Week 13

“ “Pierre Sogol, Professor of Mountaineering. Lesson Thursdays and Sunday, from 7 to 11am. Means of access: go out of the window, take a left turn, scale a chimney onto the cornice, climb a crumbling schist-slope, follow the ridges from the north to south avoiding several gendarmes, and enter by the skylight ob the east slope.” ”

— “Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal

Yesterday I have finished “Mount Analogue” by Rene Daumal. It’s a miracle that this book even exists. The book is not even half-finished as Rene Daumal has passed away at the age of 36. He literally ends mid-sentence, which seems appropriate for this type of book. Yet even the first couple of chapters showcase the possibility of this literary work. I find it absolutely delightful that the book was published and is in active circulation, in spite of containing barely five chapters ( my paperback was printed in 2019 by the publishing house Exact Change)

This short allegorical novel neatly synthesizes the exploratory experiences of the search for the meaning of human existence. Mountains are one of the most popular analogies for perseverance, self-discovery, wisdom, enlightenment, hardship and Rene Deumal uses it to showcase our individual search for meaning. The tone of the book is of a hybrid between spiritualist/occult tract and mountaineering adventure diary. It feels like a child’s adventure tales with a mature cosmic purpose.

““Long expectation of the unknown lessens the final effect of surprise” ”

— “Mount Analogue” by Rene Daumal

• I only regret that Rene Deumal already took this allegory, but maybe I have it in me to create my own version without implications of plagiarism./

• ** I have enjoyed reading the reviews by the writer Eddie Watkins

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Barbie Liberation Organization - The BLO was originally conceived in an effort to question and ultimately change the gender stereotypes American culture is known for after Mattel released a speaking Barbie that said: “Math class is tough.” Here are the instructions that show how to hack the Barbie

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he Shop of the Bookdealer Pieter Meijer Warnars on the Vijgendam in Amsterdam, Johannes Jelgerhuis, 1820

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• Allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which a character, place or event is used to deliver a broader message about real-world issues and occurrences.

• Parable - A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters.

• Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim.

• Apologue -is a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly.

So what’s the difference?

Illustration by Oliver Jeffers from* Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth

Week 12

**This week’s random notes, as we re-learn how to do things in these uncertain times. (I intentionally choose to avoid one thing on everyone’s minds).

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This week I have finished “The Language of Cities” by Deyan Sudjic - a delightful little book that should probably be classified as musings on what makes a city. The most fascinating discovery from the book was how humans try to create artificial / ‘planned cities’ and how rarely these projects result in success. Here is the list I found of famous planned cities:

• Milton Keynes

• Levittown

• Chandigarh

• Basildon

• Cumbernauld

• Radburn, New Jersey

• Amaravati

• Brasília - Wikipedia

Liuzhou, China, Forest City

But many many new cities are going up. Hundreds of entirely new cities have been sprouting up across Asia and Africa since the early 2000s. They are totally new dots on the map with names like Putrajaya, Naypyidaw, Nanhui, Kangbashi, Dompak, and Khorgos. There is a Forest City, a King Abdullah Economic City, a Blue City, a Gracefield Island, a Tbilisi Sea New City , a Port City, a Waterfall City , and, yes, even a Robotic Future City. In all, over 40 countries — such as Malaysia, Nigeria, China, Morocco, India, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Oman, Kazakhstan, and Kenya — have dumped billions of dollars into developing new cities from the ground up. Indonesia alone is busy at work constructing no less than 27 new cities. China is without a doubt the global epicenter for new city building, having established more than 600 new cities since the Communist Party came to power in 1949 and it’s doing it in the ‘2.0 style of city construction’. I found documentaries about Songdo and Duqm, but I am certain I have only scratched the surface, as Wikipedia lists a significant number of past and future’ planned cities’ .

The new city building movement that we are currently in the middle of is one of the most under the radar and most misinterpreted social and economic developments happening in the world today. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested as new dots are being emblazoned upon the map.

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Remember the Joy of Painting? Remember [Bob Ross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ross)? Talking about pre-Youtube era of how-to tutorials and “with me” movement. Nevertheless, I think his encouragement and style of speaking should definitely serve as inspiration for contemporary content-creators. As I winded-down that rabbit hole, it was delightful to read some little known facts about Joy of Painting as well as NYT piece “[Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? We Found Them”

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“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy” “The count of Monte Cristo” by Alexander Duma

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This week during the struggle to co-edit an online excel spreadsheet with my co-workers over a video conference, the name Martin Shkreli came up. Apparently YouTube is full of videos showing ‘Excel Magic’ of Shkreli doing magic with the spreadsheets. I did not know who he was, so I took to watch a YouTube summary about him. Yes, I was not very impressed with his Excel spreadsheets, as my business school classmates, in my humble opinion, had a much more superior skills of this craft.

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Douglas Engelbart is the engineer credited with the invention of the computer mouse, hypertext and email. In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated the potential of all these new tools at an event called “The mother of all demos” where Brand was operating a remote computer. This cross-fertilization between utopian speculation, physics and mathematics is fascinating to watch and shows how far we came and I am not sure if Mr. Engelbart could envision ‘Elevator Pitch’.

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Week 11

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Notes to self: We live in the time, when we have access to almost all music produced by humanity available at the tip of our fingers. Whether it’s on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music - we have access to the greatest concerts and studio recordings. Why we do not perceive it as luxury and do not take advantage of it as much as we should?

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I first heard Iskandar Widjaja on a cold and windy fall evening in New York’s Bohemian Hall. He played the violin with so much exposed, vulnerable and almost shameless passion that one rarely gets to see such performance in proper and conservative classical music halls. He performed a song of his own composition ‘Spirited Away’ as a preview. Ever since I heard it, I was craving to hear it again. This week the song was finally released on Spotify and YouTube. It is amazing that music can do this to our consciousness.

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This week while concert halls around New York city are canceling concerts until April, I had a chance to hear Brahm’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor. Unusually large, complicated and very unfamiliar, the piece has its own wikipedia page . I recommend listening to it on a rainy spring night with a glass of wine: YouTube

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I do not remember when I got my first tamagotchi, but I remember everyone in my class, school and immediate surrounding of friends had one. Some had two or more. Some sewed or knitted custom tailored clothing for this fascinating piece of plastic. When our pet died, we were as said as if a similar event would have happened to a real one.

Last week I saw my friend pulled out pocket pikachu and I was immediately overflown with nostalgia. Like it was an old rotary phone or a typewriter out of his pocket. My friend had explained the fascination with electronic objects encapsulated in physical and separate hardware. Of course, on my return home I immediately ordered one from eBay.

I am sitting at home, currently being a caretaker to my new tamagotchi (that I have called Oscar, after Oscar Wilde). Tamagotchis are digital creatures from a planet far, far away (Planet Tamagotchi). Taking care of a Tamagotchi is simple—you feed it, bathe it, and play with it—but Tamagotchis are demanding by nature. They beep and bloop at all hours of the day, requiring near-constant attention. So far my Tabagochi is never happy and always hungry.

The plastic device runs on AAA batteries. It doesn’t need Wi-Fi to work. It has a screen, but you can’t touch it. The routine is very familiar and uneventful. The beeping is distracting and slightly annoying. Yet, I can not stop not feeding and showering it.

The Tamagochi of my friend

Week 10

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This week is Art Fair Week in New York - the delight of art lovers and exceeding stress for gallery workers and art handlers. Gallerists, artists and art appreciators put on their best, predominantly black ensembles and run around New York City’s Piers and exhibition spaces. Your truly spend 4 hours roaming the floors of the Armory show on the opening night. In my opinion, the encapsulating theme was around utilization of complex materials. Here are my favorite discoveries:

• Gabriel de La Mora - made really cool black and white collages out of turkey feathers. Not sure what it means, but looks really good.
• Monir Farmandarmaian - I am a huge fan of Op Art, especially when it’s made out of mirrors. It was also delightful to discover a female Iranian artist.
• David Shringley - renowned for his satirical comments on everyday situations and human interactions, presented a funny collection called “A cabinet of curiosities”. I especially loved that pieces were small and required me to slow down my tour of fair and pay attention.
• David Reimondo -Etimografia is a macro-project embracing much of his latest research into ‘language’. The artist has created a synthesis sui generis (featuring ideograms, pictograms and glyphs among other elements) and produced new ‘graphemes’ and new ‘phonemes’.
• Carlos Cruz Diez - his work focuses on the kinetic energy of color - very vibrant
• Kate MCcGwire - sculptor who specializes in the medium of feathers. Her work experiments with the binary notions of beauty and disgust, malice and tranquillity, and the familiar yet otherworldly. Her use of pigeon feathers takes a waste product of the ‘rats with wings’ and elevates them to the status of art. By re-framing the object, placing it out of context, it generates a kind of ‘field of attraction’ around it, the viewer is left both seduced and alienated, relishing the spectacle but at the same time aware of something disquieting, something ‘other’ Kate MccGwire - 30 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy
• Tezi Gabunia “ Breaking news : the flooding of Louvre” - the artist used a method of “falsification” in order to address the issue of fake news. The video shows the flooding of the museum, which I was watching in horror how the water was approaching masterpieces vy Rubens. Yet this has never happened and the piece was produced through a simulation inside a mini constructed . Watch it here: Tezi Gabunia’s Breaking News: The Flooding Of The Louvre - IGNANT

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This is the painting by Abu Bakarr Mansaray, discovered during MOMA Armory Party. His works are studies consist of detailed calculations, sketches and diagrams of strange futuristic and imaginary machines.

“ “I like doing strange, complicated drawings and designing intricate machines inspired by scientific ideas that are at times beyond the human imagination (for example, the machines I designed called Hell Extinguisher and Nuclear Telephone Discovered in Hell). . . . I want people to feel the power of creation.” ”

— Abu Bakarr Mansaray

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One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne

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Completely opposite to Armory Show (less stuffy and more experimental) was Spring Break. It was the 9th year of the fair. Every year the art fair has a and the theme was “In Excess”. The works were hallucinatory and obsessive.

• Jonathan Monaghan “Our Bright Future” - the artists turns consumer access into apocalyptic omen: Amazon Alexas rile like monoliths and four horsemen adorned on contemporary luxurious gear. Beautiful execution of important subject.
• Miriam Carothers) made me laugh by inserting Linus Torvalds and Paul Erdos quotes onto drawings of vintage perfume ads
• Chambliss Giobbi had some incredible crayons imitations of world famous works, as well as infinity sign made out of toy cars.
• Stuart Lantry created some cool “mechanical robots as art project”. My friend was unimpressed, but I found the simplicity beautiful
• I’ve seen Jessica Lichtenstein’s work multiple times across various galleries. Untitled space defintely did a great display of printing her works as wallpaper and mixing it with acrilyc work. I think we will see more of these types of work moving forward.
• Technophilia by faith Holland has some interesting thoughts. (Inspiration for example using cables in the abstract art.
• Iva Kinnaird had some really cool paintings of sofas

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inclusionists versus deletionists

The inclusionist versus deletionist debate [within Wikipedia] is as firm and strong as the abortion debate, gun control debate, or the death penalty debate. Inclusionism says, Wikipedia, because it is a virtual encyclopedia, is capable of carrying the sum of human knowledge and hence we should add as many topics, categories and taxonomies. T he deletionists take the attitude [that] Wikipedia is not a junkyard.

“*Deletionism* is a term used to describe the idea that removal of material is a productive mode of editing, and that doing such regularly, primarily, or solely, rather than adding material, is sufficient to call oneself an editor. The main claim is that the wiki mode of editing is ‘ too quick ,’ and that there are too many of them (contributors, of some nominal spectrum of skill), and that culling is therefore an art.”

— [Deletionism - Meta](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism)

Recommended Reading:

* [Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-online-encyclopedia-best-place-internet/)

* [Wikipedia: Inclusionists vs. Deletionists](https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-deletionists/)

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Miriam Carothers

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On Sunday in search of tea parlor, I have stumbled on Garfunkel’s Speakeasy. I think I was there once a long time ago. If you want to come there with me for a drink, let me know.

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Week 9

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““You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.””

— Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design

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Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic. In my opinion there are two polarized camps on the current state of AI: those who think that we are on the brisk of creating a superhuman systems within next couple of years and those who think that we are nowhere close to a system that can be labeled intelligent. The demonstration of this duopoly can be the notorious debate between Yann LeCunn (chief AI scientist of Facebook) and Gary Marcus(scientist and professor at NYU) . The debate demonstrates completely different approaches about what AI is from tools and techniques to general philosophy. I am a big fan of Gary Marcus perspective and have recently overshared his critical piece on GPT-2. This week I have finished the latest book by professor Marcus: Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust which is a very simple yet critical summarization without the hype and over-exageration.

“The scenario that the robots will become super intelligent and enslave humans makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop the sky and seize our cattle”

— from “Rebooting AI" by Gary Marcus

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Here is the list of suggested readings about AI, robotics and common sense from Gary Marcus (a lot of the books are free and accessible online):

• General on AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition): Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig: 8601419506989: Amazon.com: Books
• Scepticism about AI: /Computer Power and Human Reason/ Computer Power and Human Reason - Wikipedia
• What Computers Can’t Do Book by Hubert Dreyfus https://www.amazon.com/What-Computers-Still-Cant-Artificial/dp/0262540673
• AI systems that read: Speech and Language Processing Jurafsky: Speech and Language Processing
• Introduction to Information Retrieval: Introduction to Information Retrieval
• Robotics: Towards Robotic Manipulation by Natthew Mason: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/16741-s07/www/Mason2018.pdf
• Robotics: Modern Robotics bt Kevin Lyrch: http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf
• Robotics: Planning Algorithms Stephen La Valle Planning Algorithms / Motion Planning
• On how Mind works: The Language Instinct Steven Pincker: http://f.javier.io/rep/books/The-Language-Instinct-How-the-Mind-Creates-Language,-Steven-Pinker.pdf
• More on how mind works: human knowledge its scope and limits bertrand russell https://www.amazon.com/Human-Knowledge-Limits-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415474442
• On common sense: Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI | The MIT Press by Hector J. Lebesque
• More on Common Sense : Handbook of Knowledge Representation https://dai.fmph.uniba.sk/~sefranek/kri/handbook/handbook_of_kr.pdf Frank Harmelen

My backlog reading list has exploded again.

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I don’t know how I made it through business school without knowing who was John Boyd. Arguably “greatest strategist since Sun Tzu”, he has invented “OODA” (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) Loop. Though very intuitive and “obvious” from the first glance, the “Orient” box looks particularly interesting and deliberate. In this phase, Boyd proposed, happens information filtering through culture, genetics and previous experience.

Side note: here is a good podcast episode on who was John Boyd

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Week 8

I have just landed from Brazil. Here are the notes and my musings from what I have seen, learned and was most impressed with.

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Too often when we speak of ideal cities, the first things that come to mind are beautiful architecture, efficient transportation and plenty of housing. Yet, Brasilia (the capital of Brazil) that has been designed with all three above qualities in mind, might be the harsh evidence that unfortunately, these ingredients might not be enough to create an urban utopia. The way I felt about Brasilia is the way I feel about Stanley Kubrick’s movies - they are beautifully designed, cutting-edge, futuristic, yet they feel old, outdated and confusing.

The history of Brasilia is absolutely fascinating. In 1883, the Italian saint Dom Bosco dreamed of a utopian city of the future.This dream influenced the construction of Brasília, the capital of Brazil, in the 1950s and 60s, and can be seen in its oneiric, ethereal buildings. The plan of the central city has been likened to a bird, a bow and arrow, or an airplane. The city is filled with beautiful architecture, considerate city planning and intricate landscape design. Yet, it feels very strange, at times artificial and alien.

“ Lúcio Costa won a contest and was the main urban planner. Oscar Niemeyer, a close friend of Lúcio’s, was the chief architect of most public buildings and Roberto Burle Marx was the landscape designer. Brasília was built in 41 months, from 1956 to April 21, 1960, when it was officially inaugurated.”

— Wikipedia

The main curiosity of Brasilia is the visionary and extraordinary architecture by Oscar Niemeyer:

* Museo National - this building wants you - it’s so futuristic and imaginative. The entrance is a large ramp. And as you ascend it, the anxious anticipation bubbles up inside you.

* Congress National - separated by towers, the two dishes - one is looking inside, one is looking outside. The towers suppose to equalize the sides.

* Palacio de Justica - suppose to signify perpetual motion and has waterfalls mounted on the externals of the building.

* The Itamaraty Palace - while in my opinion, it looks pretty modest on pictures, it looks very extravagant in real life. The external shell gently hides the internal one.

* Teatro Claudio Santoro - what a sad fate dawned on this theater. It supposed to be incredible, yet it looks completely abandoned.

* The Library - the temple of knowledge is very clean and pristine.

A special space should be dedicated to modernists churches. While I have never been especially interested in the architecture of religious institutions, these places are ostentatious:

* Catedral of Brasília - you are flooded with light. If you think that you have seen stainless windows - trust me you have not, until you saw this cathedral. While usually sculptures are grounded - here there are 3 floating from the ceiling. It’s humid and extravagant at the same time. I can’t express how I feel about this church -

* Santuário Dom Bosco - while Cathedral of Brasilia field and flooded with light, Santuario Dom Bosco played with colors and showed . There are 12 shades of blue that sparkle and change. You want to approach them and touch. And I am not even going to gush about the chandelier: This chandelier is made up of 7,400 small pieces of Murano glass, weighs 3,000 kilograms, and is 3.5 meters high.

* Templo da Boa Vontade - feel less than a hunch, but headquarters of the cult. Correction, beautiful headquarters of the cult. This is a true mix of religion - they even have an Egyptian room

* The Memorial - even memorials are unusual here - the memorial to the present JK feels more of a sculpture garden of aliens than a traditional memorial to the present.

Couple of days later, I went to Museum of Arte Moderne in Rio de Janeiro and I saw there historical photos of the process of building Brasilia. We frequently see the present and it hard for us to imagine how it came together. Yet these pictures so freshly put in perspective the swift creation of the city (build in 4 years!) . Here is the city retrospective: historical pictures of Brasilia in 1959 and the ones I took in 2020:

(photos are by Artur Costa in 1956 currently hanging in MAM museum )

It is slightly ironic that another capital city was inspired by Brasilia: Albany (which is the official capital of New York State). Architecture of Albany has been called “The Poor Man’s Brasilia”, so if Brasilia is too far, you can stay in the north hemisphere for a more modest version of modernist governmental buildings.

(The professional picture of Albany, along with a couple of snaps I took in November 2018)

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When I walk into the museum and pass by the painting that picks my interest, my first reaction is to read a side plank to figure out who is it by: “Do I know the artist?”, “Have I seen the pieces by him before?”, “Is it a prominent work that deserves attention?”. I might be projecting, but it seems that museums have trained us to use the references before we form a judgment about the piece. That’s why I was especially impressed by Sao Paolo Museum of Art (MASP) and the set-up of the exhibits. Instead of the traditional walls around the perimeter of the room, the paintings were placed on the glass walls in parallel rows throughout the room. No planks on the side- if the visitor wants to know who the painting is by, he or she needs to walk around the painting. Hence the viewer, for the most part, is exposed purely to paintings without any information, giving sufficient time to evaluate the painting aesthetically.

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I finally got to visit Inhotim - a museum inside the jungle. I felt like Alexander Von Humboldt and Larry Gagosian at the same time. To explore the works one needs to hike for 500 art works sprinkled amid 500,000 acres of tropical forests.

It is hard to pick favorites, but let me list a few spectacular works that absolutely took my breath away:

* Matthew Barney “De lama lamina”, 2009 - geodesic domes in the middle of tropical forest house inside a gigantic tree cutting machine contrasting the idyllic , capturing our current tensions between the needs of industrialized economies and need to preserve the environment.

* Doug Aitken “Sonic Pavilion”, 2009 - a glass pavilion on top of a 200-meter deep well that captures and amplifies what “Earth sounds like”.

* Laura Vinci “Maquina do mundo”, 2005 - mechanical hourglass. This sculpture uses conveyor belt to transfer marble powder from one pile to another. When all pieces are transferred, the machine turns around around and repeats the process. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something extremely meditative about this piece.

* Cristina Iglesias “Vegetation Room Inhotim” 2010-2012- a mirrored cubic structure in the middle of the jungle with a labyrinth made from plastic plants inside disorients your perceptions. The structure makes the experience surreal and distorts the feeling of space and time.

* Jorge Macchi “Piscina”, 2009- everyday objects (dress-book) in altered situations (swimming pool) is a beutiful surrealistic encounter between artist’s fantastic imagine and viewer’s and viewer’s physical experience.

* Janet Cardiff “Forty Part Motet”, 2001 - a sound sculpture. A choral work by Thomas Tallis deals with humility and transcendence. I will leave it at that. It is a favorite piece for a lot of people in the whole Inhotim, a lot of them report that they have cried. Let me say that it’s surprisingly moving and emotional for a sound sculpture. * Lygia Pape “Tteia 1C”, 2002 - geometric sculptures made out of wire that makes you question your sight. A very gentle artwork that shows that grandees and elegance can be achieved with a metabolized thread.

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In the north of Rio, in the port area, stands an eye-catching and striking white building designed by notorious Santiago Calatrava. The name of the museum is “Museum of Tomorrow”. The main purpose of the museum is the need for change if mankind is to avoid climate disaster, environmental degradation and social collapse. The construction of the building itself is also based on the premise of the museum: the building 9% solar-powered, has reduced energy consumption footprint and the cooling system taps deep water from nearby Guanabara Bay.

While it’s easy to discard the museum as a ‘tourist-trap’, ‘instagram-trophy’, or contemporary take on children’s science museum, I was impressed. For me the museum visit visit has coincided with finishing the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. In the book the author concentrates on the topics environmental degradation and technological progress from high-level perspective of the history of humanity. Museum of Tomorrow, for me was a physical manifestation of the book, focusing on ideas rather than artifacts, leading the visitors from the origins of humans to our possible futures.

There are no robots, flying cars and space travel, but the unique ideas discussed are more valuable than any technological marvels, since it helps reframe our “attitude towards the future”, making it less about the artifacts we produce, but the purpose and the means of our activity.

“When people think of the ‘Future’, it usually seems very far away. That’s why we called the museum ‘Tomorrow’. It’s closer. It depends on what we do today”

— Hugo Barreto, the head director of content of museum

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Bossa Nova began on the tropical beaches of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s, when a small group of mainly middle-class students, artists and musicians came together to create a new sound. I took a class with local composer and here is what I have learned.

Bosa Nova is:

* intimate: it was performed in the apartments in Ipanema, so it’s meant to be quiet and gentle in order not to disturb the neighbors. It’s all

* it’s genuine: sounds are frequently about love, but they are not melodramatic: lyrics do not have false promises (like “I would get a star for you”) or self-righteous victimization (“you broke my heart”)

* it’s elegant: invited and enjoyed by upper classes, the music and lyrics in a way are chic, and while the music seems spontaneous, it still has a polish of expressing correctly the feelings and doing it in style.

** Mural of João Gilberto in Sao Paolo by graffiti artist Speto (Feb 2020)

Here is the list of new favorite tunes:

* Balanço Zona Sul

* Antonio Carlos Jobim - Brazil

* Nara Leao - Diz que fui por aí

Names to know:

* Astrud Gilberto - brilliant singer, who slightly resembles Andrea Hepburn. Her fame skyrocketed when she sang ‘The Girl From Ipanema’

* Antônio Carlos Jobim (Tom Jobim) - besides being credited with creating Bosa Nova, also notable for score for the film Orfeu Negro

* Vinícius de Moraes - poet, lyricist and playwright. Fun fact he also served as a diplomat.

* João Gilberto was singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Around the world he was often called "father of bossa nova"

* Nara Leão - was a muse of Bosa Nova composers as well as a wonderful singer.

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Museums come in different shapes and sizes: some are hosted in beautiful mansions with years of history, some live in new masterpieces designed by prominent architects and some are located in obscure locations. Museu Aberto de Arte Urbana (Open Museum of Urban Art of São Paulo - SP-MAAU) is a space under the subway station. The pieces are displayed on columns below the blue metro line. No planks, but the pieces frequently contain instagram accounts of the artists. Here are some of my favorite graffiti/murals pieces from around Sao Paolo:

* Mural to commemorate people who died in the dam tragedy of the Brumandinho, was painted with mud. * Presto - the artist who has impressed me with the diversity of characters in his works - truly the ability to dream up characters

* [TarikKlein] made me laugh with his transfusion of dogs and famous works of art: Frida Huahua, van Dogh and the Beagles)

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Disclaimer: pardon typos - most of these notes were written on a 10 hour flight by a very very tired me.

Week 7

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I believe in prototypes and silly experiments. I have built my career on prototypes and silly experiments. I believe that through experimentation and tinkering we think and refine our ideas - it’s like sketches before we are ready to paint our masterpieces. I have been tinkering by attending maker fairs and doing Arduino tutorials after work and always loved watching the comic, yet endearing videos made by the ‘Queen of Shitty Robots’. Yet, I was not surprised by the Wired piece on how she moved on on bigger projects, since eventually we stop tinkering and go build things.

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The opposite of silly prototypes are megaprojects - megaprojects are the humongous projects that can only be achieved by a large group of people through synchronized collaboration. These projects take time, a lot of time. They also take resources. Probably the most prominent mega-projects are cathedrals. Cathedrals take centuries to complete and rarely finished. Here is a piece by Nicolas Kemper’s piece on how cathedrals function as megaprojects . The process of their construction highlights R&D efforts, project management and put into perspective what it means “long-time”, which nicely contrasts with contemporary short-tempered world of ‘fast-everything’.

Cathedral in New York - January 2020

Cathedral in Barcelona - November 2019

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Amazon for books? The new website Bookshop - Bookshop claims that is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. While I still enjoy and do my shopping in physical bookstores, I am going to give this website a shot for obscure books that rarely carried on the main shelves.

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Week 6

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In the world where data scientists and software engineers brag to each about the advances in artificial intelligence and the huge volumes of data used to trained advanced machine learning models, it is crucial for us to consider the cost of those efforts and resources they consume. The paper Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning tries to estimate approximately the carbon emission footprint of training neural networks. While we can debate the accuracy of estimates, I think it’s a good

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I am sure you wanted to know what is the coldest and toughest ultra marathon on the planet. :) Well, glad you asked. I am happy to inform you that it is Montane Yukon Arctic Ultra - during multiple days athletes cross 430 miles of snow, ice in temperatures as low as -40°C and relentless wilderness. For many years in the row, the race was won by the Romanian athlete Tiberiu Useriu. His story is extremely fascinating, since he used to be a robber - and now he is called ‘Romania’s Ice Man’. While he did not win this year, me and my friend Dan had been cheering for him daily from the comfort of our warm sofas. I am saving his training videos as an extra motivation for those days when I am training for the mountain and feel sorry for myself.

“„Dacă vrei să pupi cerul mai întâi trebuie să-ți julești genunchii”
“If you want to kiss the sky first you have to judge your knees””

— Tiberiu Useriu

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This weekend I have experienced the latest exhibit at Artechhouse called “Submerge” - motion graphics inspired by Pantone’s color of the year Classic Blue. The blue animated transitions were supposed “to evoke the infinite evening sky at dusk, the vastness of deep, serene ocean waters, and the limitless reflections in the rain”. In my opinion this experience is a great manifestation of where the art is going:

* Generative art captures our transition from trends of abstraction into motion graphics, desire to see vivid animations. 
* Generative art takes full advantage of everything that computing has to offer, producing elegant and compelling artworks. 
* It is mediative and experiential. 
* It photographs well
* It can be experienced in a social setting

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Travel Notebooks by José Naranja will put to shame my journaling efforts and attempts at creating a bullte/travel/mood journal.

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Best discovery of the week are photographs by Rodney Smith who should be crowned as ‘Renee Magrit of photography’. Hoping to use his intricate surrealistic images as inspiration for personal projects, compas for personal aesthetics.

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Kernighan’s law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

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This week I have completed my seasonal pilgrimage to Chelsea (I start around 26 str and enter every single gallery until either my foot are tired, or I can’t look at the art anymore). Unfortunately the exhibits were relatively disappointing/ Roy Colmer took mediative pictures of doors around New York city, Robin F. Williams tired put a face to our systems by painting “Siri Defends Her honor”, some catchy phrases and nice paintings, but surprisingly nothing notable. Or maybe the problem is with the expectation that art should constantly challenge convention, to shock and to surprise?

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On Wednesday I had a delight and honor to get the private tour of Thomas Phifer design studio. Thomas Phifer and Partners has completed projects such as the Glenstone Museum expansion, the Corning Museum of Glass expansion, and the Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University. He had talked about his latest spectacular projects of Museum of Modern Art of Warsaw - about the process of designing pavilions custom made for particular works of art and specific importance of light. To achieve the correct effect, they left a lot of pavilions with open rooftops to allow the light “drop from the top”, sometimes falling down tens of meters before it would become a part of the art experience. Thomas said that “all rooms have natural light so you can feel the passage of time”.

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Week 5

This weekend I got a chance to attend New York City Ballet (NYCB) and see the work by Lauren Redness at Lincoln Center. Floor to ceiling the hallway was covered by portraits of 100+ people who organize these spectacular performances - anyone from the head of security to shoe room supervisor (yes, shoe room supervisor, who oversees 6,000 pairs of pointe shoes annually).

For the past 5 years, every winter, NYCB had organized ‘Art Series’ - collaboration with various visual artists that gives them an opportunity to create a site-specific work at Lincoln Center. The work of Lauren is a testament, that it might “take a village to raise a child”, but it takes the huge multi-disciplinary teams to pull something truly great like NYCB productions. The project is an amazing manifestation of how much collaboration and teamwork is required to make something spectacular.

** also very sad that I was not aware of the program in 2014 and have missed installation by JR

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One of the performances at NYCB was the production of Firebird with costumes designed by Marc Chagall. In the performance, a prince is lost in an enchanted forest and a sorcerer’s evil kingdom. It is hard to describe how original were the costumes and how vivid and sensational were the monsters in the evil kingdom. However, the performance made me think about the diversity of mediums that Chagall has created in:

* Paintings (obviously, that’s what he is most famous for)

* Stained Windows

* Ceilings

* Costume design

* Engravings

* Mosaic

* Printmaking

However, what’s remarkable, is that regardless of the medium, Chagall’s art always takes us to the land of dreamy childhood memories and fairytales.

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The ship of Theseus

is a philosophical paradox and a thought exercise. It is supposed that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus in a great battle has been kept in a harbour as a museum piece, and as the years went by some of the wooden parts began to rot and were replaced by new ones then, after a century or so, all of the parts had been replaced. The question then is if the "restored" ship is still the same object as the original.

In a way, this thought exercise questions the nature of identity. Here is another long list of lists of Ship of Theseus examples from Wikipedia.

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Have attended a lecture by Jeremy Heimans, the author of the book New Power, where he shared his thoughts on the concept of power in 21st century. He used current events and topics to explain some of the power dynamics in society used by institutions and interest groups alike. He makes a case for the superiority of open, mass participatory movements that challenge the traditional monolithic power bureaucracies. He listed some interesting examples by Pope Francis’s Vatican and the National Rifle Association. In a way it reminded me of a classical framework (like BCG Growth share matrix or Porter’s Five Forces) , that can cleverly interpret selective history, but the question remains, whether it can predict the future and help shape the present.

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Side Notes:

I have finally finished my essay about climbing Cotopaxi and published it on Maptia: Cotopaxi: second chances Your feedback is always welcome - I am notorious for typos. It is also baffling that it took me over 10 hours to write under 1000 words that I usually tell as a brunch story under 10 minutes.

Week 4

“Depression is anger without enthusiasm”

— Charles Saatchi

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This week I have finished “Great Books” by David Denby (picked this book for $1 in the Strand’s dollar bins - they are just so tempting and filled with absolutely random book-selection). The writer is a journalist in his late 40th, married and with kids, when he decides to go back to the university (Columbia University in New York) to retake his classical literature courses and recounts conversations in class, reflections outside of class and his deeper relationship with the characters in the classics. Even though the book was written in the 1990, the writer discusses topics that surprisingly are still relevant today: “What role should the Western classics and a “Eurocentric” curriculum play in a country whose population was made up of people from many other places besides Europe? Should groups formally without much power-women, as well as minorities - bye asked to read through curriculum dominated by works written baby Dead White European Males? While I am still indecisive about my point of view on these questions, my “to-read” list has definitely expanded to include books that I have previously marked as boring:

* Augustine “City of God” and “Confessions”

* Machiavelli “The Discourses”

* Rousseau “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”

* Shakespear “King Lear”

* Mill “On Liberty”

* Beauvoir “The Second Sex”

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This weekend went to MET museum to the visit the exhibit “ Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe”. Coincidently last summer I have visited Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology and comparatively, pieces at the MET felt more as “beautiful tools” as opposed to scientific instruments. And frankly it should be unsurprising, since while Europe was in dark ages and courts of Europe considered watches to be the epitome of science, from 9th to 16th century Muslim scholars were inventing astrolabe, clepsydra, paper mills and syringe. I was just slightly disappointed that this course of history was not highlighted or explained.

Astrolabe (early 10th Century). Copy displayed in Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam; original is kept in Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo

Drinking Horn, 1540-1550, exhibited in Metropolitan Museum of Art

The pieces that impressed me were automata, mechanized figures based on the same self-moving gear systems that powered the clocks that serve as a reminder of our craving as humans to create artificial life even in 15th century.

Automata stimulated philosophical discussions on the human ability to create machines that mimic our movement or react intelligently to commands. Many theorists describe God as the greatest of all clockmakers, who set the vast mechanism of cosmos in motion. Debates about automata contributed to the development of a mechanistic theory of human life popularized by thinkers such as Rene Descartes during the early Enlightenment. In a way, our current work in the field of Machine Learning similarly spurs the debates on our human information processing, language understanding, visual comprehension and information categorization.

Here are some amazing examples of early robots from 15th century.

The draftsman writer (1800) - androids capable of writing and drawing

Miraculous Writing Machine (1760). The machine writes through the hand of the small statue seated at the top. Up to 107 words can be programmed.

Automation in the form of the Monk (1550). Through its origins are shrouded in mystery, one legend proposes that this marvel was made after a relic of the contest between the human clockmakers and the divine.

Reproduction of The Chess Player (The Turk) Original (1769). Touted as an android that could defeat chess masters. This robot was a hoax since the Turk operated via a concealed operator, who controlled each movement from inside the cabinet by candlelight, pulling levers to operate the Turk’s arm and keeping track of the moves on their own board. ** Amazon named it’s manual sorting service after the Machine. [Currently Mechanical Turks do not receive favorable press]([The Online Hell of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/))

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“Genius of Electricity” by A. Bordiga This statue was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889 where Edison had many large exhibits and where the statue was seen by him. It portrays a young boy with wings, holding aloft a real Edison bamboo filament light bulb which lights. He is perched atop a gas street lamp, with a voltaic pile and a telegraph sounder at his feet. This statue was purchased from the sculptor Dec. 4, 1889 by Edison through Wm J. Hammer, for 8,500 francs, plus $800.00 duty, plus shipping charges. Surprisingly, almost no pictures of it online. Here is a picture of Edison with the statue on the background - results were produced with Google similarity search.

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The distinguished Russian artists Komar & Melamid decided to interpret a market research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting. In 1995 they created America’s Most Wanted and America’s Unwanted paintings. The survey asked people’s favorite color, preference for outdoors or indoors scenes, religious or non-religious theme, preference for representation of reality or imaginary subject, hard angles or soft curves, vibrant palette or darker shades, wild animals or domestic, men or women, figures working, at leisure or posed,…erc. The list of questions was exhaustive, and enabled the artists to create the works that the survey decreed would best offer an accurate reflection of what Americans want their paintings to look like and what they don’t want them to look like.

You can read about the project and see the other countries here. The data-driven art choices are absolutely hilarious and ironic. The survey results from 1995 put to shame most contemporary art-related data visualizations.

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The Frick museum does not allow pictures, but managed to take this photo in Boucher room before I was gushed by the security guard. The room has 8 canvases that depict children like miniature adults engaging in work from everything from architecture to poetry and music. On my visits to this room I always get a rushed feeling to come back to work and “go make things”. Maybe these paintings are precursors to the newest YouTube trend of “With Me “ videos - simple videos of people film themselves going about ordinary tasks like cooking, studying, cleaning, or exercising.

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Week 3

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]

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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)

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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__/)

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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.

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Calgary, Canada

Week 2

If you live in New York chances are that at some point in winter you have noticed bright ads advertising “5000 Years of Civilization reborn” - the Shen Yun Ballet (there are also ads for it all around the world, but I have not seen it). This year planning my cultural program for the spring, I found the booklet of notorious ballet in my postbox and decided to finally give into marketing, proposing a friend to join me. In the hindsight, I feel extremely gullible, that I have not even googled the premise of the performance. My friend responded with an article from The New Yorker and the words “Falun Dafa” and “cult”. I would highly recommend reading this article, as I would never look the same at the poppy blue yellow advertising in the subway.

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In 1876, Japan presented the United States with kudzu, Pueraria lobatam to celebrate the country’s 100th anniversary. The plant was admired for its fantastic vitality, fertility and beautiful flowers; however, admiration eventually turned into terrifying dismay as the plant rapidly spread across American South with the help of people planting along the roads and railways to prevent erosion in the 1930’s. Like a terrorist wildfire, the plant is capable of spreading at a rate of 12 inches in 24 hours. Originally a well-intended gift, today the kudzu is considered to be one of the most invasive species in the world.

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In recent years, the world has acquired many more spectacular architectural marvels dedicated to hosting art - most of them financed by private individuals (More reading on the rise of the private art museums in the report by Hyperallergic: “Crunching the Numbers Behind the Boom in Private Art Museums” ). This year New York has been bestowed with a new (for-profit) museum dedicated to photography- Fotographiska. Four floors are showcasing living contemporary photographers is a nice addition to the city’s “museum-ing scene”.

“Conversation with a Lobster” by Ellen von Unwerth

The weekly discovery for me were the photographs of Tawny Chatmot. A unique combination of a photograph-painting, resembling Gustav Klimt’s paintings from the far make us rethink history from the race perspective in a stunningly -nuanced way.

Tawny Chatmon

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The first week of January in the tech world is always filled with industry gossip about CES. This year, besides the regular parade of bigger screens and less private home devices, I was surprised to hear a lot about unique electric cars…. made in China. Publicity waves were made by Byton M-Byte - a car with a huge one panel LCD screen on the dashboard. A few other names of Chinese manufacturers that are good to know are: * Fisker Automotive with a very affordable (relative to other electric vehicles) electric SUV Ocean

* BYD Auto BYD, which built the battery in your ’90s cellphone, now produces more EVs than anyone

* and NIO with it’s Formula E Team

… along with about another hundred of other up-and-comers.

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Week 1

picture from reading “The Glorious Adventure” by Richard Halliburton at the base camp of Cotopaxi the night before the summit

For the opening of 2020

Every January we grippingly look forward to the next 365 days. However, instead of self-obsessive motivation in the style of “new year, new you”, here is a line about dreams from one of my most favorite writers and a daring adventurer, Richard Halliburton (finished his book while climbing Cotopaxi )

“ We all have our dreams, Otherwise what a dark and stagnant world this would be. Most of us dream of getting rich many of us getting married and some of us getting unmarried. I’ve met people whose great dream it was to visit Jerusalem, or Carcassonne, or to look upon the seven hills of Rome. I’ll confess to a sentimental life-long dream of my own, - not the riches, or weddings, or Jrusalem, however, - something far less reasonable than that. I’ve dreamed of swimming the most dramatic river in the world - the Hellespont. Lord Byron once wrote that he would rather have swum the Hellespoint than written all his poetry. So would I! Somethimes, once in a long, long while, sentimental dreams come true. Mine did, and it was as colorful and satisfying as all my flights of fancy had imagined it would be.”

“The Glorious Adventure” by Richard Halliburton

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In one of the white rooms of Museo Municipal de Arte Moderne in Cuenca, Ecuador hides a drawing by Israel Muñoz “Theoria de la estupefaction”. I thought the drawing was especially ironic in the light of being bombarded by materials “Decade in review” currently circulating on the internet, instagram and apps. Together with friends, we spend at least half hour analyzing the canvas and trying to recognize all of the references (still could not find van Gohs’ “Starry Night”, but spotted Dali’s elephants and Manet’s “Breakfast on the grass”). The drawing crudely highlights the impact the images have on shaping our reality.

Israel Muñoz “Theoria de la estupefaction”.

I did not find a lot of information about the artist, except some of the reference to his [photography work](v)