Vanishing Point

"Vanishing point" is a term applied to graphic images, which describes an imaginary point where all perspective lines converge. As a youngster I was intrigued with vanishing points, perhaps thinking that if I could follow, say, the highway in a picture, I'd gradually shrink smaller and smaller then finally disappear. Or possibly I'd pop through into another world where I was something or somebody else besides me. Who would I be on the other side of the vanishing point, I wondered?

On the cover of a Whole Earth Catalog during the 1970s, the slogan appeared: "Wherever you go, there you are." * I thought this a very unromantic bit of wisdom, since it defused my fantasy of what lay beyond the vanishing point.

As an adult, I notice the vanishing point theme shows up in many of my photos, indicating the

persistence of my intrigue with associated ideas. I almost entitled this piece, "Beyond Infinity," because I felt an equivalence between infinity and vanishing points. Both expressions remind me of a way that I used to rattle my brain as a child when I was falling asleep at night: I'd try to imagine what lay outside the universe.

Possibly the best visualization of what lies beyond the vanishing point or outside the universe is the world Lewis Carroll envisioned existing on the far side of the looking glass. Speaking of a looking glass, If you want to rattle your own brain, and tweak (not tweet!) your imagination, hold a large mirror horizontally under your chin while looking down into it and walking around the house, then out the door. Be sure to take a guide with you so that you don't trip and do worse to your brain that rattle it.

With that, I'll leave you, probably with your imagination swirling and perhaps thinking of people or things you'd like to point at and see vanish. Visit Mindport for more Vanishing Point images.



*That's what I remember, but John Kabat-Zinn published a book by that title in 1994, which has been reprinted a number of times since. If you search for the expression on the Web, it's been attributed to a number of sources of wisdom throughout the ages. However, if it was a truly popular idea the "war on drugs" would probably be unnecessary.

Technostalgia

Not long ago I was perusing the shelves of a nearby antique shop and came across a Tektronix oscilloscope dating back to 1964 in almost perfect condition. The price was $75. (An oscilloscope, for the non tech reader, is an instrument used for inspecting the waveforms of varying electrical signals.) In 1964 this scope cost around $900, equivalent to $7500 in today's dollars.. As a techno-enthusiast young person of twenty, when this instrument was in its heyday, I would have given my eyeteeth to own one, but it would have cost me a year's worth of my wages at that time.. Fifty years later, despite the fact that I now own a computerized Tektronix oscilloscope that will do a zillion more things than its ancestor, I wanted that vintage scope. Three times in as many weeks I returned to test temptation, and temptation finally won.

Tektronix Oscilloscope vintage 1964

 When I got the scope home I plugged it in and was pleased to discover that for the most part it still worked. There was one important function that didn't seem to be performing as expected, however. I went on line and found a service manual for $30, not to speak of a complete enough schematic wiring diagram that I was able to repair the scope in about an hour using one component from my 50 year accumulation of salvage electronic parts.

I've done a good deal of thinking since I made this purchase about why I felt so powerfully motivated to buy an instrument that is really superfluous to my needs, especially since I own one of its descendants that features many more functions and whose current thousand-dollar price, incidentally, converted to the dollars of its ancestor's era, would be around $125. Obviously the older scope symbolized something for me that I wanted to be in touch with once more. Surprisingly, I've found myself using it, as much as a ritual act as anything else, in preference to the new scope with all its multitudes of (sometimes confusing) features. It has a functional immediacy that the high-tech scope lacks, partially because the latter is computerized and it's not intuitively obvious how to use its fancy features without consulting its fat manual.

It's worth noting here that in 50 years, if the contemporary scope still works at all, it will likely be impossible for someone to repair, even if blessed with a well-stocked junk box and a schematic diagram. Too many of its functions are mediated by firmware programs running on complex micro-sized microprocessors. If one of these processors fails, not only would it be physically difficult to replace, but it's doubtful that the company that manufactured it would be able to supply a component that complex as a replacement unit. I haven't looked inside it, but if it runs true to most other contemporary high-tech equipment, it's likely full of nearly microscopic components mounted on multi-layer circuit boards, which renders trouble-shooting impossible. By contrast, look at the beautiful hand-wired circuitry of the older oscilloscope. You can see why troubleshooting and repairing it is a piece of cake.

In mulling my motivation for acquiring an antique oscilloscope, I realized that the introduction of the microprocessor into our lives cost us whatever autonomy we ever had regarding the artifacts we use to support our daily activities. The old scope contains no microprocessors and, after 50 years, still operates and is easily repairable. The new one has many slick features, but if it dies, it's probably dead for good unless I send it back to Tektronix.. You can say the same thing about many home appliances, from toasters to washing machines that have been rendered almost impossible for the independent techno-savvy person to repair. Even my old 1988 Toyota Celica was bordering on inaccessibility. There's  hardly a point in opening the hood of my current 2012 computer-on-wheels. You need another computer to do any work on it, and only the dealer or an approved garage has access to the necessary equipment and software. The car starts with a push-button, enabled by an electronic key. If you push the button and nothing happens, you might as well call a tow truck. Unlike older cars, where starting was enabled by a physically accessible chain of easily visible components, this car is chock full of electronic sensors and actuators, triggered by the invisible thoughts of a microprocessor. If the start button is dead, even someone who knows something about cars is helpless to do anything about it.

Initially, I attributed my attraction to the old scope to nostalgia, That did contribute to my lust to own this instrument, but in contemplating the meaning of the word nostalgia, I realized that behind it hides complicated feelings and understandings about the course of technological "progress" over the last several decades. I put "progress" in quotes because I've begun to question what really constitutes progress and whether the electronic gadgetry upon which we now center our lives qualifies as such.

I'm in the process of reading Sherry Turkle's new book, Reclaiming Conversation - The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Turkle is a psychologist who has written several  books about our relationship to technology as it has evolved over the last thirty years, the first being The Second Self. She started out with unabashed enthusiasm for computers and their contribution to our lives, but in succeeding books she's become increasingly critical, not so much about the technology itself, but of the way we're using it. Turkle's subject matter I would loosely characterize as focusing on relationship; our relationships with each-other, and as mediated by computers, cell phones, and the Internet. Her views are important, and interest me greatly, and to them I add my own concern with our actual relationship to physical and electronic tools and the useful artifacts we employ them to create, for example, toasters, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, automobiles, extending across a full spectrum to include the sort of electronic test equipment I've heretofore been discussing. Everything I've noted in my discussion of oscilloscopes and automobiles applies to all the other artifacts in our lives that have been microprocessorized beyond recognition.

Wendell Berry published a book of essays entitled, What Are People For? I haven't read it yet, but the title popped into my head because I was just about to ask the same question. If we automate every aspect of our lives, where do WE fit in, finally? I don't know yet what Berry has to say on the subject, but my answer is: We don't. The corporations would just as soon eliminate us altogether because we are not "efficient." To keep humans involved in the machinery that builds the electronic (and other) toys that decorate our lives eats severely into the profits that can be accumulated by the sociopathic machinery we call corporations and their parasitic stockholders.

To return to discussing the business of making things: Back in the 70s, 60s, 50s and all the time before, we were intimately involved in the physical process of manufacturing all the things we use in the course of our daily lives. We were also deeply involved in the creation of whatever machinery we used to make things. Computers had not yet usurped a large proportion of the relationships and skills that we humans had by that time developed with physical machinery. To put it differently, in those days we had an intuitive feel for the machinery that populated our lives, and it was an intuition that arose from long-term practical association. Teenagers in the fifties tinkered with and rebuilt cars in their garage. I built ham radio equipment from scratch, thereby cultivating a relationship with electronics that was highly intuitive. The automobile tinkerers frequently ended up as mechanics and machinists, just as I ended up as an electronics tech and eventually a designer. To be able to identify oneself as a machinist, mechanic, or technician was a step toward living a life of some solidity and with an income sufficient to support a family.

An intuitive relationship with physical machinery, born of physical experience, provides building blocks for mechanical/electronic creativity. This relationship is a form of love. The nostalgia that arises in response to vintage test equipment, tools, and machinery is an expression of that love. The fact that the traditional creative attachment in our culture to physical machinery has been subsumed by computers, software, and robots, is cause not only for sadness but concern. Ironically, it was our attachment to machinery that brought about automated machinery to which it's difficult to become attached. Machinery that operates in the physical realm is easy to identify with. Machinery that operates primarily in the cyber realm leaves us with nothing to grasp. It's of course possible to be creative with software code, but it's abstract, and only intellectually graspable. If you take for example an operating system like Windows, there are so many layers of code that comprehending it in all it's detail is beyond most of us.

I've written quite a bit of code myself, so don't accuse me of throwing rocks at something I don't understand.

Nobody could be convinced that we should voluntarily give up microprocessors, although there could easily become a time, not necessarily in the distant future, when it might become impossible to sustain the sort of infrastructure necessary to manufacture them. As more and more symptoms of the downside of microelectronics emerge, a radical Luddite gnome lurking in an unfrequented corner of my psyche wishes that microprocessors, computers, and even TV would just disappear from the face of the earth. This lurking Luddite is not a hateful fellow, but one who laments the loss of autonomy and freedom conferred by the ability to understand and repair machinery upon which our lives depend.

If there was more discussion about how new technologies should be put to use, and it was acted upon, would that be desirable? Indeed it would be, but unfortunately I find it difficult to imagine how that might happen. Kevin Kelly wrote a book entitled, What Technology Wants. It's been quite a while since I read it, but I recall him to be arguing that technology, in a sense, has a mind of it's own. It will have its way with us. Thus far, that seems to have been the case, as distasteful as I find the idea. The only thing I can practically suggest is that we cultivate mindfulness in our use of technology, which is what I understand Sherry Turkle to be advocating in her recent book.

One possible way to nurture mindfulness in areas such as mechanical and electrical design is to emphasize craft, that is, hand work and real physical involvement. I've been building things all my life, from ham radio equipment, to high-tech espresso machines, to instruments used in radio astronomy. Over the last twenty years my focus has been creating exhibits for Mindport. That effort has taught me more about the mindful practice of technology than any work I did previously. Two questions uppermost when creating an exhibit are, what will people do with this, and what will they take from it? A third, important one is, how can I make this thing easily repairable? I can't always anticipate answers to the first two questions, but asking them has taught me a great deal about exhibits and, by extension, the uses to which technology is put on a larger scale. Making exhibits easily repairable is an ongoing challenge. You might think that it makes more sense to turn this question around and ask how to make exhibits harder to break. Unfortunately, the more "bombproof" you make exhibits, the less interesting they tend to be. It's good if they're reasonably difficult to break and better if, once broken, they're easy to repair.

Sherry Turkle, in Reclaiming Conversation, advocates a return to face-to-face talk as a means to ground ourselves and take back tasks which we've inappropriately assigned to our distracting electronic gadgetry. Taking a cue from that advice, I suggest a face-to-face "conversation" with our machinery in a quest to learn more about what machinery really is, why we use it and when we use it inappropriately. In my view, that conversation would consist of manual involvement, whether it's woodworking, bicycle maintenance, or any other sort of practice that demands careful attention. The current "maker" movement is a sign that more people are wanting to delve into mechanal/electronic creation, but it sometimes seems that this movement is excessively concerned with ego identity for its devotees as "makers," rather than really paying mindful attention to craft and the questions I raised earlier, such as, what's the point and purpose of this thing I'm making, and what's the point of US as humans? That purpose can legitimately be nothing more than practicing the art of mechanical/electronic creation. But if that's the case, it's important to avoid the temptation to turn the product into one more gadget with dubious utility, packed with unanticipated consequences. As it stands, there's too little thought devoted to the meaning of what's being made or the consequences of turning it loose on society.

Today I recalled a comment I read somewhere about our country being colonized in large proportion by misfits, borderline criminals and religious fanatics. That's perhaps excessively harsh, but It inspired the question; did the fabled native inventiveness of North Americans arise from the creative mentality of those colonists who fit badly with the British and European culture at the time this continent was invaded? Worth considering, because, like many socially  borderline personalities, we North Americans frequently don't devote enough thought to the long term consequences of our creations. We deploy them for short-term profit and consequences be damned. That sort of mentality I fear is starting to catch up us in unpleasant ways.

Kevin Jones

New Blog Location

Since revamping Mindport's website, we've incorporated our blog into it. You can find it at this URL.

We'll keep this blog open for awhile, possibly for the purpose of devoting it to different or more technical subject matter.

Kevin Jones 

Doodling

Doodle with color

Lately I’ve run across several ads for doodle coloring books, not to speak of articles about the act of doodling like this one.

Being a veteran doodler myself, having the subject come wafting through the noosphere caught my attention. A long time ago I reassured my Mindport cohorts that my doodling during staff meetings was a sign that I was listening, and not that I was tuned out. I explained, if my hands are busy my brain retains more of what I hear. As a young student I invariably used to take some odd object to class to fiddle with during lectures. It could be as simple as a clothespin, paper clip, or a frame of 35mm camera film. The teachers who confiscated these “toys” didn’t understand that keeping my hands occupied helped me focus, rather than the other way around.

Doodling, as I eventually discovered, provided a better means to focus because it’s easier to do it surreptitiously (they think you’re taking notes), not to speak of the fact that you sometimes have interesting little drawings to show for you efforts when the meeting is over. At one point I filled a whole sketchbook with doodles made during a weekly reading group. We took turns reading short stories or chapters to each other. When I wasn’t reading, I entertained my restless hands with doodling in a bound notebook.

There’s a problem, however, with the term doodling. It doesn’t give the act enough dignity and respect, as the Atlantic article cited above implies. It’s true that the visual affect of many doodles is nothing to write home about, but putting your brain in graphic mode, so to speak, is one way of taming what meditators call “monkey mind;” that restless chatter the mind engages in when not busy with a focused task. That might explain why, for me, at least, it’s easier to absorb verbally-delivered material when my hands are occupied by doodling. Under those conditions, the chatter of my monkey mind isn’t running interference to verbally delivered information coming from outside. Why doodling or other manual activity interferes with internal chatter but not information coming from outside, I can’t explain, but that’s my experience.

Not too long ago I decided that what I’d heretofore referred to as doodling would be better dignified by the term “drawing,” even though it’s by no means what we normally consider formal drawing. I have done some of the latter. In fact, when I was in my late 20s I abandoned photography for several years and set about learning representational drawing. I never became very good at it, but could hack out a likeness to a landscape or a face if I put my mind to it. Interestingly it seemed to have magically enabled at least two abilities that I hadn’t possessed previous to my drawing stint: I found that I could visualize and build 3 dimensional objects in my head, and that I could suddenly appreciate photographic work whose merits had once mystified me. The former ability has been essential to creating exhibits for Mindport. And the latter has hugely enriched my appreciation of all visual artwork, not to speak of increasing my general visual sensitivity, which reflects in the photography I hang in Mindport’s gallery.

My conclusion is this: It’s a mistake to eliminate art and music education in the schools, or to consider them less important that training in math or science. We Americans have a tendency to assume that any aspect of life or creative work that doesn’t hit us over the head isn’t worth paying attention to. The fact is, the creative mind is a holistic affair. We may create arbitrary divisions between science, technology, art, language and music, but they’re all inextricably woven in our brains and we do ourselves and our culture a great disservice by ruling any of these disciplines trivial or non-essential to a healthy society and economy. We hope the richness of visitors’ experience at Mindport will lend confirmation to this idea. At least one popular exhibit, “Road Blocks,” is a direct product of my years of doodling experience. Come and check it out, along with the many other exhibits we have to offer.

Kevin Jones

Terror vs Terroir

 I've read several articles lately about the rapid increase in consumption in this country of anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants.  Sometimes I’m afflicted myself with sufficient anxiety about the general state of  the world, environment, and economy that I find it necessary to cut way back on news consumption. A good proportion of other people I know feel similarly.

In reading through comments in my journal regarding French wine-making and agriculture, I came across the French word, terroir. This word is not etymologically related to our word, terror, but it suddenly struck me that there is a less-than-obvious relationship between these two words, as unrelated as they might normally seem, especially since they're vocabulary in two different languages.

In French terroir is vaguely related to our word “territory,” the closest single-word translation to English being “region.” But in French, the meaning is wider and more complicated than that: it's often applied to agricultural regions, especially in relation to vineyards. It refers to the "tang" of the soil, to rural-ness and to the countryside. There's connection to family history and to tradition. One apt definition I found in Wikipedia is "a sense of place."

It strikes me that in the population of the United States of America, one source of anxiety, fear, terror certainly has to do with loss of terroir, sense of place, contact with the soil and related work. In the early part of the 20th century 95% of the economy was directly or indirectly related to agriculture. (40 percent of the work force in 1940 were farmers.) Nowadays the figure is under five percent. This is not to romanticize the hard work of farming, but simply to point out that at one time in our history our major devotion was to a fundamental aspect of physical reality, namely feeding ourselves.

In bringing up the idea of terroir, most usefully translated as "a sense of place," I'm suggesting that much of our ennui (another French-derived word that means, variously, unhappiness, anxiety, angst, etc) has to do with literally losing touch with reality. After all, we float in what I like to think of as a thin tissue of lies. Our lives are saturated with advertising, which amounts mostly to lies and fantasies about what buying things will do for us. Our government and the corporations who structure our lives lie to us about their intentions. The “American dream,” which we’ve been sold as an ideal for decades is just that, a dream, a fabrication, which nowadays is increasingly impossible for most Americans to attain.

Furthermore, unlike in earlier decades, the hardware and software “tools” that dominate our work and recreation rapidly grow obsolete and must be replaced at relatively short intervals. Any skill we acquire in connection to using those tools needs to be endlessly relearned.

Old buildings, often beautifully built, are torn down and replaced with new ones, more in style with the times. Farmland and woodland morphs into housing developments. Basically, we have no firm ground to stand on. On top of that, whatever news or other information you read on the Internet is of questionable truth. Photos and even video are easily manipulated. We can no longer even count on the climate to remain constant.We live on screens, immersed for hours per day in this virtual world of questionable verity.

Is there any doubt that this constant flux afflicts us with anxiety, ennui, or whatever brand of unhappiness you care to mention? We truly no longer are blessed with a sense of place, since even the places we live change so rapidly that they’re unrecognizable in a few short years. When I first moved to this town of Bellingham thirty-eight years ago, you could drive from one end to the other during rush hour in about ten minutes. There’s not a chance of doing that now.

How do we cope with this groundlessness I’m describing? It affects us in all domains: physical place, work, climate, social custom. Some change is exciting and desirable, but with total absence of firm ground to stand on, how do we know where to go?

One way I've discovered to cope with this loss of a sense of place is to withdraw from such distractions as social networking, many of the internet news sources, and any situation that exposes me to advertising. Stay away from malls, in other words. Limit exposure to the news, especially that of the “mainstream” variety. Gardening is one good way to recover a sense of place. Being outside, preferably on a regular basis in some relatively wild place is another one. Lacking a patch of ground to cultivate a few tomatoes (I once grew them in an alley), I’ve found that there’s great satisfaction and a sense of groundedness that accrues in nurturing vegetables or flowers in pots, either indoors or out.

Oddly enough, I've found a certain reassuring sense of grounding in watching films made in the years before TV was widespread. Some of these films seem laughably quaint, but it's interesting and comforting to see portrayals of life as it was before we became completely lost in a world of electronic gadgetry. It helps that I was born in 1944, so actually lived during a pre micro-elecronic era.

Of course this piece is written from the point of view of someone who mostly grew up as a middle-class citizen of the USA. However, I’ve done enough international traveling, including 3 years of residence in Belgium as a high-school student, to understand that many people who can now read such material on the Internet live in unimaginably different circumstances, perhaps with more “grounded reality”in their lives than they welcome. Still, from my own reading, it’s apparent to me that conditions in most of the world have changed radically enough, often for the worse, that the challenge of coping with loss of firm ground and a sense of place is a challenge for a good proportion of citizens anywhere in the world.

Kevin Jones

Second Annual Summer Writing Workshop

 We are excited to announce the second year of our week-long summertime creative writing intensive with New York-based writer Whitney Wimbish. 

This workshop is a chance for six women, ages 17 and up, to practice and hone their craft in an encouraging and safe environment. Each writer will create and polish a work of original prose and help her fellow writers to do the same. The class will include workshop-style critiques in which students give and receive feedback – a component of virtually all creative writing MFA programs across the country – and will end with an evening reading at which the writers will present their work to the public.

The class will be held at Mindport July 13 – July 17, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The public reading will be held Saturday, July 18, at 7 p.m. in Mindport’s fine arts gallery and will be followed by a reception.

APPLICATION INFORMATION

To apply, please email Whitney at whitneyck@gmail.com with brief answers to the following:

* Why would you benefit from a writing workshop?

* What would you contribute to a writing workshop group?

* What do you plan to work on in the workshop? (Answers could include a first-person essay, a fictional short story, a chapter of a novel-in-progress, a critical essay, or an experimental work that combines many genres.)

* Please briefly include any additional thoughts you’d like to share.

The deadline for applications is Friday, May 1. Whitney will notify applicants of placement by Friday, May 15.

The cost of the class is $60. Following notification, a $30 deposit is required to hold a place in the class. The remainder is due the first day of the workshop.

Questions? Email Whitney at whitneyck@gmail.

Whitney Curry Wimbish is a journalist and creative writer in Brooklyn, New York, whose work has appeared in BOMB, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Cambodia Daily, and elsewhere. She is winner of a Poynter fellowship for journalists and an honorable mention in two Glimmer Train fiction contests. She holds a BA from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in creative writing from The New School in New York.

Graffiti: Art or Vandalism?

On the island where I live, a number of young people have performed the decorations you will see represented in a collection of photos that will hang in Mindport’s gallery commencing the third week of January, 2015. The original work illuminates a long sea wall of grey concrete slabs that protects a shoreline road from the wave action of Northern Puget Sound. One of these creative doodlers referred to their graphic exhibition on a local computer forum as “art.” Since graphic work on walls has always interested me, I photographed a number of these marks, which, in a cranky mood, I would view simply as vandalism. With the help of a photo processing program on my computer I selectively enhanced them by choice of framing and great amplification of color and contrast.

I don’t believe the resulting photographs are much different in character than certain others of mine that were recorded with the camera pointed at randomly peeling paint, diverse materials etched by the elements, or weathered geological formations. Whatever the “canvas,” all the original marks and patterns are created and/or further enhanced by natural forces acting on surfaces; sun, wind, freezing, rain and sometimes wave action. In the case of the graphic work we’re currently discussing, the original paints were laid down by the semi-random forces of young minds and hands, apparently being spontaneous, with little discernable plan. The images I make of such subject matter, including these, are commonly  not about the actual objects pictured, but are about abstract patterns to which my imagination or emotions respond. Often I manipulate such images to make these patterns more obvious, as I’ve done in the case of this graphic work.

If the creators of this work call it art, is it? If I frame and enhance it in various ways, whose “art” is that? A collaboration? If we uncharitably consider the raw efforts to be simply vandalism, do the modifications I perform on it turn it into art? These are intriguing questions focusing on what art is, what it isn’t, and what might be good art, bad art or non-art.

Much work of innovative historical artists, including graffiti art, was initially unappreciated by the public. Work that sells for millions today barely kept the artists who created it eating during their own era. What happened? How is it that the public judgment about such creative endeavor can change so radically, sometimes in a relatively short time? To me one of the most alluring mysteries that make creativity such a fascinating field of study and contemplation is the way it interacts with taste and what is considered valuable or worthless or of little interest at all in a given era. I have no definitive answers and mostly negotiable opinions about this myself, and hence leave it for you to ponder as you view these photographs.

Kevin Jones

Gallery Show: The Language of Rock

A new selection of my photos will be hanging in Mindport's gallery for the next couple months. These images were collected on the Oregon Coast in the vicinity  of the towns of Gold Beach and Cannon Beach, where weathering clay and crumbling stone cliffs have deposited wide varieties and sizes of lithic artifacts on the beach. In other words, pebbles, rocks, stones, and boulders, many of them bearing markings betraying eons of geologic history.

Geology was one subject I studied for a full year during my time as a college freshman. For a period I thought I might care to take on geology  as a profession, but I realized eventually that my interest was not academic but aesthetic. Besides that, the oil industry is probably the greatest single employer of geologists, so I'm retrospectively grateful not to have made that choice, considering the recent depredations of that industry.

I find it difficult or impossible to articulate verbally what attracts me to geology, which is part of the point of these photographs. As you might be able to tell by looking at them, rocks speak to me metaphorically. Perhaps, having grown up as a military brat who moved every three years or less of my young life, I find reassuring the primordial permanence of geological structure, the knowledge that its character has been formed over millions of years of crushing, crumbling, melting, congealing, twisting, and folding through the actions of orogeny, wind, flood, and freezing. These forces all leave their marks on the face of mother earth which invite interpretation by my own imagination.

Kevin Jones

New Exhibit: Combination Lock

As a kid I took a lot of things apart to see how they worked: clocks, radios, motors, various mechanized toys. Usually they didn't get put back together again, but most of the time they were castoffs anyway so that there was no loss and plenty of gain for me in the form of learning how things worked. One device I never did take apart was a combination lock, mostly because locks are designed to be difficult to disassemble, for obvious reasons. Hence, I've never educated myself as to exactly how a combination lock operates. Until now.

Recently I paid a visit to Matthias Wandel's woodworking site on the web. I discovered this site back when I was building Mindport's pipe organ, and found a number of  useful ideas that I incorporated into my instrument. It's a good place to look for exhibit ideas, not to speak of a large collection of esoteric woodworking wisdom. Upon looking through the various wooden gadgets that Wandel has designed, I ran across plans for an operating combination lock mechanism, all fabricated from wood. For $7 I downloaded these plans and built my own version, which you can now explore at Mindport.

Kevin Jones

Currently in our Gallery

 

Thao Thanh Le

Bellingham's Plein Air Artists will be showing their paintings in Mindport's gallery September 19 through October 5th.

They submitted the following statement:

We paint from life in order to learn how to see. If you can paint light, you can paint everything under the sun.

                             

          --Frank LaLumia, PAPA Signature Member

Painting from life is a pursuit unlike any other painting technique. It challenges artists to concentrate every sensory nerve on the information in front them. They absorb it all, from sight to sound, from temperature to atmosphere, and then channel those feelings from head to hand, re-creating the vision in paints on paper or canvas.

The roots of painting from life are found in 19th-century Europe. Englishman John Constable believed the artist should forget about formulas and trust his own vision in finding truth in nature. To find that truth, he made sketches outdoors, then elaborated on them in the studio. Around the same time in France, in a small village outside Paris called Barbizon, a group of artists focused their attentions on peasant life and the natural world surrounding it. Like Constable, Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet challenged conventions of the day, choosing everyday subjects rather than the traditional cliches and presenting them in natural settings, the information for which came from sketches made in the field.

 These realists, as they came to be called, laid the groundwork for the mid-19th century revolution in France that took painting from life to its logical conclusion. Lead by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edouard Degas, Auguste Renoir, et. al. the impressionists espoused the belief that you should trust your eyes. Using newly developed theories of how the eye physically registers color, they maintained that what you saw in nature was not form, but rather light on form. And light could be conveyed by color. To prove their theories, they took their paint tubes and easels outdoors, where they re-created the world as colors which suggested light. Rebuffed at first for what appeared to be unfinished paintings, the impressionist vision soon became a standard for truthfully conveying the outdoor experience.

Painting en plein air (in the open air) would forever change how we see the world. Artists in the United States were attracted to the concept, and many, like Californian Guy Rose, traveled to France to study with Monet. Suddenly, places with remarkable light were of particular interest to painters, including the both the East and West Coasts, and the American Southwest, where painting colonies formed. The goal of teachers and students alike was to capture the light and colors peculiar to the place.

Today, painting from life is a pursuit that continues to challenge the finest artists in the world, as well as the group from Studio UFO here in Bellingham.  This August will be our 9thth Annual Downtown Bellingham Plein Air Paint Out & Exhibition (PAPO).  We have an average of 30 artists that participate.  The Bellingham PAPO is different in that it focuses on the downtown core and not a natural or wilderness setting.  It is our mission to raise awareness about plein air painting, to show the community how many artists are here in Bellingham and to show the artists' interpretation of downtown Bellingham.

Automation as Golem

Early Telegraph Device, Spark Museum, Bellingham, WA

I've been involved in electronics since an early age. I was accomplishing simple radio repairs at age 9, earned my first ham radio license at age 14, and built more than one transmitter by the time I'd graduated from high school. In those days (I  turned 14 in 1958), many people my age earned radio licenses, and many of us built our own gear simply because that was the only way we could afford it.

As  time passed, I built more and more equipment, mostly associated with ham radio. At age 19, after one year of college, I spent 15 months working on an oceanographic ship in the Indian Ocean. I was responsible for keeping the ship's electronic equipment in operation: echo sounders, radar, and a few pieces of laboratory gear. Upon returning home, I returned to school for couple years, vacillating between arts & sciences and engineering. A&S was too crazy, and engineering too linear. That was in the mid-60s.

Eventually I ended up working as an electronics technician, then as a research engineer in the radio astronomy branch of the Astrogeophysics Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I'd previously been a student. One of my jobs there was to automate the tracking mechanism that controlled two twenty-ton radio telescope antennas that ran on circular rails.  My system read punched cards in a modified IBM card reader that weighed about 600 pounds. One card with new solar coordinates coded into it fed through the reader every 15 minutes and the electronics moved the antennas in accordance to them. Solar radio emissions were recorded on a chart recorder identical to the ones used to record water depth during my shipboard duty in the Indian Ocean.

That was the first time I'd been involved in automating anything. Previous to that time, the antennas had been moved at quarter hourly intervals by a grad student reading solar pointing data from a table. Hence the device I built eliminated one job.

By that time I was 25 years old. The antenna pointing system whetted my appetite for automating things, one way or another. I built a porch light turner-onner to turn on the porch light of our house when I came home after dark. It included a timer to keep the light on for a couple minutes before turning it off. That was before commercially made motion detectors were on the market. My version used a photo transistor to detect the light of my headlights.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about automation. When I later became a potter, I fired my kiln just a few times before realizing that here was a function that could easily be automated. I built three different versions of kiln programmers, the last one being completely software mediated via the first notebook computer, the Tandy 100. I had it configured so I could call the computer from a remote phone and get data on the current firing stage and temperature read out to me via Morse code.

That was fun. A few more years went by, along with various other electronic projects, one involving a joint effort with a friend, to build an electronically controlled espresso machine. It was operated by a microprocessor, which by that time was common and widely available device. The project took us about 8 years to complete, during which time I learned a lot about microprocessors, programming, etc, enough that it eventually led to building the wave music machine now on display at Mindport. That was the product of an obsessive year of work, during which I actually injured myself by writing software code, ultimately 30 pages of it.

Those lengthy sessions of coding while sitting in a straight-backed chair and staring at a computer screen culminated in a seriously inflamed muscle in my pelvis, which kept me immobile for several weeks. It set me to thinking about the obsessive quality of the programming work I was doing, and was my first clue that there was an emotional component to my intense interest in programming and automating things. It led to questions about the role played by electronic equipment in the larger world, not just my own.

Wave music was the first exhibit I built for Mindport. . . except I didn't know it was for Mindport because it was 1994 and Mindport didn't exist yet. After Mindport opened in 1995, I installed "Wave Music" there, then built the "House of Mystery," which incorporated two microprocessors to control its lighting functions. I could have done that with simple toggle switches, but I wanted it to cycle its lighting automatically and detect when someone came near so it could prepare itself to interact with a visitor. This incorporation of electronics into what was basically an art piece really set me on the path on considering the meanings behind automation, not only personal meanings but meanings in society at large.

Jump ahead, nearly to the present. A year or so ago Mindport began subscribing to "Make" magazine, which is devoted to. . . what else but making things. As time has passed the magazine seems to have evolved from one devoted to making a large variety of things, such as wooden gadgets and toys, plus a few electronically related devices, to one much more focused on high tech gadgetry, and robots of various sorts, including drone aircraft. I wondered why our societal obsession with robots seemed to be escalating, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the trend.

At the same time techno-triumphalists (a word I believe was coined by James Howard Kunstler) were beginning to talk about "The Singularity," which is a kind of techno-rapture that they believe will occur when humans have fully integrated themselves with machinery, to the point that we can upload ourselves to computers and live forever.

My candid opinion on this subject is this: HOGWASH!

After years of deep immersion in electronics, computers, programming, and then art, I've begun to understand something about the meaning of our societal obsession with electronic gadgetry, and especially robots. A clue came when it occurred to me that in my own process of automating things I was, in a sense, creating crude proxies of my own self.

There's an archetypal figure in Jewish mythology called a golem. I'll leave it to you to read the entry on the Golem found in Wikipedia. Basically it was a being formed from mud, then magically animated. If you remember the story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, its theme runs parallel. In the latter story, the sorcerer goes away to attend outside business. His apprentice, an amateur in magical operations, animates a broom to carry water for him. The broom goes out control because the apprentice has not learned the spells necessary to de-animate the broom. He attempts to stop it by chopping it into bits, but all the fragments jump up and each begins carrying water until the apprentice is swimming for his life.

The story of the Golem or that of The Sorcerer's Apprentice are part of our cultural mythology. Many people think of myths as just stories we tell to amuse ourselves, with no relation to any rational truth. However myths are usually descriptions of deep patterns that run in our psyches, our "collective unconscious."

One significant part of the Golem mythology is that the Golem is made out of mud or clay. You might ask what that has to do with electronic technology. Everything. Look at the computer upon which you're reading this. Every component in it was dug out of the earth: the oil from which the plastic case and circuit boards are made, all the carbon, copper, silver, gold, and rarer elements that make up the electronic circuitry and screen. All were dug from the earth.

In many ways this machinery we've built constitutes a Golem that has or is rapidly taking on a life of its own. We've so thoroughly incorporated this electronic equipment, formed from earth, into our lives that it actually controls us, not the other way around. Consider what would happen if the Internet was put out of commission by hackers, a solar storm, or other disaster. The country, or the world, in fact, outside of the rare indigenous tribe still living sustainably off the land, would come to a screeching halt. It would be like suddenly destroying an animal's nervous system. Instant death. We are completely in the power of the machinery.

Certain  people, Google’s Ray Kurzweil, for example, enthusiastically predict a day when we're fully integrated with machines, possibly having "uploaded" ourselves into them.  But how many machines still are viable after being in operation for eighty or a hundred years? How many of them can climb a fourteen thousand foot peak running on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a couple quarts of water?

Whoa! What are we thinking, and why?

Kurzweil and other high-powered technologists, such as Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. , Bill Gates, and others, have indeed made many valuable contributions to the technosphere. However the tech cheering section seems oblivious to the fact that every technological innovation invariably creates a whole raft of new problems, which we then attempt to solve by introducing yet more technology. Kurzweil earned a B.S. in computer science and literature at M.I.T. One wonders what literature he actually read, or whether he took other courses that focus on the human condition. Wikipedia informs us that in high school:  “. . .he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate, but instead, focused on his own projects which were hidden behind the book.”

The latter quote lends credence to my belief that technologists are the LEAST qualified people to be guiding the future of the world. So many of them apparently have very little grounding in subjects such as history, social studies, anthropology, psychology or other humanities. If they do, they act oblivious to any truths they might have garnered there. Do we want our lives determined by people obsessively interested in technology to the exclusion of everything else?  Should we do what they believe is good for us without question?  (Of course, we love the toys they invent, partially because we're a young culture, even adolescent, as Robert Bly argued in his book, The Sibling Society, but it doesn't necessarily mean all the toys are good for us.)

We're in a jobs crisis. That's because either the jobs have been sent overseas where labor is cheaper, or they've been taken over by machines. I eliminated at least one job myself by building a machine. Granted, it was a pretty tedious job, turning a couple antennas every fifteen minutes. But it did provide support for one grad student who could study or read while doing his or her job.

The computerized espresso machine I helped build eliminated the need for a barista to possess any particular skill in making espresso coffee, which means if a restaurant owned one of these machines, they wouldn't have to train anyone in the subtleties of making espresso with an old fashioned (beautiful) manually operated machine. One more job down the drain. It probably increased espresso "productivity" and the profits of machine owners, but was perhaps not the gift to the world that my engineering partner and I anticipated at the time. Incidentally, I never made any money off that enterprise. But that's a whole other story.

All I've written above leads to no answers but only to questions, and possibly a couple realizations. The biggest and most interesting question to me is, why this preoccupation with replacing our own functions with machinery? Which leads to this one: once we're replaced ourselves with machinery, what are we FOR, what do we DO, what's the purpose of our lives? A few of us who are artists and scientists can keep themselves happily amused creating art or exploring the universe. What about the rest? I've argued that there's an artist in everyone, but I've also known plenty of people with absolutely no interest in art OR science. What happens to those who like to build, maintain, and repair useful things; the people who are the human face and life of our businesses and daily transactions?

It seems to me that those who go to extremes in advocating or believing that machines can effectively replace the functions of human beings have a very limited concept of what it means to be human, and about what characteristics are desirable in a human-centered society. They possess a stunted view of their own essence. This was not an academic realization for me, but it was one that my own years-long immersion in machinery, to the point that it afflicted me with a physical ailment, woke me up to. We are not machines. We are not even LIKE machines. Machines are modeled after a very limited understanding of our own being, and that conception of our being has its own history, grown over time into a set of unconscious beliefs about ourselves that, should we penetrate them deeply, might allow us to expand our being in unexpected ways. Such understanding would also enable us to chart a course for ourselves and our society that could culminate in a much happier existence for everyone.

Post Script: You will notice that I've drawn little or no distinction between automating processes and creating robots. A robot is simply an ultimate form of automation, perhaps more autonomous than other forms. An automated machine or process is a limited form of robot. I’m not arguing that some, or even many, processes shouldn’t be automated, but that we need to widen our understanding of the function our lives serve and consider more deeply the meaning of whatever automation we eventually accomplish, not to speak of how much we really want machinery mediating our daily existence.

Kevin Jones

STEM, STEAM, STEAHM

Exhibit at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention, Bellingham,  WA

The idea of integrating art and science is one I re-examine periodically. Lately in the news I've noticed the frequent advocation of STEM teaching in the schools, the acronym standing for science, technology, engineering, and math. The importance of these subjects is invariably justified by an argument that we need people well-versed in these four subjects in order to compete effectively in the world market. The implication I take from this is that other possible areas of study are NOT important in the marketplace and hence can be ignored. However, as I've pointed out in other essays, you can have all the communications technology in the world, but without “content,” a large proportion of which is contributed by people who, by one means or another, are skilled in such areas as art, film-making, history, drama, music, writing, etc, your technology is moot. I’m reluctant to point it out, but the advertising that drives our economy (unfortunately) is wholly the product of people trained in other subjects besides science, technology, engineering, and math.

I have heard it suggested that the STEM acronym should be revised to STEAM, thereby throwing a bone to the arts advocates. What about taking one more step and making it STEAHM, since there are abundant indications that general education in the "Humanities" in our country is sadly neglected? I suggest that HISTORY would be an important component of humanities education, including the history of technology and the lives of those who were responsible for fundamental advances in scientific knowledge: people like Newton, Galileo, Faraday, Bell, Edison, Marie Curie, Cecilia Payne, Tesla, Marconi, and, of course, Einstein, to name only a few working in the physical sciences. (I included the first names of the women, to emphasize that there are a LOT of women in the sciences too, and for many of them recognition did not come easily.) Starting science instruction by telling the stories of the scientists and their lives first, instead of mentioning them only in passing, if not at all, is one good way to inspire eventual interest in the nuts and bolts of science and technology.

I also believe it’s important to study the historical uses and adoption of older technologies in order foster awareness of the possible ways in which new, untried technologies might affect us in the future. We Americans tend to accept any new technology enthusiastically, without critique. However there are cultures, such as the Amish, who carefully consider how to fit technology into their lives. It’s difficult to imagine many mainstream Americans would be sympathetic to such a stance, but at least we should be adopting new technologies with our eyes open so that we have a better chance of guiding their uses toward positive ends.

Beyond the foregoing, I wish to explore a more subtle point about science that concerns me.

During my contemplation of Art versus Science, partially inspired by reading Fritjof Capra's book, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius, I realized that I can’t imagine science and art being practiced as isolated disciplines in Leonardo da Vinci’s time, as we experience them now. Da Vinci was an artist, also a sculptor, a designer of numerous machines, and was generally interested in all the phenomena apparent in the physical world around him. Bearing this in mind, it strikes me that currently, when it comes to educating young people, tacking the label "science," "math," engineering," and “technology” onto subject matter sets learners up by association to expect a painful experience. This may be so partly because scientific and technical studies are justified primarily as means to compete in the marketplace, not as interesting subjects in themselves. The marketplace, or the job market, is an abstraction to youngsters, because it’s outside of their experience. When that concept is also conflated with competition it’s not only abstract but potentially threatening. Subject matter framed this way is rendered alien and in no way related to the inherent joy of discovery that science is capable of inspiring.

For the purpose of encouraging young people (or even older ones) to an interest in science, math, and related subjects, I believe it would be wiser and more to the point to characterize them much differently by including them as part of humanities instead of as separate subjects. Hence “humanities" would include science rather than science being taught as something apart and alien. Indeed, no education is complete without a serious amount of instruction in the sciences, but they should be introduced as a natural and fascinating backdrop to ordinary life, not as a means to compete in the marketplace.

I believe that emphasizing science as an economic tool has led directly or indirectly to the distrust many people harbor toward scientists and the sciences. For example, when someone comes out with a new study that says I should eat this, not eat that or, particularly, take such-and-such a medicine, my first question has become, “Who funded the study.” By the same token, when scientist claim the climate is changing, the first question hard core skeptics ask is, who paid for the research? Personally I trust NOAA scientists more than I trust corporate ones, but climate skeptics can justifiably question who did the research and why. As a matter of fact, oil companies have funded a good deal of the research that questions climate change. Science in too many instances has become a tool used by corporations and politicians to manipulate the public. How do you know who to trust? Science once had a reputation for being impartial, but that was never completely so, and is less so now than ever.

The subject matter commonly put under the category "science," is fundamental to our life on earth, and when presented skillfully is inherently interesting. My grandson, now turning five, was asking questions about the stars, the sun, and the universe at age two, or earlier. Why does it get dark at night? What is the moon? What is the sun? Why am I able to think, see, feel, talk? (I haven't heard him ask that latter one yet, but no doubt he'll get there by the time he's 8.) In my case, early curiosity about the invisible force making magnets stick to things intrigued me and led to a voracious reading of science books from then on. I was instinctively curious from a very early age about everything around me, especially unseen forces manifesting as electrical storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and turbulent phenomena such as water vortices and waves. I was naturally drawn to learn more, just out of curiosity. Every young child, if you carefully notice his or her exploratory style, is a born scientist. They act, observe, and hypothesize about everything around them. It’s rudimentary and instinctive scientific research. If nobody derails that instinctively conducted “science,” it can inform one’s whole life.

What I've just attempted to articulate is a style of interest in the world paralleling the sort of interest exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci’s life. It's a craving to engage with physical reality on a deeper than superficial level. That was an important and perhaps primary idea behind the formation of Mindport, to present exhibits that embody physical phenomena in such a way as to plant the question in the minds of visitors of any age: "What's that all about?"

Beyond the idea of making art and science partners under humanities, I suggest that we need new ways of characterizing both these panoramic subjects. Possibly a retreat to traditional ways of understanding them, at least for the purposes of teaching science to youngsters or lay beginners, would be desirable. For example, in Isaac Newton’s time what we now call “science” was referred to as “Natural Philosophy.” That’s in the vein of what I’m suggesting. In fact I believe that “natural philosophy” presented as a form of spiritual practice would be more effective in drawing people ultimately to a formal study of various scientific fields than attempting to whip up enthusiasm by presenting “science” as a competitive path to economic nirvana.

Kevin Jones