Spring Cleaning

Mindport's tenth-year (in this location) revamp, painting, cleaning, and exhibit-shuffling session is near its end. We're open again, most exhibits are ready for visitors, and a new show of Kevin Jones photos is hanging in the gallery. One new exhibit, a newer and larger version of "magnetic molasses" has been installed by AnMorgan and Carol. The whole staff, including docents, have put in a lot of effort on this project. When you visit, we think you'll like what you see.

Regular followers may notice that the Blog heading has also been remodeled to reflect better what actually goes on with this blog. Over time it's become apparent that only a couple of the eleven staff members have much interest in writing entries. We, the two writers, are more entertained by writing about the philosophical ideas relating to Mindport and its social environment, than we are by writing about Mindport's internal daily doings. One reason for this is, in the collaborative process inherent in Mindport's operation, there isn't much obviously visible on a daily basis. Exhibits have a way of "coming about," rather than being a consequence of a hard-and-fast planned process. Often, an exhibit or project which starts out being one thing becomes another, an implication of this being that most of us who build exhibits don't care to talk about what is in process until it's actually complete. Personally, I've found that the surest way to lose interest in building something is to talk much about it while it's being conceived or built.

Judging by the statistics on our blog site, and by the questions asked by visitors in person, more people are interested in the ideas behind Mindport and in the sort of ideas that keep US interested in the ongoing collaboration which is Mindport, than are interested in descriptions of physical "daily doings."  We do enjoy writing something about new exhibits when they show up on our floor, and we'll certainly continue to do that, as well as announce any events of interest that happen to be imminent. But entries dealing with more philosophical subject matter, mental "daily doings," will be our focus when something we're reading about, seeing in the media, or thinking about inspires comment. We're living at a pivotal point in history when the survival of the human race depends on a major change in our collective belief system. We at Mindport are acutely aware of this, and much of what we create reflects, directly or indirectly, a response to what we see going on around us, filtered through through our personal histories and a shared world view.

Mindport is about ideas, Writing about these ideas is useful to us because the process of writing has the effect of clarifying in our own minds what's important to us and suggests future directions for our work. What we write also provides past and prospective visitors hints about the thought behind what they see exhibited on our floor.

Kevin Jones

Personal History and the High Tech Path

"Home Brew" Radio Transmitter

I've been involved with science and technology since about age 7. At age 14 I earned my amateur radio license, and at age 19 started my first paid job in the field of electronics, which was serving for 15 months as electronics tech on an oceanographic ship in the Indian Ocean. After that, I spent a couple more years in electrical engineering school, then worked for the University of Colorado in two different branches of the physics department, involving research satellites and radio astronomy respectively. Upon moving to Lummi Island in 1977, I started my own business, initially repairing TVs, radios, ship radars, etc. As consumer electronics became less economical to repair, I found myself designing various electronic gadgets, which I sold via mail order, or which I supplied to others who commissioned me to build them. In 1995 Joe Edwards and Robin Burnett, and I, started Mindport. Several of the exhibits I've built for Mindport incorporate electronic circuitry, and, in a couple cases, microprocessors.

Over the last ten years, or so, I've become increasingly interested in the ways that electronic technology (and other sorts as well) impacts our lives, particularly the downside. Having spent so much time working in technological fields, I'm well-aware of the upside, since that's what drove my youthful passion to become involved there in the first place. From early on, I was intrigued with the idea of automating things, a fascination that bloomed with the advent of microprocessors and computers. It was after an extended involvement with the development of a microprocessor-controlled espresso machine that it became clear to me that technology, especially electronic technology and electronic "information technology", are not just neutral tools, but ones with often unrecognized and undesirable social and economic implications.

The development of the electronically-controlled espresso machine demanded that I become more deeply involved with computers and microprocessors than I'd been previously. In those days, we were still mainly using DOS (the early computer Disk Operating System). Windows had not yet come on the scene, or was still in a rudimentary form, as was true of the Internet. My early computer involvement gave me a first taste of high-tech rage, an emotion that has only become more severe and prominent over the years, not only with me, but just about everyone I know who suffers any involvement with computers and related equipment. It's difficult to find anyone who isn't.

It's an odd feeling for me to realize that there are young adults all around me who have never lived in a world without personal computers. Cell phones came along a little later than the early PCs, so they're only slightly less internalized in the lives of a twenty-year-old than the computers are. I compare the perspective of today's youths to my own, when I was twenty, employed as an electronics tech. I worked with people in their sixties who had been young in a world where the "personal motor vehicle" was a rarity, and rudimentary, at that. Same with broadcast radio. TV, of course, was barely conceived possible when those people were young. Experiments in sending pictures had been tried, but no commercial application (mercifully) had appeared. I, on the other hand, had known radios and automobiles all my life, and took them for granted, just as today's twenty-year-old does computers and the Internet.

I was 7 years old when I saw a TV for the first time, and was completely enchanted. My parents refused to have one in the house until well after I'd left home, at age 17. Correction: someone did give us a junker TV, when I was 13. It received one channel poorly, lasted a year, and my brother and I watched the Micky Mouse Club on it. Nowadays, I'm grateful that my parents eschewed TV, because I would have spent a lot of time in front of it, instead of tinkering with radios and electronic gear, which activities eventually culminated in an effective means to earn a living.

I've written this post as a prelude to others I doubtless will write in the future about technological impact, especially of the electronic variety, on our lives. It's a subject that comes up for me more frequently than any other, so, to avoid repetition, I've summarized experience that I hope will lend credence to future critiques of technology coming from my keyboard. I don't want anyone labeling me an uninformed Luddite, in other words. We're heading toward a likely comeuppance if we don't start paying attention to the road we're apparently taking, technologically speaking. Electronic technology is SO seductive, and nobody is more aware of this than I am. Because I become increasingly uneasy about its impositions on my life, and on the lives of everyone around me, particularly the very young, I find ideas about it creeping into my daily awareness, and into much of what I write. There's a message there that I won't ignore.

My grandson is almost four, and technology asserts a pressure on his life, and therefore the lives of his parents, that concerns me. It brings up questions about the world he and his cohorts will be creating for themselves when he's become a young adult himself. We do have the option to make choices about what technology we adopt and how we adopt it, but powerful forces militate against our making those choices, including the very seductiveness of the technology itself and the pressure exerted by its purveyors to keep us hooked on it. We must also consider the possibility that high tech may disappear, since it does require large amounts of energy to sustain its associated infrastructure, and future energy resources are uncertain. You may be tempted to scoff at this possibility, but, on the chance we must revert to more rudimentary technology, what will be the price we pay for having allowed ourselves to become absolutely dependent on the level of technology we presently enjoy?

Reading suggestions:

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle
The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen Talbott

Kevin Jones

Closing for week of February 4th

Mindport will be closed to the public from February 4th thru February 12th, reopening for our normal hours on February 13th.

After over ten years in this location, it's time for some painting, sprucing up, and reshuffling of exhibits. Please forgive us if we're upsetting your plans for a visit, and give us another try when you can.

Kevin Jones

Farewell John Ito

Snapshot of the mind of John Ito

John Ito, who has been with us for the past two years, and has built a number of finely-crafted exhibits for Mindport, including the Allella, Bella Stella, Diaballique,  and others, has, to our regret, moved on to larger pastures. He's now Director of Education and Exhibits at KidsQuest Children's Museum in Bellevue, WA. We'll greatly miss his creative energy, sense of humor, and ability to get along amicably with just about anyone. We wish John the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Imagination and Science

Science or imagination?

Every couple years I'm in the habit of asking myself what we're doing at Mindport, or what Mindport is all about now. This time the subject came up as I was lying in bed half asleep. A phrase popped into my head, "Mindport is a museum of art and imagination." My tendency has been to think of Mindport as a museum integrating art and science, which I mentioned in an essay on my staff page.

I've written a good deal about art and science being two ways of perceiving the world, one looking at it from the viewpoint of the emotions, and the other from that of the rational or logical mind. My quest in the past has been to attempt to integrate the two, since I've believed that if you study science while ignoring emotion, or practice an artistic discipline without acknowledging the logical and rational style of thinking, you get into various sorts of trouble.

So why, in my semi-somnolent musings, did the word "imagination" substitute itself for "science" in the phrase "a museum integrating art and science?" And why did I like the sound of the latter description better than the one I'd habitually used for years?

After a day or two of rumination on the subject, I realized that my attitude toward science has changed considerably over the last ten years. Previous to that, I'd thought of science as an "objective" style of viewing the world, i.e., what we learn via the scientific style of examination is a truth that you can't argue with once it's firmly established. The trouble is, after a long spell of observation, and having read a great deal about the history of science, about various scientific disciplines, especially the strangeness of quantum physics, and having seen the results of scientific research twisted in order to mislead people about such things as the harm caused by smoking, pollutants, and climate change, I'm beginning to suspect that scientific objectivity is. . . well. . . suspect; that a great deal of what science "discovers" is biased by what is already thought to be known, or by what we want to believe or what it's convenient or profitable to believe. Which is to say that scientific knowledge, and particularly the technology it begets are colored in large part by social and psychological factors.

Hence, experience and observation have awakened me to the fact that science and imagination are more closely entwined than I've been in the habit of thinking, and that one thing I've half-consciously been doing at Mindport is weaving the two together in such a way as to make that fact more obvious, at least to me, and possibly to others as well. This idea first came up in an essay I wrote about radio, which is a pet subject of mine, since I've been a licensed amateur radio operator for over 50 years. You can download the PDF here, then scroll down to the section, "Technology and Meaning," for a more detailed discussion.

To expand slightly on what I said in that essay, it seems that the direction taken by scientific research and the technological devices that follow on the heels of scientific discoveries is strongly determined by the way in which we collectively imagine ourselves. It's fun to consider what might have happened had we not been a "dominator" culture, bent on expanding our influence and ultimately creating an empire. If a culture with no interest in expansion had stumbled on electromagnetic radiation, would anyone have bothered to invent a use for it? Radio is a means to exert power at a distance, which is highly desirable for a culture bent on bringing large territories under its control. When a member of such a culture stumbles on a means to communicate instantly over long distances, of course that capability will be developed and refined. If we did not imagine ourselves to be conquerors or to have expansive desires, either physically or socially, there would be little motivation to develop communications technology.

The Aboriginal People of Australia, who inhabited the landscape of that continent for 40,000 years or more, are said to have been able to communicate over long distances via "bush telegraph." Somehow they knew at a distance what was happening to others of their society without recourse to mechanical means. Such human capabilities have been researched and well-documented, but are scoffed at by mainstream science. It doesn't fit with our current beliefs about ourselves or with the scientific paradigm, which holds that whatever cannot be proven by repeatable experiment does not exist. What would life be like if we were to consider anything possible unless absolutely DISproven by repeatable experiment?

Radio, as I see it, is an artifact of imagination. It seeded my 8 year-old mind with dreams of something quite similar to a smart phone, a handheld device with which you could communicate, watch movies, and do a number of the things smart phones are capable of. It's slightly spooky that such a device actually materialized 50-some years later. (Ironically, I don't own one.) If I'd been embedded in, say, the isolated culture of an Amazonian tribe, it's highly doubtful that anything like that would have occurred to me. Our present culture is the combination of many imaginations working in concert to realize a technologically-mediated sort of life that, if it's not exactly what WE dreamed of, it has certainly conformed to the dreams of the corporations and their technological enablers.

The Short Wave Radio exhibit at Mindport, is an example of re-visioning a technological artifact as an expression of meaning. Another exhibit, Wave Music, converts the movement of water waves to musical sound. It exemplifies an instance where "data" that might ordinarily graphed and used as a source for scientific inquiry, is turned toward aesthetic purposes instead. The intention was to be able to appreciate wave motion, not only as a physical sensation, but as a musical one as well. The ultimately pleasing application for it is to attach its four sensors around a tub of warm water, then lie submersed, wearing headphones, and listening to the music created by one's slight bodily movements stirring the water. From personal experience, it beats the hell out of lying in the tub listening to ads on the radio, which are mainly intended to convince me to colonize my life with more stuff.

In answer to my own question about what I/we are doing at Mindport: The present chaotic and possibly collapsing state of the economy and the culture have made it even more obvious to me how important it is that there exist havens of beauty and quiet. . . and good humor. Such places provide breathing room, and suggest alternatives to our increasingly frenetic and technology-plagued existence. We continue to present Mindport as one of those places. We hope that genuine peace and prosperity will rule your life in the New Year, and invite you to drop by and enjoy what we have to offer.

Kevin Jones

The Photographic Eye

 Walking on the beach yesterday, I photographed this attractive arrangement of shell, leaves, driftwood chips, and pebbles. My work? No, it’s completely the creation of wind, rain, trees, and tide. The main thing I did was to notice it and point my camera at it.

Frequently I think about the idea of "found art,” that is, odd things I just happen across that seem to express a message that I respond to aesthetically. It seems to me that much photographic subject matter could be characterized that way. I've experimented with consciously arranging things (or people) in front of the lens, but the most satisfying imagery, to me, is that which just fortuitously turns up. The art is in the noticing, which has involved cultivation, over time, of an alertness to the serendipitous appearance of photogenic subject matter before my eyes.

A possible downside to what I term “photographic alertness” is that to practice it successfully, you have to learn to see like a camera, which is really a specialized way of seeing. The photographic process compresses the 3D world into two dimensions and presents it as a bordered, flattened pattern on a page. What you see in the 3D world is not really what you get on paper, not unless you’re savvy to the tricks played by the camera eye.

After many years of practicing photography, seeing like a camera has become an internalized habit. This leads me to the question, were it not for this habit, what might I be seeing that I’m missing now?

Furthermore, now that half the population is carrying smart phones (capable of recording images and sometimes video), and is engaged in framing and flattening life for the display on computer screens, what effects might such training and habits be having on our psyches and our general response to what goes on around us?

I believe that learning to see the way a camera sees can be enriching, if accomplished consciously, but it can also be limiting in ways of which we may not be fully aware. For one thing, it focuses our attention on what can be seen, and takes our attention away from other senses. Our culture, in large part due to our focus (so to speak) on imagery, tends to cater to appearances, and to ignore substance. Also, as I’ve complained in other posts, we typically seem to be oblivious to the effect of sound on us, unless it happens to be music played very loudly. Similarly, we neglect our other senses, and do so increasingly, as we spend greater and greater amounts of time with our attention focused on electronic screens.

My last post, “Seeing outside the frame.”is a version of an essay I wrote some time ago. It seems to me that the best photography, though confined by its margins and two dimensionality, leads your attention to what's going on beyond the borders of the image, to the story it implies, or some metaphoric or even mystical meanings and associations. The objects pictured above, encountered at random on the beach, evoked feelings about the season, the end of life, that which it leaves behind. It inspired also to the speculations that I've indulged via this essay. . . and more thoughts yet about art, which I’m still exploring.

Beyond the Frame

The casual photographer's aim is usually to take a picture of something, such as an object or a person, which in his or her's mind s/he's set apart from the surrounding environment. "Here's a picture of Aunt Mary." Or, "Here's a picture of a bee on a flower." This is one perfectly legitimate use of a camera, but one reflecting the traditional Cartesian paradigm that understands reality as a collection of objects which can be separated from one-another and observed independently.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, with the formulation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, discoveries in quantum physics, and more recently, complexity theory and fractals, a new view of reality has emerged, one which understands it as a network of dynamically changing relationships, rather than as a static arrangement of distinct and separable objects. Not only do classical “objects” begin to merge into something larger, but the viewer becomes inseparably related to them, implying that meaning and emotion become as legitimate a part of physical reality as more “objective” qualities.

As my own view of the world has evolved increasingly to reflect this “new” reality, I’ve found the camera to be an effective tool for exploring and expressing my understanding of it. Photography has become for me a process of meditation, and the resulting images point not only to what is seen within the frame, but to what lies outside it as well, particularly those invisible territories of relationship, meaning, and emotion. I am intrigued by the way in which unusual perspective and lighting call attention to these unseen qualities, sometimes lending images a surreal or even supernatural flavor.

The photo above exemplifies the emotional relationships of which I speak. To me, it embodies a quality which a photography teacher of mine use to call "otherness." In other words, it's about something different than what it depicts, something outside the frame. It provokes a question: "What is the meaning here?" "What is the story being told?""Why does this image make me feel the way it does?"

Kevin Jones