Neoteny is the greatest state of mind (Part 1: Exploratorium)

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Photos galore now. I found myself pondering about how the scientific concepts are communicated and brought to life, rather than the concepts themselves. There are lots of exhibits about light, colors, acoustics, and meteorology, perhaps because the fundamental tenets can be experienced more easily by the layperson?

Just outside the Exploratorium

Bay Bridge and some sailboats

This reminds me of cross-sections of plant stems. Or views under an optical microscope. 

This I did not know! I did remember that thicker rods have higher spring constants and therefore wiggle faster. I pride myself on knowing most of the science behind these exhibits, but I'm always happy to learn new things :-)

Kaleidoscope your face!

Mirror mirror on the wall...

I did not want to use my camera flash as a courtesy to the other visitors :-P

Whoever thought of this has a slightly macabre and edgy sense of humor.

Clock tower. It has a neo-steampunk feel :-)

This made me nostalgic of my AP Physics C class activity of racing soup cans.  To my surprise, the chunky noodle soup beat the creamy peanut butter... I wonder if it's because all the chicken nuggets clumped in the middle?!

Nice glass display of the donors. Reminiscent of whimsical bubbles! More fun than the ol' engraved metal slabs.

Mmm the classic optical illusion.

Funny jokes. And puns.

More jokes.

I love these.

This is a curious exhibit on linguistics and psychology... sort of.

Another whimsical twist on the obvious.

I like this design.

This is one of the landmark exhibits that made the Exploratorium what it is today. Dr. Frank Oppenheimer is a fascinating character!

Cute note and worms.

Bubbly algae.

The columns represent the heights of SF Bay tide every hour.

Weather observatory.

This is a nice display of the water cycle that we don't usually think about.

Hilde Hein's book about the Exploratorium gives fascinating insights into how the museum came about, its founding philosophies, and how it has developed over the years. Perhaps this is the sort of thing I would enjoy doing for life... combining science and art and (helping to) inspire people about it?

Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet

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I almost couldn't get tickets for this Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet concert... The tickets sell out frustratingly early. All the retirees in the area buying up season tickets months in advance!

It was amusing to see the only gal in the group (may or may not be the youngest?) holding the biggest stick (i.e. bassoon). Their program was refreshing, spring-like, and most of all whimsical. Only musicians of their caliber can pull this off! I had a lot of fun visualizing dramatic scenarios during the pieces...

W. A. Mozart (1756-1791), Fantasy in F Minor for a Mechanical Organ, KV 608 (Arr. by Michael Hasel): Mozart being the timeless classic he is, I had no salient mental imagery other than the abstract notion of spring and joy. This seemed to be their warm-up piece, as I felt they were tweaking some intonation along the way. I know this because once the air inside the instrument gets cold, it takes a few minutes to warm it up and get the pitches right again! Mmm wave physics.

Kalevi Aho (b.1949), Kvintetto (2006): Wild safaris with cave spelunking, scuba diving, jungle trekking, and desert traversing. Along the way, the travelers encountered a pair of elephants lumbering in heat, a mixed chorus of howler monkeys and macaws, a near-death experience of almost crashing into a cliff in a propeller plane, and an explosive symphony of color-shifting corals, tropical fishes, and octopi. The last movement starts with the flute, oboe, and clarinet playing offstage, and then they come back. And then the French and bassoon leave and play offstage until the end. Curious stage effect.

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), Trois Piecès Brèves (1930): A lovely garden in the height of spring with serene fountains, butterflies dancing among the flowers, birds chirping amidst the arboreal foliage, and squirrels darting around the branches and tree trunks in their vibrant acrobatics.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), La cheminée du roi René (1939): Young Franciscan monks hiking in an ancient and pristine forest, seeking enlightenment. Magical spirits visit them every once in a while to commune with the monks and make fun of how little they know about the wisdom of the forest.

Jean Françaix (1912-1997), Quintet No. 1 (1948): The Marauders (may or may not include Lily Evans) pulling a Ferris Bueller by ditching their Hogwarts classes for a day, solemnly swearing they're up to no good. They must be constantly looking out for people who might recognize them, but that doesn't stop them from going to a bar and drinking a bit more than they can handle. James and Lily (or Sirius and Remus or some combination thereof) danced around in awkward and silly moves, before Remus reminds everyone they must head back pronto or they would really be in trouble. The next day, while passing time during a boring class hungover, they're planning their next adventure.

The quintet did an encore of a folk song medley that included "Oh Susana" and "Yankee Doodle" among other tunes I couldn't immediately recall :-P I wonder if they have an encore book of folk tune arrangements from every country they've performed in?

I wanted to ask them if any of them can circular breathe, but sneaking backstage seemed to be tricky. Too bad!

Visitations: Theotokia and The War Reporter

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One of my recent conversations discussed the following proposition: when attending an avant-garde opera, instead of dressing up in the usual evening formal attire, one could don the hipster gear of thick-rimmed glasses, hoodie, brightly-colored pants, converse sneakers, and mismatched socks. I'm really milking my grad student status for all it's worth.

As quoted from the concert program:

Visitations presents a pair of tender and powerful dramas about individuals haunted by inner voices. The first, Theotokia, takes the audience inside the consciousness of a man who, beset by hallucinatory voices, is taunted and seduced by the mother of God. The work illuminates the experience of Leon, a schizophrenic who is possessed by ritualistic and religious hallucinatory delusions and suffers from obsessive, ritualistic behavior.  

The second opera of the set, The War Reporter, depicts the true story of the inner struggle of Paul Watson, a war reporter who believes he is being haunted by the spirit of the desecrated American soldier he photographed in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 (a photograph that won Watson the Pulitzer Prize shortly thereafter). Although the libretto's narrative traverses six geographical locations, the actual drama is set entirely in the psyche of the reporter as he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I was totally mesmerized by the juxtaposition of Gregorian chant (parallel fifths and octaves) with augmented/diminished fourth/fifths, major/minor seconds reminiscent of the soundtrack from North by Northwest and Inception. The St. Lawrence String Quartet really pulled out all the chords and shook them in pizzicatos. The texturing of various percussion instruments and the alto flute was particularly effective. Kudos to the composer and the entire "pit" orchestra! (There's no real pit on stage in this concert hall.)

The New York Polyphony gave a fantastic rendition of all the angst and nuances. The countertenor (who played Leon and one of Paul's inner voices) sang with the delicate tension of stretched pizza dough, constantly stringing my ears along with the anticipation of delicious harmonies and suspension chords. It was amazing how high his range can get! The baritone (as Paul) swept me away with all the power of crashing waves on a stormy shore. The soprano's singing (Theotokia: Mother Anne, Leon's mother, Yeti Mother; The War Reporter: Paul's boss, Paul's inner voice) soared like an albatross surfing in the mountain wind.

The set design once again evoked an abstract sense of unsettling, as per Rinde Eckert's signature in his works. The visualization in Theotokia reminded me of fertilized cells dividing...

... and ferrofluids morphing...

I also enjoyed how the vocalists took over the role of the stage crew, rearranging props while doing choreographed interpretive dance moves that illuminated plot elements. This aspect of the performance was implicit and understated, letting the audience make the conceptual leaps, a fresh contrast to the special effects overkill in contemporary cinema. :-P

At some point, I wondered about the anachronistic superstition that upon taking a shot, the camera would extract the subject's soul... or perhaps the photographer's?

Some observations of children's art (under 16)

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On my third trip to San Francisco (third trip without any specific destination or purpose, that is), I spent a good amount of time in the Children's Creativity Museum at the Yerba Buena Gardens, specifically the spiral gallery that has been featuring artworks from the International Museum of Children's Art. Perhaps I wanted to get reacquainted with my childhood? i.e. drawing with total abandon and not caring whether it looks "right"?

I did not take any photos because I deliberately chose not to bring my camera so I could be more attuned to my surroundings. I did make the following observations:

(1) The artworks were generally very colorful, with bright hues and sometimes pretty clashing combinations -- lime green next to vermilion next to copper sulfate blue next to chromium yellow, for example. However, a group of paintings and sketches (mainly from the Eastern Europe region) reminded me of Picasso's Blue Period... because they used only blue shades. The subject matters were not particularly depressing, although they were somewhat abstract renditions of faces and people.

(2) Some of them were rather "well-done", meaning that the human anatomical structures, spatial perspectives, and shading techniques were quite mature and sophisticated. Two examples stood out the most to me -- 1. (Done by a 14-year-old Latvian) A watercolor of a winter night in a forest, with a wooden cabin at the center background, a moon on one side of the sky, human footprints going from the foreground to the cabin, and a lone rabbit sitting in the snow at the foreground. The moon's halo and the clouds were blended nicely; all the trees' shadows, reflected light spots in the footprints and on the rabbit were positioned properly. Totally publishable in a children's book :-P only because adults' books usually don't have pictures... 2. (Done by a 13-year-old Uzbek) A traveling bard of prophet sits in a contemplative posture reminiscent of Rodin. His facial expression, light beard, clothing folds, and shading were all meticulously delineated. Back when I was around that age... I might have been able to paint like that on a good day. (My charcoal sketches were the bomb, however.)

(3) Many artworks featured local cultures and history. Especially the colorful traditional South/Southeast Asian garbs. There were lots of farming-related artworks (Central and South Asia) as well as paintings of indoor daily life (Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong). The Austrian kids drew choir singers and the Mozart family. A German kid drew a witch cruising over a coniferous forest. Almost all the people in the artworks had big smiles! Except for the ones doing lots of manual labor that is. I particularly liked the horses, camels, and bulls in the Mongolian drawing of a mystical mountain man. They were tiny but the horses looked like horses and not dogs or pigs :-P

(4) There's an undercurrent of... global pop-culture. In a drawing by a 9-year-old Slovak featuring a three-headed dragon attacking a castle (with the requisite princess trapped inside), the dragon's stomach contents were X-rayed out in full view: packaged MacD food such as fries, burgers, and milkshakes. A Vietnamese (girl -_-) drew some farmers with wide pink hats. Many of the Singaporean and Indonesian family/friends portraits (along with an Argentinian drawing of fairies) displayed a visible influence from Japanese anime, i.e., large and detailed eyes, colorful and textured hair, etc.

(5) Some countries were not represented in this collection. Notably China (government censorship and propaganda?), Japan, Korea (too much time spent in cram schools?) Only ones from South America were one from Argentina and one from Peru. On the African continent... Egypt, Ghana, and Sudan. Lots of Eastern European (Soviet bloc :-P), South, Southeast, and Central Asian representation, especially the *stans. The only artwork in this collection done by an American was called "Two Families", featuring a sailboat with people and some whales big and small.

I wonder how much did these young artists receive prompts re: their subject matter and choice of medium? As a hopelessly analytical adult who has a taste toward postmodern surrealism / magical realism, I want to parse out the elements that originated purely from the children from those that were prompted by adults. I'm sure in some cases the boundary gets blurred. I'm also curious whether the selection in Oslo is much different from the SF cohort. Perhaps it would indicate more complicated (and adult) layers of national and cultural sensibility?

Brain Pickings is the most intriguing and illuminating website I've visited in a while

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io9.com is a close second. Together this makes for my shortest blog entry with the most number of tags.

I particularly should check out these collections of books... on the left panel on the main page. I already read a few of them and heard about a few more, but hmm... haven't read real books in a while. Too many things are happening lately...

What the Hex?

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I came across this color guessing game via this blog. Most curious. I was able to get like five correct in a row for Level 10, but definitely failing at Level 48 ROFL. 

FontForge looks like the answer to my restlessness... [NOT]

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Thanks to Fzz's link to a kerning game... that inspired this sudden concentrated exploration into typography :-P Tried my hands at the game and didn't do too badly I suppose.

Although the actual task of designing a font is rather involved!

I tried to install FontForge via Cygwin at first, then found it to be hopelessly and needlessly complicated. And then I realized, doh, I have Ubuntu. And then the installation was just one line -

    sudo apt-get install fontforge python-fontforge 

Admittedly, this is the first time I truly felt that my multi-OS machine has finally found its purpose... to be multi-OS... after the fiasco of trying to install Jacapo in Ubuntu (which is a lot more complicated than a single sudo command)

Maybe I can fiddle with the notion of my own usefulness for awhile. FontForge looks sufficiently complex to sustain my play for at least a few months.

[Edit] I impulsively upgraded my Ubuntu from 10.04 to 11.10 and now FontForge doesn't work anymore. Blerg! At least "Oneiric Ocelot" sounds cool. I wanted the next release to be called "Pensive Pelican" or "Pouncing Panther" or... "Peeing Poodle", which Fzz said was better than "Pooping Poodle" because it could be shortened to "PeePoo". The developers should make that an April Fool's joke or something...

Adding a dash of imagination to photos

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Befunky is a neat web app that adds artistic effects to photos. I was playing around and it was pretty fun. All hail computer graphics and signal processing algorithms!

Gonna play with FotoSketcher too. This one needs an installation. (Don't we love obvious misspelling in product names...) The sample gallery doesn't have people, so I wonder how that might turn out.

Why no color outside the box??

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Oh woes, I won't be able to visit these kinetic artworks in person... and my current locale would prefer to remain prim and manicured and upkeep its culture of influence via money made from playing the start-up lottery.






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"Music between nature and architecture"

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Being the pan-aesthetics enthusiast that I am, I went to this talk (blog title) by Leon Botstein. I can see why he gets to be the president of a preeminent liberal arts college... I can almost imagine him in a Count Dracula cape, working semantic and symbolic abstraction magic with his dramatic intonations and lexicons. He would have made a terrific orator in the Greek tradition. :-P

This is his ongoing project, and not so surprisingly, he started with mostly German composers and architects, stemming from his German-Hungarian (Jewish) background. Here are the main associations he made -

(1) Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel :||: Composer Felix Mendelssohn, based on their style that is evocative of 19th Century pastoral Romanticism. Schinkel did paint some rather magical Gothic cathedrals nestled in beautiful forests (below), and Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture is demonstrative of the spirit of nature (I played this with an orchestra and also happen to really like this piece).

(2) Architects Otto Wagner & Joseph Maria Olbrich :||: Composer Gustav Mahler... Initially ornate, Baroque, rectilinear and true to traditional form, later on more subtle and philosophical. I'm not as familiar with Mahler's music (will listen to his symphonies at some point). The Vienna Secession movement seems interesting to look into...

(3) Architect Eero Saarinen :||: Composer Jean Sibelius ... The connection is fairly obvious here because these two were good friends, and their styles influenced each other -- with organic, iteratively evolving themes. I could hear this in Sibelius's violin concerto. I like Saarinen's buildings, especially the staircase. I am drawn to staircase designs...

(4) Architects Le Corbusier & Frank Lloyd Wright :||: Composers Edgard Varèse & Igor Stravinsky ... Neo-Classical, functionally aesthetic/ aesthetically functional :-P Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was definitely a neo-shock at the time. And Varèse wrote this wicked difficult piece "Density 21.5"... One of Le Corbusier's buildings reminded me of Simmons Hall and another of the Green Building, huh. I didn't know he also designed the Carpenter Arts Center @ Harvard, which Botstein said was "hard to find an angle that actually looked attractive".

The Q&A session was illuminating as well. It gives a window that glimpses into Botstein's persona (at least in public...) which I find to be cogent, eloquent, uncompromising, territorial, and domineering. :-P

The first question was how did Botstein made the associations he did, i.e. what basis, and whether other scholars in the field would make the same associations. Botstein replied that these connections are not arbitrary as he approached these from a historical point of view, based on actual contacts between the architects and the composers. Since they were contemporaries, they were therefore subjected to similar social influences and Zeitgeist of the time. (Thank you, GRE vocab list...)

The second question was from another musical scholar, who asked about the influences of the French Revolution on the arts/architecture, i.e. pre-revolution being more formulaic and post-revolution being less so... Botstein said that he didn't quite agree with this, although I don't recall the details of what he said after that...

The third question was from an architect, who wondered about how to reconcile the improvisatory nature of some music with architecture, which is very planned. Botstein answered that these architects were also very much painters and sculptors, so their creative process involved lots of sketching in the beginning. The editing part was what he drew parallels to.

He also commented on concert halls and how their design influence the sound, which reminds me of David Byrne's TED about music and the architecture of concert halls. Botstein quipped that it's much harder to build a concert hall in a rural area, e.g. Bard College than in an urban area... hence Carnegie Hall is "unremarkable" and Lincoln Center is "an abomination"... har har har...

Well, it was a great talk for sure. I look forward to see how he'll continue this project.

Random thoughts

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(1) Healthful food is very important. I feel my brain power increase by 30% when I have such food vs. when I don't. The local farmer's market is awesome.

(2) I should remember to listen to certain music when I'm angsty, rather than defaulting to TV shows. Although for me, watching TV is a response to events in life, and the kind of TV shows I watch is highly correlated with the kind of event that has occurred.

(3) I'm sketching again. I wonder if that's good... I mean, TV show fandom :-P

(4) I need to feel extreme angst or extreme ecstasy in order to be able to write inspired poetry. This is of course conditioned on my ability to be coherent, with attention span longer than about 30 minutes at a time. (I like this poem. I like most poems by this poet, actually.)

(5) The reader can probably tell that my research has been stagnating.

Visit to local elementary school

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For our project #2, we're designing a hands-on education experience for 4th/5th graders. This time I'm teaming with a 2nd-year business school student and a d.school architecture student. This project is sponsored by RAFFFFT, and we'll talk to their staff tomorrow too.

We visited a local elementary school to talk with one of the teachers and her class. She gave us an overview about the kids' curricula and also told specific stories. There's a strong emphasis on environmentalism, such as the part about John Muir, field trips, and a small farm right on school grounds. There were goats, sheep, many chickens, and a garden filled with many crops! O_O Obviously I've been a city and suburbs person most of my life...

The kids do lots of hands-on stuff, which is really nice. Activities like role-playing, reenactments of historical events, "lab" stuff like basic E&M and circuits. I get the sense that the science and math components are kind of weak, but I'm biased :-P They have many books about art and Shakespeare (!) and some exploratory science subjects.

I chatted with Jamie (sp?), who seemed on the quiet side (though from personal experience, 90% of quiet people I've met turned out to the most interesting). She likes to draw and showed me one of her artworks -- a hummingbird (which was for some reason black, but it was nicely-drawn.) I learned that Jamie's dad works at DreamWorks after one of her friends mentioned their show-and-tell from the other day.

She showed me the cube clock that her teacher randomly found in her closet. The clock tells time by rotation of various slices of a truncated corner. Quite fascinating...

Jamie has two cats, one named Mystery (4-year-old) and one named Bobo (9-month old). Bobo roams around a lot while Mystery just likes to be petted :-)

From what I gather, she would probably enjoy some type of artistic design toy. She was subtly more excited when talking about art class and the activities involved. Watercolor and some kind of marble-textured painting with floating a piece of paper over the medium.

Hmmm... maybe I should read up a little on developmental psychology too, about how children's mind at this stage is like. My own childhood is hardly a typical example...

Bakemonogatari

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= Bakemono (化物) + monogatari (物語)

I should have already blogged about this when I watched it w/ S.O. in... January? So this is a belated entry :-P I just felt an irresistible urge to watch some of it again...

Such charm in the exercises of reductio ad absurdum, non sequitur, and subtly blatant -- blatantly subtle -- parodies of anime antics.

The unique factors are (1) the text on bright backgrounds that flashes in accelerated pace until abrupt stop, (2) camera angles and zooms reminiscent of Michel Gondry's films, (3) minimalist visual design and music - Philip Glass style or jazz accompaniment riffs, and (4) absurdist meta-humor.

(1) Typographical, almost subliminal messages really hammer it in... the identical replicas of characters that fill up the screen remind me of Andy Warhol soup cans.

(2) Frequent close-ups of eyes and eye movements, bird's-eye view, up-the-skirt view, spherical projection...

(3) Sometimes it seems neo-noir with the bleached coloring, even more faded-out than that in Minority Report. Almost Impressionistic. However, certain objects are emphasized with bright colors. The music induces a trance, a hypnotic state that juxtaposes with said bright colors (e.g. blue, yellow, and red establishments in the park scene, episodes 3-5).

(4) ROFL... one has to watch the episodes to understand.

ZOMG...

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I have a serious dearth of material to put here. In fact, one might see a regression (more like change of style, um?) Dang it, real life!

Auditorium: the game

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Play the online demo version.

It's a puzzle game with an aesthetically dynamic interface -- sleek, clean, minimalist color scheme. The object is to direct a photon beam via adjustable force fields in order to initiate various instrumental voicing simultaneously... and generate a symphony.

It's a festival of topology, visual arts, music, with physics references. Not much else I can ask for in a puzzle game!



The music is Hans Zimmer/Philip Glass-style hypnotic. In Act 2, the chord progression of i-VII-VI-V in C# minor works quite nicely with the elegant black background and bright particle beams. The visual and the audio together convey a sensation of cruising in space -- with an MP3 player and headphones.

I'm sorely tempted to get the full version of this.

Biologically-inspired choreography

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This made me speechless. One could go about analyzing what each move and each gesture signifies, but the overall message is elegantly presented. Evolution aptly represented.

Reminds me of the Cirque du Soleil with their exquisite motion of artistry.

Numb3rs chibi style

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Ahahahaha... what an irresistible combination :-P The next best thing to plush dolls for this rabid fan anyway... I think I'm getting a little better at drawing on the tablet.

Rodin sculptures

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I took some photos of the Rodin sculptures...

1. Meditation

2. Martyr

3. Fallen Caryatid with Urn


4. Fallen Caryatid with Stone

5. Torso of the Falling Man

6. Seated Woman (Cybele) (Thankies <3)

7. The Three Shades (Thankies <#)

Awesome art collections

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I'm a sucker for pretty pictures. Actually, it's better if they're also geometrical one way or another. Even better if they're representational. A trap for me-specimen = stunning visuals, convolved metaphors, autumn-y music.

Some such collections on deviantART:

Architecture

CG environment

Lovers

Up to no good

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I like being just a little bit evil.