This has become a rarity and I can tell by my posting history that my mind is continuously and curiously drawn to the heavens. My favorite skeptic astronomer Dr. Philip Plaitt has posted one of the most breath-taking images I may have ever seen. I will show it to you before I describe its beauty.

This eerie image is many things but first it is credited to Justin Quinnell of Bristol UK and was published in New Scientist. The effect is a result of a fact theorized by Copernicus and later confirmed by Galileo which is that of the earth going ’round the sun. Taken with a pinhole camera over a period of six months this image shows a record of the sun’s path in the sky either from the winter solstice to summer solstice or the other way around, it seems impossible to tell. The wonderful arcs are a reminder of our dynamic universe which can be a terrifying and beautiful place. For the terrifying, read Death from the Skies by Dr. Philip Plaitt, , for the wonder read anything by Carl Sagan.. However I think this is more than even the venerable Phil Plait mentioned in his article because it is also a record of cloud cover during each day that the photograph was taken. If you look closely at some of the lines, they are broken which denotes a time when sunlight did not reach the film. In this case it may, in fact be possible to tell at least which months were covered by the photographer if you compared the sun record to the annual weather record which just might tell you the exact months in which the image was made, if weather patters in fall and spring were different enough. Fascinating, beautiful.

If you haven’t been to Walt Disney World or the great wide north that is the UP of Michigan, you can’t possibly understand what a small world is. Its people who look like menacing stiffly moving animatronic robots singing incomprehensibly of course. But it is also everyone you know knowing everyone else that you know without you introducing them or being aware that they all know one another. I had one of those small fucking world, “I can’t believe it” moments just recently, and for lack of a better word it was beautiful.

The story goes like this: my brother roomed with some people who went to Kalamazoo College while he was going to Western Michigan University for his Bachelor’s degree. One of those people was an artist and amazing musician named Scott and John played music with him for a while in a band called Office. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the music and gawk in wonder at the pop sensation and thoughtful lyrics.) Office is one of those music projects that, like a bad haircut or needy girlfriend, will probably never go away because it always finds new people to make music together, like an orgy that never really had a beginning and will never end. So it still exists in all its wonderful glory, only now in Chicago.

The story continues, like a Quentin Tarantino film, with a short rewind to my undergrad which I partially did in photography. At that time I met and became friends with another photographer, John Sturdy who I met smoking cigarettes in a shitty newspaper photo lab when he edited photography at the school newspaper. To skip some boring shit, his work has always amazed me and he photographed my wedding with Crystle shortly after he ended up in Chicago working for a commercial photo studio.

The small world moment comes in presently when my brother emails me to say that Office is coming out with a new album and its fucking amazing and low and behold Sturdy shot the cover art. Check it out, it will make you cry its so fucking beautiful. No, seriously, click that link and look at the first photo on the left, it will make you cry. Anyway, the guy on the left is Scott, who roomed with my bother, the photo was taken by John Sturdy, its amazing and you wish he had photographed your wedding. Personally, if I had one wish, it would be enough money to make John my full time staff photographer so when I die there is a little beauty left over as a by-product of my otherwise unremarkable life.

Small fucking world.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s beautifully exciting conceptual development, I found today to be stifling, awkward and totally lacking in beauty. There is no beauty when I can’t find time to make or design my own art. How can I have time to appreciate beauty when I just spent an hour reading a useless New Yorker article about some random guy who made it as an art dealer and hired people to piss on his dinner guests at his gallery? The obvious answer is that there is no beauty and I don’t give a shit anymore. Here’s to Jeffrey Deitch for temporarily destroying my love of making things. Today art is nothing or at most being an unapologetic market manipulating capitalist low life.

You heard it here first and there is beauty in a good idea. I have been agonizing over how to frame my current body of work, how to make a paradigm for it to exist in and I think I have taken the first step into a much larger world. The forms I have been working with are based on Tensegrity, invented by Kenneth Snelson and co-opted by R. Buckminster Fuller. Snelson has a patent on the idea which he calls Continuous tension, discontinuous compression. His objects are elegant gravity defying feats of engineering which use tensioned wire to compress struts to build polyhedral forms, towers, and other freestanding sculptures large and small. My interest in this idea comes from the idea of reducible complexity; the notion that complexity in the natural world can be taken apart and understood piece by piece and if you reduce it far enough the pieces are few in type yet unimaginably numerous, like elementary particles in physics. Last second alone over 100 Trillion Neutrinos passed through your body without you even noticing….

Anyway, so my latest work started off as a simple dissection of some basic tensegrity prisms using some simple trigonometric equations to describe them at equilibrium (thanks to Hugh Kenner) and using those same equations to make CAD models of them. This started off as an exercise, using the trigonometry to create proportional constraints that governed the entire model. I then dissected the CAD models with planes defined by various points of interest (end points, mid points, etc) derived from the tensegrites themselves. Low and behold I found that there were several planes of interest which might lead to a new kind of structure based on the basic tensegrity form.

I’ve made some models of these new structures, some videos of my CAD renderings, and I’ve been grappling with what they are, how they are different and perhaps the implications of defining a new type of structure which uses spring wire to create a mutually opposing repulsion between struts rather than a mutually attractive force tensioned using cables or strings. I have also been grappling with how these fit into an art practice since I am an MFA candidate but for me this has been more of a challenge in semantics than anything else; explaining in words the conceptual material which can be dealt with and represented by these structures as well as the questions they pose. This part of it segues nicely with my fascination with scientific models and the way we use them to parse the world as well as their limitations in doing so. But today I think I have made a huge leap into defining what these things are by coining a new term all my own that even google can’t find! You will notice that Tensegrity yields a huge list of results. So you heard it here first, and in all the pompous, arrogant disregard of the great R. Buckminster Fuller I hereby coin my first term: Elastegrity. This one’s for you Bucky and it is a conjunction of the words Elastic Integrity. Elastegrity, I guarantee you will be saying it to yourself as you go to sleep tonight…

There, I said it, for all my negativity over the past couple of weeks, I managed to find a little beauty, maybe literally. I’ll even go so far as to say that on a normal day by the time I end up writing these things I’ve usually been so busy that I end up using it as a vent for my frustration, which is only a natural part of living, which is presumably preferable to not living. Oh bitter sweet irony.

Upon finally finding time to review some photographs I took this weekend when Crystle and I went to the arboretum to get away for a few minutes, I am prepared to declare that there may be tiny bits of beauty in the world and if you’re not careful you will crush them under your mass and lumbering stupidity. Crystle has a knack for spotting things like this; just take a drive down any residential street with her and she will point out at least a dozen cats sitting in windows.

No, really, honestly, I took that photograph on a trail at the arboretum with my old 4 MP Olympus which despite its low pixel count has an amazing super-macro feature. That poisonous little caterpillar is only an inch long. It is, despite my best efforts to think otherwise, beautiful, certainly not man made, and if you weren’t careful it would be beautifully positioned between the treads on your sneakers. Its whole being says “don’t eat me or I’ll poison you to death or at the very least get caught in your throat,” and that is a little piece of naturally selected beauty… I wonder what kind of butterfly it will be next year…

Its ok, you can tear up a little now, its pretty heart wrenching to find something so delicate and yet potentially deadly in this crazy world of ours with all its Sarah Palindroids and stiff-armed John McCainbots. Maybe if they took a moment to think about things instead of being scared of death they would see the natural beauty in the world for what it is without attributing it to their invisible friends and obsolete deities who hate gay people. Life sure is bitter-sweet when sheer beauty can exist in such stark contrast to the ugliness of people like Plain and John McCainbot. Fuck, now I’m depressed again.

746 Million Miles away is one of the most beautiful tempests in our solar system.

This is perhaps too beautiful to reduce to a mere scientific description of how it works and why it looks the way it does. So think hurricane with an eye that is 2,500 miles across (that is from here to Brazil give or take). Awe isn’t the word, I desire to see this with my own eyes and swim in it despite a surely horrifying death amid crushing currents of super dense gas. Awe, beauty, horror, wonder.

So I didn’t have a day off today but I’m going to take a sort of paradoxical, ironic, day off from writing in this log. If you don’t see the paradox, I can’t help you…. Anyway, I digress. The beauty here? Well its simple and ironic, like crappy contemporary art. The beauty here (and this reinforces my idea that beauty is as dead as it can get) is in that I am taking a day off from writing about beauty which has become more laborious than anyone could possibly imagine. Beauty is dead, and I just proved it by writing about it. I await my Pulitzer Prize, which, ironically, will never come.

Since there is no beauty left in the world I would like to comment on the notion of beauty past. There used to be this thing called Saturday which usually began with Bugs Bunny cartoons and ended with iced cream sundaes. It was a beautiful thing that came once a week and ended too soon. Now I have to work at this Saturday thing. I actually have to make effort to enjoy free time or some other sort of recreation, and making effort to do something that used to be a natural part of life is pretty depressing. Don’t get me wrong, oh voyeuristic audience, its not nearly as depressing as writing this or any other forced beauty appreciation assignment but it is still depressing none-the-less. Oh well, here’s to the crushing complexity of this shit-bag we call life.

Today is Friday and I actually had a chance to make art in my studio, but I don’t think it was beautiful and I doubt anyone else will either. Oh well, maybe the act of making was beautiful. Then again probably not, it would be boring to watch, noisy, and probably scary to people who think things come from Walmart. Maybe being alive is beautiful, after all, today is Friday and yesterday was Thursday, there is no way to tell if there will be a tomorrow so right now must be a beautiful moment.

Another thought just occurred to me. On Thursday I wake up around quarter to seven, get up, shower, eat breakfast, bike to campus. From there I work in my studio until lunch time, enjoy lunch with Crystle, bike to the Foundry, clean the place up, sit around waiting for something to happen then I bike back to the studio for Seminar. After interesting seminar discussion I call Crystle, she picks me and my bike up from campus, I come home, make and eat dinner and try to read something for class next week before passing out. You will notice that this daily schedule is lacking in two things: time for me to make my own artwork, and time for me to find and enjoy beauty. Cheers.