I am good friends with the geneticist/artist ruth west (the west coast one not the east coast one) she won several awards in genetic research and still does it but also got an mfa in new media art from ucla a few years ago. We met when we were both in a show at UC San Diego. She made a project that was a turning record on a turntable but with a laser needle....it spun in a dark room .......and triggered noises only when hitting spaced out shapes on the material above the record
she had mapped the sadly forgotten trajectories of the hugely influential early programming team on one of the earliest supercomputers ................they were all women and when the men returned they were forgotten..........it is one of the great feminist and human tragedies in technology and science in america in the last 50 years......in fact the anniversary party occured a few years ago.........and they were not even invited....... she loves science but also always wanted to be an artist.............and combines the two..... another project was a database of images that were slowly degraded by a floating point on the screen (again in a dark room) that moved based on the ambient noise levels in the room...............the images were family photos and the piece was about the alzheimers that her father had and ultimately the related complications that took his life............it was also about the psychology of observation, interaction and a sort of meditation when witnessing......... forgot to mention that she also is trained as a psychologist..... so those layers of such different careers ......so societally diametric and compartmentalized...........combine seamlessly into her work .... amazing..... I am also in contact with a geneticist in scotland that selected me to do a project based on his research on the history of genetic development in humans in relation to other species sets ..... I don't know him well, but he seems to just be jazzed to work with artists to get a breath of fresh air and see what his work can generate. Not sure if it will be a go. Will see. Met "pegleg" joe davis when I was mit. He is really hard to categorize...........was a bike mechanic that drove up to mit many years ago to talk about some ideas he had...........and when he was about to be thrown out he got an hour with a prof that announced.....he cannot work here.........but he gets a lab.... he has done projects like a functional fishing pole that "catches" single cell organisms......and a way to hear the sounds produced by entities like protozoa... he also has other projects that loose me............a bit out there... he is a controversial figure..........hard to pin down.......was an incredibly gracious host....... he seems to just have endless curiosity and a mad scientist/untrained genius dichotomy going on (cliche I know but he is really that way.......) My grandfather was a thwarted inventor that made an invention before the transistor radio that you put in your ear and spun a dial and it changes radio stations(!) 1955 I believe......but he got screwed by hisw partner who apparently for years sent the biggest gaudiest christmas cards to rub it in.........he only invented some sort of better developed valve but ran into complications there too.........I only learned these things years after he passed away.....knew him only as a bitter mean man................then it made sense..................when he gave up he worked at technicolor and raced stock cars..... that same night .....a christmas eve......I learned that the photographer alfred steiglitz had a secret love he carried his whole life for my grandmother I was floored........overwhelmed..............I'm sure it sounds absurd.................my grandmother was a wonderful person.....kindest person in the world......funny.....failed her drivers test three times twice driving into someone's yard during the test! but I forgot that the other artist in the family.........2 generations before me.........pasquale napolitano........rebel of the italian immigrant family that instead went to study in paris........had a pretty strong art career going with paintings, frescoes and sculptures...........was getting some work into museums and a cieling of a building on catalina island......when he stopped altogether.... but he told me once at 101 years old that he used to bug his buddy frank loyd wright about his work " this no good.....you do again frankie" I'm rambling now.............reel it in........... anyway the thing with my grandparents that makes this not a complete sliding tangent from hell is that you would never know these things of them........their deepest motivations........entanglements................prismatic sense of identity...........they never spoke of it.......he out of bitterness at what might have been and anger at the world.........her out of a disinterest in the past........... so the motivations of a scientist or an artist are so layered.............so complex...........that i wonder if it can be quantified in any tangible way in discourse..... speaking of that........steiglitz only spoke of his love for her in a book before he died ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre