor that brought about the divergence of Mindport's evolution from that of the Exploratorium is the matter of scale. The Exploratorium's floor space is something on the order of 100,000 square feet, as compared to about 2500 here at Mindport. Our budget is correspondingly smaller, and our staff of eight is a mere fraction of the number or people (over 300) involved in the operation of the Exploratorium. Now and then, someone advocates the expansion of Mindport. My response is that I have no desire for Mindport to become bigger, that a staff of eight is about the largest size that can maintain truly personal relationships amongst themselves. This "small is beautiful" philosophy is crucially responsible for the congenial flavor of Mindport's public persona.

I haven't visited the Exploratorium for many years, but Cole's book confirms my impression that it's become increasingly focused on demonstrating particular scientific principles and exploring the science behind human aesthetic sense. It certainly seemed that way the last time I visited, which was about ten years ago. At Mindport, we've de-emphasized science instruction, per se, mostly because we find exploring WHY art affects us less interesting personally than the emotions and ideas good art actually succeeds in communicating. Personally, I don't care to analyse the mechanics excessively because it defuses the magic of the expression.

The Exploratorium is a huge and busy hall, situated in the hanger-like Palace of Fine Arts. While we both share in common that we characterize ourselves specifically as a place for all ages, at Mindport we take much different attitudes toward young visitors. Frank Oppenheimer believed children should be allowed absolutely free reign. If they broke things, his attitude was that it was the staff's job to fix them and make them stronger. Whether the Exploratorium still fosters the degree of "wildness" that it once did is unknown to me. However, at Mindport we discovered very early on that youthful energy is best kept contained in our own setting. In contrast to the Exploratorium, we are a tiny place, with a relatively minuscule budget, and the damage caused by "wild" behavior stretches our ability to keep up with repairs. Hence, out of necessity, we've come to regard Mindport as a quiet retreat, radically different than the sort of large-scale, high-profile operation personified by the Exploratorium. After long experience with children, sensory-overload, and hyperactivity, we're convinced that children need structure and to be taught a degree of restraint, both for their own happiness and that of those with whom they associate. We also emphasize specifically the importance of respecting other people's creative work. The Exploratorium under Oppenheimer apparently focused more on the content of the exhibits rather than their identity as pieces of creative work by individual artists, which is probably appropriate for an organization so much larger than ours.

The Exploratorium does admirable work, and it does it for a huge number of people. Having at one time felt overshadowed by such an example, especially since it initially served as an inspiration, I've been moved to examine the factors that influenced our evolution toward such different ends. To me, the ways in which the evolution of both living things and human institutions respond to environmental factors is fascinating to examine, especially since such factors are often discounted or not noticed at all.

As for the future, we're considering taking a more active role in education, much as the Exploratorium has all along. But our educational focus will necessarily be different, oriented toward a contemplative and holistic view of reality, rather than paying attention mostly to scientific disciplines. We're still discussing what specific form this program will take. Check the blog later on for further updates on this subject.

Kevin Jones

Old Mail

2010-06-11T17:07:00.000-07:00

A postcard written by M.L. and mailed to Mr. Richard Metzger, postmarked September 24th, 6:30 pm, 1908. M.L. hopes that Mr. Metzger is "catching lots of rats and are making money" and wonders how Mr. Metzger and "Edward divide them." Hmm.

I've been thinking about correspondence - particularly letter-writing - fairly often during the last couple of years. Many of the friends with whom I used to correspond by letter have turned to e-mail, Facebook, and the phone (a triumverate I term "the dark side" in gloomier moments), and I've been puzzling out my feelings about this change in media. Why do I feel so sad that my friends don't write anymore? Why do I still prefer letters to anything else and persist in writing them? How does a letter writing relationship differ from one based on the phone or e-mail or Facebook? What does the trend away from letter writing say about current culture, and dictate how historians of the future might "read" us?

I'm hoping to explore some of these questions in an exhibit at MP in the coming months, but in the meantime, here's an interesting article on friendship and Facebook. If you have any thoughts about any of the above that you'd like to share, please comment here or send me an e-mail (tjones at mindport dot org) or letter! I'd be delighted to hear them.

Faux Friendship by William Deresiewicz.

T. Jones

Pipe Organ Progress Report

2010-05-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

A few entries ago we posted news about the pipe organ that I'm presently building in my shop at home, where I built all the exhibits I contribute to Mindport.

Things are moving forward slowly. All 32 pipes are finished and laid out on the floor, more or less in the pattern they will be finally mounted. They'll be spaced out wider than you see them here, and mounted in two tiers, since their tone is affected by anything spaced too close to them.

Presently I'm working on the keyboard. Initially I'd intended to build all the keys from scratch, but after building the first key I thought- there must be a better way. So I went searching on eBay and came up with a set of keys salvaged from an 1888 vintage Weaver Organ, made by a now-defunct company that was originally based in York, PA. The set cost me $50 and will save literally weeks of work. Well worth the investment. Here's a picture of the inscription on one of the keys:

Still, the keyboard is proving to be a challenge. Devising a mounting scheme and installing the keys requires quite a degree of precision in order to get the spacing and alignment even. To add to the challenge, the keys are not perfectly uniform, so they'll need to be fudged a bit by sanding them here and there, and bending the pins that hold them in position once they're all in place.

The keys will be mounted on top of an airtight pressurized box, the "wind chest." Inside will be 32 "flapper valves" connected by thin wires to the ends of the keys. When you press a key, it lifts a small piece of wood from atop a hole leading to a tube, through which the pressurized air then flows to the appropriate pipe. In the photo below, all the white keys are mounted and now it remains to repeat the process with the black ones.

Of course the pressure in the wind chest has to stay constant no matter how many pipes are sounding, otherwise the tones would not be consistent, since the pitch and timbre change slightly according to pressure. Hence a device is necessary to accomplish that end. The air that drives the organ will be supplied by a blower whose output is funneled into a pressure regulator consisting of a diaphragm and a valve. As the pressure in the wind chest decreases with more pipes sounding, the diaphragm actuates a valve allowing more air to be admitted from the blower to compensate.

There's quite a bit to do yet on this project. As with nearly everything I build, the job turns out to be bigger than I anticipated. I'm glad that I opted to keep this instrument of minimal size, with only 32 notes. Once I do 32 of any part I'm grateful not to face another dozen or so. Also, as the notes become lower in pitch, the pipes become so large that they require a lot of expensive maple, not to speak of becoming physically unwieldy to build in my very small workspace. As you go farther up the scale, the pipes require more and more precision in order to arrive at proper pitch. So this is an optimum range for an instrument if it's required to be of manageable size and cost.

It's probably fortunate that previous to starting such projects I keep myself in denial about what will be involved. Otherwise it I might think twice about starting at all!

Kevin Jones

In Praise of Poetry

2010-05-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

Canned Peaches for Snack; 360; Legos; My Room; Too Short a Ride; The Squid; Orange; Parking Lot; Crushed; Madre Mia; No; Short Sexy Season; Flight, and 413 others. Paper, ink. Various dimensions.

Our front window currently houses all 426 entries from this year's Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest. As I come in to work, I stop and read a few poems before heading up the stairs. It's heartening to imagine all 426 individuals taking the time to craft these small windows into a moment, a place, a feeling, a person- and then offering them to us freely.

Look for the winning poems from the 2010 contest inside WTA buses, and outside the walk leading to the library. Poetry Walk, a collection of the winning poems from the past five years, is on sale at Village Books. Proceeds help insure the longevity of the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest.

Judging for the 2011 contest will begin next March, so now's the perfect time to get writing!

Quote of the Day

2010-05-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

"This often happens in math and the sciences - problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, to create something beautiful- turn out to have an application in the real world. As weird and surprising at it may sound, origami may someday save a life."

-Robert Lang, origami pioneer

It turns out that some of the same folding technology used to create objects like this:

Robert J. Lang

...can also be used to create heart stents, airbags, and enormous telescopes.

To hear Robert Lang explain how math and engineering principles are being used to create new kinds of origami click here.

Tetrahedra* Are Us

2010-04-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

From this:

To this:

On one of his forays through Western Washington University's library, Exhibits Manager Bill Lee happened upon a series of books by Bradford Hansen-Smith. (Hansen-Smith explores folding the circle with a passion and determination I doubt is matched by many others and has created a number of texts that provide instructions for creating an array of fascinating objects.) Being a math enthusiast, Bill checked out one of Hansen-Smith's books and brought it to Mindport, leading a group folding effort that has resulted in the pyramid pictured above and a few more like it. For now, the folding continues up in the offices, but ultimately we expect to have a finished exhibit down on the floor.

If you're interested in exploring the folding of the circle before then, see Bradford Hansen-Smith's website www.wholemovement.com

*A tetrahedron is a kind of polyhedron and is one of the five Platonic solids.

Get Your Creature On

2010-04-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

Our current window features the froggy pictured above, a lovely wearable sculpture created by Mindport staff member Carol Oberton for the Bellingham Procession of the Species, a parade celebrating creativity, community, and our connection with nature.

It’s April 2, which means that Bellingham’s Seventh Annual Procession of the Species is now less than a month away.

Carol, one of the creative prompters of the Bellingham Procession from its inception in 2004, has been showing up at Mindport lately with large insect heads constructed from old plastic take-out containers, plumbing bits she’s found in the recycling bins here, and cast-off black mesh. If you’re bored with staff meetings, try having someone come with an oversized beetle head for everyone to try on. Works wonders! (Actually, we are never really bored in Mindport staff meetings – it’s the only time most of us are in the building in the same time, and we have a good time checking in with each other.)

Anyhow, Carol, who’s been both amphibious and crustaceous in the parade, and the rest of the Procession collaborators invite everyone to join in the fun. There are Procession workshops every Saturday in April to help you get ideas for and construct banners, creepy creatures, stroller beasts, heads, tails, masks, BIG puppets, and the like. The workshops are held at the Environmental Learning Center, 514 West Holly and are free and open to all. Since there are only three simple rules to follow: no motorized vehicles, no live animals, and no words written or spoken, you can really let your imagination go. Check out the Procession web site for more details: www.bpots.org.

Once you’ve got yourself ready, just line up Saturday, May 1 at 3:30 behind the library. You’ll march through the streets with your fellow creatures and wind up at the ending celebration held in Maritime Heritage Park. We’ll see you there.

The Bellingham Procession of the Species is a collaboration of the City of Bellingham Parks and Recreation Department and Start Here Community Arts.

More on "Vintage" Technology

2010-03-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

Lately we've been conducting an appreciation of the "obsolete" technologies of earlier eras. I've often noted the unfortunate fact that the "guts" of modern electronic technology are so microscopic that their physical function is no longer visible. The air-driven pipe organ mentioned in an earlier entry will provide contrast to modern electronic instruments in which micro-electronics have replaced large-scale physically functional components that tell obvious stories about how an instrument operates. My desire with that project is to call attention to the elegant simplicity of such instruments as they existed for hundreds of years previous to the modern era.

The telephone system is another technological artifact whose operating components have become invisible. Previous to our electronic era, this was not the case. The basic switching component of the phone system, before our contemporary push-button dialing appeared on the scene, was a special relay, which you can see pictured above. This device will appear in a future exhibit at Mindport. Don't hold your breath on this, however, because I still have two or three months to go before the pipe organ will be complete and ready for our growing gallery of musical instruments.

My thanks to our Exhibit Manager, Bill Lee, for chasing down this telephone relay, and a second unit of a different style that will also find its way into the new exhibit as we presently envision it.

-Kevin Jones

What's Been Happening at MP (Lately)

2010-03-12T16:01:00.000-08:00

Looking over our introduction to this blog, I realized that we promised to keep readers apprised of what’s happening at MP “right now.” In practice, this has turned out to be primarily keeping readers apprised of some of what we’re reading and thinking “right now,” so this week I’ll turn my attention to less strictly cerebral goings on. Here’s the rundown of the last week or so.

Last Friday Mindport housed “Speak Easy 3,” an evening of poetry organized and hosted by Luther Allen. Five regional poets, Susan J. Erickson, Kari Galbraith, Christine Kendall, David M. Laws, and Oliver de la Paz read selections from their work to a full – and appreciative - house. Look for “Speak Easy 4” in late spring or early summer.

The Underwood typewriter is back on the floor after receiving a resurfaced platen (otherwise known as the roller) from a company in Pennsylvania. The platen provides a backing for the type as it hits the paper. If the rubber around the platen becomes hard and brittle, then the type doesn’t hit the paper in a consistent manner, resulting in uneven print. Our free Underwood typewriter (courtesy of the alley) now has a price tag of $95 (not counting the labor hours it took to restore it), but everything typed on it looks a lot better.

Our director, Kevin, is busy building the last five of 32 organ pipes for our pipe organ exhibit. Once he’s done with the pipes, he’ll be turning his attention to creating a keyboard and windchest. He says to look for this exhibit in about three months or so. In the meantime, he’s been trying out the “Drawdio,” a clever device designed by MIT students that measures the resistance of a line of carbon as you draw and translates that resistance to sound. Unfortunately the Drawdio seems to be sensitive to humidity and has a few other quirks that make it impractical for Mindport.

Another addition to the Mindport musical menagerie should be out on the floor much sooner than the pipe organ. AnMorgan is just putting the finishing touches on a table for our new autoharp. After months of trying to restore a very, very antique -to put it kindly- autoharp, we gave up and found a newer one. I’m looking forward to having this instrument on the floor for patrons to try, although I will miss the impromptu renditions of popular songs given by Mindport staff. You really can do quite a bit with three chords and limited inhibitions.

Music must be on the brain these days. Exhibits Manager Bill Lee and Public Relations person Karen Weber have been working on finding a way to turn a single piano key mechanism that’s been hanging out here for about three years into an exhibit. So far they have a gong made out of an old mechanical back-up alarm taken off a truck, the piano key, and a claw. I have total confidence that these three pieces will make beautiful music together (har).

I think those are probably the highlights. We’re also making our usual rounds, cleaning fish tanks, trouble-shooting light fixtures, emptying the recycling, and fixing pieces of exhibits that have succumbed to slightly too vigorous declarations of affection. I’ll keep continue to keep you posted as to what’s new and exciting.

Until next time,

Tallie

The Seductive Screen

2010-03-06T21:54:00.000-08:00

I'm reading The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, by Mark Bauerlein. Oh, I can hear the screams of anguish over that title from digital age apologists. I won't argue the author's arguments here. I'd rather you read this book and decide the truth for yourself. If you're a parent it may open your eyes to a few myths prevalent in our society and cause you to question what your youngsters are doing with their time.

Even as someone who has been passionately interested in science and electronic technology from the age of seven, I've come to harbor serious doubts about the direction they're taking us. . . ( read more )

On the other hand, if you're not up for anything more than that teaser just now, please do register the following recommendation as an antidote to the message of Mark Bauerline's book: Mindport's around-the-corner neighbor, The American Museum of Radio and Electricity, offers excellent alternatives to excess screen time for people of all ages (as do we!). Check out their SPARK program and their ham radio classes . They're two possible ways to moderate the screen habit and engage technology more creatively.

-Kevin Jones

Local Students in Action

2010-02-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

Mindport was hopping earlier today! 30 students from Kulshan Middle School made the trip to Mindport as part of an economics class led by eighth grade social studies teacher Jeff Thran. The class combines in-class work and discussions with field trips to local businesses (organized by the students themselves) in an effort to enhance students' understanding of economics. We were impressed by the students' excellent questions and level of interest, and by the effort Mr. Thran has made to get students off-campus to see the local economy in action. We wish them well as they travel to other businesses and continue their studies.

Thanks too, to the parents who volunteered to drive!

Love is in the Air

2010-02-12T17:46:00.000-08:00

How is attention related to love?

Dumpster Diving: A Mindport Tradition

2010-02-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, Kevin spied an Underwood typewriter in the alley next to the trash cans. He brought it in from the rain and restored it to its former glory - or as close to that as possible given its age and experience.

The Underwood now graces the front desk, introducing younger visitors to a machine that takes physical effort to use, doesn't delete, and has only one font and one font size!

Last Wednesday morning, I was inspired to undertake a rescue mission of my own. Hauling out the garbage before racing off to work, I lifted the dumpster lid and discovered this lovely machine resting heavily on a bed of black plastic trash bags. A muddy jacket, a cut knuckle, and a few minor expletives later, I had myself - or Mindport, rather - this R.C. Allen mechanical adding machine.

What will we do with it? We'll probably try to make it work again and then put it out for visitors to try. We've been talking a lot lately about some of the benefits of traditional mechanical technology over modern microelectronics-based technology (think mechanical typewriter versus laptop). While it's true that modern electronic technology does a lot that the older versions don't, its impressiveness is overshadowed by the fact that its inner working are invisible, so that it's almost impossible to either discern how it works or to repair it when it breaks. For the most part, it's throwaway technology, and if you find even a twenty-year old computer in a dumpster, you might as well leave it there. . . unless you're public-spirited enough to salvage it for a trip to a recycling facility.

Keep an eye out for this machine on your future visits to Mindport, and never underestimate the value of what your local dumpster holds.

For information on mechanical adding machines click here.

For the R.C. Allen Company history click here.

For a comprehensive site on "dumpster diving" click here.

What We're Reading Now #2

2010-01-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Please forgive our silence over the past two months. The holidays usually throw us for a bit of a loop around here, but our brains have now returned to our desks and workbenches.

That said, we have been reading in the interim (and now we're writing)!

Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship, by David E. Morine

This is a non-fiction account of a canoe trip down 400 miles of the Connecticut River, commencing in Vermont and ending at Long Island Sound. The crew is a pair of friends in their 60s who haven't seen each other in years. Feeling too old for the trials of camping, they decide to mooch free lodging, arranged in advance, with volunteers along their route. Morine and his companion are opposites in character and their conflicts, many of them humorous, make for entertaining reading as do their interviews with the people they lodge with. Much of the dialog revolves around conservation and ecology, with vivid descriptions of both the beauty of the river and the ways in which it and the territory along its course have been damaged or destroyed by human enterprise.

Slow is Beautiful-New Visions of Community, Leisure, And Joie de Vivre, by Cecile Andrews

If ever I read a book that confirms my vision of Mindport's mission, this is it. The author, Cecile Andrews and her husband are founders of Seattle's Phinney Ecovillage, a sustainable urban community. Obviously, I found much to resonate with in this book, and it stimulated serious thinking, especially about the expression "Joie de Vivre" (Joy of Life). Here's an excerpt from my journal:

" I can't say that "joie de vivre" has always accurately described my orientation. I picture that expression as personifying someone who jumps gaily out of bed every morning, just full of ---- and vinegar, wildly excited to greet the birds and the sun, and to get on with the day's tasks. I wish! Maybe, rather than referring to an attitude of constant buoyancy (how exhausting!), this means that one maintains an awareness of the non-ordinariness of the ordinary and an appreciation for the miraculousness of existence, even though it can be damn terrifying and not at all pleasant at times."

I've always hoped that Mindport would inspire something like joie de vivre in our visitors. We certainly attempt to live up to many of the precepts Andrews mentions in her book, especially the Beauty of Slowness, which I interpret not so much to mean slow, but rather to take time for mindful engagement with one's life and work. This necessarily requires you to slow down, limit the multitasking and the greedy attempt to do everything that presents itself as a possibility. To me, leading a good life is about intelligent limitation. It's with this in mind that we tell visitors and even ourselves, don't be miffed if we don't seem to respond to your suggestions and ideas. There's just too much comin' at us to respond to everything, and it takes time for ideas to digest and work themselves into Mindport's flow of activity.

Andrews addresses the habit of perfectionism, which is something that comes up frequently at Mindport, and which I think about a good deal myself. For example there's always a compromise to be made between building an exhibit perfectly, and building it in a reasonable amount of time. An excess of perfection, when applied to artwork, often culminates in a sterile creation. Exhibits we put out for view at Mindport are often imperfect, simply because it's impossible to anticipate how they will interact with visitors, and which vulnerabilities will become apparent after a few weeks on the floor. Our exhibits are often far from perfect. If they were perfect, they'd never break. But I've observed that there's often an inverse relationship between robustness in an exhibit and the amount of interest it inspires. In other words, indestructible exhibits are frequently not very interesting. This is why we beg visitors to treat our exhibits gently. They ARE vulnerable. They and WE appreciate your mindful indulgence!

Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa Hamilton

Hamilton, a journalist and photographer lived in close quarters with three farmers who had converted to sustainable farming for business and personal reasons. Hamilton describes the characters of her subjects, a Texas Dairyman, a rancher in New Mexico, and a North Dakotan farming family with an intimacy that evokes a feeling of personal involvement with their lives. Her vivid descriptions of the countryside reveal her photographer's eye for detail, a quality which those, like myself, who revel in physical setting, will find alluring.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of Hamilton's book is its perspective on the dynamic by which nearly everything small, intimate, local, and beautiful becomes co-opted and destroyed by "economy of scale." Better to say, the false economy of scale. These three farm operations only survive by a thread, and due only to the dedication of their owners to an ideal, along with their reluctance to give up work that they love for its own sake. There's inspiration here, reminding us that it's worth our while to fight "the system," even if we must sacrifice comfort and ease in order to do so.

What We're Reading Now #1

2009-11-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

Mindport’s staff is comprised of inveterate readers. If you look in any staffer’s car, you are likely to spy a pile of library books and audiobooks stacked on the seat, threatening to slide off into the nether world of the vehicle floor. We often make recommendations to one another or just share our excitement about a particular aspect of a text and how it relates, directly or tangentially or very tangentially, to our work at Mindport.

Kevin: Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

If you’re old enough to have taken shop class as a junior high or high school student you may lament its passing. Crawford (who has his own motorcycle repair shop and a doctorate in political philosophy) explains why it should be brought back, arguing that working with one’s hands is essential to mental well-being.

Karen: Basho: The Complete Haiku by Matsuo Basho translated with an introduction, biography, and notes by Jane Reichhold

Karen says this book is so nice that she’s going to buy herself a copy as her Christmas present. The poetry itself is transcendent, and the book also has beautiful ink drawings and interesting historical commentary.

This road
No travelers pass along --
Autumn dusk.

Matsuo Basho

Tallie: The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland

Vreeland provides a fictionalized but well-researched account of the life of British Columbian artist Emily Carr (1871-1945). Based in part on Carr’s many journals, The Forest Lover inspired me to take another look at both Carr’s paintings and her life.

Emily Carr: Tree in Autumn

Bill: The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler

Kessler, a Harvard-educated pediatrician and former FDA head (who admits to having struggled with overeating) explains how the processed food industry has created combinations of foods that stimulate our brains to want more, more, and more! Apparently, fat, sugar, and salt alone are not particularly potent, but in perfect combination they trigger the brain’s reward system and make moderation difficult. The book makes for interesting reading as Kessler explores both the way the food industry engineers food, and the way our brains relate to that food.

Speak Easy 2

2009-11-05T16:42:00.000-08:00

Join us in Mindport's gallery Friday, November 6th from

7pm to 9pm

for:

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T15:35:00.000-07:00

No Universal Healthcare? That's Cuckoo!

AnMorgan Curry

(the label reads Ratched's Embalsamic Vinegar

All I want for Halloween is a "snack-sized" Baby Ruth candy bar, a toothbrush, and healthcare for all. What a treat that would be.

side note: Our more "senior" staff members think no one under the age of 50 is going to get the reference. I, being one of the more junior staff members, argue that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has "classic" status and that many folks 16 to 50 are going to get it. So far the jury is still out.

Organ Donors

2009-10-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes additions to Mindport’s collection find us rather than us finding them. This summer Mindport Director Kevin Jones received a series of calls from the volunteers at the Lummi Island church rummage sale. The conversation went something like this:

Church Ladies: We think you should come on down and place a bid on this nice little Hammond organ we have here.

Kevin: No. I don’t have room for an organ.

Church Ladies: Oh, sure you do. It’s really a nice one.

Kevin: No. I don’t have room for an organ.

Church Ladies: It’s real small. At least come down and take a look.

Kevin: No. I don’t have room for an organ.

3 hours later

Church Ladies: You need the organ. You can have it for free.

Kevin: No. I don’t have room for an organ.

But, Kevin did go down and take a look. A seventy-five dollar donation from Mindport, some heavy lifting, and a pick-up truck ride later, Mindport is the grateful owner of a lovely little Hammond organ. So far we’ve heard Bach, the Doobie Brothers, and some old school roller rink-inspired tunes, and we’re glad this little instrument is here to stay. Thanks, Church Ladies. You knew what we needed.

Side note: The Hammond has inspired Kevin to build a two-octave pneumatic organ for Mindport. He’s already three pipes into the project.

Love Your Liberty? Love Your Library.

2009-10-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

Bellingham Public Library - one of the most used library systems in the country - is facing severe budget cuts. This window display evolved out of a staff meeting discussion of the value and purpose of libraries. Mindport Art Director AnMorgan Curry created the piece.

Exhibit-Building at Mindport

2009-10-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

At Mindport many visitors ask what new exhibits we have planned, or why we don't get new exhibits more often. We are also often asked where we get our ideas, or "how did you think of that exhibit," and related questions.

The process by which exhibits show up on Mindport's display room floor is a complex one, not by intention but because the process just evolved that way. "As it happened," in other words.

Before discussing these matters, I'll remind you that most of the hands-on exhibits at Mindport are accompanied by a notebook. On the front you'll find instructions for the exhibit, and inside more information about it, often with much detail about how the exhibit was made and why.

Generally, we choose to build a particular exhibit because it interests whichever one of us builds it. We assume that if an idea interests us, it will interest visitors, which is an assumption that has proved valid in most cases. If the exhibit only interests a minority of visitors, we still tend to view it as successful, because we don't believe that the interests of the majority should necessarily triumph over the interests of the few. Something for everyone, including us, is our motto.

The exhibits we either try to improve or completely eliminate, are those that visitors avoid because they're too confusing or complex, or ones which are more trouble to maintain than they're worth. Sometimes exhibits go away because we're bored with them and something else interesting has turned up as a replacement. As time has passed, we've paid an increasing amount of attention to making exhibits both robust and relatively easy to maintain. Maintenance is one of our least enjoyable tasks, which is why we request that guests treat exhibits gently and with respect. It leaves us more time to build new things.

Ideas for exhibits crop up everywhere. Sometimes an idea that starts out as a joke at one of our meetings ends up, with modification, becoming an exhibit. One exhibit, Sonoluce, with the whirling musical lights, was inspired by a hand-held toy brought back by one of our staff members from a trip to San Francisco. Some exhibits, such as the Tornado, are our own version of well-known exhibits at other museums.

With a few exceptions, we build most of our exhibits rather than buy them; they're often a product of much thought and experimentation. . . and, since our staff is very small, we don't turn out new major exhibits at a great rate. None of us builds exhibits exclusively, because we have many other tasks to attend, which rarely leaves us undivided time for new construction. With this slow turnaround in mind, we put much thought into creating exhibits that visitors will find interesting enough to return to repeatedly. The "creek" is one example. Visitors young and old find the creek highly alluring, which isn't surprising, since I myself, the designer/builder of this exhibit, never grew tired of playing in creeks as a youngster, and still like playing in creeks, rivers, and Puget Sound as an oldster.

For every exhibit that finally makes it to Mindport's display floor, two or three are usually abandoned before they're finished or even halfway started. Usually, after some experimentation or trial, they turned out to be uninteresting, impractical, or they seemed like they might prove too difficult to maintain. Some exhibits we abandon because we feel they might not be safe. The shelves in my shop at home, where I build exhibits, are full of bits and pieces of exhibits that haven't happened yet, or are left from others that didn't work as expected, or fell to others of the perils just mentioned. They may later be incorporated into other exhibits later on.

Often, an exhibit that started out to be one thing turns into something else. Marbellous, for example, was assembled from disparate parts that I hadn't fully decided what to do with. The main "pump" with the rotating wheels was built as a module to see how and if it would work. The marble course on the right side, I built as a second module to explore mechanical "flip-flop" gates, and as an experiment in generating interesting sounds with falling marbles. The marble course on the left was built pretty much "off the cuff," as a spontaneous creation. The whole works took about 15 months to build. It includes some electronic logic designed to unstick hung marbles in the main pump, and another circuit to detect marbles that fly off the labyrinth above and end up in the "basement," visible through a circular window at the bottom of the piece.

Perhaps this will give you more insight into the exhibit-building process at Mindport. As you can see, there's no set process or routine. Serendipity takes its course, and we're happy with that. It makes life and our exhibits more interesting for us and for our visitors.

Welcome to Mindport's new blog

2009-09-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

Visitors to our website are sometimes frustrated because they want to know MORE about Mindport, like what are we thinking or doing today. Since our website only gets updated infrequently, this information is not in evidence. We hope this blog will satisfy you and also provide an outlet where we can post links to the same articles and sites that we share amongst ourselves, which often inspire interesting conversations and occasionally new exhibits.