Promoting Local Craftspersons

I have some super miscellaneous links that have just been hanging out in Google tabs that I've been wondering what to do with. 

I support local craftspersons and respect people who make actual things rather than find clever ways to get more from the things other people make. (These people of course have their place in society as well, but, in a sense, I sympathize with the feudal Japanese class system's putting miscellaneous businesspeople last.) Anyways, I met the proprietors of the following brands and others at a local crafts fair a few months ago...

On the Cusp Pottery - Very bright and cheery!

Fumihiko Mochizuki - There's definitely an element of wabisabi in there. I wish there were a bit more online presence. Perhaps some miscellaneous businessperson should come along...

Finally, Walter Perlman - This guy is an artist. I had a ten or fifteen-minute conversation with him, and he kept going into detail about how he hates photoshopping and how there is no photoshopping in his pictures. Like a lot of photographers, it seems he suports himself via weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc., but his articstic images are just wonderful. I've refrained from posting any here out of respect for the artist, Follow the link above. 

Do any readers know any other local craftspersons who deliver over the Internet?

Modern Visionaries Part III - Benoit Mandelbrot

"Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.” - Benoit Mandelbrot

"Nebulabrot" by Paul Nylander

In keeping with the mathematics theme established in the previous installment of this series (on Buckminster Fuller), Part III is about Benoit Mandelbrot.  It is impossible to ignore the “geodesic”, forward-looking genius of Benoit Mandelbrot.  Like Fuller before him, Mandelbrot used geometry to identify and educate us about the nature of infinity.  Mandelbrot’s elucidation of “fractals” may have given the human race a much closer look at nature’s grand design.  

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was born November 1924 and died on the 14^th of October, 2010.  A mathematician born in Poland but raised in France, Mandelbrot spent much of his life living and working in the United States.  Starting in 1951, Mandelbrot worked on problems and published papers in mathematics and applied math, information theory, economics, and fluid dynamics.  He became convinced that two key themes - fat tails and self-similar structures - ran through a multitude of common problems in those fields.

the Mandelbrot setPerhaps Mandelbrot's most famous contribution is the M-set.  Mandelbrot discovered the M-set in 1980; this discovery has been widely discussed in books such as The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Mandelbrot and Chaos by James Gleick and in scientific magazines (for example see the beautiful pictures and excellent summary in the July 1985 issue of Scientific American).

I am by no means a mathematician.  I’ve always been humbled by the complexities of higher mathematics, more of a right brained guy I guess.  Mandelbrot’s discovery of the “M-set” may well be a look in to the true fabric of Mother Nature, and sure enough, Mom speaks math.  

For those who are mathematically inclined, here is a brief outline of how the M-set is created: start with the expression z -> z^2 + c; choose two complex numbers z and c; solve the expression z^2 + c to get a new value of z; put the new z into the z^2 + c term and compute another z value; continue this process on a computer for much iteration.  Color coding the rate at which different values of c cause z to either (1) shoot off to infinity, (2) stabilize in the realm of finite numbers, or (3) go to zero creates the visual embodiment of the “m-world”.  One of the many wonders of this infinitely complex “world” is that it can be created by just a few simple lines of computer code that are repeated recursively.  From these little algorithmic loops comes the most rococo universe that anyone has ever seen.  No matter how many times you magnify the M-set to infinity, it continues to expand.  And you can see the M-set everywhere in nature.  Mandelbrot found a mathematical formula to describe a “fractal” (a term he invented to describe the M-set) – in which each part mimics the pattern of the whole.

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The Shamisen Redemption

One of my students is the curator of an art museum in my city.  We were talking the other day about the idea of Western art as subtraction stories as opposed to the idea of Japanese art as functional.  As Japanese society changed in response to contact with the West and people stopped using swords or wearing kimono (because it is so expensive), much of Japanese art also "died" - or was at least frozen in carbonite.  This works as a general overview to Japanese art history.  

Due to the nature of traditional Japanese arts as functional, there was never any concept of art as aesthetics until that idea was introduced by Westerners.  Japanese visual artists today have to walk a thin tightrope between the absurdity of producing traditionally Japanese, functional works of art for revisionist aesthetic reasons (since "art" has been de facto defined as aethetics) and appearing to do little more than copy Western modern artists.  Accordingly, creating good modern art is more difficult for Japan than it is for the West, since everything Japan's artists produce will ultimately be seen through a lens of Japaneseness.

What I mean by Western art as a subtraction story is that Western art has a history of the gradual removal of constraints - the opposite of Japanese art as necessarily bound to the constraints of function.  If we look at the history of Western poetry, for instance, we still see with Shakespeare and Marlowe a general reliance on the iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the ancients (even though those standard rhyme patterns and meters emerged from another language and culture entirely).

Fast forward to Walt Whitman and poetry becomes all about breaking "suffocating" rules of rhyme and meter whilst yawping barbarically.  This idea of directionless rule-breaking would find its most absurd expression in E.E. Cummings, who wrote about extremely conventional subjects in extremely unconventional ways.  

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Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

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Orchids and Dandelions

David Dobbs recently wrote an article for the Atlantic called "The Science of Success" about a "controversial" new theory suggesting short/short and short/long human serotonin-transporter genes, long held as increasing the risks of developmental disorders such as ADHD, depression, and anxiety, are also responsible for artistic genius, success at business or politics, and other desirable traits.  Individuals that have the short/short variant of this gene are called orchids, because, if not given proper care, they wilt and wither, but if raised in the right environments, they bloom spectacularly.  Individuals with the long/long variant are called dandelions: they are able to take root and survive almost anywhere.  Of course this is an oversimplification, but this new research could usher in a paradigm shift in how we think about child development or workplace dynamics, as well as providing the answer to the long-fought nature vs. nuture debate: it's both.

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How to Win at Art

I've been using his "Android Brain-Animal Brain" idea a lot recently, so I thought I'd link to this genius series of articles on how to "score" art by Ken Arneson.  He postulates that language is the way our android brains, the conscious, reflective part of our brain, communicates, but that our animal brain, that is our evolved animal instincts, uses art to communicate.  Our animal brain uses pattern recognition in art to form associative memories that are the currency of creativity.  Good art forms lots of memories, bad art forms none.  The best art avoids habituation (the recognition of familiarity that allows us to ignore reoccurring patterns as unimportant so we aren't distracted from keeping a watchful eye out for new stuff that might be important to our survival) and cliche even upon repeat viewings.

Beyond art, that struggle between our animal and android brains seems pretty right on in my everyday life.  Life is the attempt to train our animal brain to shape its powerful tactics into the service of our long term android strategies.