Plastic Childhood?

I didn’t intend to throw a kids party with no Plastic. Yet, it removed the veil of petroleum and it was a clear day of joy.  Children’s parties have become events about things: gifts, juice boxes, “sharing” which is another word for not grabbing the gift you can’t have, and arguing with the children to stop running, stop yelling, stop being such a crazy thing!

It was not Luca’s birthday. In fact, there was no reason to have a party – but the memory of May Day. No one celebrates it anymore – but, what the hell, we needed some fun, some celebration in this time that’s been filled with crappy news!  Also, Luca thought a party celebrating flowers coming back and summer almost here was an excellent idea. So, we did not invite the children in order to eat cake. We did not invite the children to rip open gifts. We had a party to be together.

And, that’s what we did. We had a party where, for some reason the kids did not scream, the adults talked to one another about stuff besides their kids, and we were more rested after the party.

I am NOT a person who has gone totally plastic free. It’s really hard (as a person) but with kids it’s really tough! I was introduced to the idea/fact/reality/terror of plastics by Manuel Maqueda (a founding member of http://plasticpollutioncoalition.org/) about a year ago, and the issue of plastics taps into major issues for me: ecological destruction that needs to change, civil liberties violations (we are sold water in toxic bottles, and this water and soda is aggressively sold to poor people), and finally, it’s killing us. I’ve been on a project with J Nichols (www.wallacejnichols.org) who is an oceans activist who also lives the life of clean and good slow food – I’ve learned a lot from him and his partner, Dana. And, then there is Beth Terry, living plastic free for two years who has explored this dependency of ours with clarity (www.fakeplasticfish.com) – been inspired by her as well.

So, I am a newbie – and I was curious, as a test, to see what it might be like to remove the plastic (especially since all that petroleum you sea in the ocean is the basis of plastic that holds our water). I did five simple things:

– Reused all the glass milk bottles (for milk) as containers for flowers, hold juice (no juice boxes), water to drink, and left overs.

– Reused all of the glass jars for Jam as glasses and had a few re-used plastic cups (but only 10 were put out).

– Bought paper streamers and put them up in the morning. No balloons.

– Bought fifteen tiny terra cotta pots, chalk, stickers (ok, couldn’t find un-plasticy ones), dirt, and seeds.

AMAZING things happened. The kids didn’t have juice boxes, so they did not scream. We did not put cupcakes out in full view – they didn’t even ask for them. Some people brought gifts, but once they were opened they were put aside because the kids wanted to GO OUTSIDE. Wow, they wanted to make the pots and plant. So, again, I can barely get my butt in gear to really plant my garden, but the kids took such time to make them – and were proud.

Then, the parents. Ok, I bought beer and wine. Please, it may be noon but let’s be clear – we make fierce espresso and even knowing you can relax, and have food (I made some salmon and grown up food so we did not go hungry) places you, the adult, in the picture: in the experience of fun!

I invited back that lovely facepainter (I wrote about that in in February “Body Paint Gone Wrong” about http://bit.ly/cpp0h3) – his name that he uses is Oliver Twist…come on, it’s worth it just to have a person in the house named Oliver Twist! Why facepainting? Well, it’s fun. And, Oliver has new paints that are not oil based, but, I noticed something the last time we did it: children love to choose a new face.

So, as some kids played with dirt, the others chose their faces. And, while they had their faces painted, I noticed we all stood around watching them. They sat quietly (did that have something to do with no juice boxes, or the parents being still and watching them?)

What happens to a child when they are really looked at? Seen? Not, juiced up, not fed sugar, or yelled at to stop being wild: from the stuff we feed them?

The party, for me, felt open. We were all smiling. The children were the gifts, the treats, the party favors – they ran and made bubbles, and yeah, we made balloon animals – there it is, that icky plastic – though we didn’t feed food off of them.

Each kid had a new face.

Each kid shared.

Finally, the meltdowns had more to do with naps – and less to do with sugar high.

And, in the end, they made something – they made the party, made the plants, sat on the earth and not in a bouncy house, chose their body and their art. They were May Day – a celebration of life:

And, so, yeah – I’ve told you about our party. And, here’s the nut of it – I spent half the amount of money for the party (party favors were the pots and paint, there were no extra party favors, there were no plastic utensils/cups/plates to buy)…and it took under an hour to clean up (with three of us pitching in). Oh, and not ONE big plastic bag filled with plates, cups, gunk – not one bag.

The house was lighter. It felt good. The kids did eat hot dogs, though we had out little carrots – but chips as well. They were kids. And, they were not encased  in plastics – pumped with the crap that comes in plastic – and it wasn’t that hard to do: and I loved making the party for them – as did, it seemed, every parent there. Because we love them and want them to be happy – and healthy.

Later, when were cleaning up, I saw that one of the questions I had asked as a piece of art for the kids was answered (picture below). Don’t read to much into it, but notice how even in the presence of chaos a kid made a flower on the bottom. The kid probably was older than the littler one who made the squiggles. That’s not the point – the point for me, is about a hope for this – a clear picture of a flower, pushing from the chaos: breaking out from behind the thick, plastic film that we wrap around ourselves, and our children.

The sea is a dance (of oil)

It’s been hard to slow down. I’ve been working hard with J, Jake and Stuart on our piece at The Academy of Sciences in June. It’s a piece about the sea. But, I had forgotten the feeling of water: till I saw this woman dance.

Last weekend, I saw her. She had her earphones in and had a nano in her right hip pocket. She was singing to herself, and her sister was sitting on the sand watching her. I was very tired.

We had gone to the beach to relax, watch the surfers and let Luca run free.

I stared at this dancer.

I don’t think I was gawking. Yet, like a fan, I asked her sister if I could take a picture. I got the sense by her laugh that my taking a picture might delight her dancing sibling. I took a whole bunch. Then, I crouched down, and in an incoherent way  (deeply tired) I said, “Well, she’s really in it, isn’t she?”

The sister turned her head, kindly, and replied, “Of course.”

Of course. Yes, I forgot. Some people go slow. And, to dance hula you have to slow down, to hear the crash of sea behind you as the drum. Though, in this case, the dancer had earphones in and she could have been listening to Lady Gaga for all I know – but, she was smiling, and laughing a bit, and danced on without any awareness of us.

What I see when look at this picture (and at the memory of her) is how extreme we are in our relationship to the sea – or, perhaps it’s just me. One view is that she is a perfect moving body in front of a perfect moving sea. Another, is that she is a human with ups and downs, humor and faults, and she is dancing before a sea filled with more pollution than plankton. Two extremes.

I sat down, I pushed my feet into the sand and watched my kid learn to surf by jumping high onto a boogie board laying on the sand. Two visions of him popped up: my blond Adonis learning to ride the sea before a body of water he will come to know. And, my four year old who has been a huge challenge recently what with the fixation on legos and demands to jump on the bed, and an ocean that may not be clean enough for him when he is old enough to surf.

I had a headache. I had a heartache.

So, I watched her some more.

Surfers were behind her. That dog was trying to get into the act. And, she was simply beautiful in her exact, languid flow. She was digging her personal time on the beach. She was not cut in half. She was all of herself, dancing in front of the ocean which is all of itself.

I’m tired of being torn in half about the sea – and perhaps all things human. We are all the splendid movement and trash within us – we are both/and – we just happen to be at a point where we need to decide how we want to live our lives so that we, and the sea, or the sea (and we) won’t be choked up with our filth and remnants of our fast lives.

I watched her for a while and felt the integration of both good and bad, the movement of her body and the speed of my life – which needs to be reminded of another rhythm.

I felt better. I came to the conclusion that we can clean up inside and out, slow down inside and out: we/I can stop and reconnect.

Then I saw this picture this morning – and the feeling of integration is replaced with rage:

What dance is this?

What dance with death are we in a tango with? What does this oil spill, one of the biggest perhaps of all time, do to the movement of our lives – to our ability to look our ancestor, the ocean, in the eye?

I only hear all the hips of all those who have made the sea their music to dance to, all those dancers of the living and the dead, ache.

Today, that lovely dancer from last weekend seems like a relic of innocence. Today, my heart is filled with British petroleum.

The sea is dancing in oil.

Love Letter: Richard Feynman and Her

I’ve been obsessed with the letters of Richard Feynman this weekend. It’s been a lovely, slow and quiet time between me and a man, a woman he loved and an atomic bomb he helped to build.

Richard Feynman was a remarkable person — he was a physicist, musician, troublemaker, lover and one of the members of the Manhattan Project. It’s a stretch, but his life could be a metaphor for any life: he made choices that create and destroy. It’s not that we all can say we invented the bomb, but sometimes our best efforts don’t lead us in the best directions – and we hurt people, and ourselves.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_feynman I suggest you read, “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Letters of Richard Feynman”.

Man, could the guy write a letter. Very terse ones in some cases – but you can always see where he was coming from. And, when he was young and writing his mother (and later even still) you could see his respect for her. And, perhaps I should be most impressed with the ENTIRE chapter of congratulatory letters for his Noble Peace Prize, his notes back of thanks are self-effacing works of art.  Though, I find the the letters to his first wife Arline to be the most defining – they show the basis of his approach to life – straightforward, hopeful and revolved around his own reality.

All of these letters, of course, are dated on the top right, with the formal name and address. The letters are always signed, even between family members. That is the great pleasure of reading a book of letters – as opposed to a book of emails – you have the experience of time as it moves between the date a letter was sent, to the date that there was a response. People would return a letter over a period of months. But, lovers would write every day, and respond to each one – in as rapid a fashion as they could. They would never hold on to a letter to send to a person they loved for two years – but, Feynman did. More on that later.

There is one letter that shot me through and through (again, more than the letters of fame and academic  intellectual arm wrestling) about Arline’s death.  So, let me cut to the chase about a woman who died the same day her husband tested the first nuclear bomb:

Arline Feynman had TB. In the 1940’s and she and Richard married although they knew. He was living on the base in the desert working for Oppenheimer. She lived in a sanitarium in New Mexico. He shuttled back and forth between building a bomb and loving her.  She died, as I expressed, the day the bomb was tested. It feels almost like a “life for a life” mythic threat, yet Feynman never alluded to believing this.

And, later he carried a letter  for two years after her death. It’s said it was worn down, folded and re-folded. So, this means the letter was written but never mailed, and he had it on his body for two years. Can you imagine carrying an email you send to yourself: that email you want to say everything in to her/him? That doesn’t have the same ring or feeling to it, does it?

**

To Arline Feynman, October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart … It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector.

Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried.

Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want to stand there.

I’ll bet that you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls … and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead,

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.
**

This is a gorgeous and tense letter by a person who is hard-wired for logic, yet knows that his connection to something ephemeral (her memory, her being) is real to him. A scientist taking a logical approach to grief, and a person allowing himself to feel the entire ebb and flow love, in the presence of death.

So, why was it that at 11:30pm last night as I read about his pain did I feel such sadness for Arline? All I could think was:

Who was she?

How alone was she?

What did it feel like to be in a bed, reading, waiting to be seen, her man making something “important”: her body making the way for more illness?

If she had been alive today she would have blogged about it, right? Or, perhaps she would have Skyped with him? Or, perhaps she would have used a microphone and dictated her experience? Right? Wouldn’t she have done that? Would she be more real to us?

All this technology would have “connected” them more, yes? And, would she have had more ways to ask him about what he was building out there in the desert? And, would she have had more time to connect with others who loved her via email? Or, does any of that matter?

We can’t beat back death with a T1 line, can we? And, we can’t change that we don’t know the address of the dead?

Who was Arline?

In the end she was a person we now know from letters – one in particular that is folded up and torn. And, I found the letter posted here after I Googled it…so I guess she has a place, not a carbon footprint per say, but a memory footprint because she lives in a search engine.

What about us? Will all of this emailing, and face to face contact through video, and life in 2nd life will this make us feel more? (I am not arguing here that it’s not relevant – all this technology – I am not a technology prude – but I am haunted by a piece of paper….so…) would we have the guts to carry around a letter like that – a letter that you can’t send, but you keep in your pocket to remind yourself you are broken? Back then he didn’t have the option for immediacy. Do we give ourselves the option to bind ourselves to paper?

Ok, but, let’s not get to sentimental for the printing press! If she were of this time, would Arline have left us a bit more in writing beyond lovely notes where she begs him to visit, begs to be connected: is isolated in her gender and her illness? Would we have a record (emails, word documents, texts, video, anything??) of the woman who lived with the man who helped to invent the most dangerous weapon known to man – and loved him still?

I love his letter.

I would have loved to have known more about her: from her. She had that room to her own, but, what would she have done with a portal?

An ocean without a hero…

This year is the 100th birthday of the great Jacques Cousteau. My whole life I’ve seen him as a hero: someone serious, brave, on a search – like this picture – a life etched against his own adventure. But, this is not what I was thinking a few days ago when my four-year-old son ran from the sea screaming, “I’m saving myself from the Ocean!”

Luca had been talking to the waves in a rapid back and forth manner, as he made a mad dash from the very same discussion with that same sea.

Watch children who are practicing what it means to be brave, or safe, or on their own, and you may observe their testing of the sea. Yes, they could be sucked into the water – because they’ve been told it. But, they choose to play with the water because deep down there is a feeling of being in a story with it. And, so they alternate with the sea being the monster and they playing the hero. Either way, children seem to feel how we begin and end with water.

This is our human story with the sea isn’t it? The Greeks wrote of the ocean as the great gatherer of forces, of secrets, of men and their journey into the unknown. Rarely was the sea the hero – the hero was a person taken far from home, meant to conquer lands, meant to schtup women and in the end get the lasting point that (as Dorothy reminds us in the Wizard of Oz) “there’s no place like home”.  For the Greeks, the sea was not home – it was the middle place between humanness and becoming heroic: it was the unconscious (before they knew of such a thing) – it was the endless depth of discovery.

Other great poets and writers have taken the sea on.  From Moby Dick to Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” (my new favorite poem, thanks to dad) http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/45556-Arthur-Rimbaud-The-Drunken-Boat- the sea has been the anti-hero, and man (usually, male) has found the path to heroism by being witness to the beasts in and off the sea – and most often, killing them.

Hero’s, in the past, have been the killers on the sea – or, the killers of the sea. It was rarely a love affair.

I’ve started to think that our relationship to heroes may be part of our problem when it comes to the death of our sea. Or, to be more blunt, the concept of heroism may need to be completely changed in order for people, humans, those of us not riding alongside Ulyssess, to do something to save the sea.

What’s wrong with heros? We need them, don’t we? We’re supposed to grow up to be them. A hero, we believe, is a person who, against all odds chooses the right thing. Or, chooses the selfless thing in order for others to live. Or, chooses to tell the truth. Yes. These are all the necessary elements for being the better part of valor: the person who stands on the earth and takes the harder road. You know this. You’ve been told to try to be one, at least once in your life.

Yet, being heroic seems so out of reach. Because, in this contemporary time, heroes are also supposed to be “super” – never harmed, always in the right, fearless: not very real – much like the plastic super heroes that we give our kids.

I look at these these plastic superhero dolls and can only see how they represent this “too much-ness” – the unattainable perfection – like Tiger Woods: who is a perfect plastic thing. He even has an action figure.

Ah, Tiger, how the hero falls. In true Greek form, Nike put an advertisement with Tiger looking into the camera, not speaking, while the voiceover of his (now dead) father asks him, like Zeus from above, what has he learned: is he now a man? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XXGZFqDAUo

It is all out of reach, this real hero thing. So, we commoditize it and make our heroes plastic action figures, and then we end up with their bits and pieces floating in the sea.

I asked my friend J who is a biologist with turtles, why we throw things into the sea? Poison. Plastic. Toxic crap. And, his point was clear – we have always sent things out to the sea: dead bodies into the horizon, candles, bottles with messages, skipping rocks – we have always put ourselves out into the sea to make sure that is ends up, “There”.

There, is that place beyond the horizon where our animal brain believes the Sun lives. There, is the place that takes our feelings and comforts us. There, is where we think the junk and plastic goes – magically transformed into something clean.

Though, to quote Gertrude Stein, “There is no there, there”.  She meant it about Oakland, but I mean it about the sea. There is no There anymore: no Monster of the Sea that we need to Tackle.  No hero we will become by trying to conquer it.

Cousteau was a hero. He was not plastic, although the production of plastic was just beginning to be made when he was born. He did not go to the sea to fight it. He did not go to conquer it: he went to the sea to find the world beneath us. As a naturalist, and a scientist it was not his job to anthropomorphize the sea as a hero, or the species in it: it was his job to teach us – and in turn point out our interconnection.

Sadly, it may be that because the role of the hero cannot work anymore, we therefore do not know how to be heroic when it comes to the environment. We are of the habit to look to individual people to be the hero – like Al Gore and many others – we look to “Them” to save “There”.  Yet, it is the “We” – groups of children and adults, artists and scientists, politicians and writers, groups of people will redefine the “hero” into something more powerful: not throwing ourselves into the abyss, but taking small, fast actions to enact change. This is not about some mushy, sentimental “liberal” concept of togetherness – it’s the very hard truth that the sea is choking to death, and one hero will not be able to “fix” it. Heroism itself is just another “ism” – and, “We” is a complicated, layered solution that we are not good at, yet.

It is very hard to let go of this desire to be a hero, and, it is not just a man’s struggle: it’s a struggle for all of us to not try to be perfect. And, maybe,  it’s our fear of not being perfect that has led to the commoditization of heroes – we’ve turned “Heroic” stature into plastic – the very thing that is killing the sea.

Does this all mean that we need to find the resolve, both the love and the grief, to admit that we must save the ocean – the true hero – from ourselves?

Yet, even after all this pondering, I admit it, I truly wonder what Cousteau would do?

Probably tell us to get off our asses.

But, he’d say it with a great accent, a smile, and a look that if you let him down you’d let down the ocean herself.

Futurists are Hot

So, I always thought that this guy was a Futurist. Ben Franklin seemed to scope out the future needs of the nation, while also being a deep historian of the past. He wasn’t very hot – but need he be?  No, he was a guy who could look backwards and forwards and generally, we could agree, implement long-term thinking to a nation.

Now, my buddy Jake Dunagan, a futurist, has expressed to me that he thinks we should throw out the constitution because the long term thinking of the past does not meet the needs of today. Scrap it, he says, start over. I gasped with the thought of the anarchy of that idea and then he just smiled in a wily way, and said, “Yeah, that would really shake things up.”  Wasn’t that the perspective of Franklin back then? Shake it up? Think for the future, and then, change the present?

Long term thinking.

This is what futurists do – they think long. And, I didn’t know anything about them. But, in 2006 I was introduced to Stuart Candy (http://futuryst.blogspot.com/) who was a fellow at the Long Now. And, later he introduced me to Jerry Paffendorf.  And, then I was introduced to Jake Dunagan (http://www.iftf.org/node/3402 ) And, now, we are developing a project for the Academy of Sciences, and I sometimes need to try to boss Jake and Stuart about – ok, I try to push gently. But, I don’t recommend this for the faint of heart (it’s my job, and after 15 years of practice I have the stomach for it) because futurists are, by the by, Bad Asses, and don’t like being told what to do: they are hard-wired to question…well, everything. But, more about bad assed-ness later.

In 2006 when I returned from PopTech! (www.poptech.org) I wanted to know if there were futurists under the age of 59.  I am not being snarky here – I have respect for the agents of change that are many Futurists – yet there was something about the idea of long-term thinking that interested me as it related to a younger generation.  I noticed that the futurists I met were very much in the moment – quiet, listening, asking questions about how things have worked in the past – and then imagining multiple worlds for the future. I wanted to know if young people were embodying this wisdom.

So, I have met the young ones, most under the age 35 years old. And, they are as rowdy, opinionated, fierce, and silly as the Founding Futurists must have been – it’s like hanging out with a punk circus filled with PhD’s and a van ready to leave for Burning Man.

Oh, and did I mention they are simply beautiful. Now, I will take a good deal of crap for talking about their beauty – but I think this is key – they are lively, contemporary and they are perfectly comfortable with being in the public eye, and spreading their vision as a rock band tours the planet.

But, let me define what beauty is to me: that rare combination of comfort in one’s body, and the expression of that comfort/energy/passion through feelings/words.

Please see my point below:

Jane McGonigal

Jerry Paffendorf

Stuart Candy

Jake Dunagan

These are only a few of the faces of futurists – these are just the folks I know or am near living in the Bay Area. And, they tell me that there are women around the world who are moving thought around (Jane McGonigal is most known for her insights into world-changing through gaming), and people working within the neighborhoods quietly making change (Jerry is now living in Detroit and leading a movement to convert abandoned homes and warehouses into places for film/design and futures work http://7billionfriends.tumblr.com/).

This generation of futurists I know are like highly connected community organizers with a drive to change the way people see. They want people to see the consequences of actions as a way to push for social change. It’s an inverted form of civil disobedience – it’s civic dissonance.  These brave souls want to turn your head inside out to force you into a place to resist present terrible decisions for the earth – those that are creating negative, globally destructive, future consequences.

Long term thinking = long term change = long term global beauty (beauty: health, joy, freedom of thought, embodied living and connectedness)

Concepts of beauty have changed throughout time. And, we are a culture obsessed with the physical beauty of our bodies. Though, perhaps beauty is now more critical – for me beauty is the integration of the mind with intention: and I am watching these younger people, (who defy the cliché of a tweeting/snarky/ADD Gen Y – whatever that is) these Futurists, they think in paragraphs and in 3D: and, they have every intention to change the world.

And, to me, this is gorgeous. This is beauty. This is Hot.

Moving Walls and Digital Frescoes

I have always had a fascination with walls.

Here, I was about four. This was one of my dad’s theaters.  I think it was backstage. But, I didn’t care: it was a wall that held a story, and that was what I loved – that was the family business – telling stories to strangers.

I have not fallen out of love with walls. In particular, I love walls in public spaces where people project images, blast music, make dances or create a commotion.

And, even though I work with digital technology, I still love a wall that stands outside of computers — but, I seriously love things made in computers that get projected out to ravish, and cling, and create a new way of looking at a wall. Either way, I love walls.  I think this started with the theater.

Or, perhaps it started with my first mentor: Elise Bernhardt.

In the early 1980’s, Elise founded Dancing in The Streets. She had the chutzpah to put dances on the Brooklyn Bridge. Then, convinced Grand Central Station to let dancers take over the entire joint. Stephen Koplowitz had dancers in the windows, and Savion Glover tapped in the lower terminals. Merce Cunningham’s dancers dominated the huge central area of Grand Central and people were forced to walk around them to get to their trains. Chutzpah!

Here’s what I learned from Elise, and it’s good advice if you want to take over a building and put art in it, or have a really big dinner party:

– Pick the most exciting space you can find and decide, with total conviction, that it’s right.

– Envision the most exciting things possible in it.

– Admit that you can’t envision the most exciting things in it alone – find the most talented people to come up with more ideas.

– Ask people for money (or, fill in here, “Ask for pot luck”).

– Ask LOTS of people for money.  And, then ask again. And, tell that the idea of dancers in windows, and people flying from walls, and digital images taking over buildings is GOOD for everyone. That people in public spaces looking at things together is what the history of culture is all about. That this work revitalizes community and puts attention on needed public space (which she proved from Redhook to Grand Central). And, then look them straight in they eye and say, “Plus, it’ll be gorgeous”.

– Then, make sure there is good food.

That’s pretty much it. Oh, and fall deeply in love with the knowledge that the walls of a public space can seem totally changed when people even remember having seen art in it.

A few years ago, I told Elise I missed big spaces with big things happening in them. She told me to call Zaccho Dance Theatre, and Joanna Haigood, and become their friend (That’s Elise in a nutshell really, just call for god’s sake, it’ll be gorgeous!) (www.zaccho.org) Zaccho is based in San Francisco and takes a blank space and flies off of it. Literally.

The picture above is of Zaccho doing a full digital projection on HUGE abandoned silos. The piece included Zaccho and the people that lived in a neighborhood where the closing of a plant had closed down the local economy.  All the participants tried to imagine a time when there were fields – and not machines. Amazing way to look at history. Though, let’s put this into perspective –  see those little dots on the silos? Those are dancers on harnesses who are flying/dancing within, up and down and around those silos.  Well, this work meets my need for a Sistine chapel that moves. A small request…but why not.

And, why not??

Now that digital technology can do so much as a projected medium, why not have Sistine chapel environments up the ying yang?  Obscura Digital here in San Francisco does this  http://www.obscuradigital.com/ But, let’s be clear – OD is not an arts organization, not even a production company – they are a culture unto themselves who make really humongous projection based immersive events for huge companies. Oh, and sometimes a band. And, yes, huge domes for people to experience the sea. But, generally, they make products to mess with your head. They messed with the head of Carnegie Hall:

The images wrapped the building. They moved. They were playing along with the music – talking and changing shapes. And, that was only a small example of what could be done with this level of digital imagery to a wall.

There are artists, and technologists who are specifically focused on how to use digital technology as a form of paint (or movement/spacial changer/”head-messer-upper”) itself. And, these are the people who I am watching carefully – because art has often shifted into high gear – into a voice for a new era – when it is seen as a huge image, in a huge place (or in a small place with hug impact) but, always in a public place.

Last year there was a lovely homage to walls when 77 Million Paintings was projected live on the Sydney Opera House.

Brian Eno made these images and they run on an algorithm that makes it impossible for the same collection of images to ever been seen in your lifetime – each picture is seen once, and then regenerates (or gestates) for a very long time.

And, that is interesting – and wistful.

But, to me, the fact that he had those images shift and change, and exploded on those massive sails on a public meeting place, and that those images created a new memory precisely because they reframed (changed) that space (quite publicly) is quite touching – and wonderfully demanding.

Like I said, I’m just a sucker for blank spaces on walls.

And, I love to find them filled with something, someone, someplace we can remember: together.

Remix of Memory: Working with Ame and J

Note: All photos and materials on these pages are under copyright by A. M. Hoch

“I want the space enveloped by my installations to feel like the center of the atom: a place where our mundane laws of space and time breakdown, where the architecture of matter is replaced by the architecture of the imagination; where the laws and truths of the emotions and the spirit prevail over the material world” – Amy Hoch.

Ok, I am doing something that I am not sure is verboten in blogging – but I am returning to this post. It began as a post about Ame, but now I need to add another person. The first blog was this one http://whatsarahsees.com/2010/02/11/theater-of-memory-working-with-ame/

I am returning to this post because I am working with artists and scientists on art/media projects and it’s impacting me…it’s exciting and I see how science and art can play together, freely.

Since 2001 I have been working with a lovely and insightful artist named Ame Hoch.  She was trained as a painter, though over the years she moved into installation and has found a way to make you feel you are inside a painting. My eyes have changed working with Ame. First, she is incredibly humble, while being obstinate and brilliantly opinionated! If I want anyone to tell me the truth, it’s Ame. If I look to anyone to tell the truth in a piece of art – while turning my head inside out – it’s Ame!

Though, she got me thinking about science, biology and it’s place in a piece — no person had ever made me think about this before.

I grew up not equating science with art, nor for that matter, women. Though Ame, and many I now know, have begun to turn to science as a place to look at the beginnings of time: the beginnings of the body. I have always had an interest in the esoteric elements of science (or so they seem) in Quantum Physics (which, hello, I really struggle to understand, but Love the struggle all the same). Where science used to be the place of guys, I now am engaging in science as a part of the narrative, paint, theme for art: where the heart of being a woman (and her voice) has a partner with the scientific data.

And, I am also interacting with scientists who care about media/art. Dr. Wallace J Nichols is one I am lucky to be working with. More about his work anon.

My interaction with those in science interested in art began in the early 2000’s when I was part of a team of people looking to develop a national art and technology network through The Kitchen. The Kitchen is a multidisciplinary cultural center in New York that was bringing together artists, scientists and tech tools to see how there might be collaboration. What I felt back then was that scientists and artists were still split apart by a need to “defend” process, their own, as well as argue over what art is or is not (is engineering pigs with wings in fact art? is putting sensors to a dancers body still his body, or does it belong to the software program?) These arguments were, well, arguments to me. I wanted to see what happened when you mushed those worlds together – but, that was not what people wanted to do.

I see a change. Academy’s of science have art programs. Galleries are comfortable with technology being a part of collection. Visual artist are using more and more science in their work – found objects and natural elements of nature are part of the palate. It’s exciting to me.

Though, I still want the mush, that mash up, the combustion of artists and scientists to play together: to tackle the large, achy topic of the planet.

Like I said, I’m working with a scientist named Wallace J. Nichols (everyone calls him J) who is a world expert on Turtles (picture of him on the right of the turtle)  www.wallacejnichols.org J lives with his lovely family in the woods of what he calls the Slow Coast off Pacific Hwy 1, but spends a great deal of time on the road, traveling the world working with communities to save, salvage, re-organize their habits around fishing, the sea and the turtles he protects. Though, what is startling to me is that he’s a natural media maker. He has the artist in him. And, what’s that? It’s the ability to turn a fact into feeling, and a feeling into visual representation that makes people stop – look – and perhaps change their lens.

On the project we are developing I turn to J a lot, not just for his crazy smart brain, but what I now see as that practical, data driven approach to thinking: it’s not cold, it’s just exact. Though, he’s able to look at the metaphor of a thing: the intangible element of a topic or problem because, as a scientist, it’s his job to understand, not to be right, just to watch, learn and share the observation (which can be totally dangerous – think Darwin et al).

And, it’s this exactness (and observation) that great artists have. And, it’s what makes me so interested in the chance I am now having to work with scientists and artists together: when well matched they have similar passions – What is going on in that picture? What is making it do that? What do I want to learn? What do I need to share with the people? What will my work do to influence this environment (space, canvas, ocean, mammal).

Ame is a great example of this artist who wants to dive into the world a Scientist like J dives into: the actual cells of a life – the impact of how life is formed, and how that metaphor becomes a part of what she wants to make.

As an example, Ame’s been creating enormous images of Mitosis: they feel like cells you want to climb into – sleep in – become a part of. That’s the genius of Ame, she makes you feel you are a part of something as tiny as a cell, and as remote as a lost memory. (These are her twin bed mattresses below)

Note: All photos and materials on these pages are under copyright by A. M. Hoch

So, what of all this?

Here is what I see, and what I believe: the blending of artists and scientists (scientists who can create media, and artists who can internalize both data and abstract concepts of evolution) can be remarkable partners. But, it all comes down, like it always does, down to the project and the people. It’s been talked about in creation/media circles that these kinds of science/artist projects are the future of art – and some have been successful (a lot from MIT). I have seen a lot of this blending through technology and media projects. But, I think that installation is a great place for this collaboration – especially if you want to work with biologists who have a really strong sense of place – site specific work is a total canvas, and it is open to all those who engage in this work. I have no data, no proof that I am right here – but I sense it, like one might sense a painting about to arrive or a pattern in the sea.

A few years ago, Ame and I put a request out to work with scientists on a project (http://www.bvnwgroup.com/project_nucleus/index.html) – back then we thought we were putting it out there with some hope that someone might be interested. Now, I am sure that we can do a project with these new breeds of scientists who are quietly, like secret advocates, bubbling up to take part in creating stories about the earth – or simply art.

I am so excited I think my cells might burst.

Would Diego Rivera Think the iPhone is evil? Or, what happened to looking?

I did not have the right light to take a picture of a mural created by the student of Diego Rivera. But, I had enough light to notice that all the people in the painting were looking at the same thing, or, in a conversation with nature. They were not taking pictures with their iPhones.

Lucien Labaudt was a California artist who painted  this seminal mural about San Francisco.  He was the student of Rivera, and it’s said the great master himself came to visit.  It’s not critical that Rivera ever came to visit, Labaudt was a master of his own topic: San Francisco. This mural is found on the ground floor, right under the Beach Chalet Restaurant.  http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Labaudt’s_Inspirational_Beach_Chalet_Murals

There’s much talk of how the mural depicts people together, and people together as workers, and people together enjoying their city.

I’ve eaten at the Beach Chalet Restaurant upstairs many times. I’d passed the mural and lingered by the soft curves of the bodies, and touched the wall when the guard was not watching, and enjoyed the look of San Francisco of the 1930’s. But, I never noticed the key point – I never noticed that the mural is about taking your time to look.

Taking your time to look at a dog. Taking your time to look at a crab you’ve caught. Taking your time to look at a newspaper while you sit on a beach. Taking your time to look at other people.

Labaudt was Rivera’s student. More often I think of Rivera’s murals looking at you as they demand change – or engaged in activities that reflect their life in work. They are, for me at least, NOT exploring taking your time. They feel like the demand to take action. Rivera was not exactly Mellow. (Rivera below)

I used to be mellow. Now, not so. I’m an image capturing one person revolution. And, I use my iPhone like a threat. It’s out all the time. I have ADHD-iP which means I must check one of my four email accounts regularly or I feel I need to wash my hands – four times on the back, and four times on the front. I take pictures. I love to take pictures. I love to email them. I love to flip through them. I take calls and check the emails that I sent to myself with pictures attached. I need help.

What am I looking at?

Well,  standing in front of that mural I thought I was taking pictures of beautiful people. What I saw were people looking without a lens – without the mask of my digital age device.

That got me thinking…what would Diego have done with one of these crazy digital cellphone boxes? He might have hated it because it forces you to see only what Steve Jobs (that imperialist!) has defined as the proper use of a frame. OR, perhaps he would love it because anyone can capture the truth of what they see, with beautiful color, and a way to quickly spread the word about their vision. Or, he could have just used it as a phone.

Who knows.

Yet, would he have changed the way he captured the world? Would Labaudt? Would they have drawn murals with people with phones – or would there have been rebellion in their hearts as they removed the phones…and showed people looking without a lens, their hands on flowers, hands on children, ands on tools, and hands on other people?

I was at the Academy of Sciences – http://www.calacademy.org/ – a place that is a living breathing mural of life. I was with my friend and creative cohort, Stuart Candy  http://futuryst.blogspot.com (yes, I agree, I also think it’s the greatest last name ever) and we were there to talk about a piece of art that he and I (and two other people – more on this project soon) want to make. After the conversation Stuart and I wound our way up a circular ramp into the replica of the Amazon.  Stuart pointed out to me that when you look at the ground there were people walking around at the base, underground. He thought this was very cool indeed.

We got to the top of the exhibit. Then we entered the elevator. I was gabbing. Stuart was nodding. We got to the base floor.

Then, below the ground we found ourselves looking up at a glass ceiling that separated us from swimming species. Turtles. Little small fish. Crazy plants. I was talking about them, and oohing and ahhing…Stuart had halted completely.

Then, a huge fish stopped and looked at Stuart in the face.

Then, Stuart stopped and looked at the huge fish in the face.

I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of two species, eye to eye.

It is a picture of a mural of patience, a remnant, or reminder, to look at remarkable walls – walls that take their time to look.

Are toxins pretty? Or, how Captain Moore must have thought I was Insane.

A year ago I heard Captain Charles Moore speak at Google about his expeditions in the sea, and the growing pollution of plastic killing the water (and all that lives in it – including us).

Then, I made a horrible faux paux: I said the plastic was pretty.

Before we get to my blunder, here’s a recap on the Captain. He is a hero in the environmental world. A totally unique character with an ancient mariner feeling to him. He’s seen it all. He’s pleaded for ecological action. And, he’s tireless. Here’s a snippet from the link above:

“The first paper documented his 1999 study, which shocked the scientific world when it found 6 times more plastic fragments by weight in the central Pacific than the associated zooplankton. His second paper found that plastic outweighs plankton by a factor of 2.5 in the near coastal surface waters of Southern California…To date, Captain Moore has conducted ocean and coastal                                             sampling for plastic fragments through more than 40,000 miles of the North Pacific Ocean, across 22 degrees of latitude and 70 degrees of longitude. His latest 10,000 mile voyage took him and his crew two-thirds of the way to Japan across the International Dateline.”

In other words, he has been discovering islands of plastic in the sea, tracking them, chasing them, studying them: warning us.

He’s a hero.

And, so, there I was taking it all in – feeling a bit sick to my stomach – when they started to show pictures of the mountains of plastic in the sea. (I found this picture that shows how it all looks in water).

Now, at that event they also had a table with pieces of that plastic. The table was filled up with  chunks of it. The chunks were a color I had not seen before, they were beyond pastel – they were the kind of color only salt and sun can do on any form of material. And, this material, plastic, never goes away – it breaks into the million pieces that fish and birds eat – none the less, as they break down, these particular chunks bind together like a multicolored form.

And, then I said it, I think Captain Moore was there, I know for sure that one of his team members was there. I opened my mouth and said, “Wow, they’re pretty”.  They looked at me like I was insane.

Was I?

Actually, the color was extraordinary, and as a person who hangs out with sculptors, the shapes were really interesting. That was not the issue: the issue was that the gravity of the information, the deadliness of the toxins, all of this pushed back into the farthest region of my brain, and all I could see was what my eyes could handle: colors and shapes.

It’s strange when this happens, isn’t it? When something is so horrible and what we notice is the deep color of the blood, or the shape of the car as it’s been exploded, or the color of the dead person’s eye. There is so much horror thrown at us in images on TV – mainly of death – and so, when these shapes (like the one pictured here, one that looks like a sculpture/monster) comes your way, they almost seem like a relief. Yet, it’s a trick of the mind. It’s easier to see the shape of plastic rather than the shifting shape of your own bloodstream as the toxins impact your health, your cells, your kids.

I started to learn a lot about plastics after that event.

Then it happened AGAIN. Faux paux of my brain!

The Plastic Pollution Coalition www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org launched it’s entity in Malibu. We were the guests of the Decaprio Foundation, and many people were there to review the issues at hand related to Plastic Pollution – how to mobilize, how to educate, how to get artists and media involved. This time, even more plastic was there that was brought back from a trip to Midway Island. These were toothbrushes that were found in the bodies of ead Albatross that the photographer Chris Jordan http://www.chrisjordan.com/ – had photographed.

And, what did I think? You got it,  “Look at these pretty colors…”

I took tons of photographs of these toothbrushes, and faded cigarette lighters from China, and bottles that fish has eaten from and all the little plastic do-dads that McDonald’s sells.

I didn’t feel incensed. I had no moral outrage. I knew all the data.

What I could do, in the way I know how to do, is look. And, see shapes. And, feel safe in the knowing that I can at least capture an image.

It’s totally irrational. Do we all do it?

Or, at least, do our our brains do it?  When we have no alternative to a problem, we approach the image/thing/fear before us and try to change the fact into some inner mythology that we can handle. And, it’s this neural function that makes art. And, it’s this neural function that creates denial – and this function that points to the ecological danger we are now.

My friend and creative cohort, Wallace J. Nichols (www.wallacejnichols.com) – pictured here – is a leading scientist on turtles, the sea (plastic pollution) plus numerous other ocean/marine related programs, was quietly reviewing each object of plastic with the lovely boy pictured here.

The boy was touching it all. Rooting through it. Asking questions. J was answering all the questions. Rooting through the plastic to explain how far each each piece must have traveled to get to Midway Island.

J and the boy talked. And, explored.

I kept looking at the colors and taking the pictures. It was dissociation. It was too much for me.

Later, I told myself I felt better, especially when J started to talk with me, and make jokes the way he does, and think of quirky ways to engage people into doing the simplest thing to change eco habits. I don’t know if he could see I was trying hard to be present. I remember making some jokes. I remember laughing. I remember connecting with people. I also remember feeling that heap of plastic, like a shadow in a closet, way up on the deck above us.

I think I pulled myself out of it. Perhaps it was my friend Beth who did that – said, come on, let’s go for a walk: let’s do something. Beth Terry has purposely lived without plastic for more than two years ww.fakeplasticfish.com, took me for a walk. It was the day that pictures were being taken all over the world to end climate change. So, we had an action to accomplish. That was good. And, it was not at all sentimental, and I was not even scared, or thinking at all about the plastic from the insides of birds, or the sea choking with crap, or the way the plastic still lingered on my fingers, or how the iPhone was filled with images that I taken with a disconnected inner lens. No, of course I wasn’t able to think of these things.  I was safe on a beach with my friend, whom I admire.

A friend who’s trying to get the plastic out of her body.

So, I took her picture.

And, then, I told her, because she really did, I told her,  “You look so pretty”.

Has anything dangerous ever seemed beautiful to you?