Not as part of an art exhibition, to be fair, but it is an art gallery, and I’m easily excited :-).
Wide load
As mentioned earlier, I submitted a number of photos for consideration in a call for art for UMM’s new Welcome Center. Much to my delight two photos were in fact chosen, being I think the first two pieces of mine to ever be purchased as art (as opposed to illustration or journalism). The first is the train panorama above, and the second is the turbine shot below.
Turbine, sun, and fog
Michael Eble (the curator for UMM’s HFA Gallery) also asked if he could exhibit four other photos (below) that I submitted in the 2010 Celebration exhibition in the HFA Gallery! They’re hanging now (in the upper level down at the end). There will be special showings during Founders Weekend, September 23–26 and Homecoming Weekend, October 8–10, and the exhibit closes on 16 October.
So I’ve been a pretty good boy while here in Minneapolis, and have left my camera back at the B&B every day, focusing instead on important things like course prep. Yesterday, though, I gave myself one day of photography, focusing on St. Anthony Falls, the Mill District, the Mill City Museum, and the Guthrie Theater.
While I was in the Guthrie I made my first trip up to the 9th floor where the Dowling Studio is. The 8th and 9th floors are mostly for education and cutting edge work, and the architect felt that this called for yellow windows to ensure that the people working there always had a "sunny" view. I’m not sure I buy that argument, but I must say that they provide a really amazing view of the city, including this shot back across to the old Mill District and the great Gold Medal Flour sign. So the weird colors here aren’t my doing, and nothing in Photoshop, but are the result of shooting through several inches of yellow-tinted glass.
If you’ve been to the Guthrie, but never been up to the 9th floor, I definitely recommend it. To get there you have to catch an elevator at either the 4th or 5th floor (only staff can use that elevator to go to the 1st floor) and head up to the 9th floor. It’s totally cool to go there, because that’s how you get to the Dowling Studio, which is the third and much smaller theater at the Guthrie. I was there in the mid-to-late-afternoon, and the light was really interesting, but I suspect that it changes quite a lot all through the day.
In all my wandering around I also learned a ton about the origin of Minneapolis (which I’d known almost nothing about). I’d always assumed the Cities were here primarily because of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, but no! Minneapolis is all about the water power of St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall of note on the entire Mississippi River. This initially powered sawmills which sliced up the northern forests into planks, and then drove the amazing flour milling industry that for 50 years made Minneapolis the largest producer of flour in the world.
Most of the old mills are gone, but there’s are bits of a few, including this old General Mills grain elevator and the shell of the adjacent mill that now houses the Mill City Museum.
Fascinating stuff, and a really fun day of taking photos.
While it’s really hard to describe and summarize such a complex performance, a section I particularly loved had them doing a somewhat traditional dance to a large chunk of the audio from the video below. The video is of an art installation by Nate Harrison where the viewer listens to the audio on an LP, where Harrison discusses how a drum break from the The Winston’s 1969 B-side “Amen, brother” (often referred to now as the “Amen break”) has been sampled, re-used, and deconstructed in hip-hop and commercial advertising. Harrison’s discussion is a really nice piece of cultural history and analysis, although I confess it was perhaps more compelling with casebolt and smith dancing at the same time.
It would have been interesting in its own right if casebolt and smith had simply danced with Harrison’s commentary. They took it up a notch, however, by following it up with a really interesting dance/discussion of how dancers use and re-appropriate moves and steps they learn in classes and see in performance, effectively “sampling” movements much like a hip-hop artist samples beats. She demonstrated various moves and styles, and he then grilled her about where she learned the moves, and on the appropriateness of re-using these moves without credit or payment. This quickly borders on the absurd, which is of course the point. The courts have allowed labels to charge for re-use of tiny fragments of recordings, where there are no such expectations in dance. Presumably a key piece of this is the ability to record (either on paper or as an audio recording) and distribute music, where dance can’t be recorded and copied in the same way.
In short, it was a cool, funny, intelligent performance. We had a great time, and highly recommend the show.
I found it really interesting to find that the YouTube version of the video above was in fact lifted from Harrison’s web site without his permission, although he says in the comments that he doesn’t care (search for “nkhstudio” in the full comments). So you have Harrison making a commentary on copyright and intellectual property, which is then appropriated by someone else and turned into a YouTube video. Then casebolt and smith use it in their performance, without ever telling us where that audio comes from, as a starting point for a great conversation about intellectual property. And while it’s possible they knew about the Harrison piece before it showed up on YouTube (Harrison was a friend from college for all I know), the odds favor them discovering the piece via YouTube, where it has over 2 million views.
So…
Now I’ve listened to “Amen, brother” (a song I’d never heard of)
because of a dance performance
borrowing parts of an audio track
which I was able to find via Google
as a YouTube video
generated (without permission) from a video by a performance artist commenting on intellectual property and copyright
using as a springboard the extended and repeated use of a 6 second drum break from The Winston’s “Amen, brother” in hip-hop and advertising
What a wonderful example of how re-appropriation can enrich the world, especially if we worry less about profit and more about gain.
Tom and I are living in the Cities for 9 days while he’s in the Shakespeare workshop at the Guthrie Theater, and quite happily our first week coincided with the last week of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. We saw some great shows, and with a little luck you can still catch some of the awesomeness, either tonight or as one of the encore performances tomorrow, where the best selling show at each venue gets one more show.
Tuesday we saw James T. Wilson, a two person show including Stanton Pavlicek in the title role. We know Stanton and his family from Morris (his dad was a huge help in building an enormous frame to hold up our gargantuan honeysuckle vine), and it was cool to see two 18-year olds just out of high school in this setting. The show itself was still struggling to become, and while there was a of potential, it’ll need some more work to realize that possibility.
Thursday we saw Speech!, an absolutely hilarious comedy about the goofy (and often twisted) world of high school speech competitions. The writing and performances were tres sharp, and the audience was rolling in the aisles from the start to finish. This show has received a number of well deserved nominations, including a best male performance for our friend and UMM alum Tim Hellendrung! Tim’s did lots of cool improv back at UMM (as well as being an excellent manager for the campus radio station), and has continued to develop at Comedy Sports in Minneapolis. It was great to see him do such a fine job in a great ensemble production like this. Big congratulations to Tim and the entire cast and crew!
Last night (Friday) we saw what will sadly be our last show, because we head back to Morris this afternoon so Tom can hang with his friends some before we come back to the Cities Sunday night. We went out with a bang, though, catching the amazing O(h) by casebolt and smith, a two person show unlike any dance performance I’ve ever seen before. They combined some great dance with liberal splashes of spoken word and singing, providing a rich piece of performance than transcended any simple notion of genre. There was wonderful (often comedic) commentary on both culture in general and dance in particular, creating a really fun experience that was also chock full of food for thought. They also received a number of nominations, and our group (two straight guys and a woman) all agree that a sweaty Joel Smith in Superman briefs is hot!
O(h)
There’s a great section in this performance about intellectual property that inspired a long enough commentary that I’ve moved to it’s own post. It’s not often in my experience that a dance performance explicitly opens these kinds of doors, so check it out.
When certified, the Welcome Center will be the first LEED Platinum building in the University of Minnesota system; the first LEED Platinum building on the National Register of Historic Places; and one of only thirteen higher education LEED Platinum certified buildings in the world. The Welcome Center is also the first building in Minnesota to use energy efficient chilled beam technology.
They’ve put out a call for art for the building, with a particular interest in work from alumni and others connected to the campus. In a foolish moment, I’ve submitted 20 photos. Now we wait and see if they want to purchase any of them!
I took over 1,000 pictures at yesterday’s 2010 graduation ceremony at UMM, and will sometime be putting the least bad of them on my events account on Flickr, but at the moment I have a ton of deadlines looming (grades, etc.) so that’ll have to wait a bit.
The wind ensemble and choir both did an excellent job (as they always do); these are from before the ceremony started while people were filing in and taking their seats. I really loved the reflection in the euphoniums, especially the mirror sharp reflection of the Student Center, trees, and sky in the silver instrument.
I took quite a few pictures of that reflection, and struggled a bit with the final presentation. It’s not clear to me whether the emphasis provided by the desaturation above, or whether I’m better off leaving the color alone (below).
The top one makes a really nice desktop image, by the way :-).
The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.
The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.
As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".
Happy, happy, happy.
But I’m easily amused :-).
In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.
I don’t get enough time to look at the wonderful photos that other people are posting on Flickr, but every now and then I carve out a few minutes. This morning over breakfast I discovered this gem and had to share. There is so much to like about this: The cool and unexpected subject matter, the generous treatment, the wonderful lighting and color, the tilt of the mother’s head. So, so nice. Well done to nailbender and thanks a ton for sharing!
A student shows off her work to the judges in the 2010 UMM Fashion Trashion show
Friday was the second annual Fashion Trashion show, where a number of UMM’s Studio Art students grace the runway modeling outfits they’ve constructed primarily from recycled, reclaimed, and re-used materials. Jess Larson was kind enough to ask me to take pictures again (I shot the first show last year).
Except this time the view count just went totally through the roof. My events account typically gets a few hundred views a day, with small spikes when I post a new set. 1,000 views, though, would be a big day for that account.
I’ve had over 5,000 views today, the vast majority of which have been on the Fashion Trashion photos.
A bit of a spike in views, eh?
I’m quite thoroughly gobsmacked, and not entirely sure where all the traffic is coming from. I’m thinking a lot of it is via Twitter, but it’s not really clear.
I suspect that the total lifetime views of my photographs pre-digital/Flickr might have been than 5,000, so to have 5,000 views of my work in one day is pretty amazing. I’m most grateful for the attention – thanks!
Flickr’s “day” just rolled over, and we peaked at 5,600 views for the 24 hour period. I’ve probably never seen anything close to that, and may never again. Crazy.
This year I submitted two sculptures to the juried student art show and both of them were accepted.
The first piece is called, Entangled, and was made as part of the Fabric as Form class. We were each given 2.25 yards of muslin and asked to create a piece of art based on an object from nature using all the fabric in the piece.
Some what obliquely I began with the idea of a vagina and how society talks about this piece of female anatomy as if it’s a constantly present space waiting to be occupied by a man’s penis. In fact, it is much more reasonable to think of it as a glove, or sheath, that space is only created when an object is either pushed inside or enveloped. With this as my starting point I went on to create the piece below.
Below is my second piece called, Torso. This was one of the first pieces I made as part of an aluminium pour in the introductory sculpture class. The original form was carved out of Styrofoam/polystyrene. (Styrofoam is a brand of polystyrene.) In approaching working with polystyrene I found that the nature of the material led me to carve organic forms that could rest comfortably in the palm of my hand. (The wood base is walnut.)
Award ceremony at the 2010 Poetry Out Loud regional, Fergus Falls, MN. Thomas McPhee (on far right) took first.
Last night was the 2010 Lake Regional competition as part of the national Poetry Out Loud competition. Morris Area High School (MAHS) had two students in the field, Thomas McPhee and Tim Ostby, and Thomas took first place! He and Ellen Ferry (who took second) will be among the 18 students from around Minnesota at the state finals in the wonderful Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, starting at 9:30am, Monday, 8 March 2010.
Thomas qualified for the state finals last year (along with MAHS student Alex McIntosh), so we had the good fortune to attend last year’s event. The quality of the performances was really exquisite, and I highly recommend the event to any fans of poetry and literature in the area.
Tim Ostby (the other MAHS student this year) placed fifth at the regional. Congratulations to him and all the other students that performed last night! While there were fewer competitors at the regional than last year, the quality of the performances was considerably stronger, and the venue (A Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls) was vastly better than last year’s (a classroom at a regional community college).
Thomas McPhee, David Johnson, and Tim Ostby at the 2010 Lake Regional for Poetry Out Loud. Thomas took first, and Tim took fifth.
A huge thanks to David Johnson, drama coach and english teacher at MAHS. Dave’s been a huge influence and support for Thomas in both theatre and Poetry Out Loud. It’s greatly to Dave’s credit that MAHS has had a student in the state finals of Poetry Out Loud each of the last four years (which is every year MAHS could have competed), with two in last year’s finals. Further, every MAHS student that’s gone to state has placed in the top 6: Anika Kildegaard took 2nd in 2007, Mary Hu won the state competition in 2008 and went on to the National Finals, and Alex McIntosh placed 4th and Thomas McPhee 6th in 2009. In fact Morris is the only high school in the state to place four students in the top 6 from 2007-2009, with no other school has placing more than two. Not a bad track record for a small rural high school. Thanks a ton to Dave for all his support and assistance!
The BBC in conjunction with the British Museum is putting on a new series this year, “A history of the world in 100 objects”. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, has chosen 100 objects from their remarkable collection to illustrate the sweep of human history, ranging from early stone axes through modern icons such as credit cards. Each object gets a 15 minute episode broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and available on-line and as a podcast.
They’ve finish 4 weeks (or 20 episodes), and the objects and their stories have been consistently engaging and informative. Some standouts have been the carving of the swimming reindeer, the Egyptian clay model of cattle, and the Rhind mathematical papyrus, but it’s awfully hard to choose favorites when the quality has been this good. If I had to pick just one out of what they’ve broadcast so far, it would probably be the Jomon pot episode. This type of pottery changed the way we understood the development of this crucial technology, and the way these objects were revered in Japan thousands of years later is quite wonderful. This particular pot, made some 7,000 years ago, was valued so highly a few hundred years ago that it was lined with gold and incorporated into the tea ceremony.
I’ve been to the British Museum several times over the years, and taken way too many photos there. (A few on my “main” Flickr account, and way too many on my events account.) One thing that’s been cool about the series is that in the first 20 episodes there was only one object that I remember seeing and actually photographed: The statue of Ramesses II up above. He’s huge and pretty hard to miss there next to the Rosetta Stone. Many of the objects in the series have been small and subtle, however, which nicely illustrates the value of a cool program like this. Some objects are pretty remarkable in and of themselves, but others benefit enormously from a guide who suggests we slow down and really look at this stone or that statue. Here MacGregor and his guests help us understand the significance, context, and impact of these objects, and totally make me want to go back to the Museum and seek these treasures out.
There are some other objects in the series that I’ve seen and photographed (such as the Assyrian Reliefs below), but most of them will be new to me. I’m eagerly looking forward to the remaining 80 episodes!
Detail from Assyrian Reliefs in the British Museum
Another from that gorgeous sunset behind the wind farm at Buffalo Ridge (near Lake Benton, MN).
KK and I got off US 75 on Norwegian Creek Road, which is what’s heading off in front of us here. The GPS, which was a bit confused about our little photo detour, actually suggested we continue down this gravel road and wander the backroads for a while. After breaching a few snow drifts across the road, we decided this wasn’t such a great idea in extremely cold weather with night fast coming on. We turned around and made it back to the blacktop safe and sound, and remained on more substantial roads the remainder of the journey.
I’ve often struggled with different ways of pulling out the useful information in both strong highlights and deep shadows, but somehow in all these photos I’d never learned (or figured out on my own) about multi-RAW processing. RAW is really nice and gives you a ton of flexibility, even though it takes up a lot more space. There’s a lot of great data there, but you have to learn to use it. I’d figured a lot of stuff out by just digging around in Photoshop and on-line, but somehow I’d totally missed this multi-RAW idea. I got a copy of The Photoshop darkroom for Xmas, however, and it’s really opened my eyes to some possibilities I’d been missing before.
Here I essentially pulled two images from the raw data on the camera. One was adjusted for the sky (keep the exposure down to saturate those great colors), and the other for the ground (crank up the exposure so you get some detail in the road and the snow). Then you lay those two versions on top of each other, and use a mask to merge them. It look a reasonable amount of futzing (maybe an hour, but I was fairly new to the whole masking thing), but the result was far cooler than I could have gotten by attempting to adjust the original image in toto.
The color is a little richer if you view this in a context that respects color profiles. Everyone who’s not in such a context will just have to take my word for it :-).
Last week I drove to a workshop in Madison, SD, with Kristin Lamberty (one of my Computer Science colleagues here at UMM). On the way, we went south on US 75, along the east side of the Buffalo Ridge wind farm, and there was a really gorgeous sunset behind them as we came into Lake Benton, MN.
KK was kind enough to let me stop and take some photos. This is one :-).
I haven’t actually messed with the colors here, except for deliberately underexposing the photo in the first place to saturate the colors. It really was a very cool sunset.
So the current “sculpture” being exhibited on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is by Antony Gormley of Angel of the North fame. 2400 people will each get to spend an hour on top of the plinth doing, basically, whatever they want. To watch the live feed go to One and Other.
My friend Jane will be one of the 2400 on 21st September. Go Jane!!!!!!
We had a very cool fog last week, and when I dropped Sub-Evil Boy off at school, the turbine was just peeking out through the top of the fog bank. With WeatherGirl’s encouragement, I grabbed the camera and dashed off to snag some shots, several of which I’ve uploaded to Flickr.
I never did get the image that first caught my eye because we just don’t have anything telephoto enough for that shot, and by the time I was closer I was down in the fog looking up at the turbine. Yet another reason why we really need to get a digital SLR so I can buy fancy lenses again (evil grin). Still, I was able to have some fun and grab some pretty nice images.
In one of those happy on-line community moments, I got a cool pointer on Flickr from imago (who has a very cool photo stream - see the example to the right) to a neat clip of Ivor Cutler performing a great little song “Shoplifting”. This was pulled from an old UK TV show called The Old Grey Whistle Test (also here, and the Beeb will sell you DVDs), and features Ivor playing his harmonium and singing. It’s a wonderfully goofy song and a totally dead-pan performance that is, in some ways, just what I would have expected from Cutler.
Check out the video here. imago found it on WFMU’s blog, and they snagged it from YouTube. Great fun and definitely recommended.
It looks like Andy Kershaw’s BBC Radio 3 show on Sunday is a very popular “Listen again” show this week, which is a nice sign. The show featured a great Cutler session recorded for John Peel in 1979, as well as a fine tribute to Ali Farka Toure, who also died recently. And who couldn’t love that Rev. Charlie Jackson guitar sermon track! This show should be available until sometime Sunday, so check it out while you can!
These are the two gift samplers mentioned earlier. The one on the left is the one Carole made for Randee, and the one on the right is the one WeatherGirl did for Athena.
While I was there on Saturday with my tripod I took various random pictures, including this shot of one of the two spiffy new hand-painted ceilings that were done by Lisa Johannes as part of the rennovation of the Stevens County Museum.
The discussion of this over on Flickr has been interesting. I was especially struck by a comment from Eryximachos (who has a cool photo stream) that he had initially thought it was done with Photoshop. I hadn’t thought about it that way at all until I read the comment, but immediately saw where he was coming from when I did. I was drawn to the image in part because of the incongruity of the chandelier hanging down from “the sky” with the birds flying around it, which is exactly the kind of thing that Magritte did in paint and Pedro Meyer has done with digital image editing (I highly recommend Meyer’s wonderful Truths and fictions CD-ROM).
And then one could riff on how hip-hop turntabling grew in part from kids thinking that things they were hearing on the radio were being mixed “live” when in fact they had been spliced together in the studio. But not today…
