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

Vraiment "Diaballique!"

Maze collaborator, Andy Mcbride, at work

Exhibit builder John Ito has done it again, this time with a truly diabolical creation which, with its sheer addictiveness, will put any video game you've ever played to shame.

The challenge is to get four steel balls through the maze and into a spiraling cup, where they ring a bell to let you know you're a genius. Looks easy? Don't be too sure. You can't see it in the picture, but the center of the maze counter-rotates against the perimeter part, mining an enticing adventure with with perils and pitfalls. Once you try Diaballique, you'll never go back to lackluster video games again.

See details here.

In the Gallery