Dial "G" for Gator

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Jones

New Shows

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Jones

Travelogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Jones

Exhibits: Rolling Marbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marble Pump 1

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

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

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

Marble Pump 2

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

Marbellous Indeterminacy

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

Kevin Jones

Curiosity Killed the Cat?

Fully alive. . . and enjoying the catnip!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Jones

Starting Something New

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

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

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

Tallie Jones 

The Allella

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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