Author Archives: Jacob Armas

Reflection on tour of Oregon Contemporary Theatre and Silent Sky 

My first impression after touring the building the Oregon Contemporary Theatre now occupies was how large it was, despite its diminutive appearance from the outside. The theatre manager mentioned this was a common experience and expressed gratitude for the space they now inhabit. The theatre’s previous home was described as a small space bound by “a hallway” that made up the dressing room and prop storage concurrently.

Talking with the carpenter for the company was interesting. I hadn’t thought about the challenges that a set designer is confronted with previously. She mentioned the challenges she faced in designing the spiral form that served as the centre piece for Silent Sky. She is usually able to make considerable use of stock pieces, but cubes and rectangles don’t translate into curves very easily. I’ve seen a few shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before, and one in particular struck me as having a particularly evocative stage design. Much Ado About Nothing‘s set consisted of a large number of hanging strands of flowers that were illuminated depending on the the mood and demands of the scene.

Image from Eugene Art Talk 

I saw some of that same idea repeated on the stage of Silent Sky. The boards behind the stage receiving the projectors image served to signal location and scene change. The painted spiral galaxy served to underscore the main point of the second act. Our heroine undergoes an existential crisis during this act. What does her work mean? Why does it matter? In contrast, the other characters have found purpose in their lives in the second act. Her sister takes care of the Wisconsin farm, Peter takes a teaching job, and her colleagues at Harvard have rallies in support of the suffrage movement. It is not until the end of the play that Henrietta finds purpose: measuring the stars. The stage design allowed her to stand at a level above the spiral galaxy. She has transcended her earlier struggle for meaning and now stand above the Milky Way, which she has proven does not define the entire universe. She looks back on her accomplishments from her place among the starts and in the words of her sister, has “answered the question God put before her.”

Abstraction that straddles the border between attempt at naturalistic representation and emotive fluid form has always interested me. After talking with the shows’s staff on Tuesday it was apparent to me that the sort of stage craft displayed in Silent Sky is an excellent application of these principles. The set was able to function as a Wisconsin farmhouse, Harvard office, ocean liner, and various outdoor environments, all while implanting the cosmic significance and striving of Henrietta Leavitt’s quest to measure the starts by way of abstracted spiral galaxy on the floor. If this floor painting would’ve been done in a way that made its star-nature more obvious, the play would’ve suffered. What sense does it make that the stars are under a home in Wisconsin? It would’ve been distracting. Instead, their degree of abstraction allowed you to notice them when the plot demanded, and allowed them to fade out of memory in other scenes. Overall, the design forced me to think more about the ability of forms and colours to function as multiple symbols simultaneously. This is something I have struggled with in my own project, which contains many nested symbols. It was encouraging to realize that this sort of dense symbol arrangement could be effectively pulled-off, albeit by professionals. People will interact with my cardboard sculpture like actors interact with a stage. In that respect the play cemented in me the importance of having clear meaning behind symbols that are employed for two purposes simultaneously.

I was not at all familiar with the work of Henry Leavitt before the play, which I know now is because of the way science was conducted during that period at Harvard, at least in the astronomy department. The fact that the actual Dr. who conducted the work was never in the play resonated powerfully. The whole set-up reminded me of a parallel in the fine arts world, where master artist depend on a team of artist to bring their ideas to fruition, and then claim the credit for the entirety of the process.

Response to Dr. Haack’s Presentation and Activity 

A) Dr. Haack’s presentation forced me to see data visualization in a new way. Before I had not put much thought into the merits of data visualization. With the sudden explosion of infographics everywhere my response is usually just to ignore them, figuring if I’ve seen one I’ve probably seen them all. Haack’s introduction to the Nike Making app also introduced me to the potential value of data visualizations and user friendly databases. I also believe my interest was piqued in this subject, despite my previous feelings toward it, due to Dr. Haack’s warm personality and excitement. I thoroughly enjoyed our short challenge activity in the class and have since started to think a lot more about how data is presented in the form of advertisements lately.

This is the quick draft my partner and I sketched out in class. The idea is that consumers could consult this chart, which graphically compares the water usage in the formation of various materials arranged according to what what season one would wear that material in.  

B) Between the exposure in class to methods and purposes of data visualization and some of my own research into the links that were provided on the class blog site after the class, I am trying hard to think of some way to add a data visualization component to my project. It may not be possible since my project does not deal directly with hard data and most of my planning has been set in place at this point, but I am definitely racking my brain for anyway to apply what we learned in class to my project. I suspect I will have a chance to explore these ideas more in future classes.

C) I believe that now, more so than ever before, creative thinking is an essential skill for a college graduate to have when entering a competitive job market. Besides the fact that the creation of visualized data can be enjoyable, I think that it is on of those aforementioned creative skills that will become useful in the future. Motivated by that thinking, I downloaded a data visualization program called Tableau Public last night that is immensely powerful and appears fairly straightforward to use. I suspect it will be of use to me in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ-cy67GJck

Video from Tableau Smith 

Data Visualization in my Project 

Image from the USDA Forest Service 

Due to the nature of the topics I am studying: nurse logs and artist who draws on scientific concepts rather than hard and fast numbers and graphs, data visualization will not play a large role in my project. On the other hand, visualization of concepts and key data points certainly will. The physicality of my creative display, a cardboard sculpture with a sentence fragment which will wrap around it, also ensures interaction with my project will be provoked in some way.

Inspired by Shel Marcuvitz’s thesis, nurse logs in a coastal oregon forest, my sculpture will display the edges of four trees that decay into nurse logs in the Pacific Northwest region. Their outlines will subtly emerging from cardboard sheets. Another piece of data represented through my sculpture is the presence of four used rolls of wrapping paper. The number, four, is also the number of the decay class in which some, Marcuvitz among them, theorize rotting snags are able to best support tree seedlings successfully taking root.    

Though not through the medium of a sophisticated digital image, my project is still cognizant of the creative potentials that lie inherent in the mounds of data that are ceaselessly churned out by scientists and researchers.  

Response to The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives 

Image from Wikipedia

The key idea of the beginning of this article, that the mathematical models used in physics are simply projections or “maps” of physical phenomena draws together two ideas that I have had before. As such, I found the article particularly interesting to read.

In my seventh grade geography class I was introduced to the Mercator projection and its inherent distortions. I tucked that information into the back of my mind, but didn’t think on it very often. Now in college, I am taking entry level physics classes and have had a limited dealing with different physical models that describe the world accurately enough to perform calculations, but are of course simplifications of the real events taking place. This idea has always intrigued me: that one is able to glean useable results from the world by essentially assuming false information. If it were not for this article, I would have never seen the connection between these two realizations from my past. Granted, I was largely lost in the article’s further explication of this metaphor in regards to quantum mechanics, but it was still interesting to witness the incredibly complex mathematics that have been developed to explain the world given the inherent limitation of never actually being able to describe anything with complete certainty. In a way, this is a metaphor for the stories of reality that each human tells themselves in order to describe an experience that they have no way of fully understanding. They can never view it at the “full scale”, be that the full scale of time, the complete sensations of everything living on the planet (to say nothing of knowing the complete definition of life), or even just the complete set of events that each individual action will set into motion. This last idea is explored wonderfully in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, in which a form of math so advanced is produced that a man is able to accurately predict the tides of history based on the actions of the masses.     

Image from Collider

 Since I am intrigued by the illustrations and the general concepts of the latter half of this article, I decided to do some basic research into some of the mathematical terms with which I was unfamiliar. In reading about unitary evolution operators, qubits, and Bloch spheres, I came across a whole host of other terms with which I am unfamiliar. These, of course, also impede my understanding. I was able to see the connection between the metaphor of the “non-locality” of a three-dimensional ball projected onto a two-dimensional surface and the “non-locality” of quantum mechanics being “mapped” into systems that are less complex. One of the results of this, at least in my brief understanding, is quantum entanglement. This allows electrons to somehow communicate instantaneously across vast distances. If these systems, particularly the Bloch sphere “map” (at top of post), are also distorted in some way from reality, it begs the question: how much more complicated is the world beyond even what we can conceive of?  

Reflection on Dr. Dawson’s Presentation 

Image from weheartit.com

A) My experience in my high school anatomy class served me well today. I was able to connect the terms I had learned in that class with a physical heart. The opportunity to handle a real organ of human anatomy solidified the terms and science I had learned before. My main takeaway from her discussion today was not directly related to the tangible organ, however. What I found most interesting was when Dr. Dawson asked the class where their mental images of anatomically correct hearts came from. The answers were varied-some came from science textbooks, some from Youtube or social media, my own mental image was informed by a combination of scientific images and cartoons. These answers made me think more about how knowledge is disseminated through society. The large majority of people come upon scientific images second or third hand. That is, they do not have access to facilities such as cadaver labs or electron microscopes. It raises the question- Would the fields of science seem appear more accessible to the general public if this equipment was more readily available? instead of in the possession of the select few who are able to reach the upper echelons of academia? 

B) Since my project this term does not deal with a physiological component, there was no direct correlation between this guest speaker and this specific project. However, her active demonstration at the end of the session – in which the whole class was employed to symbolically carry out the role of the heart through movement – gave me a new perspective on how performance could be used to visualize data.

C) The aforementioned realization that information can come from an enormous variety of sources gives me a lot to think about as I move forward both in my college career and beyond. As someone with a burgeoning interest in contemporary art and visual culture, I decided to explore the ideas of the beauty of visualizing data, and came across an interesting article.

Is Data Visualization the Future of Art?   

(personal note on the above article: it is my personal opinion that painting will never lose its relevancy. Some of the earliest records of human art we have are cave paintings, and the traditions has only become more richly varied and provocative since then.)

Today’s presentation may have not made me decide to rush to the anatomy department and pursue a career in medical study, but it definitely planted some new ideas in my head. I would argue that that is just as impactful.

Image from Visual News 

Response to Scientific Looking, Chapter 9

Image from Northwestern 

The author of this article makes a powerful case for the idea that culture informs science, which in turn informs science, and so on and so forth.

I was familiar with how the camera changed how artists and scientists view their respective disciplines, and I was also familiar with the philosophy of eugenics, but I had never before read anything that so clearly illuminated how the camera provided such widespread means of spreading that philosophy.

I’ve always found it interesting to reflect on the claims science has made over the years, and on their cultural power. This chapter certainly presents a lot to think about in both of those respects. This chapter also provoked some questions in me:

What are the current social assumptions that scientists have today, and how do they inform their research? 

The problem with this question is that it points to what I will call the “Post-Modern Conundrum”. It is easy to see the overt racism that guided much of the early use of photography to study human morphology because of our own chronological distance. As a result, one is lead to my earlier question, yet it cannot be answered, because as we see from this analysis it is only possible to detect biases and the effects of culture on science in hindsight. This leads to the development of psychological tension in the post-modern scientist and thinker:

How is one to know if one’s own research and thought is negatively influenced by ones own’s culture? Or framed another way:

How will the scientists of one hundred years from now view the science we are doing now? Will they comment on how inhumane it was? Will they have some sort of advanced knowledge about humanity that we did not even realize we were stifling by means of our scientific inquiry and cultural arrangement? 

Another thought I had while reading this article was in regards to the contrast presented between photography and ultrasound. The author takes the position that these ultrasound images have power because their data is presented visually instead of in charts or graphs, a assertion that I believe has been frequently demonstrated. It is possible to take one step further back from this idea, and leap further into post-modern thought with the realization that both of these devices are simply collectors of electromagnetic waves. We cannot see these waves, and these devices present to us visual representations of one way or another of these waves, but not the waves themselves. From this lens, it is possible to see that all these devices, photographs, ultrasound, MRI, PET are not in fact making visible the invisible but really translating something invisible into something that can then be interpreted through vision, whether the things being interpreted are graphs or images.

Regarding the commentary on human anatomy and the cultural coding of dissection and Bodyworlds, I realized that the author never pointed out one of the implicit messages of all of these disciplines, that truest knowledge of the human body can only be obtained when it no longer functions as it did in life. This implies that the animating force of life, what each human experiences as living is so complex that only in its absence can anything definitive be said about it.

Finally, the latter part of the article reminded me of the trans-humanism movement. Which is thought-provoking to say the least. They even have a political party, to which I have provided the above link.

Image form Wikipedia