GIANT TASKS/tiny people

Mindport has a number of new residents, all of whom are under an inch tall, all of whom are doing big jobs – vacuuming up tangled messes, feeding each other, cleaning gum off sidewalks, recreating without technology, ending racism, confronting environmental collapse.  One rounds the corner, and there they are, heads down, working hard, chipping away, little by little, day after day, only occasionally swayed by the seeming impossibility of solving the problems at hand. 

I admire their diligence and determination in the face of what may be insurmountable obstacles, and in quiet moments I can hear them shouting to us in their tiny voices, “This is our time!  These are our tasks!  If we can do it, so can you!” 

Devotion versus Distraction

Early Radio Receiver

Yesterday I took my camera on one of my periodic tours through the  Spark Museum, formerly known as the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, located just around the corner from Mindport. Much of the instrumentation and equipment there represents technological innovation of the hundred years previous to my birth in 1944. Textbooks on my grandfather's shelves, which supplied much of my early education in science, were full of attractive etched illustrations of just the sort of artifacts you find at the Spark Museum. That memory sparks a considerable amount of the pleasure I take in being a member there and in my periodic strolls around its aisles.

Morse Code Printer

 Vintage radio equipment and scientific instrumentation to me represent a time when handicraft was a part of nearly everyone's life. In viewing this handmade technology, you begin to understand the spirit of craft that produced it as a form of devotion bordering on the religious. These scientific artifacts were not just thrown together. They were built with love and an appreciation of form, as you may notice from the accompanying photos. They were built not only to demonstrate phenomena, or to serve useful purposes, but to be beautiful to look at, and possibly as monuments to the creativity of the people who fabricated them.

You see the same sort of devotion evident in technical drawings created by my great grandfather, mentioned in an earlier blog posting, and soon to be on display in our gallery. In them you notice infinite attention to detail and an obvious effort to create something of beauty as well as utility. Nowadays that sort of sustained creative attention has gone into hiding, at least when it comes to the design and production of the throwaway technology we use on a daily basis. A vestige of it survives in the arts. For example, Edward Burtynsky's startling images of enormous piles of junked cell phones and other castoff electronic equipment remind us of just how little enduring regard we now have for the the physical equipment and related technology that graces our daily routines.

Power vacuum tubes

 Some might accuse me of being a Luddite, or of being anti-technology, but, as I've mentioned in earlier blog postings, my life has been a long love affair with all sorts of technology. It's just that in the last ten years or so the direction of technological innovation has begun to evoke an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The sort of wonder I associate with the instruments over at the Spark Museum has disappeared without a trace, and we now merely consume equipment that operates on the very principles demonstrated by those early technological artifacts. We, especially young people, are endlessly absorbed by the Internet, as presented via smart phone, iPad, and computer, which tends to eclipse any possible interest in the history of scientific exploration that made such toys possible in the first place. I can't say that I don't understand why, but it's disturbing to me to witness in any case.

An allied discomfort I feel about the current thrust of scientific research, leading to technical innovation, is that it no longer seems motivated by a quest to understand the mysteries of the universe, as was the case 100 or more years ago, but now seems propelled strictly by commercial interests. . . which in turn use the technology as a means to spy on us and sell us more junk that in two or three years will end up being subject matter for Burtynsky's photographic work.

Leyden Jars

In perusing the historical technology at the Spark Museum, I find that it brings to awareness a subtle quality that is nearly extinct today, which I can only describe as an amalgam of silence and attention. It's an incomparably satisfying experience to see something that has heretofore only been manifest as a mental conception take material form in the physical world. Acknowledgment and understanding for that sort creative process has unfortunately waned and rarely seems to be modeled by adults to the advantage of young people. It's certainly not a quality that can be conveyed via such forms as film or video. The opposite is true in fact: the spontaneous capacities of the young to put themselves in such a quiet, concentrated mind space are being hijacked by a clangor of commercial distraction coming in the form of video games, television and the multitudes of other forms of mental noise promulgated by electronic media. It seems to me that if we don't foster the capacity for inner silence and concentrated attention, our ability to innovate in ways that truly enhance human life, rather than simply provide further distraction, will be further compromised.

Kevin Jones

Science Education

I’ve been noticing a great deal of hoopla here and there on the web regarding the importance of science education, and the fact that a lot of jobs are going begging because companies can’t find adequately trained people to fill the positions they have available.

This, and the fact that I’ve encountered proposals recently that mentioned the idea of science education and Mindport in the same paragraph, have set me to thinking more about the subject and how Mindport fits there.

Over the last few years, especially since the advent of personal computers and the Internet, my interest in technology and science has evolved increasingly toward curiosity about the effect it has on us and what we’re doing with it. My curiosity is illuminated partially by the fact that I’ve known and worked with many scientists, so have had opportunity to observe first hand something of what science in the trenches is all about and how the character of scientific research has changed over the last fifty years.

Nowadays, when I encounter laments about the present state of science education, they usually take the form of worries expressed about companies not being able to find skilled employees, or that the United States is falling behind X other countries in training scientists, or that kids can’t pass exams in math or science, etc. In other words, science is usually presented as something that has to be learned in order that we can do something else, usually involving earning money or beating competition. In contrast to the frequently free spirit of scientific research before the mid 20th century, it’s rarely, if ever, presented as something that might be fascinating in itself, for no other reason than being a means to satisfy one’s craving for knowledge about the nature of the universe.

With that in mind, it becomes clear why science education is in such big trouble. Children, especially children, do not understand why they should learn something simply in order to attain some abstract carrot, like big bucks or high social station, that’s being dangled before them. Either they’re interested in something for its here-and-now reward, or they’re not. This implies that it’s important to present science to them not as: “science, which you have to learn so you can get into college and attain a high income working for a multi-national corporation,” but as knowledge about everyday things, which are right in front of your nose and easily explored.

My daughter has been telling me stories about my grandson, age two, who is fascinated with the fact that the sun rises and sets. He doesn’t even have enough language yet to explain his fascination with that, but he’s obviously attempting to “grok” the idea of the earth rotating and the sun only appearing to rise and set. This is a first attempt to “do” science. You see something akin to “scientific method” operating every time he explores some new facet of his environment. He plays with the handles on the wood cook-stove in our kitchen, attempting to fathom how they work and what they do. His exploration consists of manipulating them again and again, carefully observing what happens, as he does with many other mechanical things he encounters. He seems to have a built-in interest in what we call “science” . . . and it’s important to note that nobody discourages his exploration, hence inhibiting his “scientific” interests.

My point is, most children have built-in curiosity about what goes on around them, that is, until someone comes along and discourages their curiosity: “Don’t touch that.” “Stop asking so many questions.” “That’s wrong.” “That’s bad, etc. Later on, someone else comes along and tells them, oh, you gotta start leaning about science so you can get into college, get a job, make six figures, buy a house in suburbia (a thing of the past), and all that jazz. Then we wonder why they don’t want to study science and math. . . especially after they notice on TV that people seem to acquire whatever they want with scarcely any effort at all.

As a counterpoint to what I’ve just said, I also believe that when it comes to the formal study of science, it should be rooted in a matrix of meaning. In other words, to explore the world from a scientific point of view, it's desirable to be standing on some sort of firm base that relates your discoveries to a coherent world view or ethos. There must be a set of values in your background. Otherwise, discoveries float meaninglessly in limbo, as in, “Oh, that’s interesting, what can we do with it to make money?” For example, there have been controversial experiments done in England in which clones are created by crossing human and animal genes. Obviously, whoever is doing these experiments has given no thought to the sort of life and consciousness that might be the product of, say, human and pig genes being mixed, assuming that there was any product at all. It’s a little like purposefully causing a human to be born with genetic defects, just because you’re curious about what might be the result. Can you call such experiment ethical?

We’re all the time using science and technology to create new products, which are foisted on the public with NO examination of what the consequences might be. In fact, we’re living in a vast, chaotic sea of unanticipated consequences. We’re mired in them. Granted, you can’t anticipate every consequence of introducing some new technology, but you can at least give it a thought. The Amish, for example, carefully examine all technology before they adopt it. They live according to a certain set of firm beliefs, and they choose their technology consciously, with those beliefs in mind, and pay attention to the ways in which the technology in question might impinge on them.

In our country, there’s a large proportion of the populace who have never really examined what our culture is about, or examined the idea of culture in general. History is typically an unpopular subject in school. It certainly was for me, in large part, as I discovered later, because it was never taught in relation to a context I could relate to. Rather, it was presented as a series of (to me) abstract events whose dates I was expected to memorize. It wasn't until I was an adult and began to read history on my own that I discovered how scientific research and the adoption of various technologies has been driven by certain (unconscious) assumptions deep within our cultural history. For me, that was a pivotal discovery, one which I was never given an inkling of in school. It lead me to an understanding that science and technology are not value-neutral. They affect us powerfully, and are also a means by which others, notably corporations, gain power over us. We  need to know about that, and make decisions about which technologies should be adopted, how, and by whom.

What we’ve done instead is to adopt every sort of technology that has come along, willy-nilly, without a thought about the consequences, the main consideration being whether the technology in question can turn a profit. The consequence is chaos, and ultimately, a serious danger of collapse.

This gets me back to where I started, the subject of scientific education. I propose that before we even think about science education, we need education in the humanities, the arts, history, sociology. We’ve been running a blind sociology experiment for over 100 years and it’s time to take stock of where it’s lead us. Judging by the apparent unhappiness of many people around me, we seemed to have missed the boat somewhere. We need to generate a context in which we can live happily and comfortably, and THEN we can consider what sorts of technology will enhance and which sorts will muck it up.

To be realistic, it's unlikely that we'll make voluntary choices about how we adopt technology, but it is very likely our technology will impress on us some lessons we'd just as soon have avoided. We’ll learn the hard way that something we did didn’t work, and, while gathering seaweed for dinner, we can contemplate how best to start over without making the same mistakes.

Having said all this, what is my position on “scientific education?” First, it's desirable that young people be exposed to rich environments that inspire spontaneous interest in “scientific” exploration. Such explorations should be permitted to proceed freely, without being tempered by adult agendas involving considerations such as future jobs, fame, or money. Meanwhile formal and informal education in the arts, history, and sociology, would provide meaningful context for later formal scientific training.

It’s been my intention for Mindport to at least partially fulfill such conditions. We exhibit a collection of intriguing interactive exhibits, and have set them in an attractive physical space that also includes visual and three-dimensional artwork, many photographs relating to the natural world and human environments. We encourage adults and young people to explore, and if they have questions, we attempt to answer them. Or tell them where to find the answers. Or trust that they WILL find them if they’re sufficiently interested. We assume that if a project interests us enough to build it, that it will interest visitors enough to wonder how it works, where the idea came from, and possibly open up just a little spark of general curiosity. That is one way to foster a healthy and meaningfully-rooted curiosity about the universe in which we find ourselves, and an unselfconscious ability to employ logical thought in discovering its secrets, a process we culturally label as "doing science."

Kevin Jones

New Ceramic Show in Mindport's Gallery

Cary Lane

Commencing March 17th, the work of five local artists will be featured  in Mindport's gallery: Cary Lane, Linda Hughes, Eugene Lewis, Ene Lewis, and Larry Richmond. They're showing in conjunction with the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts conference in Seattle. The show will run through April 15th.

Photography and Place

The other day I took a walk along the Northeast Shore of Lummi Island, near where I live. My walks there are infrequent, compared to the number I take on the opposite shore, facing Orcas Island and Rosario Strait. This is especially true in the winter when the northeast-facing shore is dank, cold, and gets very little sunshine, except on the occasional cloudless morning. This shore is also subject to freezing and inhospitable "Nor'easter" windstorms, known to the professional forecasters as "northerly outflow winds."

When I walk I invariably carry along my camera. Having it along has the effect of organizing my seeing in a certain focused manner that I enjoy. It also heightens my awareness of place, i.e. the sort of feeling one place evokes compared to others. Most of us respond emotionally to surroundings, but the awareness of that response tends to remain only semi-conscious, if we notice it at all.

For me, one of the greatest pleasures of photography, in fact, is the way it brings into fuller awareness my emotional response to physical environment. One way places speak to me is according to the way they appear visually. When I walk on the northeast side of the Island, especially in the winter, I often feel like I'm journeying in a realm populated by goblins. I see their distorted faces everywhere, the effect being enhanced by the naturally goblinesque dank winter atmosphere of the area. The sun doesn't touch it often and the high clay cliffs there become waterlogged after heavy rain. They collapse, bringing down trees with them, whose evocatively gnarled roots become quickly exposed as wave action washes the soil away from them. Also, the beach is littered with roughly barnacled rocks of all sizes that have weathered out of the soil of the cliffs. Excess moisture accelerates decay, and nourishes the growth of molds and green algae. All these physical conditions conspire to give the whole beach its rather spooky atmosphere, which colors my emotional and photographic response correspondingly.

By contrast, the beach on the Island's southwest-facing shore is exposed to the miles of often-turbulent water constituting Rosario and Georgia straits, hence receives warmer southerly winds and heavily scouring wave action. When the winter sun shines, this shore receives warming and drying solar rays for much of the day. The cliffs bordering the beach are much lower and set farther back from the water than on the Island's opposite side, so they're less subject to weathering. Part of the beach surface is characterized by nearly horizontal, wave-eroded sandstone shelves. Gravel and small stones from the beach litter these sculpted shelves in a visually interesting way, and the gravel beach as a whole takes on gracefully smooth forms that change according the the recent impact of wind, waves, and tidal flow along the shoreline. If my mood is low, this is the beach to which I naturally gravitate in order to bask in its cleansing atmosphere. The drift logs there dry to a weathered light gray, rather than accumulating green algae, as similar logs do on the east shore of the island. Weathered roots on some of these logs convey an association with elf homes, rather than goblins. . . a lighter association altogether.

Having intimately explored and observed these two beaches so frequently for the 35 years I've lived here, I've become acutely sensitized to the atmosphere associated with all the places I visit, whether country or city, and whether carrying a camera or not. The effect of place on me, and by extension, others, has become a fascination, and photography has provided a medium through which emotional associations with place can be expressed. Long experience with this special place has enriched my life in ways for which I remain deeply grateful.

Kevin Jones

The Art and Science of Bread

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

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!