Making Art

If you read the Make magazine blog, you'll see a lot of folks making stuff. Lots of technologists and craftsmen are putting together neat stuff and setting up maker spaces. For instance, there's the folks at GRMakers who have set up the maker space in my hometown Grand Rapids, MI. This is also the home of Art Prize.

And then there's Pablo Picasso. Of all the folks you'd call modern artists, I respect him the most. He was a prolific artist and he did a lot of it. I heard that he did a lot of doves. He said that he refused to draw their feet, because he'd had to draw so many of feet when he was younger. Why would he be forced to draw a lot of bird feet? Because that was the way he was taught.

Before Pablo Picasso produced abstract modern art, he had to master his artistic technique.

When I experience the various entries in Art Prize, I see several Taxonomy of Art Prize Entries. Each entry manifests a separate mastery of some technique. Whereas the Old Masters knew how to put paint on canvas, nowadays artists are also glueing seeds or wine corks to a substrate, or welding, riveting or bolting together bits of metal. Or any of a zillion other techniques.
sorts of work I've described in my

The ones that get me excited generally involve wires and electronic components. And most exciting include some logic switching electrons around.

And this puts a great stress upon the artist, because folks can conceive art works that exceed their inherent skill sets. Some art pieces require a fusion of artistic vision and technological craftsmanship.

This is why some of the neat stuff you see on the Make magazine blog are art projects. You'll also see in maker spaces an easy marriage of the technologists' expertise and the artists' vision.

In fact, one of the leading entries is a dragon from a Detroit maker space. Gon KiRin is awesome.

I figure that maker spaces are going to become a key contributor to culture. If you can hook up with one, or with the maker movement in general, by all means do so.

Breakfast With Joe

I have a friend who is immensely interested in politics. He's on news haitus as a matter of mental hygiene. I've complained of the class of induhvidual who think that "shut up" is viable political rhetoric. And of the deliberately obtuse activist who misconstrues to misinform 3rd parties watching the exchange. But today my friend, Joe, reminded me of a more toxic pattern of contemporary rhetoric.

Joe has a friend who is a parasite whose politics are a reflection of his parasitism. (You can decide for yourself whether s/he's a corporate welfare beneficiary or not.) At breakfast this morning Joe disclosed that his friend told him s/he likes engaging in political rhetoric with the sole purpose of creating red-faced spitting rage. I suggested Joe upgrade his friends.

With this in mind I had this twitter exchange wherein my interlocutor said, "the art of argument seems to be lost these days, usually ends in insults flying, does web make it too impersonal?". This question reminded me of my breakfast conversation, because I believe there are powerful economic forces mitigating against rational argument and for insults & ad hominem attacks.

To see what I mean, fix in your mind a clear mental picture of your typical cable news show discussing the issues of the day. All I notice are paid consultants shouting "bumper sticker  slogans" at other paid consultants and trying to grab the microphone from the others. The most recent innovation in cable news has been for the moderators to abandon any pretense of fairness and get in on the shouting themselves.

It would be a lot smarter of you to turn off your television and pick up one of Plato's Dialogs. They are just collections of guys talking to each other. So, you can read these guy's bull-session transcripts without minoring in Philosophy. In fact, it's better if you aren't into philosophy, because the point I'm making is their cordiality. In the Dialogs, each of the guys talking to Socrates is a representative of a distinct partisan camp.Yet nobody resorts to name-calling, personal insults, or any of the other ugly behaviors that characterize contemporary political discourse such as I've described elsewhere.

You might think that I'm about to advocate Poling's Theory of Devolution here to explain what happened between Plato's day and today, but instead I have a simple Marxist observation, "Conflict sells newspapers."

Sure, the guys on the cable news shows might attract intelligent and articulate members of the distinct partisan camps in contemporary society. But they'll just talk using big words in long sentences that induhviduals will have to think about to understand. Cable news shows are not in the business of informing or educating the public about issues, they are in the business of selling advertising. They can charge more for Poly-Grip if they can attract the middle and bottom of the bell curve who just care to see the fight. And the true believers who can't imagine the truth is more nuanced than a bumper sticker slogan.

Unless you don't know which brand of denture adhesives to buy, I suggest you shy clear of cable news shows. If you live in the shallow end of the gene pool, then find some blogs that pander to your current political polarity and you can cocoon without being challenged to think.

Instead you might pick up a copy of Plato's Dialogs and read it through enough times to learn how to discuss issues in a reasoned and civil fashion. And when you finish, let's chat like humans about what you know and what you're interested in learning about.

The Red pill or the Green pill?

Are you going to take the Red pill...

... or are you going to take the Green pill?

I've rambled on about how much I hate dystopian novels. And how I intend to write prose that is anti-dystopian.

Sarah Hoyt, et alia, have suggested an alternative they call Human Wave. Human Wave is basically old-fashioned Humanism (neither Secular nor Religious, just Humanism qua Humanism) that's contextualized within the motifs of Science Fiction.

That's a fine sentiment. I like humans. I really like cute little humans and attractive female humans--particularly the one to whom I'm married. But I've always thought "man is the measure of all things" to be a bit too uppity. Not humble enough.

Thus I now feel more of a co-belligerent of Human Wave than an unequivocal ally. Instead, something got me thinking about the future and how my writing should engage the future.

Let's suppose I take all the problems in the world and consider worst-case scenarios. The great terror of my childhood was nuclear war.

Maybe there will be a nuclear war, and the radiation will keep growing so that we'll all die. And if that happens, the last survivors would live in Australia, drive race cars, and take suicide pills. That's not a fun day On The Beach, is it?  
Conversely, the survivors in such a scenario would have the time and resources to build underground or underwater habitats with sufficient shielding to protect against radiation. OR they could build rockets and live on the moon for a century or two while waiting for the radiation to half-life away.

So, do you want to keep calm and carry on or do you want to get excited and make things? Do you want the Red Pill or do you want the Green Pill?

(You'll note that I did not say Blue Pill.)

When I was a wee lad (That sounds better in a Scottish brogue.), you could drive through Gary, Indiana and you would see an orange haze in the air from all the steel making. The river in Cleveland caught fire.

Today you can fill your lungs with air that's a lot cleaner. You can go to the beach and take a dip in water that's a lot cleaner, too.

(But I live in Michigan. It's too cold to go swimming. At least, not until we get some more Global Warming, please.)

What changed between then and now is that our parents saw problems and set about to fixing them. They fixed them so well, that the remaining pollution problems became much more subtle, and more questionable.

That's the green pill. You see something is wrong, and you set about to fixing it.

Is the planet too hot or too cold? Don't Stay Calm and Carry On, roll-up your sleeves, build a thermostat, and hook it up. What about unintended consequences? There's risks in anything and we're already dealing with unintended consequences of everything else that's gone before.

Once Upon A Time the world of the future was not a dystopian place. Stay Calm and Carry On was WW2 and on the other side of the Atlantic. The American way has been to see a problem, and do something to try to fix it. We Get Excited And Make Things.

Happily, today most of the things that are worth making are within the scope and skills of one or a few tinkerers. The Maker Movement is a bunch of folks doing art installations, starting companies, subverting monopolies, and engaging in creative destruction. A lot of us are engineers and computer geeks. Note the word "us" because that's who I am. You may have noticed my experiments with the Raspberry Pi.

I also write. And after you read my stories I hope that you will want to get up and invent a jetpack or a flying car. Or a cure for cancer. Or a better way into space.

Camille Paglia Needs To Get Out More

When you live on an island, it is easy to think that the world ends at the shoreline--particularly when that island is named Manhattan.

A week and a half ago, Camille Paglia wrote an opinion piece in one of that island's local newspapers.

With a title like "How Capitalism Can Save Art" Ms. Paglia piques the interest

Ms. Paglia cites a decline in the visual arts, particularly painting since the 1970s. She goes on to state that the avant-garde is dead while citing execrable installations masquerading as art. If that is what art is, then art is dead. She further laments the fact that in recent years young people have become disconnected from the manual trades, and thus lack the technique to pull off artistic expressions.

This is contradicted by the "Maker Movement" something you can see on display if you pick up an issue of Make magazine or haunt any of the "hacker spaces" popping up across the country. I think her observation is correct--as far as it goes.

True, today's kids are not going to get summer jobs in shoe factories or learn about steel making from besooted parents--unless those parents are artisans making hand-made shoes or smelting metal in backyard forges.

As technology creates new forms of expression old forms don't necessarily die so much as become art forms--like the blacksmith I watched on Nova last night forging a Viking sword in his shop in Door county Wisconsin.

Blacksmithing is art? It's more art than taking snaps of a crucifix in a jar of urine.

There is a limited amount of creativity in the world and there are many more modes of creative expression than smearing paint (or feces) on canvas. Perhaps this generation's Pollock or Mondrian are happily building fire-breathing dragons to drive around Burning Man.

I've said elsewhere that rich people can be stupid, filling museums with overrated junk and in so doing they are disclosing a naked-emperor groupthink unmatched by anything except perhaps the Obama presidency.

I don't think my hometown's billionaire is stupid, because he started ArtPrize a few years ago. Art experts squealed like pigs that the prize would be awarded on the basis of popular vote instead of expert judgement. Indeed. By crowd-sourcing art evaluation as was done with ArtPrize entries, art experts can be disintermediated.

Dangling a quarter-million dollar prize in front of the public caused a lot of talented people to think about what sort of art they could produce. And--for better or worse--they manifested a diverse spectrum of creativity as I've describe elsewhere. But don't take my word for any of this, look at this year's winners for yourself. The 2nd and 3rd prize winners are illustrative of this diversity of creativity: in the former case, hundreds of little robotic birds danced and flew about the room in a dazzling show of technology, while in the latter case, the artist put paint on canvas in a way that would please the Dutch masters of old.

The two trends both falsify and confirm Ms. Paglia's thesis.

First, the maker movement gets creative people back in touch with the hands-on matter of making thing. And they're spreading their creativity across a broad spectrum of artistic expression as they design circuits and software to create new forms of beauty while mastering techniques unimaginable a generation ago. I believe Ms. Paglia is no farther than a subway ride from some of the preeminent hacker spaces in the country. Are these folks capitalists? Maybe in an Etsy.com sort of way.

Second, by bringing hundreds of visitors to the Grand Rapids downtown area, the ArtPrize organizers have brought a lot of business to restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. ArtPrize is capitalist. It is as capitalistic a happening as an Amway presentation. Art may be dead in Manhattan, but it's alive each autumn in Grand Rapids, MI.

So, Ms. Paglia, if you want to see art that is not dead, look in Brooklyn for a hacker space. And if that doesn't satisfy, drop by Grand Rapids next fall.