A. "The Performance of a Lifetime" 24" x 30" Oil/Paper/Panel 2022
Reference Notes
1. Territorio Mexicano , 1995-1997 Performance de Loena Wolffer
Las transgresions delcuepro, Museo Carrillo Gil, México D.F., México
Exchange Resources Festival, Belfast, Irlanda, Multivisión, México – Fotografías: Mónica Naranjo
LORENA WOLLFER – “MEXICAN TERRITORY” 1995 PIECE DONE AT EXCHANGE RESOURCE FESTIVAL, BELFAST, IRELAND Lorena Wolffer
Lorena Wolffer of Mexico City brings her politically charged performance Mexican Territory to a storefront in the Arcade on Sunday May 11. In her piece that lasts nearly six hours, she is tied to a surgical table and lays motionless while 30 liters of cow’s blood drips on her naked body and a voice endlessly and monotonously recites the phrase "Danger, you are approaching Mexican territory."
6 HOUR PIECE CONNECTED TO THE DEVALUING OF THE PESO IN 1994
– Wollfer SAID “I WANTED TO ESTABLISH PARALLELS BETWEEN THE IRISH POLITICAL STRUGGLE AND THAT OF MEXICO.”
This performance is a commentary on Mexico's passivity towards their economic and political concerns. Wolffer co-founded Ex-Teresa, Arte Alternativo, an experimental art space in Mexico City, where she served as Curator and Director until 1996.
I am a politicized Mexican woman artist, working in a highly charged environment: Mexico City of the late 1990s. I articulate the complexities of my country's political crises through both cultural activism and the creation of performance and installation artworks. Focusing on the body and its limitations, I search for archetypal symbols and metaphors that explain our condition as women and as a society in crisis.
2. Chris Burden shot in the name of art in iconic performance (video)
1 min 45 sec
At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.
“Shoot” is 8 seconds of footage, filmed on November 19, 1971, in a gallery located in Santa Ana, California named “F Space.” With only a handful of his friends in attendance, he proceeded with the piece that he had already announced the intention to the editors of an art journal called Avalanche1. With a small number of people in attendance, he performed what was likely his most shocking piece. “Shoot” featured Burden, who was only 25 years old at the time, being shot in the arm at close range by a friend with a rifle. The danger in this piece was obvious. All it took was being off a few inches and Burden could have been killed.
Shoot documentary
4 min 40 sec
Burden stumbling after being shot
Even Burden wasn’t immune to the shock of being shot in the arm as he quickly walked off-screen. Burden implores viewers to listen to the sound of the empty shell as it collides onto the ground. The imagery of the shot man stumbling forward is one that is difficult to forget.
What happened with the bullet?
The bullet was only supposed to graze Burden’s arm, but the shooter was slightly off target. The shot went through his arm instead of grazing it. Although the film was only eight seconds long, it burns itself into the mind of the audience breaking through desensitization that is felt by most indifferent viewers.
Aftermath of being shot
Following the performance, Burden and his friends were left to deal with the reality of a gunshot wound to the arm. They went to the hospital and had to explain the performance piece to the hospital staff that was left in disbelief. This part of the story reminds of the reality of Burden’s work, the reality of the violent brutality he was representing through the self-inflicted violence and resulting injury.
The meaning of the performance
The piece is a reminder of the fundamental reality of our corporeal life and corporeal reality. If the bullet had only moved a few inches in one direction, Burden would have likely been killed. If it had moved a few inches in the other, he wouldn’t have been touched by the bullet. It brings us to the realization that the gun holder had Burden’s life in his hands, just as soldiers in Vietnam held lives in their hands, politicians held the soldiers’ lives in their hands, and so forth.
3.
The Bob Ross art class of our dreams –
They paint like Bob Ross, while watching Bob Ross, dressed as Bob Ross. Video and photos by Timothy Chipp and Greg Jaklewicz of the Abilene Reporter-News.
Humankind Humankind, USA TODAY 2.26.19
4. The words that Picasso said during the celebration of his jubilee (90 years) in 1971:
“… Many become artists for reasons that have little to do with art. The rich demand a new, original, scandalous. And I, starting with cubism, entertained these gentlemen with absurdities, and the less they were understood, the more I had fame and money. Now I’m famous and very rich, but when I’m alone with myself, I do not have the courage to see an artist in myself in the great meaning o the word; I’m just an entertainer of the audience who has understood the time. It’s bitter and painful, but it’s true.”
Arnold Newman ( American, 1918-2006 )
Picasso in his studio, Cannes 1956
Pablo Picassotrue
452 notes
5.
Speaking in the NGV Great Hall, in view of his magnificent participatory sculpture Golden Mirror Carousel 2014, Carsten Hӧller shares insights into his unique approach to art making, which provides audience members the opportunity to experience the world differently. From hallucinating reindeer to rethinking our built environment to incorporate slides as everyday transportation, this wide-ranging In Conversation event, a partnership between the Melbourne Festival and NGV, explores the thinking of one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
Golden Mirror Carousel appears to be a traditional fairground ride, except for one striking aspect: its speed of revolution. Turning approximately one cycle per five minutes, the work confounds the excess of velocity expected today from machines of entertainment. Our daily experience of speed – of vehicles, machines and even technological tasks – is faster and faster, and entertainment in the fairground context has evolved with this normalisation of speed, becoming ever more immersive and ‘on the edge’. Actively confounding this central aspect challenges us to submit to a slower pace and get lost in a movement of contemplation.
Many recent activities at the NGV reflect an increased interest, by artists and audiences, in art practices that might be considered participatory, interactive or relational, perhaps most notably as part of the recent Melbourne Now exhibition. Melbourne Now projects exhibiting these qualities were discussed in the essay ‘Playtime’, in the exhibition’s limited-edition publication, by Isobel Crombie, Assistant Director, Curatorial and Collection Management, NGV, which identified ‘play’ as a theme central to the works and, via philosopher Emmanuel Kant, central in fact to the creative act.
The Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s upcoming retrospective at London’s Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery will feature two of his popular slides, the BBC reports (see Höller to Taker Over the Hayward Gallery).
A similar installation complete with five slides was featured at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2006, and at the Swiss furniture company Vitra’s headquarters (see Carsten Höller Unleashes 100-Foot-Tall Slide on Vitra Campus).
The major survey exhibition titled Decision will feature works spanning the artist’s 20-year career. It sets out to encourages visitors to consider the consequences of their life decisions and to reflect on how past choices have impacted their present reality.
In accordance with the theme of making choices, the exhibition will force visitors to choose once before entering, and once again before leaving the show: The gallery has been outfitted with two separate entrances and visitors also have the option of exiting via one of two of the artist’s shiny slides.
Höller told the BBC that the slides would hopefully make visitors experience “an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness.”
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, said Höller was “one of the world’s most thought-provoking and profoundly playful artists, with a sharp and mischievous intelligence bent on turning our ‘normal’ view of things upside-down.”
The exhibition, he added “will ask visitors to make choices, but also, more importantly, to embrace a kind of double vision that takes in competing points of view, and embodies what Höller calls a state of ‘active uncertainty’–a frame of mind conducive to entertaining new possibilities.”
Carsten Höller Decision runs from June 10 to September 6 at the Hayward Gallery, London.
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6.
Vehicle vs Pedestrian Pomona 6.27.20
Solo Vehicle Fatal Crash / Moreno Valley
1. Territorio Mexicano , 1995-1997 Performance de Loena Wolffer
Las transgresions delcuepro, Museo Carrillo Gil, México D.F., México
Exchange Resources Festival, Belfast, Irlanda, Multivisión, México – Fotografías: Mónica Naranjo
LORENA WOLLFER – “MEXICAN TERRITORY” 1995 PIECE DONE AT EXCHANGE RESOURCE FESTIVAL, BELFAST, IRELAND Lorena Wolffer
Lorena Wolffer of Mexico City brings her politically charged performance Mexican Territory to a storefront in the Arcade on Sunday May 11. In her piece that lasts nearly six hours, she is tied to a surgical table and lays motionless while 30 liters of cow’s blood drips on her naked body and a voice endlessly and monotonously recites the phrase "Danger, you are approaching Mexican territory."
6 HOUR PIECE CONNECTED TO THE DEVALUING OF THE PESO IN 1994
– Wollfer SAID “I WANTED TO ESTABLISH PARALLELS BETWEEN THE IRISH POLITICAL STRUGGLE AND THAT OF MEXICO.”
This performance is a commentary on Mexico's passivity towards their economic and political concerns. Wolffer co-founded Ex-Teresa, Arte Alternativo, an experimental art space in Mexico City, where she served as Curator and Director until 1996.
I am a politicized Mexican woman artist, working in a highly charged environment: Mexico City of the late 1990s. I articulate the complexities of my country's political crises through both cultural activism and the creation of performance and installation artworks. Focusing on the body and its limitations, I search for archetypal symbols and metaphors that explain our condition as women and as a society in crisis.
2. Chris Burden shot in the name of art in iconic performance (video)
1 min 45 sec
At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.
“Shoot” is 8 seconds of footage, filmed on November 19, 1971, in a gallery located in Santa Ana, California named “F Space.” With only a handful of his friends in attendance, he proceeded with the piece that he had already announced the intention to the editors of an art journal called Avalanche1. With a small number of people in attendance, he performed what was likely his most shocking piece. “Shoot” featured Burden, who was only 25 years old at the time, being shot in the arm at close range by a friend with a rifle. The danger in this piece was obvious. All it took was being off a few inches and Burden could have been killed.
Shoot documentary
4 min 40 sec
Burden stumbling after being shot
Even Burden wasn’t immune to the shock of being shot in the arm as he quickly walked off-screen. Burden implores viewers to listen to the sound of the empty shell as it collides onto the ground. The imagery of the shot man stumbling forward is one that is difficult to forget.
What happened with the bullet?
The bullet was only supposed to graze Burden’s arm, but the shooter was slightly off target. The shot went through his arm instead of grazing it. Although the film was only eight seconds long, it burns itself into the mind of the audience breaking through desensitization that is felt by most indifferent viewers.
Aftermath of being shot
Following the performance, Burden and his friends were left to deal with the reality of a gunshot wound to the arm. They went to the hospital and had to explain the performance piece to the hospital staff that was left in disbelief. This part of the story reminds of the reality of Burden’s work, the reality of the violent brutality he was representing through the self-inflicted violence and resulting injury.
The meaning of the performance
The piece is a reminder of the fundamental reality of our corporeal life and corporeal reality. If the bullet had only moved a few inches in one direction, Burden would have likely been killed. If it had moved a few inches in the other, he wouldn’t have been touched by the bullet. It brings us to the realization that the gun holder had Burden’s life in his hands, just as soldiers in Vietnam held lives in their hands, politicians held the soldiers’ lives in their hands, and so forth.
- Trans-Fixed was a 1974 performance by Chris Burden in which he was crucified onto a Volkswagen Beetle.
- On April 23, 1974, performance artist Chris Burden was crucified shirtless onto the back of a pale blue Volkswagen Beetle.[1] Burden stood on the car's rear bumper and leaned backwards.[2] His attorney hammered two nails through his open palms into the roof. Three other assistants ran the engine and opened the garage door, which opened into an alley called Speedway in Venice, California.[1] The assistants rolled the car out of the garage, where it ran while stationary for two minutes with the engine at full throttle.[2] Fifteen of his friends were there, having been invited but not briefed on what to expect.[1]
3.
The Bob Ross art class of our dreams –
They paint like Bob Ross, while watching Bob Ross, dressed as Bob Ross. Video and photos by Timothy Chipp and Greg Jaklewicz of the Abilene Reporter-News.
Humankind Humankind, USA TODAY 2.26.19
4. The words that Picasso said during the celebration of his jubilee (90 years) in 1971:
“… Many become artists for reasons that have little to do with art. The rich demand a new, original, scandalous. And I, starting with cubism, entertained these gentlemen with absurdities, and the less they were understood, the more I had fame and money. Now I’m famous and very rich, but when I’m alone with myself, I do not have the courage to see an artist in myself in the great meaning o the word; I’m just an entertainer of the audience who has understood the time. It’s bitter and painful, but it’s true.”
Arnold Newman ( American, 1918-2006 )
Picasso in his studio, Cannes 1956
Pablo Picassotrue
452 notes
5.
Speaking in the NGV Great Hall, in view of his magnificent participatory sculpture Golden Mirror Carousel 2014, Carsten Hӧller shares insights into his unique approach to art making, which provides audience members the opportunity to experience the world differently. From hallucinating reindeer to rethinking our built environment to incorporate slides as everyday transportation, this wide-ranging In Conversation event, a partnership between the Melbourne Festival and NGV, explores the thinking of one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists.
Golden Mirror Carousel appears to be a traditional fairground ride, except for one striking aspect: its speed of revolution. Turning approximately one cycle per five minutes, the work confounds the excess of velocity expected today from machines of entertainment. Our daily experience of speed – of vehicles, machines and even technological tasks – is faster and faster, and entertainment in the fairground context has evolved with this normalisation of speed, becoming ever more immersive and ‘on the edge’. Actively confounding this central aspect challenges us to submit to a slower pace and get lost in a movement of contemplation.
Many recent activities at the NGV reflect an increased interest, by artists and audiences, in art practices that might be considered participatory, interactive or relational, perhaps most notably as part of the recent Melbourne Now exhibition. Melbourne Now projects exhibiting these qualities were discussed in the essay ‘Playtime’, in the exhibition’s limited-edition publication, by Isobel Crombie, Assistant Director, Curatorial and Collection Management, NGV, which identified ‘play’ as a theme central to the works and, via philosopher Emmanuel Kant, central in fact to the creative act.
The Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s upcoming retrospective at London’s Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery will feature two of his popular slides, the BBC reports (see Höller to Taker Over the Hayward Gallery).
A similar installation complete with five slides was featured at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2006, and at the Swiss furniture company Vitra’s headquarters (see Carsten Höller Unleashes 100-Foot-Tall Slide on Vitra Campus).
The major survey exhibition titled Decision will feature works spanning the artist’s 20-year career. It sets out to encourages visitors to consider the consequences of their life decisions and to reflect on how past choices have impacted their present reality.
In accordance with the theme of making choices, the exhibition will force visitors to choose once before entering, and once again before leaving the show: The gallery has been outfitted with two separate entrances and visitors also have the option of exiting via one of two of the artist’s shiny slides.
Höller told the BBC that the slides would hopefully make visitors experience “an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness.”
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, said Höller was “one of the world’s most thought-provoking and profoundly playful artists, with a sharp and mischievous intelligence bent on turning our ‘normal’ view of things upside-down.”
The exhibition, he added “will ask visitors to make choices, but also, more importantly, to embrace a kind of double vision that takes in competing points of view, and embodies what Höller calls a state of ‘active uncertainty’–a frame of mind conducive to entertaining new possibilities.”
Carsten Höller Decision runs from June 10 to September 6 at the Hayward Gallery, London.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
6.
Vehicle vs Pedestrian Pomona 6.27.20
Solo Vehicle Fatal Crash / Moreno Valley
B. “This Can’t be Happening; It’s not Real.” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel. 2021
Spoken to Jodi Doering, ICU nurse, by patients who are dying from Covid. November 2020, South Dakota
1. A Promise That Never Bloomed, a Post-Minimalist You’ve Never Heard Of
Last chance: Lester Hayes
“Lester Hayes: Selected Work, 1962-1975” continues through Sunday at Triple Candie,
But he will not be raised, because there is no Lester Hayes. He never existed. He is entirely an invention of Triple Candie. The gallery’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, the co-publishers of the magazine Art on Paper,
So, with no real artist and no real art, what do you have here? You have many questions raised about art and the often unquestioned ideas surrounding it, like originality, authenticity, influence, history, formal value and biography-as-value. Is contemporary art largely a promotional scam perpetuated by — in no particular order of blame — museums, dealers, critics, historians, collectors, art schools and anyone else who has a sufficient personal, professional or financial investment riding on the scam to want to keep it afloat?
If you are affected — moved, amused, provoked — by the assembled Hayes oeuvre, then is it art? Are Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett artists? (They would certainly say no.) Are they themselves perpetrators of a scam? Or are they critical thinkers working in an alternative direction to the market economy? Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to? The whole art-as-investment illusion would evaporate. The market would crumble. Art myths could no longer be trusted. The Triple Candie’s Hayes biography, in other words, is spun largely from myths and clichés that sell art and artists today.
As for the “Hayes” art in the show, with its junk materials, slapdash handiwork and jokey titles, it’s not much. Or, rather, it’s exactly an alternative to “much.” When the show, which runs through Sunday, comes down, everything will be destroyed. And the gallery, which runs on a small budget and has a tiny board of directors, will go on to other projects, including a planned re-creation of one of the most controversial museum shows of the latter half of the 20th century, the Metropolitan Museum’s 1969 “Harlem on My Mind.”
When that show opened, it was bitterly attacked for perpetuating racist myths and substituting documentary material for actual work by black artists. Can such charges be leveled at Triple Candie for the Lester Hayes show? Is it an example of the white art world — Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett are white — getting mileage out of the work of a black artist, real or not?
According to his biography, Hayes was invited by fellow African-American artists to join them in protesting the Met exhibition, but he refused, stating that “it was ultimately more important for our community as a whole to be better understood, than for specific individuals to be celebrated via their work.” Maybe he and his work, however uncelebratable, will get a dollar-glutted art world thinking in more complex and alternative ways than he, had he existed, could possibly know.
By Holland Cotter Published: January 16, 2007 Art New York Times
2. An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World
Lebbeus Woods (May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012) was an American architect and artist known for his unconventional and experimental designs.[2][3] Known for his rich, yet mainly unbuilt work and its nonetheless significant impact on the architectural sphere, Lebbeus Woods and his oeuvre are considered visionary, describing a radically experimental world built on the principles of heterogeneity and multiplicity and bridging thus the gap between numerous fields including architecture, philosophy, and mathematics. Reconfiguring the architectural space in environments of crisis, whether it be natural, social, political, or financial, Woods stated: “I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.”[4]
Top of FormBottom of Form“Berlin Free-Zone 3-2,” a 1990 proposal by Lebbeus Woods for an abandoned government building in reunified Berlin. The structure, more theoretical than practical, has no assigned purpose.Credit...Lebbeus Woods
While the purpose of most architects is the construction of their designed work, for Woods, the essence of architecture transcended these limits by seeking something other than an idea expressed as a built form. Interested in what would happen if the architect was freed from conventional restrictions, he did not intend to generate and construct a design proposal of a specific geometrical form in order to approach an existing architectural problem. To the contrary, his work consists of intricately complex drawings and designs, envisioning and exploring new types of space. Yet, he considered his architecture neither utopian nor visionary but an attempt to approach reality under a radical set of ideas and conditions.[4]
The majority of his explorations deal with the design of systems in crisis: the order of the existing being confronted by the order of the new. His designs are politically charged and provocative visions of a possible reality; provisional, local, and charged with the investment of their creators. He is best known for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana, and Sarajevo that were included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction in 1997 (Sarajevo after the war, Havana in the grips of the ongoing trade embargo, and San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake).
3. Gordon Matta-Clark
“It would be interesting to take a conventional living space, somewhere still inhabited, and transform it to the point of rendering it unusable”. During his brief lifetime, Gordon Matta–Clark studied architecture at Cornell and literature at the Sorbonne in the thick of May ’68 (his first encounters with Debord’s Situationism). Armed with various sharp tools and explosive ideas, he went on not to erect buildings, but to cut them in half or knock huge holes into them, stripping them down to their bare bones. His aim? To lay bare the forces that preside over traditional architecture and which make “states of enclosure” for “passive and isolated consumers”.A spectacular ideal of productive destruction emerged as he took sledgehammer and chainsaw to edifices due for demolition — hence nothing remains of his interventions apart from the short films (Splitting, Conical Intersect, Office Baroque) that document the work of this “anarchitect”.Matta–Clark is now a legend, remembered for his short, brilliant career (or perhaps for a meal eaten at FOOD, the artist–run restaurant he opened in 1971 in SoHo) and for his tragic and untimely death from cancer, at the age of 35.GALERIE DU JEU DE PAUME (Paris), until September 23.Photo: Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark et David Zwirner, New York / Londres / Hong Kong. © 2018 The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / ADAGP, Paris
4. Stockholm . 210m . Architect Per Oberg
Brussels . 470m . Architect Serge Fontiny
Brusssels . 380m . Architect Lionel Jadot
House R 128 . Stuttgart, Germany . Werner Sobek . Architect
C. “Backtracking” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
1. When we look at the night sky, how far back in time can we see?
The time it takes for light from objects in space to reach Earth means that when we look at planets, stars and galaxies, we're actually peering back in time.
By Stuart Atkinson
Published: January 8, 2021 at 11:22 am
When we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. The light entering our eyes from these distant objects set off years, decades or millennia earlier. Every time we look at something ‘up there’ we’re seeing it as it was in the past.
With enormous modern telescopes and sensitive detectors, professional astronomers can see far beyond what most back garden telescopes are capable of.
As far as our own Solar System is concerned, one of the farthest objects observed so far is a 500km-wide asteroid, 2018VG18.
Also known as Farout, it is over 120 times further from the Sun than Earth, or three times further away than dwarf planet Pluto.
If you were standing on Farout’s dark, pink icy surface, Earth would be a mag. +6.8 ‘star’ hugging close to the Sun and Jupiter would shine at barely mag. +5.0.
If a space probe ever reaches Farout it will take 17 hours for its radio signals and images to reach Earth.
As for the most distant object ever seen in the Universe, the current record holder is a galaxy – GN-z11.
Located in Ursa Major, GN-z11 is a young galaxy barely 1/25th the size of our own, and it is so far away that when its faint light is observed by astronomers they are looking back in time more than 13 billion years, to just 400 million years after the Big Bang.
It is expected that when it finally launches, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to look even further back in time and observe events that happened long ago in galaxies far, far away…
Science fiction has got it wrong; you don’t need a TARDIS or a DeLorean to travel back in time: your own eyes will do just fine.
2. Various galaxies used in the painting
Warped Edge-On Galaxy ESO 510-G13:
This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that has an unusual.... is so far away that the light from it has taken 11 billion years to reach Earth.
Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038-4039: .Galaxy NGC 3079:
45,000,000 light-years from earth.
Overlapping spiral galaxies, 2MASX J00482185-2507365:
19190 km/s ... million light-years from Earth
Earth (from Old English: Eorðe; Greek: Γαῖα Gaia;[n 5] Latin: Terra[25]), otherwise known as the World[n 6] or the Globe, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets.
"Black Eye Galaxy" M64: . Majestic Sombrero Galaxy M104: . Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300:
Hoag's Object Galaxy: . Starburst Galaxy M82: . Dusty Spiral Galaxy NGC 4414:
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1512: . Warped Edge-On Galaxy ESO 510-G13:
Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038-4039: .Galaxy NGC 3079: Overlapping spiral galaxies, 2MASX J00482185-2507365: . Earth
An artwork included in Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Obsession” exhibition.
3. The Universe Is a Giant Donut That We Live Inside, New Research Suggests
The idea that the universe has a 3D torus shape ties in to some pretty far-out stuff, like the CIA’s 1980s Gateway report on psychic phenomena.
by Sarah Wells July 22, 2021, 6:00am
The Universe Is a Giant Donut That We Live Inside, New Research Suggests
Image: Alexey Brin via Getty Images
Without scientific instruments or knowledge to tell them otherwise, you can forgive ancient humans for initially believing the Earth was flat. After all, from a human perspective, the world does appear to stretch out before us without suddenly sloping down like a half-pipe. But while this notion has been thoroughly disproven for centuries, a new kind of flat-versus-curved debate has recently captured academic imagination. And this time, scientists are debating the very shape of the universe itself.
In a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server, a team of astrophysicists and cosmologists from Ulm University and the University of Lyon have studied the leftover light from the Big Bang—known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB—and determined that the universe may not be a flat plane, as many scientists currently believe.
“The example in our paper is… a donut shaped universe model,” explained Thomas Buchert, a professor of cosmology at the University of Lyon and coauthor on the new paper, in an email. This shape is also known as a three-torus, Buchert wrote, AKA a three-dimensional donut. The idea that the universe has a torus shape is at the center of some pretty far-out stuff, such as the CIA’s 1980s Gateway report on psychic phenomena.
This paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, but Buchert said it has been submitted to journals for consideration.
Buchert and colleagues are not the first to propose an oddly shaped universe. The idea of a torus shape originated in the 1980s, and new data reinvigorated discussions among researchers in 2003. But in the last 18 years scientists have broadly come to a different conclusion about the universe’s shape. Namely, they believe it to be geometrically flat—meaning parallel lines in the fabric of spacetime remain parallel—and infinitely expanding. This last tenet is evidenced by observed redshifts, a signal from light that it’s retreating, at the edge of the universe.
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This idea that the universe’s shape is essentially an infinite sheet of flat paper would seem like the end of the story, but Buchert and colleagues write in their paper that there was something in the CMB that didn’t quite line up.
“The [CMB] spectrum is not only discrete but has in addition large gaps,” they write. Which creates “intriguing discrepancies between predictions of the [standard model] and CMB observations.”
In other words, there appear to be signals missing from the CMB that would be present if the universe were truly infinite as the standard model proposes. One explanation for this would be that the universe is actually “multiply connected,” at these missing points, meaning that its topology is curved in such a way that it connects back onto itself like a donut.
The same way you can fold a flat piece of paper into a curved shape without changing its parallel properties, this solution would mean the universe could be both flat and donut shaped. Through simulations of the CMB, this is exactly what the researchers found. However, if proven to be true, this would mean that the universe was no longer infinite, said Buchert, which may be philosophically jarring to some.
“Finite universe models might be scary to some people, but you do not experience a boundary,” said Buchert. “So you live in an unbounded Universe although it has finite volume.”
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But even if you won’t necessarily bonk into the edge of this finite universe, can you sail around it and end up back where you started? Theoretically, yes.
“Light can travel around the whole finite Universe, but for a space-traveler it'll be difficult,” said Buchert. “Certainly, if future technologies would allow to create wormholes in spacetime, or if we would realize [warp drives that are] not limited by the speed of light, then it is in principle possible to travel around.”
But even if you could hop onboard a warp-speed spacecraft, it might have some unintended consequences, warns Buchert.
“It is expected that your proper time within the warp bubble is considerably shorter than the time elapsed at Earth where you started from,” he said. “If you would complete the loop and come back, Earth might no longer exist.”
While they wait for new warp craft to be developed, Buchert and colleagues will instead continue probing this mystery the old fashion way: analyzing data from probes like Planck, WMAP and COBE to uncover hidden clues at the birth of the universe.
4. Excerpt — The Infinite Complexity of CellsMichael Denton
October 2, 2020, 6:47 AM
In terms of compressed complexity, cells are without peer in the material world, actualized or imagined. And there is likely far more complexity still to uncover. Even as recently as 1913, when Lawrence Henderson composed his classic The Fitness of the Environment, the cell was a black box, its actual molecular complexity a mysterious unknown. Only as the veil began to lift with the mid-century molecular biological revolution did science begin to glimpse the sophistication of these extraordinary pieces of matter. Subsequently, every decade of research has revealed further depths of complexity. The discovery of ever more intricate structures and systems with each increase in knowledge — including vastly complex DNA topologies and a vast and growing inventory of mini-RNA regulator molecules — tells us there is probably much more to uncover. What we glimpse now may be only a tiny fraction of what remains to be discovered.
As Erica Hayden confessed in the journal Nature, “As sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data,” the complexity unearthed by cell biology “has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set… that reveals ever more intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.”
A Third InfinityThere is much more to discover about the cell, but even from our current limited knowledge of its depths it is clear that this tiny unit of compact, adaptive sophistication constitutes something like a third infinity. Where the cosmos feels infinitely large and the atomic realm infinitely small, the cell feels infinitely complex.
But cells are not just complex beyond any sensible measure and beyond any other conceivable material form. They appear in so many ways supremely fit to fulfill their role as the basic unit of biological life. One element of this fitness is manifest in their incomparable diversity of form. Contrast a neuron with a red blood cell, a skin cell with a liver cell, an amoeboid leucocyte with a muscle cell. Each of these different forms is found in the human body, and many more. Or consider the diversity of ciliate protozoans. From the trumpet-like Stentor to the dashing Paramecium, the universe of ciliate form is absurdly diverse. Or take the radiolarians. Even within this small related group of organisms, the diversity of cell forms is stunning. And yet every member of this fantastic zoo of radiolarian forms is built on exactly the same canonical design.
Unique FitnessThe unique fitness of the cell to serve as the fundamental unit of life is also manifest in its amazing abilities and the diversity of functions it performs. Even the tiny E. coli, a cylinder-shaped bacterium in the human gut, has spectacular capabilities. Howard Berg has marveled at the versatility and capacities of this minuscule organism, calling its talents “legion.” He notes that this tiny organism, less than one-millionth of a meter in diameter and two-millionths of a meter long, so small that “20 would fit end-to-end in a single rod cell of the human retina,” is nevertheless “adept at counting molecules of specific sugars, amino acids, or dipeptides; at integration of similar or dissimilar sensory inputs over space and time; at comparing counts taken over the recent and not so recent past; at triggering an all-or-nothing response; at swimming in a viscous medium… even pattern formation.”
Capable of…Almost AnythingThese remarkable specks of organized matter have constructed every multicellular organism on Earth, including the human body, itself a vast collective of as many as 100 million million cells. Cells compose the human brain, making a million connections a minute for nine months during gestation. Cells build blue whales, butterflies, birds, and the giant sequoias of Yosemite. Cells constituted the dinosaurs and all past life ever born on Earth. And through the activities of some of the simplest of their kind, cells gradually terraformed the planet over the past 3,000 million years, generating oxygen via photosynthesis and releasing its energizing powers for all the higher life forms. They are the universal constructor set of life on Earth. In short, they can do almost anything, adopt almost any shape, and obey any order. They appear, in every sense, perfectly adapted to their assigned task of creating a biosphere replete with multicellular organisms like ourselves.
This photo is the most detailed model of a human cell to date, obtained using X-ray, NMR, and cryo-electron microscopy data sets .
"Cellular landscape diameter through an eucaryote cell. " - by Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill .
5. This painting is constructed from three previous paintings I made, which are attached.
"Echo" 24"x48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2004
"Seduced Again" 45" x 80" Oil/Paper/Panel 2005
"Compressed" 40" x 60" Oil/Paper/Panel 2017
D. "Time Enough at Last" 24" x 30" Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
A - The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 1) Wikipedia
List of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) episodes - Original air date November 20, 1959
"Time Enough at Last" is the eighth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.[1] The episode was adapted from a short story written by Lynn Venable.[2] The short story appeared in the January 1953 edition of the science fiction magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction[3][4] about seven years before the television episode first aired.
"Time Enough at Last" became one of the most famous episodes of the original Twilight Zone. It is "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world"[5] and tells of Henry Bemis (/ˈbiːmɪs/), played by Burgess Meredith, who loves books yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. The episode follows Bemis through the post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the difference between solitude and loneliness.
B - A look inside the Human Library, where you check out people instead of books
"I figured that if we could make people sit down with a group attached to a certain stigma they don't like, we could diminish violence."
March 9, 2016, 11:48 AM PST / Source: TODAY
By Alexandra Zaslow
With all the violence and conflict in the world, it's refreshing to know that people from all different demographics are able to sit down together around the world to have an open conversation.
That's what Ronni Abergel, 42, has achieved since launching the Human Library in Copenhagen in 2000. Just as you would at a library, you can check out a "book" on a certain topic for an allotted period of time. The only difference is that the "book" is actually a person who you can have a conversation with — and learn from.
"I figured that if we could make people sit down with a group attached to a certain stigma they don't like or even know about for that matter, we could diminish violence," Abergel told TODAY.com.
The type of books you can borrow range from someone who is transgender, deaf, blind, obese or homeless to a person with autism or even a refugee. In the 16 years since its inception, Abergel brought the concept to more than 70 countries, including the U.S.
Growing up in Copenhagen, Abergel said he got involved with the wrong crowd. He would get into fights both in school and on the streets. In 1989, when he was 15, Abergel decided to escape and he moved to New Milford, Connecticut for a year as a foreign exchange student.
"I had enough common sense to realize that if I continued in this direction, my life would end poorly," Abergel said. "That experience changed my life because it forced me to leave the circles that were negatively influencing me."
He returned to Copenhagen in 1990 feeling a greater respect for those different than him. After finishing school in 1993, he and his friends started Stop The Violence, an organization that raised violence awareness. His work eventually led him to create the Human Library Organization. "Sometimes you see someone in the supermarket and think things about them, but you don't dare go ask them questions," Abergel said. "I wanted to build a space where you can ask them anything because they volunteered to answer."
When the Human Library came to St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, on Feb. 25, Sarah Griffiths, who works at the college's Center for International Education, brought her two sons, ages 11 and 13, to check out a book titled "International Woman, Leader of Color, Gender Justice."
It's set up just like a normal library: You check out a "book" on a certain topic and have an allotted amount of time with it. Only at the Human Library, the book is, well, a human.
People who volunteer to become "books" make their experiences open and available, usually on issues that people tend to have a difficult time discussing. "Readers" are encouraged to ask questions freely, and they'll get honest answers in return. It's brilliant.
C - US photographer Eric Pickersgill has created “Removed,” a series of photos to remind us of how strange that pose actually is. US photographer. In each portrait, electronic devices have been “edited out” (removed before the photo was taken, from people who’d been using them) so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.
By Steve Mollman, Weekend editor, Published August 28, 2019Last updated on September 18, 2019
D - The new Apple Store on the Upper West Side is a splendid oddity amid the retail recession, all steel, marble, and glass. 2010
Peter Aaron/ESTO
At 67th Street and Broadway, a pavilion of marble and sheer glass walls opened in November, a composition as austerely purposeful as a classic Greek temple. Is this elegant glass-roofed room the home of a cash-flush hedge fund?
The new store nestles snugly into a corner lot along Broadway.
Clutter has been banished from inside the store—making room for the crowds.It’s an Apple Store.
As retail reels in the recession and even established stores look like temporary pop-ups, Apple lavished expanses of Tennessee marble with end-matched vein patterns as soft as wisps of smoke. Because the store is that Manhattan rarity, a freestanding building, it is an even more alluring display of costly investment than the famous glass cube that tops the computer company’s underground store on Fifth Avenue. According to Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, these stores merit lavish outlays because “they are the most profitable.”
A - The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 1) Wikipedia
List of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) episodes - Original air date November 20, 1959
"Time Enough at Last" is the eighth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.[1] The episode was adapted from a short story written by Lynn Venable.[2] The short story appeared in the January 1953 edition of the science fiction magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction[3][4] about seven years before the television episode first aired.
"Time Enough at Last" became one of the most famous episodes of the original Twilight Zone. It is "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world"[5] and tells of Henry Bemis (/ˈbiːmɪs/), played by Burgess Meredith, who loves books yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them. The episode follows Bemis through the post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, and the difference between solitude and loneliness.
B - A look inside the Human Library, where you check out people instead of books
"I figured that if we could make people sit down with a group attached to a certain stigma they don't like, we could diminish violence."
March 9, 2016, 11:48 AM PST / Source: TODAY
By Alexandra Zaslow
With all the violence and conflict in the world, it's refreshing to know that people from all different demographics are able to sit down together around the world to have an open conversation.
That's what Ronni Abergel, 42, has achieved since launching the Human Library in Copenhagen in 2000. Just as you would at a library, you can check out a "book" on a certain topic for an allotted period of time. The only difference is that the "book" is actually a person who you can have a conversation with — and learn from.
"I figured that if we could make people sit down with a group attached to a certain stigma they don't like or even know about for that matter, we could diminish violence," Abergel told TODAY.com.
The type of books you can borrow range from someone who is transgender, deaf, blind, obese or homeless to a person with autism or even a refugee. In the 16 years since its inception, Abergel brought the concept to more than 70 countries, including the U.S.
Growing up in Copenhagen, Abergel said he got involved with the wrong crowd. He would get into fights both in school and on the streets. In 1989, when he was 15, Abergel decided to escape and he moved to New Milford, Connecticut for a year as a foreign exchange student.
"I had enough common sense to realize that if I continued in this direction, my life would end poorly," Abergel said. "That experience changed my life because it forced me to leave the circles that were negatively influencing me."
He returned to Copenhagen in 1990 feeling a greater respect for those different than him. After finishing school in 1993, he and his friends started Stop The Violence, an organization that raised violence awareness. His work eventually led him to create the Human Library Organization. "Sometimes you see someone in the supermarket and think things about them, but you don't dare go ask them questions," Abergel said. "I wanted to build a space where you can ask them anything because they volunteered to answer."
When the Human Library came to St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, on Feb. 25, Sarah Griffiths, who works at the college's Center for International Education, brought her two sons, ages 11 and 13, to check out a book titled "International Woman, Leader of Color, Gender Justice."
It's set up just like a normal library: You check out a "book" on a certain topic and have an allotted amount of time with it. Only at the Human Library, the book is, well, a human.
People who volunteer to become "books" make their experiences open and available, usually on issues that people tend to have a difficult time discussing. "Readers" are encouraged to ask questions freely, and they'll get honest answers in return. It's brilliant.
C - US photographer Eric Pickersgill has created “Removed,” a series of photos to remind us of how strange that pose actually is. US photographer. In each portrait, electronic devices have been “edited out” (removed before the photo was taken, from people who’d been using them) so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.
By Steve Mollman, Weekend editor, Published August 28, 2019Last updated on September 18, 2019
D - The new Apple Store on the Upper West Side is a splendid oddity amid the retail recession, all steel, marble, and glass. 2010
Peter Aaron/ESTO
At 67th Street and Broadway, a pavilion of marble and sheer glass walls opened in November, a composition as austerely purposeful as a classic Greek temple. Is this elegant glass-roofed room the home of a cash-flush hedge fund?
The new store nestles snugly into a corner lot along Broadway.
Clutter has been banished from inside the store—making room for the crowds.It’s an Apple Store.
As retail reels in the recession and even established stores look like temporary pop-ups, Apple lavished expanses of Tennessee marble with end-matched vein patterns as soft as wisps of smoke. Because the store is that Manhattan rarity, a freestanding building, it is an even more alluring display of costly investment than the famous glass cube that tops the computer company’s underground store on Fifth Avenue. According to Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, these stores merit lavish outlays because “they are the most profitable.”
1. “Fabricating an Illusion” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
Last Thursday I went up the street to have coffee with a friend. We had visited this café a number of times before the pandemic. Both of us are vaccinated, and sat at a table far enough away from others, so no need to wear masks. It was enjoyable hanging out like this, after about fourteen months of being by myself, other than to shop for food. Initially, having coffee with my friend had a newness in feeling. But after a bit of time had elapsed, I began to feel a bit like I had been doing this same thing a week or two earlier. This strange collapse of time I experienced has a lot to do with my most recent painting. This painting is my investigation into how I, and I suspect many others perceive time, how previous months or decades of my life can collapse into a shorter time frame in an instant. Those of my generation, can remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when hearing the news of John Kennedy’s assassination. In a similar way as above, I can go back to that afternoon in 1963, collapsing fifty-eight years of events, and be there again. It’s strangely more than just memory, or so I feel.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.[1] Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, firing in ambush from a nearby building. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered. My painting includes frame 313 of the Abraham Zapruder film. the frame which shows Kennedy being shot in the head, while his wife Jacqueline turns fully towards him. Zapruder’s film, taken with the intent of have a wonderful memory of the Kennedy’s visit, was not shown to the public until 1975, although a few tasteful frames were reproduced in Life magazine in December of 1963.
And now for a taste of the real stuff! “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness. Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”By Maria PopovaIn Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.
But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as The Life of the Mind (public library) — the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning. In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand: Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego — summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s — is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls — and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them — does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018) According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.
Artem Boytsov “Time is not an illusion. It is no more illusory than space is. But it is also true, that you can never experience time directly. Whether you think of the past, or you think of the future, neither actually exist - these are just thoughts happening at the present moment. Notice that the same can be said about space - you perceive space, but you are always right here. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You can move in space and you’re constantly moving in time. You could also look at the universe as one indivisible space-time object, and from that perspective, both past and future already exist, and your present moment and position is a dot moving along your individual trajectory. Saying that both past and future already exist and predetermined and saying neither exist are different ways of saying the same thing. As far as spirituality is concerned, things get somewhat more complicated. The process of spiritual enlightenment is basically the process of moving towards imperceptibility of time. That’s why “time doesn’t exist” is such a well-known spiritual cliché.”
Last Thursday I went up the street to have coffee with a friend. We had visited this café a number of times before the pandemic. Both of us are vaccinated, and sat at a table far enough away from others, so no need to wear masks. It was enjoyable hanging out like this, after about fourteen months of being by myself, other than to shop for food. Initially, having coffee with my friend had a newness in feeling. But after a bit of time had elapsed, I began to feel a bit like I had been doing this same thing a week or two earlier. This strange collapse of time I experienced has a lot to do with my most recent painting. This painting is my investigation into how I, and I suspect many others perceive time, how previous months or decades of my life can collapse into a shorter time frame in an instant. Those of my generation, can remember exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when hearing the news of John Kennedy’s assassination. In a similar way as above, I can go back to that afternoon in 1963, collapsing fifty-eight years of events, and be there again. It’s strangely more than just memory, or so I feel.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.[1] Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, firing in ambush from a nearby building. Governor Connally was seriously wounded in the attack. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally recovered. My painting includes frame 313 of the Abraham Zapruder film. the frame which shows Kennedy being shot in the head, while his wife Jacqueline turns fully towards him. Zapruder’s film, taken with the intent of have a wonderful memory of the Kennedy’s visit, was not shown to the public until 1975, although a few tasteful frames were reproduced in Life magazine in December of 1963.
And now for a taste of the real stuff! “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness. Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”By Maria PopovaIn Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.
But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as The Life of the Mind (public library) — the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning. In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand: Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego — summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s — is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls — and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them — does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli Allen Lane (2018) According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.
Artem Boytsov “Time is not an illusion. It is no more illusory than space is. But it is also true, that you can never experience time directly. Whether you think of the past, or you think of the future, neither actually exist - these are just thoughts happening at the present moment. Notice that the same can be said about space - you perceive space, but you are always right here. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You can move in space and you’re constantly moving in time. You could also look at the universe as one indivisible space-time object, and from that perspective, both past and future already exist, and your present moment and position is a dot moving along your individual trajectory. Saying that both past and future already exist and predetermined and saying neither exist are different ways of saying the same thing. As far as spirituality is concerned, things get somewhat more complicated. The process of spiritual enlightenment is basically the process of moving towards imperceptibility of time. That’s why “time doesn’t exist” is such a well-known spiritual cliché.”
2. “Painters of the Past” 24” x 30” O/P/P 2020
The figures in this painting were taken from a photograph by Aaron Chang, sometime in the mid 1980’s. It appears that Chang came upon the young men in his travels, in the evening, near Highway 17, Charleston, South Carolina.
Eventually a wide range of images by various photographers, was used to make a book. This book covered a number of topics in various U. S. States. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book anymore.
The heading for Chang’s photograph read: “In Charleston, Coming to Terms With the Past: The compulsion to engage the Charleston area’s history as a slave-trading center was, for the writer, a visceral thing, akin to the urge to revisit a crime scene.”
I’ve had the young men’s image for some time. What drew me to the image initially, was the way in which this group of guys appeared to be relating to each other. I felt they had worked together for a while, and had a connection to one another, a comfortableness, a friendship. Of course, photographs are fictions in way or another, and realizing that, I couldn’t really know them.
The figures in this painting were taken from a photograph by Aaron Chang, sometime in the mid 1980’s. It appears that Chang came upon the young men in his travels, in the evening, near Highway 17, Charleston, South Carolina.
Eventually a wide range of images by various photographers, was used to make a book. This book covered a number of topics in various U. S. States. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book anymore.
The heading for Chang’s photograph read: “In Charleston, Coming to Terms With the Past: The compulsion to engage the Charleston area’s history as a slave-trading center was, for the writer, a visceral thing, akin to the urge to revisit a crime scene.”
I’ve had the young men’s image for some time. What drew me to the image initially, was the way in which this group of guys appeared to be relating to each other. I felt they had worked together for a while, and had a connection to one another, a comfortableness, a friendship. Of course, photographs are fictions in way or another, and realizing that, I couldn’t really know them.
3. “The Scale of Expectation: The Value of Intent” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
The men you see are the Mercury astronauts getting their space suits fitted in 1961. Mercury was the US initial space program. The woman in back is eating, in a room that is totally covered/insulated with foil. The title is "The Scale of Expectation: The Value of Intent. It's a kind of thought experiment around what constitutes a "meaningful idea."
The men you see are the Mercury astronauts getting their space suits fitted in 1961. Mercury was the US initial space program. The woman in back is eating, in a room that is totally covered/insulated with foil. The title is "The Scale of Expectation: The Value of Intent. It's a kind of thought experiment around what constitutes a "meaningful idea."
4. "Velvet Underground" 30" x 24" Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
The Velvet Underground playing for the American Society of Clinical Psychiatrists in 1966
The Velvet Underground filmed on 16mm by Jonas Mekas at the Annual Dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, Delmonico's Hotel, New York City, January 13, 1966. Also featuring Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. Originally included in the film 'Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol'. Excerpt from the book Women’s Experimental Cinema: On January 13 1966, Warhol was invited to be the evening’s entertainment at the NY society for Clinical Psychiatry’s forty third- annual dinner, held at Delmonico’s Hotel. Bursting into the room with a camera, as the Velvet Underground acoustically tortured the guests and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick performed the ‘whip dance’ in the background, Rubin taunted the attending psychiatrists. Casting blinding lights in their faces, Rubin hurled derogatory questions at the esteemed members of the medical profession, including: ‘What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out? As the horrified guests began to leave Rubin continued her interrogation: ‘Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed. The following day the NY Times reported on the event; their chosen headline, ‘Shock treatment for psychiatrists’, reveals the extent to which Rubin’s guerrilla tactics had inverted the sanctioned relationship between patient and doctor expert and amateur.
The Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry was a psychiatric hospital located on either side of Roosevelt Boulevard (US Route 1) in Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was specifically located in the Somerton section of the city on the border with Bucks County. The name of the institution was changed several times during its history being variously named Philadelphia State Hospital, Byberry State Hospital, Byberry City Farms, and the Philadelphia Hospital for Mental Diseases. It was home to people ranging from the mentally challenged to the criminally insane.
The facility included over fifty buildings such as male and female dormitories, an infirmary, kitchens, laundry, administration, a chapel, and a morgue. The hospital's population grew rapidly, quickly exceeding its capacity; the peak patient population was over 7,000 in 1960.
The hospital was turned over to the state in 1936 and was renamed the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. Conditions in the hospital during this time were poor, with allegations of patient abuse and inhumane treatment made frequently. The situation came to national attention between 1945 and 1946, when conscientious objector Charlie Lord took covert photos of the institution and the conditions inside while serving there as an orderly. The 36 black-and-white photos documented issues including dozens of naked men huddling together and human excrement lining facility hallways. The photos were shown to a number of people, including then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who subsequently pledged her support in pursuing national mental health reforms. In May 1946, Lord's photos were published in an issue of Life, creating a national "mass uproar".[1]
In his 1948 book, The Shame of the States, Albert Deutsch described the horrid conditions he observed:
"As I passed through some of Byberry's wards, I was reminded of the pictures of the Nazi concentration camps. I entered a building swarming with naked humans herded like cattle and treated with less concern, pervaded by a fetid odor so heavy, so nauseating, that the stench seemed to have almost a physical existence of its own."
Reports of patient abuse were still rampant through the 1980s. One patient had reported that one of his teeth was pulled without "Novocaine".[citation needed] Another state inspection team was sent to evaluate the hospital in early 1987. By the summer of 1987, five of the Philadelphia State Hospital's top officials were promptly fired after the Byberry facility once again failed the state inspection.
Thorazine (chlorpromazine) is a phenothiazine anti-psychotic medication used to treat psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or manic-depression, and severe behavioral problems in children. Thorazine is also used to treat nausea and vomiting, anxiety before surgery, chronic hiccups, acute intermittent porphyria, and symptoms of tetanus. The brand name Thorazine is discontinued in the U.S. Generic forms may be available.
Each round, orange, coated tablet contains chlorpromazine hydrochloride as follows: 10 mg imprinted SKF and T73; 25 mg imprinted SKF and T74; 50 mg imprinted SKF and T76; 100 mg imprinted SKF and T77; 200 mg imprinted SKF and T79.
7656 (Olanzapine 15 mg)
Pill with imprint 7656 is Blue, Elliptical / Oval and has been identified as Olanzapine 15 mg. It is supplied by Prasco Laboratories.
Olanzapine is used in the treatment of agitated state; bipolar disorder; schizophrenia; major depressive disorder; agitation and belongs to the drug class atypical antipsychotics. Risk cannot be ruled out during pregnancy. Olanzapine 15 mg is not a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
By Adrian ChoJan. 7, 2021 , 1:45 PM
While working on his doctorate in theoretical physics in the early 1970s, Saul Teukolsky solved a problem that seemed purely hypothetical. Imagine a black hole, the ghostly knot of gravity that forms when, say, a massive star burns out and collapses to an infinitesimal point. Suppose you perturb it, as you might strike a bell. How does the black hole respond?
Teukolsky, then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), attacked the problem with pencil, paper, and Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. Like a bell, the black hole would oscillate at one main frequency and multiple overtones, he found. The oscillations would quickly fade as the black hole radiated gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space itself. It was a sweet problem, says Teukolsky, now at Cornell University. And it was completely abstract—until 5 years ago.
In February 2016, experimenters with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of huge instruments in Louisiana and Washington, reported the first observation of fleeting gravitational ripples, which had emanated from two black holes, each about 30 times as massive as the Sun, spiraling into each other 1.3 billion light-years away. LIGO even sensed the “ring down”: the shudder of the bigger black hole produced by the merger. Teukolsky’s old thesis was suddenly cutting-edge physics.
5. “The Gift of Consciousness: The Challenge to Negotiate Meaning” 30” x 24” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
My late friend Bob Reney, came from an east coast Catholic family, moved to CA in the early 1970’s, promptly taking up the study of Buddhism. I met him in the 1993, when my wife and I moved to California.
Is there a thinker behind our thoughts, as Aristotle noted, or are we, as the Buddha believed, just the summation of our aggregates/senses, that in turn give us the illusion of an individual self/ identity? Either way, consciousness is a marvel, but what follows is momentous! Carmen Wolfe Aristotle has been noted for proposing that to be conscious that we are perceiving and thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
My deceased friend Bob, a Buddhist, used to marvel that humans have a consciousness, what a gift it was, while also believing that the sense of individual self was an illusion. It seems that science has yet to find clear evidence as to what causes consciousness. That said, and not wanting to sophomorically wade into the very complex domain of this experience, I none the less acknowledge there is a weight and a price to be endured for experiencing this phenomenon. It is thinking, that comes in tandem with feelings.
6. “Echos of Remnants” 24” x 30” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020/21
This piece centers around one aspect of dreaming, the feeling/s we have as we traverse a dream’s narrative. These feelings can be very strong. They have a certain flavor, and at least in my experience, seem to fade when I awake in the morning. They are so much of what gave the dream it’s meaning, that without them, the events of the dream can seem like a bullet point report of what happened.
A while back, I had a dream about a friend of mine who died three and a half years ago. Meeting friends who have died in a dream isn’t necessarily unusual for me, given that I’ll soon be seventy-one. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve lost five friends, some who I’d known for fifty plus years. When I meet a deceased friend in a dream, it almost always is in a time related period of the past, when we are doing something together. It seems very normal.
The dream I had about my friend Diane, who I knew for twenty-one years, was different. To begin with, the time I was experiencing in the dream was the present moment, today. I was in San Francisco walking down a wide down town street. I was about thirty-five feet from the intersection. The light was green, and people were walking perpendicular through the crossing. All of a sudden, I see Diane walking across, talking with a person beside her. I immediately was in shock. I knew she had died over three years ago, but there she was, walking casually through the intersection. Diane had a continually worsening disability, making her unable to walk in the two years before she passed, but here she was strolling along. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. I began running, but I somehow lost her in the crowd. When I got back to Berkeley, I told a number of people what had happened. They looked at me quizzically not knowing what to say. The accompanying feeling during my dream, was what really made this resurrection experience impactful, but I had lost that feeling by morning.
The image references for this new painting were mostly from stock photography, which I modified. However, the image below is a piece made by an art school friend of mine, Richard Harrington. He talks about what he does below. Somehow, the description of his work, struck me as relational to what I was exploring. 5 1/2 inches top point to bottom point
Hi John,
I want to let you know a little bit about this object and how it might be thought about, displayed, or experimented with.
The material is hardware cloth, i.e. zinc coated steel. The zinc coating is resistant to oxidation but will eventually become uniformly gray. In the ‘art’ domain it is usually used as the substrate for something rigidly moldable … covered with plaster and then made into something. You’ll also recognize it as the material used to keep deer or rabbits off the carrots. For me, the uniform grid, ductile yet rigid property, uniform grayness, and tendency to generate moiré patterns have always been attractive. Who needs to cover over this interesting stuff? In the art object world, I suppose this would be regarded as a type of minimal sculpture. There is one part of me that has that in mind all the time. But there is also a kinetic dimension created because, as you’ll see, the slightest movement of a viewer’s eyes or movement of the object itself create a moiré flickering that is characteristic of kinetic artwork. I’m especially interested in the ‘skeletal’ dimension of perception, alternately looking at, or through, the objects that I’ve been building. In the mathematical world this object is called a (star-like) stellation of a dodecahedron. The seed geometry of this object is a dodecahedron i.e., a Platonic Solid consisting of twenty equilateral pentagonal faces. Each of the twenty faces of the dodecahedron are made from five four-sided pyramids (tetrahedra.) Though the dodecahedron is an ancient form it’s usage was most recently revisited by Buckminster Fuller and others.
I’m intrigued by the ‘valencies’ that appear depending on the scale or material that the objects that I make. Some smaller ones than yours are made of aluminum screen and have a jewel-like property that some have characterized as ‘featherlike gravitas. Because of the scale and density of yours I think it has a property that is quite a bit like a medieval weapon of some kind. Some of the objects are significantly larger… About 1.5 m in diameter, and they are like wire balloons… seemingly fragile, but in fact quite rigid because of the techniques that I use to assemble them. When I exhibited some of them at the Cambridge Science Festival in April, one nerd immediately characterized them as antiballoons.
Finally, for now, but most importantly, I have to point out the significance of the ‘ecology’ of how these experiments are exhibited. Ideally they ought to be seen in a condition of focused light. Direct sunlight, tensor light, light from a projector of some kind…digital or old fashioned slide projector, or focused theater light. The objects were originally conceived to be seen with the cast shadow that they create… a circumstance where the cast shadow―penumbration is so similar to the object that it’s hard to say which is more important… the object, or its shadow. This circumstance is straight out of camouflage theory. My other installations have always included circumstances of unique light conditions. You’ll see…have fun with yours.
This piece centers around one aspect of dreaming, the feeling/s we have as we traverse a dream’s narrative. These feelings can be very strong. They have a certain flavor, and at least in my experience, seem to fade when I awake in the morning. They are so much of what gave the dream it’s meaning, that without them, the events of the dream can seem like a bullet point report of what happened.
A while back, I had a dream about a friend of mine who died three and a half years ago. Meeting friends who have died in a dream isn’t necessarily unusual for me, given that I’ll soon be seventy-one. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve lost five friends, some who I’d known for fifty plus years. When I meet a deceased friend in a dream, it almost always is in a time related period of the past, when we are doing something together. It seems very normal.
The dream I had about my friend Diane, who I knew for twenty-one years, was different. To begin with, the time I was experiencing in the dream was the present moment, today. I was in San Francisco walking down a wide down town street. I was about thirty-five feet from the intersection. The light was green, and people were walking perpendicular through the crossing. All of a sudden, I see Diane walking across, talking with a person beside her. I immediately was in shock. I knew she had died over three years ago, but there she was, walking casually through the intersection. Diane had a continually worsening disability, making her unable to walk in the two years before she passed, but here she was strolling along. I called out to her, but she didn’t hear me. I began running, but I somehow lost her in the crowd. When I got back to Berkeley, I told a number of people what had happened. They looked at me quizzically not knowing what to say. The accompanying feeling during my dream, was what really made this resurrection experience impactful, but I had lost that feeling by morning.
The image references for this new painting were mostly from stock photography, which I modified. However, the image below is a piece made by an art school friend of mine, Richard Harrington. He talks about what he does below. Somehow, the description of his work, struck me as relational to what I was exploring. 5 1/2 inches top point to bottom point
Hi John,
I want to let you know a little bit about this object and how it might be thought about, displayed, or experimented with.
The material is hardware cloth, i.e. zinc coated steel. The zinc coating is resistant to oxidation but will eventually become uniformly gray. In the ‘art’ domain it is usually used as the substrate for something rigidly moldable … covered with plaster and then made into something. You’ll also recognize it as the material used to keep deer or rabbits off the carrots. For me, the uniform grid, ductile yet rigid property, uniform grayness, and tendency to generate moiré patterns have always been attractive. Who needs to cover over this interesting stuff? In the art object world, I suppose this would be regarded as a type of minimal sculpture. There is one part of me that has that in mind all the time. But there is also a kinetic dimension created because, as you’ll see, the slightest movement of a viewer’s eyes or movement of the object itself create a moiré flickering that is characteristic of kinetic artwork. I’m especially interested in the ‘skeletal’ dimension of perception, alternately looking at, or through, the objects that I’ve been building. In the mathematical world this object is called a (star-like) stellation of a dodecahedron. The seed geometry of this object is a dodecahedron i.e., a Platonic Solid consisting of twenty equilateral pentagonal faces. Each of the twenty faces of the dodecahedron are made from five four-sided pyramids (tetrahedra.) Though the dodecahedron is an ancient form it’s usage was most recently revisited by Buckminster Fuller and others.
I’m intrigued by the ‘valencies’ that appear depending on the scale or material that the objects that I make. Some smaller ones than yours are made of aluminum screen and have a jewel-like property that some have characterized as ‘featherlike gravitas. Because of the scale and density of yours I think it has a property that is quite a bit like a medieval weapon of some kind. Some of the objects are significantly larger… About 1.5 m in diameter, and they are like wire balloons… seemingly fragile, but in fact quite rigid because of the techniques that I use to assemble them. When I exhibited some of them at the Cambridge Science Festival in April, one nerd immediately characterized them as antiballoons.
Finally, for now, but most importantly, I have to point out the significance of the ‘ecology’ of how these experiments are exhibited. Ideally they ought to be seen in a condition of focused light. Direct sunlight, tensor light, light from a projector of some kind…digital or old fashioned slide projector, or focused theater light. The objects were originally conceived to be seen with the cast shadow that they create… a circumstance where the cast shadow―penumbration is so similar to the object that it’s hard to say which is more important… the object, or its shadow. This circumstance is straight out of camouflage theory. My other installations have always included circumstances of unique light conditions. You’ll see…have fun with yours.
7. “The Obsession to Feel" 24" x 36" Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
Rooftopping and other Extreme Actions: It’s hardly a secret that many of today’s younger generation, feel a pressure to succeed and measure up in ways that past generations didn’t. The largest amount of this contemporary pressure comes from the vast array of electronic platforms available for comparing and contrasting oneself.. Sites like Instagram, can literally cause some younger people to question their value, as they see others on the platform “killing it” with their life statuses. Even if the look of success doesn’t really mean success, it hardly matters to the person who believes it in that moment. Late teen to early 20’s, is a period of intense awareness of being alive, both exhillerating and overwhelming. Given the artificial reality of popular culture we live with today, it’s reasonable to see the current state of youth from a hyper-pumped feeling perspective/demand.
Like many photos on this list, this Instagram shot from Tianjin, China — taken by Angela Nikolau, who regularly risks her life in pursuit of a hair-raising pic — is hashtagged @DangerousSelfie.
Here's Angela Nikolau again, taking a selfie of herself taking a selfie while looking a long way down.
Daniel Lau – Hong Kong
Here we have Alexander Remnev, perched over the skyline in Hong Kong, looking extremely chilled out while gambling with his life.
I wasn’t able to get the names of everybody involved in the selfie taking.
Rooftopping and other Extreme Actions: It’s hardly a secret that many of today’s younger generation, feel a pressure to succeed and measure up in ways that past generations didn’t. The largest amount of this contemporary pressure comes from the vast array of electronic platforms available for comparing and contrasting oneself.. Sites like Instagram, can literally cause some younger people to question their value, as they see others on the platform “killing it” with their life statuses. Even if the look of success doesn’t really mean success, it hardly matters to the person who believes it in that moment. Late teen to early 20’s, is a period of intense awareness of being alive, both exhillerating and overwhelming. Given the artificial reality of popular culture we live with today, it’s reasonable to see the current state of youth from a hyper-pumped feeling perspective/demand.
Like many photos on this list, this Instagram shot from Tianjin, China — taken by Angela Nikolau, who regularly risks her life in pursuit of a hair-raising pic — is hashtagged @DangerousSelfie.
Here's Angela Nikolau again, taking a selfie of herself taking a selfie while looking a long way down.
Daniel Lau – Hong Kong
Here we have Alexander Remnev, perched over the skyline in Hong Kong, looking extremely chilled out while gambling with his life.
I wasn’t able to get the names of everybody involved in the selfie taking.
8. “The Unforeseen and the Inevitable” 24” x 36” 2020
Titanic – 1912 - Sinking
The first-class tickets ranged enormously in price, from $150 (about $1700 today) for a simple berth, up to $4350 ($50,000) for one of the two Parlour suites.
Women
Children
Men
First Class Women (Servants*) Total: 141 Died: 4 (0) Survived: 113 (24) % Survived: 97% (100%)
First Class Children Total: 7 Died: 1 Survived: 6 % Survived: 86%
First Class Men (Servants*) Total: 171 Died: 105 (10) Survived: 54 (2) % Survived: 32% (17%)
39% – the percentage of First Class passengers who perished. 58% – the percentage of Second Class passengers who perished. 76% – the percentage of Third Class passengers who perished.
World Trade Center – 9.11.2001 A beautiful sky-blue morning in NY.
Indonesian Earthquake and Tsunami - December, 26, 2004 - A beautiful sky blue morning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=AUo7TloWISY
Quake in the Indian Ocean on the morning of 12.26.2004 A beautiful sky-blue morning.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami occurred at 07:58:53 in local time on 26 December, with an epicentre off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. It was an undersea megathrust earthquake that registered a magnitude of 9.1–9.3 Mw, reaching a Mercalli intensity up to IX in certain areas. Wikipedia
Number of deaths: 227,898
Areas affected: Indian Ocean coastline areas
Location: Banda Aceh, Indonesia
Asteroids
A comet that you could actually jog from one end to the other in less than an hour is likely more than large enough to do serious damage – like the comet that killed the dinosaurs. (Not exactly the most comforting thought, but still kind of cool nonetheless.)
To help put the size of 7P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in perspective. Artist Matt Wang took a photo of the comet taken by the Rosetta spacecraft, and paired it alongside the city of L.A. As you can see, that’s one monstrous space rock. Thankfully we don’t have to worry about any danger of the comet colliding into our planet.
On the downside, there are dozens of similar comets and asteroids whizzing by our little blue orb all the time. And if any of those rocks hit our planet we won’t even be around to compare their size.
** Correction: NASA changed to European Space Agency (ESA)
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Family photo taken in 1951 by Maurice LaClaire, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Roger(43) and Beatrice(44) Warnshuis, with son Roger(21), and daughters Marcia(19) and Mary Gwen(5).
Marcia Mcclimans (age 88) is a woman, born in 1932, currently listed on 3604 # St-347 Fulton St, Grand Rapids, 49546 Michigan.
This family photo interested me because of the time it was taken, just after WW 2, during the 4th phase of the Korean War, and while Harry Truman was president. The “50’s,” as we denote now, had yet to happen. But certainly, for some families, this was the beginning of the” two cars in every garage, and a nice home; the middle class was beginning its formation. I kept the lighting that was used in the photograph. The photo was taken in the living room, which at that time was quite small, say compared to what the size is in today’s homes. The Warnshuis family seems sequestered in this space, with windows covered in heavy drapes.
Architectural images
Berlin 750M – Lars Kruckeberg/Wolffram Putz/Thomas Willemeit, London . 23M . Architect - Zynk Design Consultants
9. "Minimilism's Maximilism" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
A painting referencing a number of popular culture minimalist structures interspersed with various artists' works that have a minimal visual presentation, but a maximal load of pertinent content.
A painting referencing a number of popular culture minimalist structures interspersed with various artists' works that have a minimal visual presentation, but a maximal load of pertinent content.
10. “Lost" 48” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
A comparison of actual shots of astronauts on the moon, compared with staged moon landing pics.
11. "Unreal" 30" x 60" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
Los Angeles – Five days old, Nicholas and Sophia Cohen remain close. 2004
Santa Cruz – Chris Gonzales, who prints vinyl stickers for Bro Prints, pushes an uncut batch from the printer over to the cutting department. “I like having the resources to play around with my own ideas,” says Gonzales. Who also sketches stickers. The company, which started with skateboard logos, now employs nine people and runs three presses to silkscreen T-shirts and stickers. 2004
Malibu – muralist David Legaspi III puts the finishing touches on The Little Bridge Between the Mountain and the Sea, Where the Kelp Plant Meets the Sycamore Tree. Legaspi and 500 children from greater Los Angeles area painted the mural on the Pacific Coast Highway underpass in Leo Carillo State Park to commemorate the park’s 50th anniversary. 2004
Child-filmed-throwing-punches-in-wild-Indiana-Walmart-brawl
Emergency teams break down pieces of wreckage at the site of a commercial plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015.
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 with 58 people aboard clipped a bridge shortly after takeoff and crashed into a river in the island's capital of Taipei on Wednesday morning. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)
'In Front of a Nightclub' by Jeff Wall (2006) - Vancouver-based artist Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946) has studied and practiced art since childhood. He is widely recognized as an innovative picture-maker whose dynamic photographs, both color and black-and-white, have affinities with painting and cinema. Their sense of scale comes from Wall's interest in the tradition of painting, and their methods of production from his fascination with cinematography.
Wall has pioneered state-of-the-art film and digital techniques to compose meticulously staged scenes. At first glance they often appear to be snapshots but, on closer inspection, the multi-layered content sometimes seems too bizarre or complex to be real. He views himself as part painter, part movie director and part photographer, all three being part, in his opinion, of a single pictorial tradition. Some images are shot on location, others in his studio. The process may include paid actors and consultants, stage builders and Hollywood special effects experts.
Here is what is often viewed as Wall’s most significant work, 1979’s Picture For Women. It is inspired in part by Edouard Manet’s painting Un bar aux Folies Bergère. This photograph was included in the 2013 exhibition entitled "A Sense of Place" at the Pier 24 Photography Gallery located on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, California.
12. “Kingdom" 40" x 60'" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
Highway underpass (Gilman) home in Berkeley, CA / Russian fashionistas. Slavik is a 55-year old man that proves you don’t have to be rich and famous to be the best dressed in town. Slavik lives in Lviv, Ukraine, and even though he lives on the streets he still cares greatly about fashion and his personal appearance. Slavik has been a noteworthy figure among locals for a long time, and now thanks to a Ukrainian photographer, Yurko Dyachyshyn, the whole world has a chance to meet the world’s best-dressed homeless man. Slavik proves homelessness is just a state in life, not something that defines a person.
13. “Cycle” 30” x 40” Oil/Paper/Panel 2017
Two men assault a drunk in an alley off Winston Street in downtown Los Angeles, an area better known as “Skid Row.”
Day in the Life of America photographer Sarah Leen says, “I turned into an alley and saw a mugging down at the end of the block. My first instinct was, Can I change my lens fast enough? I stood there, and I photographed the whole incident; then the muggers started running up the alley towards me, and I quickly turned around so they couldn’t see my cameras. But they just blew right by me and disappeared. I thought I was shaking too much for the pictures to come out.”
14. "Deep" 30" x 90" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
The Sand Hills of Nebraska, 6:30 AM: Five year old Merici Vinton sleeps securely in her parents' bed. May 2, 1986 A Day in the Life of America San Francisco,
7:00 AM . Water Temperature 52 degrees . Miles Logged: 8.5 . Dianna Shoosterstrokes through the home stretch of the Bay to Breakers Swim, a 10 mile race from the Bay Bridge, under the Golden Gate Bridge, to Ocean Beach. May 12 - 13. 2003 . A Day in the Life of America .
B. T.("Bennie") Wrinkle, 85, cares full time for his wife, Minnie, confined by strokes and heart trouble to a hospital bed in their living room. Wrinkle stills grows vegetables and churns his own butter on a farm his grandfather started a century ago in Lebanon , Missouri. May 2, 1986 A Day in the Life of America
15. "The Idolatry of Longevity" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
What economy class looked like in 1970!
Strawberry cave
Situated on the right bank of the Buinovska River and as part of the Buynovsko Gorge, Strawberry Cave is among the most visited caves in Bulgaria. It is located 3 km from the village of Yagodina. The total length of the cave galleries is over eight kilometers and this makes it one of the longest in the country. The cave is entered through a special entrance to the lowest of its three floors, which has been refurbished and illuminated. The temperature in it is between 6 and 8 ° C throughout the year.
16. "Surveillance" 40" x 30" Oil/Paper/Panel 2017
An amalgam of skyscraper windows, reflecting light
17. "Fake" 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
The inception of this painting began with the figures, which were made of plastic. They all had an expectant, celebratory posturing. I searched for patterns of varying geometries, which I integrated to make one vibrant pattern. The positioning of the figures relational to the pattern, was such that the figures were receiving the pattern as information, to which they responded. The visual and the auditory are the two senses being primarily affected.
There is one part of the pattern which actually represents real, scientific information. It is below.
The use of this stem cell, signifies that information has to be looked at carefully. Where much maybe fake, it’s possible something real and important is buried within.
18. "Whittling Down" 36' X 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
The title is “Whittling Down.” The catalyst for the piece was based on a conversation I had with a friend some years back. She had cancer, and was receiving rounds of chemo over a two-year period. I commented on how great she looked, and asked her how she was doing. She told me that the chemo was weighing her down. Then she made a reference that chemo’s effect was like a pencil that was constantly getting sharpened. Eventually there was no more pencil left. I realize this topic is not on the top ten lis tof what most people want to readily engage. I have made the issue of entropy and extinction the topic of a number of my paintings over the years.
I’ve also been under the knife a number of times myself, and am no stranger to hospitals.
I chose a series of images of cancer operations from early, mid, and late 20th century, as well as one from this century, where a robot is the surgeon’s hand. I also included images of abandoned operating theaters and hospital rooms. I, as most people, find these abandoned spaces scarily seductive.
The images on the top of the painting were taken from a book on lofts. Berlin 230M2, architect: Alfred Peuker – Berlin430M2: Höing Architekts.
19. “The Gift” 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2021
1. “How a transplanted face transformed Katie Stubblefield’s life. At 18, Katie lost her face. At 21, she became the youngest person in the U.S. to receive a full face transplant.
It would take a team of 11 Cleveland Clinic surgeons and multiple specialists to perform the hospital’s third face transplant – and its first total face transplant – on Katie. At 21, Katie was the youngest person in the United States to receive a face transplant.
And, indeed, it was extensive: The surgery included transplantation of the scalp, the forehead, upper and lower eyelids, eye sockets, nose, upper cheeks, upper jaw and half of lower jaw, upper teeth, lower teeth, partial facial nerves, facial muscles, and skin – with 100 percent of her facial tissue effectively replaced.
2. Kurt Schwitters - Merzbau
One of the most important art works and myths in modern art, the inspiration for many installation artists, and still one of the most well known and published works by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), the Merzbau, in fact, no longer exists. It was destroyed in a British air raid in October 1943 in Hannover. By 1937, when Schwitters left his hometown to follow his son into exile in Oslo, the Merzbau comprised a total of eight rooms in his house at 5 Waldhausenstraße in Hannover. Most of the surviving photographs seem to have been taken in the space of the ‘Merzbau proper’ (‘eigentlicher Merzbau’), in which Schwitters is known to have begun working at the beginning of 1927. Three photographs taken by Wilhelm Redemann in 1933 show the most detailed and complete overview of this main room.
Based on these photographs, the Switch stage designer Peter Bissegger executed a reconstruction of the ‘Merzbau proper’ between 1981 and 1983, assisted and supported by the artist’s son Ernst Schwitters. Harald Szeemann commissioned Bissegger to make a one-to-one reconstruction and it formed part of his famous exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, which included other reconstructions of this kind. Szeemann called it an ‘attempt at reconstruction’. He was himself aware of the inherent problems of making a reconstruction of a work that is in its very core an unfinished permanent work in progress, intended to grow and spread from ‘Hannover to Berlin’. Indeed, Schwitters’ aim can be surmised by the fact that he started his Merzbau again and again at the different locations where he lived (Hannover, Kijkduin, Lysaker, Hjertøya, Douglas, Elterwater), carrying it around him like a snail-shell.
3. This driver was fast — and is probably now furious.
Modal Trigger
South Yorkshire Police
An ill-fated motorist crashed his brand new Ferrari in spectacular fashion – just one hour after purchasing the more than $260,000 sports car in England.
Police said the Ferrari 430 Scuderia “went airborne” when it careened off a wet M1 highway in South Yorkshire on Thursday, the BBC reported.
It rolled more than 160 feet down a bank and burst into flames in a field.
Luckily, the driver walked away with cuts and bruises — to both his body and ego.
“Officers asked the driver what sort of car he ‘had’ to which he replied, ‘It was a Ferrari,’” South Yorkshire police said. “Detecting a sense of damaged pride he then said, ‘I’ve only just got it, picked it up an hour ago.'”
4. Smoker’s vs. Normal Healthy Lung
When you inhale cigarette smoke, there are thousands of tiny carbon-based particles that are inhaled.
Our bodies have a special way of dealing with these particles to get them out of the way if you will.
As soon as you inhale a puff of cigarette smoke, your body is alerted to the fact that toxic particles have invaded. Inflammatory cells rush to the scene. One type of white blood cell called macrophages may be thought of as the "garbage trucks" of our immune systems. Macrophages essentially "eat" the nasty brown-black particles in cigarette smoke in a process called phagocytosis.
Since these particles could be damaging even to garbage truck cells, they are walled off in tiny vesicles and stored as toxic waste. And there they sit. As more and more macrophages containing debris build up in the lungs and lymph nodes within the chest, the darker the lungs appear.
5. Female Ring
20. "Optimism's Promise" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2019
The oldest house in Aveyron, France. Now known as Maison de Jeanne, it was built during the 13th century.
Mobil hippie house in Berkeley. In 1970 Berkeley passed a law not allowing people to live in a converted van or truck.
A house abandoned in a forest in Stradbally, Ireland, as well as a VW converted and abandoned as a living abode.
The piece centers around Jung's metaphor of the house as the interior self, with the rooms signifying parts of the mind/self. I was intrigued by Clare Cooper's paper titled, "The House as a Symbol of the Self."
There is a tribute to the Chinese Lanterns Festival. For example, lanterns are now often made in the shape of animals. The lanterns can symbolize people letting go of their past selves and getting new ones,[6] which they will let go of the next year. The lanterns are almost always red to symbolize good fortune.
The ovals located in the left are signifiers of different skin tones
Clare Cooper University of Ca., Berkeley House as a Mirror of Self presents an unprecedented examination of our relationship to where we live, interwoven with compelling personal stories of the search for a place for the soul. Marcus takes us on a reverie of the special places of childhood--the forts we made and secret hiding places we had--to growing up and expressing ourselves in the homes of adulthood. She explores how the self-image is reflected in our homes/ power struggles in making a home together with a partner/ territory, control, and privacy at home/ self-image and location/ disruptions in the boding with home/ and beyond the "house as ego" to the call of the soul. As our culture is swept up in home improvement to the extent of having an entire TV network devoted to it, this book is essential for understanding why the surroundings that we call home make us feel the way we do. With this information we can embark on home improvement that truly makes room for our soul.
21. "Monsters" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2019
Nairobi attack leaves 14 dead
January 17, 2019, Thursday at 12:37 AM
Kenyan personnel help people to escape after a bomb blast at DusitD2 hotel. — AFP photo
NAIROBI: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said yesterday that Islamists who stormed an upmarket hotel complex, killing 14 people, had been “eliminated” after an almost 20-hour siege in which hundreds of civilians were rescued.
Gunmen make their way into a hotel and office complex in Nairobi, Kenya, in this still image taken from a CCTV footage obtained by Reuters TV. — Reuters photo At least one suicide bomber blew himself up and gunmen engaged security forces in numerous shootouts during the assault on the DusitD2 compound, which includes a 101-room hotel, spa, restaurant and office buildings.
The attack was claimed by the al-Qaeda-linked Somali group Al-Shabaab, which has repeatedly targeted Kenya since it sent its army into Somalia in October 2011 to fight the jihadist group. The sight of armed Islamists and terrified civilians fleeing reminded Kenyans of a 2013 Shabaab attack on the Westgate mall left 67 dead in a siege that stretched out over four days and led to sharp criticism of the security response. In a televised address, Kenyatta said some 700 civilians had been evacuated throughout the attack at DusitD2, with the swift and effective work from security forces drawing widespread praise in local media.
“I can confirm that… the security operation at Dusit complex is over and all the terrorists eliminated,” Kenyatta said in a televised address to the nation.
“As of this moment, we have confirmation that 14 innocent lives were lost to the… terrorists, with others injured.”
Police sources and a mortuary official had previously reported 15 dead. It was not immediately clear how many attackers there were in total. CCTV footage broadcast on local media showed four black-clad, heavily armed men entering the complex on Tuesday afternoon.
At least one of them blew himself up at the start of the attack.A police source said two attackers had been shot dead Wednesday morning after a prolonged shootout. “The two have red bandanas tied around their forehead and bullets strapped around their chest with several magazines each,” the senior police officer said. “Each had an AK47 which has been secured.” The attack began at about 3pm (1200GMT) on Tuesday afternoon, with a loud blast followed by gunfire and rapid calls for help spreading on Twitter. Kenyan police chief Joseph Boinnet said the attack began with an explosion targeting three cars in the parking lot and a suicide bombing in the foyer of the Dusit hotel. Among the dead was an American citizen, a State Department official said. A mortuary official said there were also 11 Kenyan victims, a British victim, one with no papers as well as an unidentified torso of a male adult. It was a tormented night for families of those trapped as they waited outside the hotel, with sporadic gunfire ringing out, and the rescue of dozens of people at about 3.30am (0030GMT). Explosions and gunfire intensified from dawn until police managed to secure the complex mid-morning.
"Invaders from Mars" (1953)
Three hundred and fifty million years in one picture.
Electron microscope image of deadly bacteria.
22. "Secular Sanctuary" 48" x 72" Oil/Paper/Panel 2019
Lapis Lazuli crystals benefits include feelings of peace and serenity, brought about by stress relief. Lapis Lazuli properties encourage spiritual journeying and enhance spiritual power. The focus of learning at the root of Lapis Lazuli means carry through to: Providing more intuitive enlightenment in dream work. Blue crystal energy will unblock and balance the Throat Chakra. The darker shades of blue carry the power of truth. That is why Lapis Lazuli is the crystal of choice for the Chakras.Lapis Lazuli encourages self awareness, allows self expression and reveals the truth, providing qualities of honesty, compassion and morality to the personality. It stimulates objectivity, clarity, and encourages creativity. Lapis assists to confront and speak one's truth, and inspires confidence.
A man walks toward a Texas tavern diner at night.
A paired down bedroom
Lapis Lazuli crystals benefits include feelings of peace and serenity, brought about by stress relief. Lapis Lazuli properties encourage spiritual journeying and enhance spiritual power. The focus of learning at the root of Lapis Lazuli means carry through to: Providing more intuitive enlightenment in dream work. Blue crystal energy will unblock and balance the Throat Chakra. The darker shades of blue carry the power of truth. That is why Lapis Lazuli is the crystal of choice for the Chakras.Lapis Lazuli encourages self awareness, allows self expression and reveals the truth, providing qualities of honesty, compassion and morality to the personality. It stimulates objectivity, clarity, and encourages creativity. Lapis assists to confront and speak one's truth, and inspires confidence.
A man walks toward a Texas tavern diner at night.
A paired down bedroom
23. “Five of All” 24” x 36” Oil/Paper/Panel 2020
This father can be seen saying goodbye to his son and daughter for the last time in this picture, shortly after the shot was taken he passed away from cancer.
In this picture, we can see a Nepali man only inches from the ground, and death, after he decided to jump from a rooftop. Emergency services had tried to talk the man down from the ledge for hours but their attempts were unsuccessful in the end and the man decided to take his own life on the 13th of September 2013.
Speaking of people with a sense of humor, this man takes the cake! Here he can be seen just hours before his death. He decided that he wanted to give his family one last silly picture to remember him by and he had his daughter take this picture while he was dying in the hospital.
There is nothing quite like human determination! This woman was determined to marry the love of her life and she decided that not even cancer would stand in the way of her walking down the aisle. A mere 18 hours after this photo was taken, the women succumbed to the disease, knowing that she had married the love of her life.
Moments after this photograph was taken, the life of one of the people in the picture was cut short. After the group photo was shot, the group decided to go for a hike when out of the blue a large rock fell on the head of the boy wearing the red shirt. It is thought that he was killed instantly as the rock severely damaged his skull.
Three Astronauts Killed in Apollo 1 Fire. Edward White, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee. Fire caused by shorted wire in control panel.
Burning Man Artwork/Cutout and Reflection
This father can be seen saying goodbye to his son and daughter for the last time in this picture, shortly after the shot was taken he passed away from cancer.
In this picture, we can see a Nepali man only inches from the ground, and death, after he decided to jump from a rooftop. Emergency services had tried to talk the man down from the ledge for hours but their attempts were unsuccessful in the end and the man decided to take his own life on the 13th of September 2013.
Speaking of people with a sense of humor, this man takes the cake! Here he can be seen just hours before his death. He decided that he wanted to give his family one last silly picture to remember him by and he had his daughter take this picture while he was dying in the hospital.
There is nothing quite like human determination! This woman was determined to marry the love of her life and she decided that not even cancer would stand in the way of her walking down the aisle. A mere 18 hours after this photo was taken, the women succumbed to the disease, knowing that she had married the love of her life.
Moments after this photograph was taken, the life of one of the people in the picture was cut short. After the group photo was shot, the group decided to go for a hike when out of the blue a large rock fell on the head of the boy wearing the red shirt. It is thought that he was killed instantly as the rock severely damaged his skull.
Three Astronauts Killed in Apollo 1 Fire. Edward White, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee. Fire caused by shorted wire in control panel.
Burning Man Artwork/Cutout and Reflection
24. "Integrated Polarities 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
Investigation into the left/right side of the brain. It is believed that the "right side" of the brain sees the big picture, while the "left side" is more focused on the details.
Check out this awesome cutout view of the road chief. It comes with a separate bedroom(made up into a king bed in this picture, a bathroom(with shower) that expands to 3' x 5', a relaxing dining and lounge area, with a hidden sofa and our chef's kitchen.
Clever marble floor tile patterns - cool pattern wallpaper- prismatic hypercube
25. "Glimmer" 36" x 48" Oil/Paper/Panel 2019
Bordello owner in Australia, 1980
18 yr. old Sandra Carver gears up for final classes at Lakeside High School in Battle Creek, Michigan, 1986.
(from a Day in the Life of America, 1980/1986)
26. "Utilitarian Abstraction Reborn" 48" x 36" Oil/Paper/Panel 2019
A tip of the hat to Constructivism, Feminism, while also indicating that popular culture is culture
27. "Encroachment" 48" x 36" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
Bill Angers, Hyatt Regency, Dallas, TX 1986 – Kevin Kierran, changing one of the 10,000 bulbs that glow during evening hours on the Chrysler Building
28. "Worlds" 30" x 30" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
San Francisco - An elderly man has walked from trash can to trash can in Chinatown, removed contents, culled what he wants, and then meticulously replaced what he doesn't. In 2003, San Francisco's mayor's office estimated the city's homeless population as 15,000. The city's Coalition on Homelessness insists the number is much higher.
29. "Memory" 36" x 36" Oil/Paper/Panel 2018
the Mind -E.N.I.A.C. - the CLOUD - Digital proliferation
30. "Compressed" 40" x 60" Oil/Paper/Panel 2017
Warped Edge-On Galaxy ESO 510-G13:
This Hubble Heritage image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that has an unusual.... is so far away that the light from it has taken 11 billion years to reach Earth.
Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038-4039: .Galaxy NGC 3079:
45,000,000 light-years from earth.
Overlapping spiral galaxies, 2MASX J00482185-2507365:
19190 km/s ... million light-years from Earth
Earth (from Old English: Eorðe; Greek: Γαῖα Gaia;[n 5] Latin: Terra[25]), otherwise known as the World[n 6] or the Globe, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets.
"Black Eye Galaxy" M64: . Majestic Sombrero Galaxy M104: . Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300:
Hoag's Object Galaxy: . Starburst Galaxy M82: . Dusty Spiral Galaxy NGC 4414:
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1512: . Warped Edge-On Galaxy ESO 510-G13:
Antennae Galaxies NGC 4038-4039: .Galaxy NGC 3079: Overlapping spiral galaxies, 2MASX J00482185-2507365: . Earth
An artwork included in Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Obsession” exhibition.
31. "Century" 40" x 30" Oil/Paper/Wax/Panel 2017
Fight of the Century - Muhammad Ali/Joe Frazier, 1970
Image of a CAR-T cell (reddish) attacking a leukemia cell (green). These CAR-T lymphocytes are used for immunotherapy against cancer (CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor). After the proliferation of the CAR-expressing T cells, they are transfused back into the patient and can directly detect the cancer cells carrying the antigen.
The new treatment is known as CAR-T cell immunotherapy. It works by removing key immune system cells known as T cells from the patient so scientists can genetically modify them to seek out and attack only cancer cells. That's why some scientists refer to this as a "living drug."
32. "Faceoff" 30" x 40" Oil/Paper/Panel 2016-17
This painting is comprised of ten deadly bacteria. Over the surface of this painting is a list of cures for these bacteria. The problem is that the letters to these cures are scattered randomly across the painting's surface, impossible to make sense of. There is a double helix cascading across the entire surface of the painting, as a final overlay.
Borrelia Hermsii Bacterium
Seen wending its way among red blood cells, B. hermsii bacteria is the causative agent of tick-borne relapsing fever. Here, a single B. hermsii spirochete – a flexible, corkscrew-shaped kind of bacterium – represents the many injected into flesh through the bite of an Ornithodoros tick. In fact, the bacteria can reach concentrations in human blood 100 to 1,000 times greater than Lyme disease particles.
Coxiella Burnetii Bacteria
Coxiella burnetii bacteria usually infect humans via inhalation of the organisms, particularly through barnyard-dust-contaminated air that might include dried placental particles, birth fluid, and excretions of infected cattle, sheep and goats. Tick bites and ingesting unpasteurized milk or dairy products can also pass on the bacteria, very few of which are needed to cause infection.
The result is what is known as Q fever, which causes abdominal pain, high fever, chills, chronic night sweats and general malaise, among other symptoms. Given their work environments, veterinarians, meat processing plant workers, sheep and dairy workers, and livestock farmers are particularly at risk.
For acute Q fever, doxycycline is the drug of choice, and 2 weeks of treatment is recommended for adults, children aged ≥8 years, and for severe infections in patients of any age. Children aged < 8 years with uncomplicated acute illness may be treated with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole or a shorter duration (5 days) of doxycycline
Ebola Virus - Hundreds of filamentous Ebola virus particles stream from an infected cell. A protein on the virus’s surface is critical for attachment to host cells and catalyzes membrane fusion, though it’s not exactly clear yet how the virus enters the cell. In fatal cases of what becomes a hemorrhagic fever, death results from an uncontrolled proliferation and replication of the virus particles, somewhere in the range of six to nine days after infection.
atal about 50 percent of the time on average, fatalities have reached 90 percent in some severe outbreaks. The outbreak that began in March 2014 in West Africa is the largest since discovery of the virus in 1976 near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, causing more deaths than all other outbreaks together.
Blood and other bodily fluids of infected animals such as chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines transmit the disease to human hosts. Ebola then spreads by human-to-human contact, through bodily fluids or even contaminated materials like bedding and clothing
E faecalis infection
Ampicillin is the drug of choice for monotherapy of susceptible E faecalis infection. For most isolates, the MIC of ampicillin is 2- to 4-fold lower than that of penicillin. For rare strains that are resistant to ampicillin because of beta-lactamase production, ampicillin plus sulbactam may be used. Vancomycin should be used in patients with a penicillin allergy or infections with strains that have high-level penicillin resistance due to altered PBPs. Nitrofurantoin is effective in the treatment of enterococcal UTIs, including many caused by VRE strains. As more experience is gained with the use of linezolid, daptomycin, and tigecycline, these drugs may be used more commonly to treat VRE infections.
Combination therapy with a cell wall–active agent (eg, ampicillin, vancomycin) and an aminoglycoside (eg, gentamicin, streptomycin) has long been regarded as the standard of care for E faecalis native valve endocarditis.
Klebsiella pneumoniae Bacteria -A blue-colored neutrophil, a type of white blood cell that actively fights disease particles, snakes its hair-like extensions around two pink-colored Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria, perpetrators of severe hospital-acquired infections
including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound or surgical site infections, and meningitis. The rod-like shapes of the individual bacterium are surrounded by a capsule, which makes them particularly impervious to the immune system’s efforts – like those of this white blood cell, one of about 100 billion produced in human bone marrow daily – to eradicate them.
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) Virus Particles
A treatment that has proven highly effective in initial trials, but is rarely used in practice, is the "stool transplant," also
known as a "fecal transplant."12 Actually, it's less off-putting than it might sound. To restore healthy intestinal bacteria in
the colon, a "small" amount of fecal matter is taken from a healthy donor, mixed in water, and then deposited in a patient's
colon, where the beneficial bacteria can now multiply exponentially – repopulating the colon with multitudes of healthy
bacteria. In fact, stool transplants are now being explored as a treatment for a number of diseases including obesity and
diabetes.
Highly-magnified and digitally-colorized to a vibrant yellow, Middle East respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) viral particles cling to a cell. Each particle has spikes – or corona, from the Latin for wreath or crown – on its surface that is the signature shape trademark of the coronavirus group of viruses.
Treatment includes rest, fluids, pain relievers, and oxygen therapy in severe cases.
Mycobacterium Tuberculosis
Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause tuberculosis (TB) in human beings, once the leading cause of death in the U.S., seem to float in an elegant pink cluster. The rod-shaped menace can attack only humans and needs oxygen to survive, so the lungs are a main target. But TB bacteria can go on the offensive and proliferate in any part of the body, including the kidneys, spine and even the brain.
Though still among the top killers – a new person is infected by TB every second – the insidious disease isn’t new to the world. Evidence of TB has been found in the spines of Egyptian mummies thousands of years old, and the disease also plagued both ancient Greece and Imperial Rome. Some historians argue it caused the fall of the Roman Empire.
Coughing, spitting, singing, laughing and even talking can propel this highly-contagious bacteria into the air in microscopic droplets. Only a few bacteria are needed to cause infection.
isoniazid - pyrazinamide
Salmonella Bacteria
In this image, red-colored Salmonella sp. bacteria – a common cause of foodborne illness – disappear into the nooks and crannies of an immune cell. Approximately 2,000 strains of salmonella (named for the American doctor who discovered it more than a century ago) cause human disease that settles in the intestinal tract, resulting in one million illnesses in the U.S. alone. Diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps start about 12 to 72 hours after infection and can last up to a week. The disease usually resolves on its own, but severe cases cause about 400 deaths a year.
Because salmonella infection can be dehydrating, treatment focuses on replacing fluids and electrolytes. Severe cases may require hospitalization and fluids delivered directly into a vein (intravenous). In addition, your doctor may recommend:
¥ Anti-diarrheals. Medications such as loperamide (Imodium A-D) can help relieve cramping, but they may also prolong the diarrhea associated with salmonella infection.
¥ Antibiotics. If your doctor suspects that salmonella bacteria have entered your bloodstream, or if you have a severe case or a compromised immune system, he or she may prescribe antibiotics to kill the bacteria. Antibiotics are not of benefit in uncomplicated cases. In fact, antibiotics may prolong the period in which you carry the bacteria and can infect others, and they can increase your risk of relapse. Staphylococcus aureus Bacteria, or MRSA
Yersinia pestis Bacteria
Acid-green-colored Yersinia pestis – the bacteria that causes the bubonic plague – creep across the spines of the digestive system of a Xenopsylla cheopis flea.
Human infection is caused by the bite of an infected flea, which live on rodents including rats, mice and squirrels, but can jump to humans if their animal hosts die and they are looking for their next blood meal.
Though the highly deadly disease killed 60 percent of the European population in the 1300s, today it can be cured by antibiotics. But prompt recognition of infection is required. If left untreated, the bacteria remain extremely fatal.
The Nevada case is different in that resistance was discovered early in treatment, but even the drugs seen as the last line of defense didn't work. "This one is the poster child because of resistance across the board," Johnson says.
The woman described in the report was in her 70s and treated in a hospital in Reno. About two years ago, on an extended visit to India, she broke a thighbone, according to the report. She had several hospitalizations in India because of infections, says Dr. Lei Chen, of the Washoe County Health District in Reno and an author of the MMWR report. When the patient was admitted to the Reno hospital, health workers discovered that the bacteria specimen tested was resistant to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems — carbapenem-resistant enterobacteria. "Before, we could go to carbapenems, and they could reliably squash the bugs," says Johnson. "This case broke down even our last great gun."
The woman's most recent hospitalization for infection in India had been in June 2016. She was admitted to a hospital in Reno in August, and state health department officials were notified that she had CRE. "Lab results showed she was resistant to all 14 drugs we tested," says Chen. Further tests at the CDC lab showed resistance to 26 antibiotics. She died in September of multiple organ failure and sepsis. "This was my first time to see such a resistant pattern," says Chen.
The medical pushbacks are included within the painting. However, the cures are all in a jumble of letters strewn across the painting.
Magnified to 20,000 times their size, a gorgeous-looking horde of golden-colored Staphylococcus aureus bacteria evades destruction by a squadron of white blood cells (here colored blue). Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, causes a range of illnesses, from skin and wound infections to pneumonia and bloodstream infections that can lead to sepsis and eventual death.
Some experts recommend combination therapy with a penicillinase-resistant penicillin or cephalosporin (in case the organism is methicillin-sensitive S aureus [MSSA]) [8] and clindamycin or a quinolone.
33. "5.18.2016" 60" x 40" Oil/Paper/Panel 2016
Images taken of flowers from the time sequence of 5:30AM - 9:00PM, on May 18, 2016. The photos are shot through a glass of water, using a wide angle lens. The glass was elevated to just below the rim of the base. This piece was formulated using a modified version og the Fibonacci Sequence, moving from the ceater, earliest time, to the outer, later times. The Fibonacci Sequence is defined as the sequence of numbers in which each number in the sequence is equal to the sumof two numbers before it. The Fibonacci Sequence is given as: F S = 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, .....
Images taken of flowers from the time sequence of 5:30AM - 9:00PM, on May 18, 2016. The photos are shot through a glass of water, using a wide angle lens. The glass was elevated to just below the rim of the base. This piece was formulated using a modified version og the Fibonacci Sequence, moving from the ceater, earliest time, to the outer, later times. The Fibonacci Sequence is defined as the sequence of numbers in which each number in the sequence is equal to the sumof two numbers before it. The Fibonacci Sequence is given as: F S = 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, .....
34. "Possibilities" 20" X 30" Oil/Paper/Panel 2014
"A Day in the Life of Hollywood" May 20, 1992
Stephanie Robinson, marketing and special projects assistant to Sony’s Sid Ganis, spent part of her day on May 20th squiring visiting photographers around the Culver City backlot. With her mobile phone, beeper, and Filo-Fax, any old crate in any old vacant sound stage could serve as an instant office. Photographer – Diego Goldberg
"The other source is from the book "Dream Apartments," by Paco Asensio. "The apartments featured in this book, most of which belong to the urban context, and reflect a wide variety of needs, clients, authors, and locations, provide a comprehensive sample of city lifestyles."
35. “Anticipation is Greater than Realization” 20” x 30” Oil/Paper/Panel 2013
“A Day in the Life of Hollywood" Images shot on May 20, 1992
Goldie Hawn, 47, takes an outdoor meeting with writer Valerie Curtain, at far left, and Anthea Sylbert, producer and partner in the Hawn.Sylbert Motion Picture Company.
The day’s discussion concerned an untitled comedy about a modern family, written by Curtain, which Hawn and Sylbert are considering for production.
Alex Winter, of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" fame, goes to work on location in Malibu. Each morning, Winter spends three to four hours getting into his make-up for his starring role in "Hideous Mutant Freekz, the movie he also co-write and is co-directing. He says his makeup, (designed By Bill Corso of X Effects) is so comfortable that he can sleep in it-and once did, during a marathon three day period when he was too busy to get out of costume.
Steve Neale, 29, rehearses for a knee-up body burn in "Warlock II, was on fire for forty seconds before being extinguished by his crew. Neale practices with different fuels to make sure the flames show up on camera. His clothing is treated, and his body is covered with a protective gel. A stunt man for eight years, Neale has never been hurt. "If you're a professional, you don't feel the heat," he claims.
Bulthaup D3 – 7/2004 – a book devoted to the environment and placement of the kitchen
36. "Apollonian Apex" 30" x 20" Oil/Paper/Panel 2013
The Mercury Seven were the group of seven Mercury astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959. They are also referred to as the Original Seven and Astronaut Group 1. This was the only astronaut group with members that flew on all classes of NASA manned orbital spacecraft of the 20th century — Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.
These seven original American astronauts were Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton in 1960. This was the only time they would appear together in pressure suits.[1] Slayton and Glenn are wearing spray-painted work boots.
36A. "Apollonian Apex" 60" x 44" Oil/Paper/Panel 2015 - This is the second version of "Apex".
37. "White on Color" 60" x 48" oil/paper/on panel 2011-2012
This painting is a compilation of images, set in one point perspective, that characterize the idea/reality of space and gravity. The hundreds of color images underneath the surface were carefully painted with white paint, applied in such a way so as to let the character of the image exist by allowing bits of negative space to come through within various parts of an image.
Kasimir Malevich "White on White" is the catalyst for the painting.
There are images of various kinds of space and gravity. The Necker Cube image is one of many to describe the ambiguity of space. One of the more intense images to describe gravity is a photograph of Evelyn McHale, a 23 year old woman, who on May1, 1947 jumped to her death from the observation deck on the Empire State Building. In her desperation and determination, she jumped clear of the embankments of the building, to land 86 floors below on the the roof of a United Nations limousine.
38. "Climbing" 18" x 24" Oil/Paper/Panel 2011
Models from a 1993 Neiman Marcus Catalog
Male climbing a pole in the jungle
39. “The Conservator” 24” x 48” Oil/Paper/Panel 2011
Northern Ca. family showing how pervasive technology is in our lives – specifically the microchip – San Anselmo, CA
Temples of Anghor Wat – medieval beauty of Carcassonne
“Terracotta Army” of the Qin dynasty(210BC)
40. "The Art World" 24" x 18" Oil/Paper/Panel 2012
Guggenheim Museum - Swimware model - Bill Viola "Ocean Without a Shore" - Venice Biennale, 2007