Bedazzled

I should really be sleeping right now, but I just discovered something wonderful in a very unlikely place. I was at my dad's house, sitting in the backyard drinking tea with my dad, stepmom, and two of their friends discussing artwork, when my dad brought up an exhibit he had recently gone to with Bella's relatives. The exhibit was called "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" and was displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC until the 24th of june. My dad was so enthralled by this exhibit that he tried to describe it to us to the best of his ability; I was astonished.

The artist's name is Taryn Simon. Her goal, put simply, with this exhibition was to capture views that relayed previously unknown information to the American public. She spent a lot of time conducting research about unknown and unfamiliar facts in American history, and went on a journey throughout the United States to photograph the evidence of their existence. The result, from what I've heard and seen online, is breathtaking. I will give an example. The first photograph in the exhibition is of a stark white wall. Two red cables come up out of the ground in front of the ground and are plugged into the wall. You look at the photo, come up closer to read the caption, and then back away after knowing what the photo is trully of. Apparently, there are two cables that flow underneath the Atlantic from England to a small city in New Jersey; these cables are responsible for all intercontinental interaction between Europe and America, and the only place in America that you can see the origin of this interaction is in this room, in this building, in some small city in New Jersey, of which this photo was taken. The most shocking and captivating image my dad described, was a black canvas, with black orbs surrounded by a neon blue aura. Upon reading the caption the viewer learns that the photo is actually of nuclear waste capsules at the extremely well guarded and enclosed, partly-underwater Nuclear Waste Storage Facilities in Arizona. An extremely limited number of people is allowed into this facility, due to high radioactive activity and extreme security, but she was allowed in for only a few minutes to take her photo so that she may reveal it to the American public in this exhibition. Fascinating. I couldn't find a sharper image of it because the exhibition took place so recently, but the image I found is in the upper left hand corner of this post. 

The exhibition was closed down in New York, but the next stop will be Frankfurt, Germany in September, and I'm almost crazy enough to go there to check it out. 

My dad's description of the exhibition made me think about a lot of things. It made me think about creativity, limiting access to information, and about how we process information in the first place. The creativity part is pretty self-evident; the woman's incredible, but what's even more interesting is how difficult it was for her to access these places, get to these objects/scenes/views and photograph them so that America can see what the truth looks like. I think it's great that she did eventually gain access to these places and displayed and explained what she found, but how much work did it take? Who is granted this sort of access? Who is not?

Even more interesting, when you look at one of these photos without reading the caption, what do you think of? Certainly (or at least probably) not of nuclear waste capsules. You just see the image and make as much sense out of it as you can. You look at colors, you make associations, you probably take the environment you're in into account, try to piece together what you already know with the information in front of you and make sense out of it. And once you've made sense out of it you see the image in a whole new light. It's no longer just a bunch of random colors and shapes. And what's unique about all this is the human capacity and tendency of eluminating things for other humans, for starting from something that is completely unknown and building upon it for generations and generations until we have very strong grounds for knowledge, textbooks, facts, laws of nature. 

This exhibition is incredible because we are bridging what we know and what we don't know with our instincts, our very basic processing of information--the interception of colors and shapes, our intuition, our emotions--and we are calling it art. 

Life Less Ordinary

This is probably going to be a long one (and somewhat disconnected since there's a lot to cover). 

I've been doing a lot of soul searching these past few days. Maybe it's because I've been spending more time than usual on my own, which I've come to find has been pretty beneficial to my efforts at self-improvement. I still see friends every day because I need them and love their company (I'm a very social person), but I'm trying to spend my time more wisely and to leave more time for myself. Aside from waitressing I've been practicing a lot of piano, watching some History Channel, and spending a great deal of time at the bookstore, just picking out books and reading them. Lately I've been picking up a lot of History/Anthropology books, but hopefully by the end of the summer I'll have moved on to something else. Today I picked up a fantastic book called "Human," which is basically an encyclopedia of all the things that make us both similar to and different from the other mammals in the Animal Kingdom. I'm really excited about reading as much of it as I can over the next couple of weeks at the store, and I'd even buy it if didn't cost $50. The book had a great foreward about humans' progress; the co-author wrote about how our uniquely super-inquisitve nature will no doubt lead to more human progress, but that it has already led to advances that could also lead to our downfall. He didn't at all expand the last point, but the magnitude of our inqusitiveness struck me then. It's stricken me like that before, but it's always just a fleeting realization, kind of like when I look right into the sun and then am forced to look away. Normally I attribute our progress/possible self-destruction to our need/search for power, but all that is just an arm of our inquisitve nature. With a brain three times the size of our chimp ancestors, we are much more curious, and thus yearn for much more than what is "mapped out for us." That's why we try so hard to exceed expectations, why we keep crossing borders, breaking limits, setting new goals. One begins to wonder why we ever stay within the lines of red tape in the first place. But then although we are curious, we are also very community-driven (though modern society tries to tell us otherwise). Humans would never have been able to survive if it weren't for community; they needed to protect one another in order to triumph against nature's forces and predators, since physically we are mostly inferior to the majority of the earth's predators. It is only our brain and a very few other physical assets that have issued us the upper hand. I think that part of our problem with the possibility of eventual self-destruction, is our recent inability to balance the need for community with inquisitiveness. We've begun to associate inquisitiveness with stark individuality, and have forgotten that family and community are essential to our survival. We've begun to weigh one against the other--funny how we lost sight of that. I know I did for a while. 

The other book I've been spending a lot of time reading in the past week is a History Book about the 70 greatest human voyages of all time; the voyages are listed chronologically and then backed up by archaeological and historical evidence. Very interesting stuff. Turns out Herodotus wasn't just the "Father of History;" he is also one of the world's most ancient inquisitive explorers!  I thought that was pretty cool; I don't know if anybody else would share my fascination, though. 

I feel like, lately, good old change has been slapping me across the face every morning to wake me up. I keep having to remind myself that I like challenges, that they're good for me, that overcoming obstacles is always worth it in the end---you know, all the good pep talk stuff. A new, messed up car, moving into a new apartment (hopefully), and socially--the graduation of the WPI guys. I think that's what reminded me of how much social connections really mean to me. I've gotten so close to those guys, so used to their being around, that now I feel pretty lost. Of course the most difficult thing now is realizing that Nick will no longer be in driving distance, and though I've been feeling pretty low because of it, I know we can totally work with the distance--because we need one another--and that's one of the most beautiful thing about human relations I think. 

Now let's talk about what seems to be a lack of true human relations. Waitressing (I warned you this post would be jumpy.) I have been working as a waitress for about a month now at the Original Pancake House in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It's good money, but it's an extremely tedious and exhausting job. Part of the reaon is of course being on your feet all day, but I found that even more tiring is feeling like a machine for 7 hours in a row. Not only do I feel like a machine when I'm waitressing, but I feel like I am serving machines as well. The entire process is completely mechanical: bring the water/syrup/table setup, take the drink orders, bring the drinks, take the order, take the menus, bring the food, bring the check, refill coffee, repeat. And try as I may to be friendly or chatty, there is minimal eye contact and very little interaction with the waitor or waitress. And that bothers me. It was so refreshing when only yesterday, after about a month of minimal interaction between customers and staff at the pancake house, I had a twenty minute long conversation about acupuncture and psychology with a father and daughter who came there for the first time. It was so refreshing that for the rest of the day I felt revitalized, like I hadn't just been standing on my feet for four hours, handling food in oppresive kitchen heat. I understand that waitressing is about serving people, but surely there should be more interaction, more humanity in it. No?

In other news, I am SUPER-excited about visiting the UK in less than two weeks :) I'm actually going to cut this post short because I'm realizing how much planning has yet to be done. Arrivederci!