Art and Manipulations

September 25, 2022September 25, 2022 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 13 Comments

What is art? “Art is in the eye of the beholder.” Says the old cliché.

_{Original work: Félix González-Torres Depiction: Ken Lund – https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/42514872465/}

Picture of Félix González-Torres‘ participatory sculptural installation “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. A pile of candies wrapped in many-colored cellophane sits against the wall in the corner of a gallery.

In 1991, Félix González-Torres, a minimalist artist, piled 175lbs (12.5 stones) of candy into a corner of the Art Institute of Chicago with the title, Untitled ( Portrait of Ross in LA).One hundred and seventy pounds was Ross Laycock’s healthy weight before he was stricken with HIV and died of AIDS the same year as the exhibition. Ross was Felix’s boyfriend. Felix wanted to convey his loss and start a conversation about HIV/AIDS when no one wanted to talk about it. Museum goers were encouraged to take a piece of candy. In this respect, they were taking a piece of Ross, consuming art made in his memory. Felix Gonalez-Torres left it up to museums to decide if they wanted to replenish the candy or not. This decision is where the art installation speaks to me the most.

The pile is not refilled

The pile of candy diminishes until there is nothing left. Ross, like some of my own friends and family having wasted away until their disease consumed them.

Re-filling the pile

The body is gone, but their memory remains. By making his art installation candy and sharing it with other he shares the memory of Ross with us. Ross Laycock remains in memory, in pictures, and in written word.

Félix González-Torres passed away of AIDS in 1996. His art Installation Untitled (Lover Boys) ideally weighed 355lbs (25 stones) to represent the combined weight of their bodies when they were both healthy.

Untitled (Placebo) weighs 1,000-1,200 (454 – 544 kg) was an attempt to visualize the massive amount of pills the patient had taken in their life.

(Side Note: I made a conscious choice to use the artist’s first name when mentioning him after the first introduction, because his art was deeply personal and centered on self.)

_{Original work: Maurizio Cattelan Depiction: Sarah Cascone – https://news.artnet.com/market/maurizio-cattelan-banana-art-basel-miami-beach-1722516}

Let’s put this in juxtaposition to Maurizio Cattelan, an absurdist artist, and his famous/infamous installation titled, Comedian. You’re more likely to be familiar with this one as “the banana that was duct taped to a wall” or Art Basal Banana. The banana was sold three times and eaten four times. Two people shelled out $120,0000 for it, another for $150,000 and the fourth ripped it off the wall and ate it, because he was a performance artist and that was his “performance art” of the day. (No, He didn’t discuss it with Maurizio Cattelan beforehand and I wish someone would bring these two together because I can’t decide if it would be an interesting conversation or some completely boring grandstanding on both their parts.)

Art and the rules regarding art are a funny thing. So, what did the people get that paid for their banana art installations? They get to replicate in their own homes, in front of people, and take pictures or videos of it over and over again (at the cost of fresh bananas) because they purchased the legal right to display it as an authentic version of the original.

What happens when an architect asks an artificial intelligence program to design nature-inspired buildings? Lots of curves and monolithic housing complexes that look like giant trees. You also get buildings presented in that ultra-white white that modern architects love so much, but with a draping of green, at least in the few iterations that I saw. Manas Bhatia is an architect in New Delhi, India who wanted to see if the AI imaging tool Midjourney could help him build cities of the future. While the concept art is computer-generated it still took Bhatia hours to find the right words to create text-based writing prompts that generated the kinds of images he wanted. His prompts included words like, bioluminescent material, symbiotic and futuristic towers.

Does this make Manas Bhatia the artist? Or the AI program?

This is a big debate in the art world now and rightly so in my opinion.

Each time we advance the field of technology new rules of social order are formed. We talk about “business ecosystems” and have to clarify buildings as “the built environment” as opposed to things like the “cloud construction” of data networks. A person can no longer define themselves as an “Engineer” without being asked: “What kind of engineer?”

Physical? Electrical? Computer? Or one of the more than dozens of other kinds of engineers?

I predict that we will now need new and more defined roles as artists. Visual Artists (as they were formally known) and not the only ones who work is being invaded by AI. I am first and foremost a writer and I’ve already seen where the future of ‘predictive text” is going. I’ve already seen advertisements for programs that can “write your novel for you.” How do I feel about this as an artist? In a word, hostile. When I’m writing my emails and predictive text makes their suggestions about what word I’m going to use next I will intentionally pick a different word to use as “screw you!”

Even better is when the email software tells me that my word choices are “unprofessional” because its usually when I’m writing family or friend. If I started writing in a professional manner towards my friends, they would prompt write back asking “What’s wrong?” “Are you okay?’ “Are you mad at me?”

Do you find this auto-text helpful? Yes, or No? I always say “No” and when it prompts the question, “Why is the auto-text not helpful?” I write in the comment box, “Because I’m the fucking writer!”

I know full well my little act of rebellion amounts to nothing. It would take an army of people to answer no and provide the same comment before it ever escalated to the “value” of being seen by human eyes at Microsoft or Google. I use both. I have no loyalty when it comes to corporations. I suppose I could borrow some script kitties to make a bunch of bogus email accounts who all type random emails, click on “No” and comment fill “Because I’m the fucking writer!” but I’ve got bigger endeavors to attend too.

It’s all rather insane, but it’s only a symptom of a larger problem. Welcome to the information war! You’ve already been enlisted. I hope you didn’t think the war/mobilization/whatever you want to call it, in Ukraine was the only war going on now.

Pay attention to how people say things and not just what they say. What do you learn about the person and the message through their word choices?

Listen to politician, advertisements, and everyone else around you. Is what they say and what they mean the same thing? Are they being genuine?

When my son was four, I had him in a bike camp to learn how to ride. One day I arrived to pick him up wearing a stained and wrinkled old shirt because I’d been cleaning all day. When I got there one of the camp counselors quickly came over to me.

“First of all, I like your shirt.” She chirped.

“No you don’t.” I said tersely.

“Yeah, so anyways, your son had a rough day.” She continues.

He approached like he was coming off a battlefield and his side lost; all dusty and bloody, a tear in one pant knee, and his jaw set in a resigned grimace. I stopped listening to the woman. I’m sure the gist was to the effect of “Please don’t get mad and sue us.”

Walking back to the car, I acknowledged to my son that he’d had a rough day and told him I was proud of him. Maybe that wasn’t the day he’d learned to ride a bike, but he’d put in the work and tried.

When it comes to definitions there’s a difference between Nature-led and Nature-inspired. Nature-led means that we learn the rules of nature and work within nature’s framework of systems and organizations. Nature-inspired means that we look to nature for ideas and then go about making our own framework of systems and organizations. One of these could be the key to the survival of the human race. The other could be the key to our eventual annihilation. Am I being too dramatic to say such a thing? Well, we didn’t create the world, but some people are arrogant enough to pretend like we did! Beavers build a dam because it’s their home and they need to set up a successful environment for themselves. They don’t consider their impact on the greater environment at large. Humans are aware of their impact and often continue anyways, even when it negatively impacts the greater environment at large. They are just as disingenuous about saving the planet as the camp counselor pretending to like my nasty old shirt! There is no one country, politician, or corporation that can save us from our own arrogance. We, the collective people who make up our societies have to define our cultures by setting the rules.

We choose through our cultural acceptance or rejection whether a pile of candy in the corner of a museum is art, a banana duct taped to a wall, or an architect’s concept image created through AI software by using words. We also have choose whether we’re willing to buy the messaging from politicians, advertisers, businesses and people around us when they say they are making a commitment to the health and well-being of others and the places we inhabit.

I’m not against technology. I use it and consider it an amazing tool and resource, but it’s different than a hammer or a knife. I don’t have to worry about a hammer assuming implied consent to do or say things on my behalf.

Words matter, art matters, and our understanding of their interpretations matters. We are the rule makers and rule breakers. We decide what is culturally relevant and acceptable. There is a cabal of people who would love to make a job out of doing your thinking for you.

Links:

Why did Félix González-Torres put free candy in a museum? – Public Delivery

Félix González-Torres – Wikipedia

The Art Basel Banana, Explained | Vogue

An architect asked AI to design cities of the future. This is what it proposed – CNN Style

Who should get the credit for AI art? – CNN Style

Current Blog Post Schedule: One a month

I need to focus on my books-in-progress: The Nature-led Life, The Nature-Led Society, and my collection of five dark medieval tales (Title TBD).

Reminder: “A Tree” Photo submission is due September 30^th. Photos will be featured in a post On October 1^st. I currently have eight submissions, but more are always welcome! It could always be split into a Part 1 and Part 2 if we get a lot of submissions. Please provide as a .JPEG or .PNG file, General location (State/Province & Country), your name/the Artist’s name, and a link to your website if you have one. Email to: natureledlife@gmail.com Subject: September Submission

The Prize: My love and gratitude for participating.

Final Note:

All Image rights and credits belong to their respective owners. Used here with the understanding of Fair Use w/ Credit Attribution for the purpose of a single post discussion. This site is non-commercial and does not sell or distribute anything. Images will be immediately removed upon request by their respective owners.

3D Printed Houses, Homes of the Future?

November 12, 2021 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 10 Comments

Hello Nature-Led friends! I hope you are having a good day! I’m currently swimming under what’s called an “atmospheric river” (The warm air around the Hawai’i islands blows into the Pacific Northwest cold mountain air and comes down in heavy rain. (Also called a “Pineapple Express” locally.) Oddly enough, I’m allergic to pineapples, so I’m grateful it only drops heavy rain and not actual pineapples. Can you imagine the damage? We’d have to reinforce everything with steel roofs!

Home Sweet Home Minecraft Edition – I recreated my house in Minecraft

This post was inspired by an article I read about a house that was 3D printed using raw earth See link #1). This sparked my imagination. What if we could build in place with minimal noise and additional resources? It seems to me the walls would be stronger and additives could be added giving it a pliability that could help reduce the stress of earthquakes. I’m always thinking about how new building techniques can create safer housing option. Having the ability to make a house rounded or into more organic shapes could help reduce wind resistance in areas with hurricanes and tornados. It also unlocks a whole new level or architectural possibilities! The thick walls provide a higher R-value for insulation and in conjunction with steel beams or careful internal wall placement can create load bearing structures that could house gardens and other times of greenery on top. Sometimes I build out these ideas using video games like Minecraft and Terraria, but then I’m limited by the game’s environment. There are games and applications like Dream by Media Molecule and Blender (blender.org) an open source #D graphic tool to name two. I recently reinstalled an old program called Bryce. I just haven’t been able to convince myself that investing a lot of time learning/relearning these applications is the best use of my time.

Pros of 3D printed houses:

Higher R-value for insulation that reduces heating and cooling costs
Opportunity for new building materials that may be more resistant to environmental disasters
Opportunity for more organic shapes and architectural elements, including rooftop space for gardens, rain catchment systems, and durable platforms for solar panels, residential wind turbines, or other ecological investments to reducing a home’s carbon footprint.

I’m also supportive of factory-built builds. This is where a large portion of the building is done in a factory-controlled setting then trucked to the pre-prepped site location.

The benefits of factory builds include:

Reduction of weather induced delays
Safer working conditions for the workers, framing is a dangerous low wage job
Reduction of noise and disturbances at build site
Reduction of trucks driving raw resources to the build site
Reduction of security issues like theft or vandalism

One of the toughest challenges facing new building techniques are strict building codes. Most building codes are created with the intention of make sure that buildings are built in a safe and responsible manner. However, some codes and laws are written in a way as to use language that favors existing builders and building standards from competitive innovative materials and designs. These manipulations of codes and laws are “business as usual” in most countries and extend beyond just the building sector. What if we had a clear pathway to design, innovate, stress test and implement new building structures?

When we talk about systemic changes for racial justice, we also need to talk about systemic changes for environmental justice. In my mind the two are tightly interwoven. What would the United States have looked like now without the principles of manifest destiny and the colonization dogma of our forefathers? “Business as usual” cannot continue to be the status quo if humanity wants to survive into the next millennia. As I get older I become more resistant to change in some ways. Sometimes the “new way” isn’t really the best way, sometimes its forced upon us so someone else can profit from it. At other times the “new way” is actually a really old way being re-learned by a new group of people.

Working together and respecting where people are in their lives is much more helpful to providing long-term sustainable environments and communities. War is the least sustainable thing any country can do. Every time a missile gets fired to prove combat readiness or military prowess, I think of all the marine life disrupted and destroyed because of it and the people that could have been fed and housed for the cost of creating that missile.

We need opportunities for meaningful work that helps solve problems instead of creating new ones.

So far one of my biggest concerns is the lack of information on how the plumbing and electrical wiring are supposed to be done. They also don’t say much about the after-market opportunities for painting and customizing ones own home. Questions like; Can I still go down to the home improvement store an repaint a room? How do you hang a picture on a wall like that? What if a window breaks? and all the other little things that go into making a house feel like home.

Links:

This is the first house to be 3D printed from raw earth (itsnicethat.com)

3 Steps for Building Carbon Neutral Houses (entrepreneur.com)

Bamboo Architectural Designs that prove why this material is the future of modern, sustainable architecture: Part 2 | Yanko Design

I watched A LOT of YouTube videos on the subject of 3D printed houses. This was one of the videos I liked the most.

What do you think? Could you see yourself living in a 3D printed house?

Tiny Forests: Small forests for big impact

July 14, 2021 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 25 Comments

^{Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata on Pexels.com}

Every week I read a lot of news stories, predominately on the topics of the Environment, Science and Technology. All this reading interweaves into a tapestry of ideas and inspirations. Last week, I read about how Reddit’s former CEO, Yishan Wong, uprooted his family to follow a dream of environmental restoration in Hawaii, which sparked the research for this week’s focus. I feel like there was another story I read that first mentioned “The Miyawaki Method”, but I’m not sure which one it was now.

The Miyawaki Method creates a dense bio-diverse forest in 20-30 years instead of waiting for the natural cycle to take around 200 years. (It depends on the forest type. This estimation is based off the temperate forests of Japan.)

The first and most important step is the site assessment. Before you send your trees off to college or tell them to reach for the stars, you have to give them a good foundation of the basics, air flow, food and water. Miyawaki’s Method is dependent on the belief of creating “an authentic forest.” The trees, shrubs and other plants should be native to region and native to the microclimate of that region. This requires carefully harvesting seedlings from native flora that may be rare and hard to find.

The seedlings are often grown in various levels of shade to help them establish deep root systems. Once they are ready for planting all the kids are shoved into a small plot, typically no smaller that 30sq meters (about 322.92 sq feet) with one tree per square meter, but at least 60-90 plants in total for the whole space. These plant kids are growing up in a natural world version of an apartment complex.

In the conventional method of planting your trees would all be suburban kids, neatly spaced out with cute little name tags and yet they’d all have a handful of the most common surnames in the country, the Smiths, Johnsons, and Williams of the US. The Rodriguez, Martinez, and Garcías of Colombia. The Sato, Suzuki, and Takahashi of Japan or the Devi, Singh, and Kumar of India. (Search “Most common surname in [Country]” to see what the most common last name is in your country.)

^{Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Pexels.com}

The actual planting of all this flora requires randomly distributing it and not doing it in rows or staggered. Have you ever tried to do something randomly? If at this point in your life you have not discovered that humans are naturally inclined to certain patterns, you will suddenly make this realization when you are told to “randomize” something. I find it an interesting side effect of human adaptation. We’ve worked so hard to organize the world in order to make sense of it that when we are asked to randomize we struggle not to make patterns. In the past I’ve made necklaces and done beadwork. I’ll try to make it random only to discover that the longer I work at it, the more likely a pattern will emerge if I am not paying attention.

Akira Miyawaki came up with his method after studying a concept in Germany called “potential natural vegetation” (or Kuchler Potential vegetation) in the 1960s. The idea is to study what the forest would look like without human interference and try to replicate it. The seeds that are harvested from native plants need to have the qualities of being pioneers and secondary indigenous species with mycorrhization. These are the pathfinders of the indigenous forests trying to regrow in areas that might have once been damaged by fire, flood, or disease.

If you’ve read The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben (goodreads.com)or watched the episode of “The Magic School Bus Rides Again Season 2 Episode 10 (Tim and the Talking Trees | The Magic School Bus Wiki | Fandom) then you’ve come to understand the importance of the mycorrhizal (fungus) and soil bacterium.

Did you know that the microbiome of the human gut has it’s own nervous system? It’s called the enteric system. As we learn the importance of what a healthy gut biome means to human health, one could argue that the trees gut biome is found through the soil. Alternately, You’re feeding a forest in your stomach! A micro biome unique to you. You’re a walking terrarium. When we humble ourselves to the possibilities within the natural world and truly set our egos aside, then we can truly learn new things instead of re-creating the same old premises that hold us back. This is how you learn to think in radically different ways.

Mr. Miyawaki has traveled all over the world to create his process in several countries. As the method become more well-known it inspires others to also work towards this goal of restoring the land one tiny forest at a time. One of these people is Subhendu Sharma of India, who created a company called “Afforestt” and speaks on the subject as a TedTalk Fellow. You can find his videos on YouTube. Some are in English and some are in Hindi. I hope that I too can be a part of the Tiny Forest movement in my own region. I would like to see economically depressed neighborhoods in Seattle, Everett and Tacoma be helped and healed instead of continually ignored.

Right now, I live in a very hot housing market as people in the cities try to outrun urban decay, California and whatever else, small living spaces I suspect, noisy neighbors, etc. I live at edge in what is called the “urban-wildlife interface”, it’s the point at which humans and wildlife collide into side by side living. When the new people move in the freak out after the first windstorm and decide that all the trees need to be cut down, because they’re tall and they *might* fall, even though its already been standing there for 80 years. Then they see their wild neighbors and think they should be the ones to move. Just because a black bear walks across your lawn doesn’t make it a “problem” bear. It’s just existing and each new 5-acre, 9-acre, or 60-acre lot of land that gets developed into matchstick houses pushed the animals further into sight and conflict with humans.

This is a battle I’m willing to fight. I think to save my wild neighbors, we need to revitalize the urban cores once again. We must change our urban planning methods built on old premises and build upon new ones inspired by nature. No more redlining. We need to re-create cities where people can thrive and to do that, we need to bring back some of the forest back into the cities with us.

Don’t we all want to live in beautiful and interesting places? Part of what makes a place interesting to me, is the cultural and indigenous heritage of that place, through its land and its people. An authentic forest. An authentic city. An authentic forest city.

What do you think?

Links:

Former Reddit CEO’s New Startup Terraformation Raises $30 Million To Restore Forests And Tackle Climate Change (forbes.com)

Akira Miyawaki Official site: Akira Miyawaki | Inventor of Manmade Forest

Shubhendu Sharma, Afforestt Founder and TED Fellow: How to grow your own tiny forest | (ted.com) (video)

UK: Tiny Forest projects launching in Wales: Tiny Forest | Keep Wales Tidy

Potential natural vegetation (PNV) (aka Kuchler potential vegetation): Page translated in English: Potential natural vegetation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (original page in German: Potenzielle natürliche Vegetation – Wikipedia)

A good step-by step outline: How to Build a Forest in your Backyard – The Miyawaki Method – CUTTING EDGE VISIONARIES (cevgroup.org)