Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning [1962]

Musee des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. [1938]

Ovid on Icarus

These, as the angler at the silent brook,
Or mountain-shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or gaping plowman, from the vale descries,
They stare, and view 'em with religious eyes,
And strait conclude 'em Gods; since none, but they,
Thro' their own azure skies cou'd find a way.
[Ovid, Metamorphosis, VIII:183-235, Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al trans.]

Bruegel's Icarus

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558
by Pieter Bruegel

hi-res image
it's like Where's Icarus?

Review of Jeff's work

STAGES OF TRANSCENDENCE -
Sculptor Jeff Becker's twin exhibits beautifully blend a stage designer's sense of drama with a post-K sense of dread
Friday, December 21, 2007
By Doug MacCash, Art critic
The students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts may be just high-school age. But a list of their visual arts teachers reads like a university faculty. Keith Perelli, Erzy Schwartz, Mary Jane Parker, Courtney Egan: The roll call of instructors is a list of some of the most accomplished artists in the Crescent City.
NOCCA sculpture teacher Jeff Becker is best known for his ambitious, inventive stage designs that date back to the 1990s. Times-Picayune theater critic David Cuthbert described Becker's set for ArtSpot's 2004 production of "Maid of Orleans" as a "brilliant piece of stagecraft," including a "whirling circular platform . . . ingeniously refashioned into a gyroscope."
Becker, 44, sees the ingenious, toy-like sculpture he's produced over the past two years as models for possible future stage designs. Clusters of miniature bombs hang beneath a tiny couch, bed and easy chair. The small-scale furniture hangs like surrealistic porch swings beneath the wings of abstract stealth bombers. Marionettes, holding bells in their tiny hands, balance precariously atop tall metal towers that sway back and forth on rounded bottoms. Other marionettes are carried toward the heavens by old-fashioned hot air balloons.
Becker envisions real live actors someday seated on life-sized versions of his dangling furniture, rocking atop his towers and swaying beneath his balloons. He probably has the skills to pull it off.
From welded iron, to cast paper pulp, to poured bronze, to embossed metal repousse, Becker has mastered myriad sculptural techniques. But he tells his students that technique shouldn't be their first concern.
"Don't worry about the how," he tells them, "worry about the what."
The what, in Becker's recent works, is flight.
"I'm intrigued by how our desire to fly has created innovations and consequences that are ongoing and unpredictable," he said.
But he's not just interested in flight as it pertains to aircraft; he's interested in flight in the sense of fleeing danger. Becker and his family fled Hurricane Katrina to Charleston, S.C., where they spent three months on what he sarcastically calls a "hurrication."
He said he didn't exactly set out to create metaphors for New Orleans' jarring experience when he returned to art making. But like so many artists, the trauma seeped into his work anyway.
As Becker pointed out, a pair of feet being carried aloft by wings brings to mind the helicopter rescue of so many stranded citizens. A cow borne by a hot air balloon implies a search for "greener pastures." The suitcases and figurines that dangle from balloons at the Contemporary Arts Center symbolize "people and possessions that are caught in some state of limbo awaiting eventual transcendence."
For Becker, transcendence has come sooner. The beautifully made, whimsical objects in his pair of exhibits deftly describe the longing for deliverance so many of us in post-Katrina New Orleans still have somewhere deep in our hearts.
Though Becker has shown his sculpture regularly in local group shows, the current twin shows represent a solo breakout for the high-flying artist, who says he will translate some of the designs into stage sets for an Artspot production titled "Flight" at the CAC in June.

vocalizing in the dark 12-10 session

this links to an 8mb, 10 minute file of the 12-10 vocal experiment

flying lessons tumble

flying lessons

pilot&co-pilot straight

gravity experiment

Flying Dude, Jean Albert

Cocteau's Blood of a Poet

I'd like us to watch Blood of a Poet (45 min., I could do excerpts if necessary). There are some nice ways of disorienting space that if so inspired we can draw on. Also, Cocteau was interested in mixing drawing and the 3-d human form on film - some things I'd like to try with mixing the body with projection. The image of the man falling into the pool of water began with him looking into a mirror that exactly fit the size of the pool - with the cut, it appeared he was passing into the mirror with a splash.

Emergence

since we've been doing so much flocking, here's a little info about it. Evidently scientists have worked hard to figure out how flocking happens, and it's because of something called Emergence. from what I gather it's a phenomenon found in self-organizing systems, and guess what else is a self-organizing system? a hurricane. the link takes you to a pbs site and there's a video too.
-Courtney

Video on Blog

I will start posting video on the artspot server, and Sean or I will email you and post the links to the video here.
look for it after Friday.

Flying Monk

watch this nytimes video about this dude

Pilot and co-pilot

Bruce and Nick spar to dialogue

J&Bruce read

Art serves evolution!

Scientists concur: Art creates and cements community.
And it all starts with the babies, the babies and their mothers . . .
from today's NY Times
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: November 27, 2007

If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”

I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.

What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.

Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world. As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.

A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.

After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.

To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.

In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.

Falling Up, 2000

ran across this while researching performer - controlled video. another Flight theme, without the "flee" aspect

"Falling Up explores concepts of gravity, flying and many of its related metaphors: the physical self, imagination, and how old beliefs hold us in place, limit and color our experiences. Inspired by inventors and pioneers, the first pilots, astronauts, and digital explorers, we examine moments in the 20th Century where technology enabled us to do something previously impossible and changed how we think forever. We also speculate on future technologies, enabling the body to be transported, modified and projected..."

Jeff's wing piece

The link is to a group of transcripts from the cockpit voice recorders (black boxes) of various flights that crashed. oddly technical and tragic a the same time.

Once in a Poem by John Berger

From: And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it has never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.

Yet poetry uses the same words and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multi-national corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of god?

That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones form the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation of the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as principle and a presence.

The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assemble point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.

If poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, the claim is more far-reaching than that of a genius of a particular poet in a particular cultural history. Immortality here should be distinguished from posthumous fame. Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present and future.

To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading, for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applies to the present and past as well as to the future can better be called an assurance.

The Flocking Party from Courtney

The Flocking Party is an interactive, non-linear web-based online story by artist Chris Landau. if you have some time and a good connection and the latest Flash installed, take a look at it. What I find interesting is how through the idea of an "electronic journal," a futuristic story about ecology, the loss of birdsong, and the reorganization of the world's political boundaries into regions by watershed, unfolds. I like its reliance on drawing - it makes me continue to think about how Jeff's drawings can be used and animated.

from jeff

I am thinking a great deal about memory, how places and objects have memories What does Kitty Hawk remember about the Wright Bros. The memory of Cape Canavral. What does the Enola Gay remember. What was the last thoughts of the planes involved in 9/11? The black boxes recording data in planes, what poetry can we find in that data?
I am also thinking about the planes and pilots susposedly lost in the Bermuda Triangle, where are they? Where is Steve Fossit?
Jeff

Kansas, from Lisa D.

Inspired by Daedalus and Icarus.
Who knew? (thanks Wikipedia)
Rock On...

Carry On Wayward Son
by KANSAS

Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher
But I flew too high
Though my eyes could see I still was a blind man
Though my mind could think I still was a mad man
I can hear the voices when I'm dreaming
I can hear them say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man
It surely means that I don't know
On a stormy sea of moving emotion
Tossed about I'm like a ship on the ocean
I set a course for winds of fortune
But I hear the voices say
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more
No!
Carry on
You will always remember
Carry on
Nothing equals the splendor
Now your life's no longer empty
Surely heaven waits for you
Carry on my wayward son
There'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Don't you cry no more

from J

funny kathy's assignment re. daedalus - i was reading up on him this morning and wondered if the clown/air traffic controller wasn't also daedalus several things intrigue me in addition to the icarus story - one seems to be that his genius/artisanship was the very thing that kept getting him into (and out of) trouble [he was almost trapped by the labyrinth
that he created, he exposed himself to minos by solving a puzzle]
another, perhaps a little more overwrought involves daedalus almost killing his nephew b/c his skills were approaching daedalus's, maybe there was something similar w/ icarus, ie icarus flew too close to the sun b/c daedalus planted the idea (to remove the competition)

J's assignment for lisa: instructions from falconer to falcon (some sensical some nonsensical) and maybe it's the falconers instruction that cause the falcons to fly out of earshot thus:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Assignments

Hey everybody!

Just got a great update from Jeff regarding the rehearsal last night. I'm carving out some time over the next few days to write, and will send some material to play with on Sunday. I have received small assignments from Kathy and Ashley and would love to have a few more for my stew pot. They can be tiny or big, according to your whim. I am pasting in Kathy's assignment to me below, to give you an example, but anything goes, so send 'em on.
Be Well,
LISA D.

KATHY'S ASSIGNMENT TO LISA
I would like for you to write some conversation between Icarus and Dedalus at any point in there relationship.
Some examples:

Deadalus explains birds to a 3 year old Icarus
Deadalus finally lets Icarus know he has been developing wings for them to fly away from their prison
the two planning their escape
conversation while flying
Icarus' thoughts flying fast on his descent into the ocean
Dedalus speaking to his son sometime after his death

or anything else that strikes your fancy

other archetypes I'm interested in:

the Wright brothers and their sister Amelia Earhart

Paintings by Jeff's student

Fuerza Bruta

Does everybody know about this show already? At the very least, you
should check this out...

http://fuerzabruta.net/website/fuerza_eng.html

Then click on visuals > videos > video clip 01.

It may be (or may not be) nothing but a glorified music video, but it's
impressive in every way.

Second Life

you can create an avatar and fly around Second Life.
if you're too busy in your first life, well...

If Leonardo had made toys...

nytimes article sent by nick

comment from Lisa D.
"From Nick's article:
“We’re moving into an age where toys are becoming more high-tech to stay competitive with gaming.”

It is interersting we haven't really talked about video games.   Does anyone know what the "hot" airplane video games are these days?"

phillipe decoufle

anyone who has directv (it might be on other services
too) there is a new channel called ovation
there is a show on there about phillipe decoufle
check it out
-j.

2 ideas for video

a couple ways of suggesting exodus:

a collage of disembodied hands and arms waving (goodbye, or for help?), arranged like a starburst and maybe mutating kind of kaliedescopic-like into other arrangements.

underwater shot: feet walking thru water that is dark, lit with rays of light, passing by the camera.

courtney

love seat image from Jeff

SCENE
A full size loveseat outfitted with a set of wings that together spans about 15 - 20 feet. . The flying love seat is on a wheeled scaffolding structure that supports it about 8-10 feet off the ground. The winged loveseat is connected to the scaffolding on pivot that allows it to move from side to side. The wings themselves will be strong enough to support weight and can be used as performance spaces. Diagonally across from the flying loveseat is a structure that is a cross between an air traffic control tower and a bird cage. On the top of this tower are varius odd instruments that are a cross between radar and gardening tools.The structure is supported on a scaffolding structure at about 10 feet from the ground. There are blinking lights attached through out the structure.

There are two performers seated in the flying loveseat, a pilot and copilot. The lighting is focused to appear as they are being lit from an instrument panel. In the control tower bird cage there is one performer (the air traffic controller). Throughout the scene the air traffic controller is climbing in around and on top of the structure adjusting varius things and looking around the space with a strange binocular periscope device.(binocuscope) Lighting on the control tower is similar to the flying love seat accept every so often intense lights come up as if from an approaching airplane.

The scene begins with the winged loveseat moving slowly in stage right from back of space.I envision the pilot and Co pilot having a Harold Pinteresque conversation about esoteric and unrelated subjects like cooking, gardening,vacations ailments ect. Their diologue is interspersed with coordinates, numbers letter words like south north ect with occasional cryptic messages from the air traffic controller.
The conversation between the pilot and Co pilot remains at an even tone, professional with no emotion.
The air traffic controllers physical behavior increases in intensity it becomes erratic and frenetic however his words remain even and without emotion in contrast to his movements. I see projections of a blue sky with clouds moving to give a sense of speed and velocity, Sound is a wind instrument like recorder or flute. As the conversation progresses there are more and more coordinates and less full sentences. The air traffic controller movements are very tense and animated at this point building to a crescendo. He then stops all movement and focuses on one point looking through his binocuscope The word release is spoken by the copilot lights become bright then quick fade out on winged loveseat and control tower. Troughs containing hundreds of leaflets with printed words installed above the audience and other high points in the space are opened dropping leaflets throughout the space Fog machine Lights come up to revealing the falling leaflets that at first should appear as early morning snow. Singing is heard from the back of the space. Three lights that seem like headlights appear from where the singing is coming from. As the lights and singing approach the audiance see 3 vehicals that are a cross between a flying carpets and a pirogue. There is a performer on each one . They pole themselves through the space as if assessing the damage. Two of the performers pick up leaflets and read the words as the third one (Kathy) continues to sing. I have no clear idea of what is written on the leaflets but the reading should appear random but should actually be fixed and predetermined. The performers pole their way trough or around the audience andmove behind them and out of the space.

2 images

a person rriding a bike, holding their arms out as if in flight
lots of people all over the city, doing that, editing together somehow

a bike that a person gets on that, when pedalling starts, is connected to a projector that starts images of clouds coming towards the biker, starting far off in the distance and getting closer and faster as the pedalling gets faster

from court

Stephen Hawking in zero gravity

Did you read or hear about Stephen Hawking zero gravity experience, it is pretty amazing. I think we should think about how we can explore his experience in relationship to his connection with flight as it relates to time and space.
It would be great to have parts of the text spoken by a machine similar to the one he uses to speak. I was not thinking of performing in this show myself but if there is an opportunity for a cameo I would like to play Stephen Hawking in
zero gravity.
-jeff

question

jeff and/or sean
is there a way to build a "flying device" (wings/arm leg flappers)
that maybe builds up air pressure that gets "released" musically/tonally?
-j

Uberorgan

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/om32290.html

this is a link to the "uberorgan" it's a piece i saw
at MassMoCa several years ago
i've been thinking of this since we started this
process
-j

propeller bra

found this in old scrapbook-
it says "stop motion animation lady being lifted by propeller bra"

Marey again-I love this stuff

More about Jules Etienne Marey from the linked website:

"Marey also developed several ingenious techniques to further track and isolate movement. These techniques would reoccur several decades later in the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, as they searched for "better" ways for the body to work, and more than 100 years later as digital technology sought to capture and trace movement, albeit for completely different reasons than Marey's.
One such technique was to cloth his subject completely in black, except for thin white bands which indicated the position of movement of the arms and legs. Photographed against the black interior of one of the "hangers" at the Station Physiologique, the subject's form was reduced to its essential components. These images of soldiers running were part of Marey's research into determining a scientific means of training soldiers."
-Courtney

Skuli's audio via Sean

Here's one of those songs my Stacy Hoover's
boyfriend Skuli Sverrisson (this one's called "Seria").
The rumor/myth is that he makes all the sounds with a bass (or maybe that was only true of his previous albums).
-Sean

Note from Courtney: click on the link above - the file is about 5 MB, so if you use dial up, be prepared for a wait.

april 24th workshop

jeff's drawings

lisa's drawings (click to see larger picture)

from Lisa

from J

has everyone seen "Science of Sleep" (Gondry)
esp "making of..." really cool interesting stuff
how they made the flying (in the pool w/projection)
the super lo-tech approach
(also reminds me of a flying scene we had in "EC"
where there was a projection of one dancer's torso and
two other dancers' legs - the two met at one point on
the projection surface and a cardborad cut-out
cityscene was pulled underneath so it looked like the
flyer was flying over

Fly Me Right

posted by Lisa

'machine for imitating insect flight' Marey

Watercolour by E Valton, 1869

yall look at this site

http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/marey.html

I've been enamoured of the Marey photos where he put people in black suits with white stripes and recorded the movement of the body. I'd like to try some Marey - influenced video experiments.

this other site looks good too, more of Marey's work:

http://www.expo-marey.com
but only the french part of the site works.

Étienne-Jules Marey's 'machine for imitating insect flight'
Early in 1869 Marey constructed a very delicate machine to demonstrate the flight of an insect and the figure-8 shape it produced during its movement. His artificial insect, with a body formed by a drum containing compressed air, could move up, down, and even diagonally.

"A mechanism actuated by an air pump produces alternate raising and lowering of a pair of wings constructed to the same design as those of the insects, formed, that is to say, with a rigid framework to the front and a flexible surface behind, made of rubber supported by thin steel shafts ... the small model which I present to the Académie [des Sciences, on 15 March 1869] develops a tractive force which may be measured by the dynamometer and which represents the raising of a weight of eight to ten grams. ... If the tip of one of the wings of this artificial insect is gilded, we see that all the movements and changes of shape in the flight of the real insect are reproduced in the mechanical apparatus."

sculptor staying with me - related work

This sculptor Sean Derry is coming down to do a piece for Art in Action and he is staying with us for a weekend while he does some research. I just read a description of his work he did for The Scuplture Center:

Sean Derry creates a site-specific installation for The Sculpture Center based on experimental environmental interactions using helium, balloons, water, and electronic speakers and microphones. The installation is derived from his outdoor experimental flight of a tethered large red balloon in the sky and the use of recording devices in an effort to “hear the clouds”. Derry brings the results of his experiment into the gallery in order for the viewer to witness and listen to the results. Environmental sounds play throughout the run of the exhibition.

if anyone wants to meet him let me know - it may be good to see images of this piece or what else he's done. for Art in Action, I think he wants to install one of his giant inflatable cars in an abandoned parking lot.- Courtney

de Tocqueville, from Bruce

This is an excerpt from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville in the section entitled "Why American Writers and Orators Often Use an Inflated Style." Considering human flight is an American invention I thought this might have a random connection.

"We have also seen, that, amongst democratic nations, the sources of poetry are grand, but not abudnant. They are exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the cloouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may sometimes make us regret the world of
reality."

Another one from the section entitled "Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man" goes like this:

"I accost an American sailor, and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidently, and on a particular subject, from an
uninstructed man, I recognized the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns.

Aristocratic nations are naturally to apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations, to expand it beyond reason."

animate drawings

something that would be fun would be to animate drawings, some of Jeff's sketches for instance, to be used in the show.

balloon head

I have an image of 50-70 helium balloons on long strings, tied to someone's hair, all their (longish, sorry J) hair.
it would be quite a prep every night.
of course that 's where video can come in... but it would be great to see it live. do you think someone could actually float away?
balloons could be blown up over the course of the performance, to try to get someone to fly away...