Curatorialist

Like everyone, I have a special place in my heart for Duchamp. I simply love his story, love his character, love his role in art history. He was a joker, a chess player, a true lover of art, imagery and critical thinking. He also loved Cezanne and was influenced heavily by him in his seminal days and that, to me, is the sign of someone who has art inside. To truly love Cezanne is to truly love fine art. And Duchamp did both, in spades – even if he remained very non-reverential of art to his last day. And wasn’t that really his gift?

Strangely, despite all that, I never really adored Duchamp’s work. He tried Impressionism, he tried Cubism and none of it really was as good as the major artists of those movements. And for the movement that he did start, my personal taste was for what happened later on with it, even though I know he paved that road. That is neither here nor there, though. What is here and there is that Duchamp changed the course of art history and few people in the world can lay claim to that. He understood what was so great about Impressionism and Cubism and he honored it by moving it forward into the next place it could go. I love how artists work like this over time, like relay racers, each with their particular leg of the race to run, handing off batons to each other to propel the entire world forward.

I really enjoyed finding this video of him describing himself. It has a bit of an off-kilter feel to it in the pacing and music, but also in the cut and paste style of the dialogue. Despite that, the video is filled with life and does a not-bad job of capturing a bit of his spirit, and it was inspiring to me to watch this and consider all that he contibuted.

This image is super arresting. I think it is a woman in the throws of some kind of palsy or tantrum. I downloaded it a few days ago and can’t stop looking at it. A person struggling with inner demons is just a delicate place that we all skate on the surface of. Well, one of us does.

“Thirst for knowledge.” That actually turns out to be completely true, studies prove it. The human (and other animal) brain signal the body to release a stimulant as a reward for learning. Pinker’s “if you were to design a being, you’d give it the same qualities” math applies here, too – a system that rewards continued learning, guessing, probing and speculation keeps a species safe from predators. In the end, perhaps, it is not a thirst for knowledge so much as a love of life, but at least I feel a little better about my 2 hour jaunts on Wikipedia. This is life or death, ppl!

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read more here.

The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.

By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.”  “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.

It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way.  And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.

If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.

There is a 3-DVD program on the “Genius of Darwin” that came out last year and, thankfully, someone has posted up the uncut interview with Steven Pinker, my pick for smartest man alive. I’ve read two of his books: “How the Mind Works” and “The Language Instinct” which are such amazingly straight forward and sensical looks at the human brain that it becomes immediately difficult to think about ourselves any differently than how he lays it out. Much of the thinking of both books are laid out in this video.

This is over an hour of footage and has a hard time competing with more entertaining uses of time, like a Michael Mann video essay for example, but if you have any kind of interest in human evolution, psychology, biology, linguistics or the human brain then this will be immensely interesting to you.

This website – which matches up simple, but strange, household objects of seemingly lost eras with a writer – seems a lot like a creative writing class assignment. But it gets to the heart of what creativity is, for a lot of people – an assignment with a good inspiration; small, life moments described. Putting one thing with another and watching the chemicals react in the test tube.

Get into it here.

This is the final paragraph of a fascinating study on brains and our innate desire to know what’s going to happen before it happens.

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read the full article here.

Nice accomplishment for $12:

Homigod.

When you’re done drooling, go get as close as you want at the animators’ website. They don’t seem to mind if you stare.