Saltwork

Pam and I went tonight to the opening of a show of cyanotypes and daguerreotypes by our friend Alyssa Salomon. On the walk there, we started talking about technology and wonder. I’d heard a piece on Radio Lab about EMI, a computer algorithm that analyzes a composer’s work—say, Bach—and then writes the unwritten piece, Emi Bach. Sometimes the results are stilted, but sometimes they are genuinely moving, engendering in the listener the same kinds of emotions that arise with the music of the flesh and blood Bach. We so often think of wonder as the ultra-human, as humanism in the extreme, so this kind of a program is disconcerting to say the least. (It’s possible to try to bring the human back into the picture by noting that it was a person who created EMI, but I think that misses the point.)

But I think we need to be much more thoughtful about technology and wonder, not opposing them but rather looking for ways that they work together. Here’s what Alyssa had to say about her show, called Saltwork:

Light sensitive salts produce photographs. Nearly alchemy, these salts convert light energy into physical matter. Silver salts formed with bromine and iodine, enhanced with gold, generate images on a daguerreotype plate. Iron salts on paper yield deep blue cyanotypes. Intellectually, I understand these chemistries. I am a saltworker. I concoct the formulas in my studio; employ them to retell knowledge and experience. Yet every time, their results emerge wondrous.

Is that the crucial wonder-gap, between the understandable science and the wondrous results? Where does she fit in, the artist/alchemist (who not coincidentally was the first person to tell me about the Museum of Jurassic Technology)?

On a different note, one of the things I think about when I look at Alyssa’s daguerreotypes is the difference between the way I see them and the way a nineteenth-century viewer would have seen them. Then, the wonder would have come from the new possibilities of affixing an image. (Did photography do to painting what EMI does to composing?) But now, we come to that same process belatedly: this is not something new, but something old, so that it is less the novelty than the archaic quality that fascinates me. That, and the fact that these books are hovering backward in their blue depth.

Hoaxes and unmasking wonder

I love the idea of thinking about pseudo scientific documents–Fontcuberta could fit in with Lawrence Weschler’s book, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. (Allan Rosenbaum told me a few days ago that Weschler is coming to VCU this spring.) It all makes me wonder (there’s that word again) about the relationship between wonder and hoaxes–Are hoaxes an unmasking of wonder, showing us that our wonder leaves us open to fraud, or is a hoax an ultimate expression of wonder, blurring lines between reality and imagination? there’s a line in Emma Donaghu’s story about Mary Toft, the 18th century woman who gave birth to 18 baby bunnies, where one of the doctors who uncovers the hoax really wanted the miracle to be true, even as he tried to unmask it.

Fucuberta and Pseudo-Science

From Pam:

Wow (Maybe the black seadevil should be part of the masculinity symposium)

I like the idea of wonder in science. This brings to mind the Spanish artist John Fontcuberta who created pseudo scientific documents – so convincing that at first they appear to be factual.

(Fontcuberta’s frames his work this way)

Here is a little clip from a gallery review -

About 1987 Fontcuberta and Formiguera apparently made a startling discovery. During a visit to Scotland, in the attic of a house in Glasgow, they found the archive of Dr. Ameisenhaufen who had died in a car crash in 1955. After further research into the life and work of the Doctor, they learned that his discoveries, which document what appears to be many previously-unknown, bizarre genetic mishaps, had provoked great debate and controversy during his time. But can any of it be trueNULL

Solenoglypha Polipodida is a snake-like creature, with twelve feet, that is supposed to be able to paralyze its prey with a high-pitched whistle. And there’s a squirrel with webbed feet and a snake tail – Myodorifera colubercauda. There is Micostrium vulgaris, a menacing weapon-swinging mollusk, and Centaurus Neandertalensis, which Dr. Ameisenhaufen didn’t known whether to treat as a semi-humanoid, as a living myth, or simply as a zoological specimen. As one reviewer put it: This modern-day bestiary is every bit as fascinating as the strange illuminations of the medieval age, and all the more disconcerting as the camera seems to bear undeniable witness to the beasties’ meanderings. (Melissa Rombout, Boston).

http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/imagesandideas/pages/reference.cfm?page=222 (see a photo and more about the project here)

Absorbing Seadevils

I keep meaning to set up a document to jot notes about the Wonder course. Right now, I’m in the middle of a NY Review of Books article by Tim Flannery about two books: The Deep (Claire Nouvian) and The Silent Deep (Tony Koslow). Here are the paragraphs that made me stop and make notes:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. it’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish–seemingly all fangs and gape–with a “fishing rod” affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea–until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs but his testicles, but even those, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

I don’t know what we’d do with a description like that, which tops anything from the Museum of Jurrasic Technology. But it makes me think that we need to talk to some folks in Gilmer about wonder in science.

Can we do something with Elizabeth King’s work and the automatons of the Renaissance, which I think showed up in their cabinets of curiosities? (These also remind me of the short stories of ETA Hoffman, in which young men repeatedly fall in love with women who turn out to be automatons.)
11/30/2007