Week 4 posts

Peter Richards, environmental artist

Peter Richards has long been the artist in residence at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. His art installations help people connect with the space where they are sited. He has no signature style because each site demands a different approach and takes advantage of and reflects the particularity of that space. He has helped create a public greenspace in Palo Alto wetlands that were once the site of a landfill. (http://www.ci.kent.wa.us/content.aspx?id=7610) The point here was not to try to recreate a pristine space as it was before humans intervened and screwed it up but rather to take advantage of what the space offers now and make it amenable to human recreational activities. Another work that particularly interests me is the Wave Organ, an installation on a jetty in the San Francisco Bay. Richards was brought up in the mountains so the ocean was new to him. When he discovered this jetty, created in part with stonework from a demolished cemetery, at the end of a path that seemed to lead nowhere, he was intrigued, both by the ocean influence on the space and the appearance of ruins created by the cemetery stones. He collaborated with sculptor and stone mason George Gonzalez, to create vent pipes that would amplify the sounds of the water moving against the ends of the pipes. This was inspired by a recording made by Bill Fontana of sounds from a vent pipe in of Sydney, Australia. Combined with the already-present ambient sounds of water, birds, and other aspects of the space, Richards finds the site calming and always wondrous. It attracts local visitors to a space that would otherwise be abandoned and unappreciated. http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/plan_your_visit/wave_organ/

Blue Marble Images of the Earth

In the late 1960s, scientists first were able to show us images of the whole earth from space. The images have changed and improved over time but they remain a startling depiction of how small the earth is in the scheme of the universe and how interrelated everything on earth is. This report aired on NPR’s Science Friday on February 3; I heard it and was interested. But today, listening to it while looking at the images, I realize how compelling the concept is – to be able to see the whole earth at once, as a unit, as the one place where we all live. It is inspiration for the environmental movement and gives rise to all sorts of philosophical thoughts that most people were not thinking and perhaps were hardly capable of formulating before the 1960s when these images were available. Astronaut John Glenn saw it first, when he orbited the earth in 1962.(See the film The Right Stuff for a reenactment of how exciting it was for him.) To see more versions of the blue marble, go to NASA’s website. http://visibleearth.nasa.gov

Here is the link to the Science Friday broadcast. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201202034

So now we know, the earth really does look like the maps, just a lot more real.