#3: What the nothing becomes | Dark matter rum | Performance chess
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
Welcome new readers to my newsletter of intersections and uncategorisations. You can read the introduction to find out a bit more about what will be a regular digest of thoughts inspired by my major interests and a subscriber-only set of mailings that reveal more of my personal creative journal and process.
art | tech | design | digital culture
What the nothing becomes
Making things seems to be the opposite of doing nothing. But recently I’ve been thinking about their relationship because of the plant biology and art project I’ve been working on with Zach. (I touched on it last week.)
A major point of the art side of the project is to see what happens when nature takes it course based on a kind of prompt we give it. This means placing plant cells in a specific configuration and then seeing what happens. We essentially do nothing for a while.
There is, of course, something frustrating for me about just having to wait to see the results. Waiting is a staple technique for many works of art but it can be tricky to do. So while I wait for things to grow, I have been thinking about waiting and doing nothing.
An enjoyable discovery for me was the fabulous podcast PRNT SCRN by Dorothy Santos for Art Practical. Episode 6 was titled “The Value of Doing Nothing”.
In the podcast, she spends a lot of time chatting with Jenny Odell, a cool artist who just released a book called “How to Do Nothing—Resisting the Attention Economy”. They discuss how much good can come from deliberate efforts to do nothing without falling into the typical anti-tech, anti-engagement tropes.
[Cover of Jenny Odell’s new book “How to Do Nothing—Resisting the Attention Economy”.]
Embarrassingly, I haven’t actually read the full book yet but am still prepared to recommend it due to Dorothy’s podcast and Odell’s precursor essay, which was based on a talk she gave at the EYEO 2017 Festival. I won’t even try to summarise what she wrote. It’s important and worthwhile though and puts a name to a concept I had been trying to pin down: “#NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out”.
[By the way, why do I refer to Dorothy Santos as “Dorothy” and Jenny Odell as “Odell” when all my experience as a journalist is yelling at me not to do that? It feels right for this short essay and the newsletter in general because I know Dorothy in person but not Odell. In this newsletter I talk about my experience and engagement with the world and so I am, I suppose, highlighting what is personal and what is a step removed by doing this. I hope you don’t mind, Dorothy!]
The whole idea of the benefits of doing nothing is discussed fairly often these days, but mostly in terms of the personal benefits. While I was thinking about the topic, I received a mailing list email from the Nielsen Norman group about user experience and testing. The essay by Kate Kaplan “The Science of Silence: Intentional Silence as a Moderation Technique” discusses how when you are testing websites/products/etc. with users or moderating group discussions, silence (or doing nothing!) is an important tool that gives others the freedom to not merely have an opportunity to contribute but to react/feel/think/speak. I feel myself consciously practicing this at times when I’m teaching and asking students for their responses, thoughts, and ideas. It doesn’t always come easily when we feel the pressure of time and the end of class coming ever closer (but what about all the topics we need to cover!)
Sidenote: Was the Gmork actually the foiled hero of the Neverending Story?
Back to growing plants, or more specifically plant cells at the moment, I’ve been thinking about embracing the doing nothing and making a kind of slow art. The tech we use is often optimised for speed and efficiency. But what if we reject that idea? What would happen if I use the 3d bioprinter we’re developing and building to print slowly?
One goal of the project is to grow living plants from the cells alone without the scaffolding that is sometimes used for this kind of thing. But we start with cells that are slippery little things. They haven’t bonded with each other at the beginning and that takes significant time. But if they’re in a fluid form, they won’t create rigid structures without a scaffold. Not immediately. If we wait, they will bond, they will become more solid. So if we wait, can we then build on top of what has solidified? 3D printing with plastics means the structures solidify on timescales of fractions of a second. The plant cells will solidify on the timescales of days to weeks. Maybe the printing of this plantform will take a year or more, step-by-patience-stretching-step. But maybe it creates something new in the process.
While it all grows, perhaps I won’t be doing nothing. But like the experiences Odell talks about in a rose garden, I can at least sit and watch the plants seeming to do nothing, while giving them the space to do their own thing.
[By the way, more details of the slow art project are the kind of thing I’ll be talking more about in my journal section of the newsletter, but that’s in the paid subscription bit. See toward the bottom of the introduction to read about why it’s paid.]
design | science
Dark (matter) rum
I was at a wine tasting at a good wine store last weekend and scanning their shelves when I saw this bottle:
Of course, having been a physicist and a science journalist who worked with people who studied dark matter, I was intrigued. I’m not a huge fan of spiced rum but I wanted to know more so looked more closely.
The rest of the label looks like this:
Obviously the words are overblown for rhetorical effect but they do hook into a number of stereotypes of scientific culture that are actually kind of fun as long as you don’t take it too seriously.
I enjoy the aesthetic overall and I like how it appropriates from things like medical labels for the structure and uses science-similar iconography for their “molecule”. Even the choice of a typewriter typeface for the label has a lot of relevant cultural referents.
I was a little taken aback by the fact it’s from Scotland, not a place particularly known for its rum. But I chatted with the woman who worked at the store and asked about this rum. She said that she was just about to put it on her recommendation list as it was the best thing on the shelf (even though it was from Scotland!)
Spirit-making is an interplay between science and craft, and in this bottle it is given a form through graphic and product design. It’s quite a fun combination and something I have explored before in some conceptual art projects and am revisiting at the moment for a performance art/cocktail making event I’ll be going to in Switzerland in the first week of July. More on that another week, however.
On a side note, there feels like a slight consonance between talking about dark matter and the idea of nothing above. Dark matter is invisible but everpresent. Always acting, but rarely observable. Just running along in the background.
As for the rum: I was overwhelmed by cloves at the start but I also hadn’t had any spiced rum in a long time and it was unfamiliar to my palate. After a few more sips, it settled quite nicely and it’s an interesting complex mixture that I began to enjoy quite quickly.
art | tech
Performance Chess
Chess as a spectator sport has been around for many years but particularly picking up after the world’s attention focussed on the 1972 World Chess Championship between American Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky. (The story is told in surprisingly engaging detail in “Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time”.)
Every Olympic cycle there is a strong lobbying effort to have chess included in the Games. During Sydney 2000, it was included as an exhibition sport with Grandmasters Alexey Shirov and Vishy Anand playing a two-game match. The International Olympic Committee has rejected efforts apart from that, including Paris 2024, which coincides with the centennial of the creation of the World Chess Federation.
Chess as art performance has run on a parallel track with the highlight being a live match in 1968 between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, the latter a chess grandmaster. It’s another example of mostly nothing punctuated with minor action and completely consistent with Cage’s quotidian tendencies.
I was surprised that neither of these masters of modernism were known to any of my undergraduate students in an art school. Only one or two knew of Duchamp’s seminal “Fountain”, below.
[Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”, 1917.]
And only one student had heard of John Cage’s work 4’33” (score below).
[Original score for John Cage’s 4’33”.]
The reason I was talking about this event with my students was that it involved an electronic chess board designed by Lowell Cross, inventor of the laser light show. The board had a photoresistor light sensor in each square so it could register whether a piece was on the square which triggered electronic compositions by a set of composers. The board also had contact microphones so that the scratchings and scuffings of pieces on the board were amplified for the audience to hear.
The match lasted about 4.5 hours finishing at 1am when nobody could take it any more.
At the time, the Toronto Globe & Mail reported that Duchamp and Cage seemed “like figures in a Beckett play, locked in some meaningless game. The audience, staring silently and sullenly at what was placed before it, was itself a character; and its role was as meaningless as the others. It was total non-communication, all around.”
Curiously, about 20 years ago after a bout of reading Beckett myself and being absorbed in the writings of the OuLiPo, I drafted a play based with the characters set on a chess board and the plot of the play generatively inferred from chess moves. It was terrible and I lost the draft and that is a good thing.
My first year students now could build that interactive electronic chess board almost trivially, but it might be a little harder to get artists of the stature of Cage and Duchamp to play. It would be fun to see them try!
That’s it for this newsletter. I tried a somewhat different format this time with a more discursive approach in the first item so let me know what you think of that. I suspect it will take a little while to get into the groove.