Introducing Bella Stella!

Mindport's latest exhibit is on the floor.  Exhibit designer/builder John Ito has created another wonder - this time a giant windup toy inspired by the crosswalks of our fair city.

To celebrate, we'll be open until 8:00 tonight, January 6th.  Stop by to visit Bella and congratulate John.  We'll see you there!

New Gallery Window and Holiday Hours

Our Art Director, AnMorgan Curry has posted her latest editorial comment in the gallery window. Come have a look, and while you're at it, there's a few new photographs by Kevin Jones hanging in the gallery.

Meantime, John Ito is working away on an intriguing exhibit that he's hoping to have on the gallery floor sometime in January. Hint: His inspiration for this exhibit was found on the streets of Bellingham. It has certain features that might remind you of a vintage 1930 grandfather clock, writ large.

Holiday reminder: We'll be closed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, December 23, 24, and 25; also on January 31 we'll close at 3PM, and will be closed all day on January 1, New Years day.

What are we?

A  local media organization asked to interview us for a short video production. We requested that they send us some specific questions that they might care to have answered during their interview. Since we often have difficulty generating off-the-cuff answers to such questions, three of us sat down for a half hour to discuss the questions proffered, in the process discovering responses that might not otherwise have occurred to us.

1. What is Mindport?

This is one of the questions asked us frequently by people who haven't been here. We've never been comfortable calling ourselves a "museum" or "gallery," (though we do have a space we refer to as a "gallery") because these terms don't quite fit how we understand ourselves. Usually we tell people that it's best if they come and see what they think we are. In a sense, we're a "work in progress," because the work that appears here depends a lot on who happens to be on the staff at any given time. The majority of us have been here for quite awhile, so where we go creatively also depends on where our personal explorations are taking us at the moment. We assume that whatever interests us will likely interest our visitors, which has proven to be true nearly all the time.

2. What sets your "museum" apart from other history/art museums?

One important factor that distinguishes us from other "museums" is the fact that we're not a government-defined "non-profit" organization, hence we on the staff entirely set our own direction. We are not responsible to a board of directors or other outside forces. This gives us great freedom, not enjoyed by most other public organizations who display artistic work.

3. How many exhibits are built at Mindport?

Almost all exhibits at Mindport are built by staff members. Occasionally  we find something we like "out there" and either display it as-is, or incorporate it into exhibits we build. We've discovered that in-house exhibit-building is a rarity in the museum world, possibly because most such organizations have more money than time, whereas we have more time than money.

4. How long has Mindport been open?

Mindport opened in 1995 at our previous location at 111 Grand Avenue in Bellingham, right across from Henderson Books. In 2000 we acquired our present building and spent a year remodeling it before reopening in 2001.

5. What exhibits are most popular?

We avoid any measurement of exhibit popularity. Such measurements tend to force all exhibits to fit some average or standard, which eliminates the surprise factor and dampens a spirit of creative exploration. There's nearly always someone who likes any particular exhibit, and we believe that the average should not receive too much favor over the exceptional. Many people like many or our exhibits, and a few like even the ones that are less popular with the masses.

6. What kinds of reactions do you get from visitors?

Reactions run the gamut from those who stick their heads in then run the other way, to some who get hooked after a few minutes of exploration, stay for a couple hours, then write us a donation check for $50, telling us how much they appreciate what we're doing. Some visitors engage our docents in long conversations, others walk around checking out the exhibits, then leave without further ado. Some spend an hour here then tell us they'll be back with friends or family members.

7. What do you hope people take away from their experience here?

In answer to that, I'll respond by describing my own reaction when viewing the creative work of others: Creative work and beauty always raise my spirits and give me hope. They remind me, especially during an era when things are looking pretty grim in the world at large, that human beings are capable of doing wonderful things, and amidst ample examples of humanly created ugliness, there's also the possibility of beauty. We hope visitors leave Mindport with renewed curiosity, calmer minds, and greater optimism about human possibility.

Tools

My co-worker, John Ito, our exhibit designer/builder, sent me this link to a short video describing a shop in New England that sells used tools. Watching it set me to reflecting about tools and the part they've played in my life. It's an appropriate thing to be contemplating during this era of consumerism that has culminated in our being swamped with goods that are non-repairable and must be thrown away when they fail. When I was growing up in the fifties, a do-it-yourself (DIY) movement was in full flower. In the decades following the seventies DIY seemed to disappear into the woodwork, so to speak. You began to get the feeling that only nerds and losers bothered to fix anything, much less build anything from scratch.

The picture above was shot in my father's workshop. He's 94 years old now and doesn't spend much time there any longer, sad to say. But seeing those tools, some of them the same ones I used when he first started teaching me to use them, when I was age eight or ten, stirs my nostalgia. At the time he was very active with Do It Yourself projects. He always had a well-organized workbench in the house where he operated on ailing appliances and built various projects, some of them for my own entertainment. For that reason using tools, repairing and building things seemed an ordinary part of life, one which I completely took for granted and which skills I absorbed by osmosis.

Here's photo of my drawer of electronics tools and another of my woodworking tools, all of which were instrumental in building every exhibit I've contributed to Mindport's collection. With the woodworking tools you'll notice a certain father-son resemblance in the means of their organization, if you compare to the earlier photo of of my father's shop. Most of my tools visible in these photos have been with me for over 40 years and are as much a part of me as my own hands. I own one set of chisels that my mother gave to me. When I was about seven years old, she took a carving class from an old German woodcarver, and bought these chisels from him. It's pleasing to me to use tools that have a history of known human connections, as these do. These photos remind me of the contrast between the throw-away values of today, and the values of a time when many household objects, especially tools, served us well for years, during which time we grew increasingly attached to them, to the point where we'd only part with them regretfully.

During the past few decades, there's been a growing cultural tendency in the US to value abstract mental work over manual skills. If you were a machinist, carpenter, or practitioner of any other trade that involved using physical tools (outside of computers. . . which are only semi-physical) your pay rate betrayed the fact that your profession was valued less than that of someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling paper or bytes and thinking for a living. This despite the fact that your work was the last step in a chain of activities culminating in creations that were actually necessary and useful, in the physical sense of the word.

Now that the activities of an elite group of paper and byte shufflers has brought the world's economy to its knees, and the possibility of the collapse of industrial civilization has begun to hit the mainstream press as a distinct possibility, we're suddenly hearing that certain physical skills and the tools necessary to put them into action might be coming back in demand. Various groups around the country are beginning to ask what steps we might take to re-industrialize America and get us producing useful things again, not only useful, but repairable and recyclable. Hallelujah!

Having done an assortment of jobs as a self-employed person, that included both mental/paper-shuffling work and physical design and construction, I've increasingly come to appreciate the latter. For a long time, I've noticed that the best medicine for anxiety and unease is to build something with my hands. There's something deeply reassuring about seeing things that I've only imagined come together in the physical world, and that satisfaction serves to remind me of my deep appreciation for the tools that make that possible.

Kevin Jones

Occupy Yourself

This title is not to be construed as my being unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In truth, I'm at least 60% sympathetic to it. Not having yet seen a hard list of demands by the protesters, I can't tell you exactly what positions I completely agree with, but the point I intend to make is that Wall Street greed is not the only culprit behind this cascading economic collapse we're presently suffering. My title (suggested by my co-worker, AnMorgan Curry) speaks to the part the "99%" have played in creating this debacle. I bring this up because when revolutions occur, it's too frequently true that, because the revolutionaries have ignored the part they played in the dysfunctional system, the new system they install is as bad or worse than the one they replace. I'd hate to see that happen.

"Occupy Yourself" says it's important to put yourself into the driver's seat, pay attention, educate yourself, and don't waste all your energy blaming corrupt government, and corporate CEOs for what has happened. They're a large part of the problem and the culprits should have been prosecuted years ago, however, throwing them in jail and making new laws or reviving old ones that have been ignored will not deliver us from our current predicament.

We're in trouble because we've been attempting to defy the law energy conservation. This physical law is inviolable and cannot be countermanded by congress, the president, or anyone else. It states, in lay terms, that you can't get something for nothing.** Sadly, a large proportion of the American populace has been seduced into believing the opposite, via a storm of corporate advertising and the blandishments of self-serving politicians, not to speak of their own reluctance to face reality. A belief in the possibility of getting something for nothing shows up in many guises, including a reluctance to pay taxes, the embrace of a consumerist throw-away culture, and a general willingness to blame somebody else for whatever is wrong. This, in other words, means to  embody an attitude whereby I have permission to do whatever I want and, if there are unpleasant consequences, to blame it on something THEY did.

By the way, if you believe a bank officer who tells you can afford to buy a house worth a half-million dollars when your income is $20,000 per year, do the math, or get a disinterested party to do it for you. This is part of what I term, "educating yourself," or "putting yourself in the driver's seat."

The sad fact is, any system that defies the law of energy conservation must sooner or later collapse. Our system was brought to the edge more quickly by greed and ignorance, but it actually was doomed from the start. It worked well when there was plenty of low-cost energy available in the form of oil, plenty of other natural resources, such as minerals, vitamins (oops, I mean forests), fish in the sea, unpolluted water, air, etc. But we're to the point that the availability of low-cost hydrocarbons is on the wane, and this, beyond anything, means we're in big trouble. It means that our economic system, whose functioning has been predicated on growth, CANNOT continue in its present form. You can't grow without fuel, and the fuel supplies, along with other resources (water being of prime importance) are getting tight. And for numerous reasons, alternative energy sources are unlikely to be able to take up the slack as oil depletes. See This link.

"Occupy Yourself" also asks us to start getting in touch with our creativity. That's because it's going to require a huge amount of that human resource, along with other types of human energy to dream up a new and sustainable way of living on this earth. It will have to involve recycling materials 100%, for one thing. Take a look at this site:  for ideas about how that might be accomplished. The new system will not be based on consumption, unless it involves somehow funneling all our waste back into producing the next generation of stuff. Even then, it will be a much lower key style of living than what we're used to.

If the Wall Street protesters indeed have been vague or confused about their demands, it may be because they haven't quite yet discovered that much of what needs to be demanded is inside themselves, and not available from the empty husks personified by Bankers, Wall Street, corporate manipulators and their government lackeys. Protesters, and all of us, must begin to demand from ourselves the aforementioned creative energy to devise a whole new culture that is both kind to people and does not require infinite economic growth and continuously increasing energy input for its perpetuation.

Here's a film whose story is an exact allegory for the state in which we currently find ourselves, and which suggests symbolically, and possibly in actuality, a direction we might follow: "The Milagro Beanfield War." Even better, read john Nichol's book by the same title, along with its two sequels.

Kevin Jones

**
You might not immediately see how the law of energy conservation is equivalent to "you can't get something for nothing," Let's take unwillingness to pay taxes as an example of an attempt to defy the law of energy conservation:

First, you have to understand that money has no inherent value. It's paper that we've arbitrarily assigned value. Useful things like food, oil, clothes, a car, a bicycle have real value, and we assign an amount of money to the value of any of these things. Then we can trade the money instead of the things, which is very convenient, because it means you can buy a bag of groceries without dragging in a barrel of crude oil to pay for them.

Now the law of energy conservation says that you can't destroy energy or create it from nothing. You can only change its form. If you drag a weight up a hill, it takes energy to do the job. The energy you expend, say, riding your bike to the top of a hill is stored in the earth's gravitational field as "potential energy." When you coast back down the hill, it's the release of potential energy that keeps you moving. You don't have to put any more energy into pedaling because of that. A fraction of the energy you put into riding up and down the hill is not lost, but dissipated into space through heating your tires, heating your body, and warming the air that flows by you as you ride up and down the hill.

Roads are a necessity for the perpetuation of our present civilization. Creating and repairing them requires energy, lots of it, and materials such as gravel and asphalt, derived from crude oil. It takes energy to run the machinery, grow the food that feeds the workers who operate it, transport that food, keep the workers warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Someone digs the oil out of the ground that supplies that energy. The digging itself requires energy, usually supplied by oil. Oil is full of potential energy held in the chemical bonds of the oil's hydrocarbons, which were originally cemented together by the energy of sunlight. The same energy is conserved through the entire chain of its conversions from one form to another.

Much of the oil we burn today comes from foreign countries. We exchange dollars for it, which implies that the foreign country taking our dollars will eventually be able to get something of real physical value back by sending back the dollars we traded them for oil. If we've been printing a lot more dollars than we have valuable things for them to represent, then we can't very well pay back the oil-producing countries with material goods of value equivalent to the oil we got for the bucks in the first place. We don't have them. Hence, in the future, those countries are not likely to trust the value of or our dollars and are likely to want a lot more of them for the same amount of oil, which indeed has real, measurable value.

If you don't want to pay taxes, then the roads can't be built or fixed because to do so requires a finite and measurable amount of energy. We trade tax dollars for that energy. Because of the law of conservation of energy, we can't create the energy needed to build or fix the roads out of thin air. It has to be dug out of the ground, and we need to trade dollars that are still worth something for that energy, otherwise we won't get it.

Hence money, when a monetary system hasn't been abused, is equivalent to energy, in that it can't (or shouldn't be able to) be created or destroyed. Money is actually LENT into existence, and the money that is lent must be paid back to its creator, namely the government. If you aren't willing to pay for what you get, or pay with dollars that have been inflated by a government that has created more dollars than there is true value for them to stand for, then basically you're attempting to defy the energy conservation law. The consequence is systemic collapse, which is right were we are just now.

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