Week 3 — anna nicanorova

The legend on the stonecutter and the cathedral builder:

“A traveller happened upon a large group of workers adjacent to the River Avon and decided to inquire about their work. With a slight detour he moved toward the first of the three tradesmen and said “my dear fellow what is it that you are doing?” The first man continued his work and grumbled, “I am cutting stones.” The second man briefly stopped his work and responded “I am laying the bricks“. To the question the third man have responded: ““I am a mason and I am building a cathedral.”

I really like the story, since it’s a great reminder of keeping the big picture in perspective - “the cathedral”, no matter how long it takes. A more superfluous version of the story can be found here: [The stonecutters and the cathedral builder: Anecdote]

This weekend I got a chance to visit the Calgary public library. While the building is cutting-edge modernistic, it felt extremely approachable and inviting. It might have been the wood, might have been the blue light penetrating the windows, or maybe it was just the fact that the library was full with people, (in spite of early Saturday morning) - the lobby was a hot spot fair of local communities, people came with their kids for the integrated playground and almost all computers were taken. Incredible showcase of how we as people for communities- and how libraries can serve as a catalyst to form them.

Extra cool things:

* The Bookscalator - that carries ~ 1200 daily across the floors

* The painting made with books (Fish by Christian Moeller, 2018)

For a long time I have been a huge fan of School For Poetic Computation(SPFC) - the attendees of school code, build hardware, hack, but also do it in poetic way, trying to reflect on the environment. The school is also a great manifestation how coding as an activity skews closer to poetry and writing, rather than math and quantification. This week I had a chance to attend the showcase that the school has produced during the last 7 years (!).

Some of the favorite projects:

* Average Face Mirror - the face is detected in the webcam feed by a motor hanging on the wall., and it gets added to the computed average face by the passer-by. The longer the viewer looks into it, the bigger of an impact their face has on the resulting portrait, which is computed by normalizing and averaging the viewers’ faces using an open source face tracking software.

* The book “draw what you think Alexa Looks like” - a collection of drawings from children age 2-15 in response to the question “Draw what you think Alexa/ Google Home/ Siri” looks like.

* Facebook 1040 - social participation application. This form presents Facebook’s information collection in a physical manner in an effort to reveal the true depth of what is company is asking from the user. Presented as a paper form most people would feel uncomfortable providing the information requested. This contrasts with the reality that most of us have already provided all of this information to facebook.

* Rice Dimmer - a meditative and cultural experience where the audience is expected to move a handful of raw rice with a set of chopsticks one by one to slowly change the brightness of a light bulb. Makes us think about time.

“Average Face Mirror”, 2015 by Sarah Howorka [Sarah (@wackelkontakt__) • Instagram photos and videos](https://www.instagram.com/wackelkontakt__/)

A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Zines are the product of either a single person or of a very small group, and are popularly photocopied into physical prints for circulation. I think I need to make one as soon as possible - let me know if you want to co-author.