9-May-99 De Cordova cyber show
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Charley phoned and asked if we wanted to go to the De Cordova museum to see their current show. We hadn't been there in a while, and it sounded like a good Mothers' Day activity. We drive into Cambridge and got him, and zoomed out the pike and out to Lincoln.
The De Cordova and Dana Museum and Sculpture Park is about 16 miles from Boston on a hillside overlooking woods and a pond. On a beautiful Sunday after a rainy week and showery Saturday it was filled with people walking around the sculpture park. The museum built a large new wing in the last two years and is easily twice as big as it used to be, but it's still a small suburban museum. The new main gallery had three large pieces on exhibit, all interactive hi-tech art.
One was a series of eight almost identical pieces: suspended from the ceiling was a tray with a tomato on it and on two sides acupuncture needles that could be jabbed into the tomato by little electric motors which were controlled by sonar sensors on a piece of electronics the size of a pack of cards. As you walked past, or put your hand in front of the sensors, the tomatoes would be tortured by the acupuncture needles. Creepy but fascinating!
A second piece, called Galapagos, had a dozen 19 inch computer monitors and, presumably, computers, running a simulated evolution program. Viewers could select on of the twelve monitors by stepping on a foot pad, and the image on that one screen would be the seed for twelve different images in the next generation. The images rotated at different speeds and flapped different appendages -- the real-time rendering was most impressive -- and you could select the one that you wanted to be elaborated in the next generation.
The third piece also had about a dozen computer monitors. At least four of them had tiny video cameras on top. These from time to time had live pictures of the viewers, and after an interval the images fragmented and the fragments broke into smaller and smaller fragments, until there were just points of color drifting along all dozen screens. The idea was that the motion of the fragments was controlled by the motion of the museum visitors in front of the piece, and some of your image was still there, getting smaller and smaller and more and more mixed with other images, as time went on. Indeed, when I looked at it from across the gallery when nobody was near the piece, the screens were all still. When I went closer and walked in front of it not only did my picture appear on one screen and fragment, but the pixels on all the screens started drifting along again. It was kind of mesmerizing, but if you just stayed still in front of it nothing would have happened. There was a strange balance of passivity but being forced to be active if you wanted it to remain interesting.
We walked from Charley's place up to Central Square and had dinner at Central Kitchen, a new yuppie place with a large selection of imaginative appetizers, a small menu of reasonably priced delicious entrees, and a big bar under what looks like an old copper building cornice. Charley thought it was a replica, but I think it's too bumpy and uneven to be anything but authentic.
I did some photoshop work on my latest stamp designs, two locomotives (that's been a glaring omission in our line of stamps) and some barbecue designs that I did after becoming enamored of our Weber grill last summer.
Yeah! All right, graphics. I mean, I can draw a little, and once in a while someone even pays money for a stamp I designed. That's my Baldwin 2-8-2 locomotive just below, one of the new stamp designs. It doesn't have a catalog number nor a price yet. I started by drawing freehand from a photo on a calendar, changing the perspective a tad to make it come more towards me. Then I transferred the drawing to a piece of Uncle Walter's Carving Block and carved out a stamp with an x-acto knife and linozip tools, with the smoke sort of as an afterthought from carving block left in the background. Then I stamped it, scanned it into the Mac, moved the wheels to put them on a straight baseline, put in some more shading and a little more smoke, cleaned up the negative spaces on the cowcatcher and the driving wheels (not too much, it still has to look like a carving) and now, wave to the engineer as the Wabash Cannonball roars by! (Once in a while I wish I had real audio... sigh...)
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