For a short time period before the development of radar, militaries around the world experimented with devices that amplified listening called ‘acoustic locators’. Here are a few images of these amazing yet obsolete devices from this link (which has provided the caption text as well):

The height-locating half of the Czech four-horn acoustic locator. This picture is believed to show the testing at Waalsdorp.

Acoustic locators in Japan: 1930s.
To the right, one of the figures is the Japanese emperor Horohito. Behind him are the AA guns intended to be used in conjunction with the locators.

Acoustic locator on trial in France: 1930s.
This remarkable machine is an acoustic locator based on hexagons. Each of the four assemblies carries 36 small hexagonal horns, arranged in six groups of six.

Jean Auscher’s maritime acoustic locator: 1960.
This remarkable headgear was invented by Frenchman Jean Auscher as an acoustic navigation device in case of radar failure on small vessels. Shown at the 1960 Brussels Inventor’s Fair, and, one suspects, nowhere else ever again.

Ah! Life is good, thanks to the amazing SMW team! The benches for Binding Sky are looking great, the droid app is almost perfect, the sound pieces are compelling, and the website is up and running.

Esther and Venaya pose for the official photos

Owner of The Original Sweetmeat and host to the 2nd bench said he wants the bench on his property ‘forever’

TIME curator Eileen Braziel shows off our signage

Benchmaster Russ, selfless hero of project

TIME website designer Gabe helps to lay the foundation of the bench at Sweetmeat

More to come on the team’s video, sound and programming…

Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals.

Carl Jung’s Red Book

Here is an interesting analysis of Jung’s Red Book by Terrapsychology author Craig Chalquist that ties ego-consciousness to ecology, he states:

Where Faust the alchemist sold his soul to the devil in exchange for carnal frenzy and mechanized might, our world-girdling civilization has altered the elements, the atmosphere, and life itself through the anti-alchemy of mutating toxins and genetic manipulation. The type of ego consciousness responsible for all this cannot tolerate anything wild, uncomfortable, or imperfect; it must clean, cleanse, fix, and solve instead of allowing what arises to open up and move from within.

and continues:

Mired in its own attempts to work on, toward, around, and though, the Faustian ego remains walled off from inner and outer nature except in rare individuals who make their own heroic descent into the depths. For them, the Red Book tells the inside story of Jung’s painful evolution as he sat with what pinched and bothered him long enough to let it share its soul. In the wound, he found, was the voice of the divine, ever calling into presence a more spacious and heartfelt relatedness to an animate world, one whose creatures, liquids, fires, and minerals speak on their own behalf to anyone with ears to hear.

A preview article I wrote about ISEA2012 is now posted on the excellent Temporary Art Review (TAR) site here, lots of cool pictures of projects. Thanks to TAR editor Nancy Zastudil, students in my ISEA2012 International Practicum class at UNM next semester will have an opportunity to publish interviews, images, updates and articles for TAR too.

Check out this short called ‘Afterlife’ about the international disposal and recycling of computers and other electronics (e-waste). The memorable scene for me is the one in which a man outside Delhi is using a pan to sift through metal parts in a pool of water – reminiscent of panning for gold during the gold rush.

Here’s a teaser for ‘Let Fury Have the Hour’, a new doc by Antonino D’Ambrosio.

A generation of artists used their creativity as a response to the reactionary politics that came to define our culture in the 1980s. This dynamic and exhilarating documentary brings together more than 50 big-name musicians, writers, artists, and thinkers to trace a momentous social history from the cynical heyday of Reagan and Thatcher to today—and impart a message of hope. Featuring Chuck D, John Sayles, Eve Ensler, Tom Morello, Lewis Black, Richard Wolff, and many others.

Found at economist Richard Wolff’s blog

Aaron Moulton

My co-presenter today was Aaron Moulton, the new senior curator of exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Former Flash Art International news editor, Moulton has been based in Berlin for the past five years where he founded the exhibition space Feinkost. Aaron presented some intriguing works of art and science in his presentation including floating sculptural experiments by Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno with the new material technology aerogel (a solid as light as air).

One of my favorite works by Saraceno at the Barbican

After the talk, Aaron and I had a conversation about political activism, media and art centered around video work by Andrea Bowers that profiles currently imprisoned environmental activist Tim DeChristopher. In 2008, DeChristopher protested an oil and gas lease auction of 116 parcels of public land in Utah, conducted by the US Bureau of Land Management. DeChristopher decided to participate in the auction, placing bids to obtain 14 parcels of land for $1.8 million. DeChristopher was taken into custody for fraud by federal agents, and in 2011, he was sentenced to two years in prison.

Through her video art work, Bowers has been the only person to document the 14 parcels.

United States v. Tim DeChristopher from Harold Linde on Vimeo.

According to the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Bowers

mines the intersection between political activism and art. She is interested in the role of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience…She begins by conducting archival research on a topic, then creates photorealistic drawings, videos and performances that are more poignant than dogmatic. Bowers seeks to contextualize historical events such as the struggle for reproductive rights in relation to our contemporary situation.

Drawing by Bowers

Closer to home, Daniel Richmond’s Lobo Louie project hosted a presentation by activist Demis Foster. Demis is most well known for directing the Ancient Forest Roadshow, a year-long nationwide media and outreach campaign that helped to raise awareness for the plight of ancient forests. As part of this project, she drove across the U.S. with a 1,000 pound crosscut from a 450-year old Douglas Fir tree.

Ginger Cassady with the crosscut from greenpeace.org

When I spoke to Demis about the project, she talked about the importance of working with artists, as emphasized in this article about Lobo Louie in UNM’s Daily Lobo.

The Lobo Louie project effectively integrates a number of complex subjects by weaving the activism of wolf protection and recovery, the history and science of wolf research through the Museum of Southwest Biology, the economics of a major University and its sports teams, with a meaningful local symbol. The ‘local’ nature of the project is, in my view, one of its greatest strengths, allowing the student, faculty and other university-based audiences who usually see art works designed for an imaginary global ‘art world’ to experience art that engages (and challenges) a symbol so ubiquitous its impact is almost unconscious.

How should we think of our work in a gallery? As artists we often think of an art space as a generic ‘white cube’, a space populated by international ‘art consumers’, each with the same global perspective. We believe that every gallery, museum and international biennial is designed for essentially the same person: liberal, educated, rich, international, etc. and that work we create for one space could just as easily be installed in an identical space half way across the world. But this idea is completely false and negates the potential power of the artworks we create. Ultimately the local context of an artwork is everything, the only impact of a work happens through the perception of each very unique individual that walks through the door. An effective artwork could challenge the established world view of this individual in a very visceral way, so that once this person leaves the space, he or she may see the world very differently. Do artists intersecting with political activists increase the potential impact of each? Based on what she has said to me, I believe Demis would agree.

I’ll end this mini-rant with an excerpt from a presentation by Bowers:

The Personal is Political, Revisited – Andrea Bowers from ExquisiteActs&EverydayRebellions on Vimeo.

I’m presenting at the Mountain West Conference on the Arts in Utah today and heard a very intriguing keynote by neurologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang who has tracked the biological mechanisms that occur when humans have inspirational experiences and has found that these actually happen in the same place in the brain as basic survival mechanisms.

Here is her TEDx Manhattan Beach presentation:

These mechanisms happen (perhaps especially so) in human babies, and after viewing the video of the Gorilla Michael (see previous post – I still can’t stop thinking about it), it seems very likely to me that they occur within other species and between species – as in my emotional response to Michael’s story.

A large number of Dr. Immordino-Yang’s publications are available online here:
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~immordin/

She’s also presented at what looks like an interesting conference Making Science Visible with lots of videos (including a presentation topical to this blog called From Open Source to Open Science) and another called The Mind and its Potential: We Feel Therefore We Learn

Dawn Weleski is an artist and MFA candidate at Stanford University whose studio I had the pleasure of visiting on Monday. She and her collaborator Jon Rubin have done some wonderful public intervention projects around the world, most notably in Pittsburgh where they have created two ongoing projects The Waffle Shop and Conflict Kitchen.

The Waffle Shop is a neighborhood restaurant that produces and broadcasts a live-streaming talk show with its customers and operates a changeable storytelling billboard on its roof.

Right next door, Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. There have been 3 iterations of cuisine so far: Iraqi, Afghani and Venezuelan.

I’m going to stop by for a snack on my cross country drive this summer.

I can’t stop thinking about this – as an infant, a captive Gorilla named Michael who grew up with Koko and learned American Sign Language with her, probably witnessed his parents being killed by poachers. In this clip, Michael responds to the question: “Can you tell me about your mother?”