http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/science/01alch.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 1, 2006
Transforming the Alchemists
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
PHILADELPHIA — Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.
There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base metals into pure gold. So alchemy fell into disrepute.
But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce.
“Experimentalism was one of alchemy’s hallmarks,” said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. “You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter.”
Bent over boiling crucibles in their shadowy laboratories, squeezing bellows before transformative flames and poring over obscure formulas, some alchemists stumbled on techniques and reactions of great value to later chemists. It was experimentation by trial and error, historians say, but it led to new chemicals and healing elixirs and laid the foundations of procedures like separating and refining, distilling and fermenting.
“What do chemists do? They like to make stuff,” Dr. Principe said. “Most chemists are interested not so much in theory as in making substances with particular properties. The emphasis on products was the same with some alchemists in the 17th century.”
Pamela H. Smith, a history professor at Columbia, said alchemy “was the matter theory of its day” and was “incredibly multilayered and therefore a powerful way of viewing nature.”
Yet on the whole, historians say, the widespread practice of alchemy impeded the rise of modern chemistry. While physics and astronomy marched slowly but inexorably from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the Scientific Revolution, chemistry slumbered under alchemy’s influence through what historians call its “postponed scientific revolution.”
The new research and revised interpretations concerning the role of alchemy in the history of chemistry as well as pharmacology and medicine were discussed at a three-day conference late last month at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. The meeting, attended by more than 80 scientists and historians, was organized by Dr. Principe, who said, “Only in the last 15 or 20 years have we learned how crucial alchemy was to the emergence of modern science.”
No one at the meeting tried to turn lead into gold. But the historians conjured up quite a lode of pyrite, fool’s gold, in the colorful characters they had found buried in previously neglected archives.
A few practicing alchemists, it seems, may have been certifiably mad — probably, like mad hatters, from sniffing the mercury they worked with.
One notable alchemist of the 16th century, a Swiss named Paracelsus, was not mad, but cantankerous and iconoclastic. “He was equal parts metallurgist, pharmacist, physician and crackpot,” Dr. Principe said.
Historians have found that Paracelsus made some advances in the detection of disorders by analyzing urine and claimed marvelous cures through alchemy.
In his chemical cosmology, he saw the world as a great distillation vessel and its changes as parallel to the operations carried out in a laboratory. But he recorded his material and spiritual ideas in the deliberately opaque writing typical of many alchemists, who expressed themselves in codes, symbols and emblems to conceal their findings from the uninitiated.
From his study, Dane Thor Daniel of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, concluded that Paracelsus’s unwavering objective was to find a Christian alternative to pagan natural philosophy — science.
Other alchemists were outright charlatans or fools, ridiculed in contemporary art and literature. On display in a gallery at the conference hall were several 17th-century paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists, who depicted alchemists toiling in the disorder of dark workshops and the poverty of futile quests. The paintings were said to be popular among Dutch burghers as a caution to anyone contemplating a life in alchemy instead of steady trade.
But many an alchemist drew support from royal courts where visions of newfound wealth and power danced in crowned heads. It was not always a happy alliance.
In 1601, Hans Heinrich Nüschler signed a contract with his patron, Duke Friedrich of Württemberg in Stuttgart, to demonstrate his process for extracting a substantial amount of gold from a sample of silver. The duke, keen on mining technology, promised a generous reward. Nüschler agreed to conduct the experiments at his own expense.
After several months of failure and mounting debt, the desperate alchemist resorted to fraud. He asked his brother to help by surreptitiously adding gold to the alchemical sample. His ploy exposed, Nüschler was tried, convicted and hanged.
“Only a handful of alchemists actually ended their careers on the gallows,” said Tara E. Nummedal, a historian at Brown. “But this underscored that alchemy was very serious business in the Holy Roman Empire.”
In her report, Dr. Nummedal concluded that the relationships of patrons and alchemists showed that “alchemy was a direct engagement with the political, economic, religious and intellectual realities of the early modern world.”
At the turn of the 17th century, King Henry IV of France surrounded himself with alchemists who sought to resurrect plants from their ashes and experimented with ways to extend the monarch’s life. Even the diplomats had orders to seek out the cryptic methods of alchemists in other countries.
An alchemist in the court of a German prince scored a profitable success quite by accident. Looking for materials for creating precious metals, Johann Friedrich Böttger analyzed a “white earth” that duplicated the ingredients for imported Chinese porcelain. The discovery was the beginning of the Dresden china industry.
Even geniuses of the first order, like Isaac Newton, found alchemy irresistible. It was an accepted method of seeking knowledge — or confirmation of received truth — in early modern history.
Newton, whose laws of gravity and optics ushered in modern physics, also delved into alchemy with relentless energy. His notebooks contain thousands of pages on alchemic thoughts and experiments over 30 years.
William R. Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, said many manuscripts had not received the scrutiny they deserved. He reported on a text in the Smithsonian Institution that he called “an overlooked gem.”
In these notebook entries, Newton cited the ideas of German alchemists for imitating the processes by which metals were generated in nature, deep inside the earth. These involved the familiar alchemical theory of metallic generation through interactions of sulfur and mercury.
But Newton, expanding on the theory, wrote: “These two spirits above all wander over the earth and bestow life on animals and vegetables. And they makes stones, salts and so forth.”
As Dr. Newman noted, “Thus we have passed from a theory of mere metallic generation to one that is intended to explain the totality of life on earth, as well as the production of all mineral materials, not just metallic ones.”
In this sense, Dr. Newman continued, Newton’s repeated experiments for the rest of his life were aimed at fulfilling the words of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, considered the founding text of alchemy in ancient Egypt. Newton expected to achieve what the tablet said was the una res, “the one thing” by which “the world was created” and with which one could “perform miracles.”
So it seems that Newton was no ordinary alchemist interested in making gold. He apparently aspired to a theory of alchemy more comprehensive than even his laws of gravity. But it could be said, in a paraphrase of Newton’s famous expression of modesty, that the giants on whose shoulders he stood in this endeavor did not measure up to his antecedents in physics and astronomy.
Newton’s alchemical bent was not out of character, Dr. Smith of Columbia said. “He was drawn to the occult,” she said. “Gravity for him was an occult force, and so was alchemy as an explanation of how things transform into other things.”
The British chemist Robert Boyle, a Newton contemporary, also had a foot on each side of the alchemy-modern science divide. He dabbled for years in an alchemical obsession, the search for the philosopher’s stone — the long-sought agent for transmuting lead to gold and unlocking other material and spiritual secrets. The stone was the unified theory of everything in that time.
Boyle wrote enviously in 1680 that “there exists conceal’d in the world” a group of chemists “of a much higher order able to transmute baser Metalls into perfect ones.”
At the same time, Boyle hurled harsh criticism at alchemists, particularly Paracelsians and the obscurity of their language and concepts. His purpose, he wrote, was to draw “the Chymists Doctrine out of their Dark and Smoakie Laboratories into open light” and to engage in “better Experiments and Arguments.”
Citing Boyle’s “swinging critique” and even earlier attacks on alchemical practices, Stephen Clucas, a University of London historian, raised questions that he said require deeper research by historians: Why did a “scientific revolution” in experimental chemistry not occur earlier in the 17th century? Why was a clear separation of alchemy and exact chemistry delayed until the 18th century?
Bruce T. Moran, a historian at the University of Nevada at Reno and the University College London, said it was not all that unreasonable at the time to be attracted to alchemy. “For a variety of practical and intellectual reasons,” Professor Moran said, “the idea of transforming one thing into another was to be expected.”
In everyday life, grapes were turned to wine and wheat to bread. A sour green apple grew into a sweet red one. It was in the nature of things to change, even metals. Miners and refiners already knew that lead ore almost always contains some silver, and silver ore almost always contains some gold. This implied that the metals changed one into the other over time.
In the booklet “Transmutations: Alchemy in Art,” written with Lloyd DeWitt, an art historian, Dr. Principe noted that in 1600, chemists knew of just seven metals — gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury. (Since then scientists have discovered another 60.) The original seven known metals had properties in common. They were shiny and, except for the liquid mercury, could be hammered, shaped and cast.
“The commonality of properties implied to early thinkers a commonality of composition,” Dr. Principe wrote., “And thus it was theorized that all the metals were composed of the same essential ingredients in different proportions and degrees of purity.”
“Even if in the modern view alchemy is all nonsense or very spiritual,” Dr. Moran said, “many people drawn to it for whatever reasons were actually creating very useful, practical chemistry and bringing to it an artisan know-how.”
The conference on the history of alchemy opened with a program of chamber music called “The Philosophers’ Tone.” The scholars delighted in Handel’s transmutation of Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist” into pure gold. Over coffee between sessions, they pondered new directions of research and topics for dissertations. They said, for example, that more attention should be paid to alchemy’s role in the history of medicine.
They also remarked, somewhat conspiratorially, over parallels between the misguided certainties and self-delusion of alchemy and today’s political and religious attacks on modern science. Of Boyle’s efforts to replicate experiments from alchemical writings, Joseph E. Early, a retired Georgetown University professor who studies the philosophy of chemistry, said, “He couldn’t do it any more than we could find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
Then the scholars departed Philadelphia, leaving the city’s lead-to-gold ratio unchanged.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
micheal morley project drawing year 3
Galileo and the Pendulum
In 1581, Galileo began studying at the University of Pisa University of Pisa, where his father hoped he would study medicine. While at the University of Pisa, Galileo began his study of the pendulum while, according to legend, he watched a suspended lamp swing back and forth in the cathedral of Pisa. However, it was not until 1602 that Galileo made his most notable discovery about the pendulum - the period (the time in which a pendulum swings back and forth) does not depend on the arc of the swing (the isochronism). Eventually, this discovery would lead to Galileo's further study of time intervals and the development of his idea for a
pendulum clock.
Text, design, and layout by Megan Wilde for the Electronic Text Center. This biography is based upon information culled from The Galileo Project website.
In 1581, Galileo began studying at the University of Pisa University of Pisa, where his father hoped he would study medicine. While at the University of Pisa, Galileo began his study of the pendulum while, according to legend, he watched a suspended lamp swing back and forth in the cathedral of Pisa. However, it was not until 1602 that Galileo made his most notable discovery about the pendulum - the period (the time in which a pendulum swings back and forth) does not depend on the arc of the swing (the isochronism). Eventually, this discovery would lead to Galileo's further study of time intervals and the development of his idea for a
pendulum clock.
Text, design, and layout by Megan Wilde for the Electronic Text Center. This biography is based upon information culled from The Galileo Project website.
project drawing; micheal morley year 3
GALLERI NICOLAI WALLNER
njalsgade 21 • building 15 • 2300 copenhagen s • denmark • phone:
+4532570970 • fax: +4532570971 • contact: nw@nicolaiwallner.com
http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists/joachim/morningtext.html
Morning of the Magicians by Joachim Koester
The history of the occult is also a history of the obscure. A history of ideas shrouded in secrecy seeping through the darkness of centuries, before suddenly resurfacing in the 'mystic' 1960s, and settling as a minor but constant presence within mainstream consumer culture. The 'occult' hasn't left many monuments, mostly dusty manuscripts found or 'rediscovered' in forgotten boxes in libraries or bookstores, or an occasional alchemical symbol engraved in a church or on a building, which surprisingly survived the vigilant eye of the Inquisition. Nor are the historical figures of this 'occult' easy to trace. Real identities are typically veiled by disguises and pseudonyms making me doubt if these people ever actually existed. Some relatively recent and verifiable sources can be mentioned, however. One is the French Socialist and Kabbalist, Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1857) better known as Eliphas Levi, who in his book "The History of Magic" (1861), brought together several different strands of esoteric thought - in effect, inventing occultism - and influenced artists like Arthur Rimbaud, J. K. Huysmans, André Breton and Erik Satie. Another is The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an early twentieth century esoteric society in London, and its renegade member, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley's portrait was included on the cover of The Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper" album, and his imagery finds its way into the songs of John Lennon and David Bowie among others revealing Crowley's position as a progenitor and avatar of the occult's thriving within the counter-culture.
On March 1, 1920, Aleister Crowley and a group of devotees, arrived at Cefalù, Sicily, and moved into a small house at the outskirts of town. The house, formerly called "Villa Santa Barbara", was renamed "The Abbey of Thelema", inspired by the French writer Rabelais, who in the concluding chapters of his book "Gargantua" (1534), describes an ideal community named "Theleme", which had the governing maxim "Do what you will". Though hedonistic, centered around Crowley's own version of magick - Kabbalah and yoga, with a particular empasis on tantric practices, hetero- and homosexual rituals, and the use of drugs to heighten intensity - life in the Abbey was often described as bleak. The house had neither gas nor electricity, and no plumbing. General conditions were unsanitary in the extreme, and in the summer the air was thick with flies, gnats and mosquitoes. With Crowley as a drugged, benevolent dictator at his best, and a gruesome, perverted manipulator at his worst, the days at the Abbey could be harsh. On top of that, the magical training was rigorous and unrelenting. Newcomers would spend the night in "La chambre des cauchemars" - "The Room of Nightmares" - its principle features - three large walls painted in fresco, representing earth, heaven and hell, depicting mostly demons, goblins and graphic sex scenes. Here, the new student of magick would experience "The nightside of Eden" primed by a "secret process" - probably a potent mixture of hashish and opium, administered by Crowley - as the walls came alive. The idea behind the ordeal was to contemplate every possible phantom that can assail the soul, to face the "Abyss of Horror", and thereby gain mastery over the mind. This approach was strikingly similar to what was practiced 43 years later in Timothy Leary's community, Catalina, founded in a vacant hotel in the sleepy Mexican beach town of Zihuatenjo, where members would sit alone in a lifeguard tower on the beach, dosed on LSD, summoning the forces of the 'irrational', trying to break through to the other side.
With a curriculum of ordeals like nights spent in "The Room of Nightmares", daily evocations in the Temple, and solitary and exhausting 'magical' retreats on the nearby cliff, coupled with the Spartan living conditions, it is perhaps evident why the "Abbey of Thelema" never attracted more than a small group of visitors and benefactors. So much for free love, and "Do what you will". Crowley was decidedly more lenient with his own sexual excesses than with others and there was a catch to the word 'will'. It also didn't help the cause of Thelema that a number of visitors left with a heroin habit as an unwanted souvenir. But in the end it was not the liberal use of drugs, the inherent contradictions in the teachings, or local prejudice that eventually led to the demise of the Abbey - the Cefalù locals did tolerate the community, though they were frequently shocked by the members' preference for bathing nude. It was the tragic death of Raoul Loveday - from enteric fever, contracted by drinking water from a mountain spring in the Cefalù countryside - and the ensuing storm in the British press against Crowley and the Abbey, which prompted headlines like "Orgies in Sicily", that led Mussolini to order the community closed. The directive came as part of a crackdown to suppress breeding grounds for dissent. If not exactly politically dangerous, Crowley and the others were at best undesirable. On April 22, 1923, the Abbey came to an end. The Italian authorities carefully covered the frescos, the magic circle on the floor and other traces of the previous activities with a coat of whitewash.
According to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the villa subsequently sat abandoned for more than 30 years. Maybe also forgotten - sleeping - until Anger in 1955 re-found the villa and obtained permission to remove the whitewash, which had "turned to stone". Anger spent three months working on the walls and floors, gradually revealing "all those hyper-psychedelic murals" in "The Room of Nightmares" and on doors and shutters, planning a photo shoot on location, in which the costume of the sorcerer in the dreamy film Children of Paradise (1945) - a blue velvet robe emblazoned with the word "ABRA" - would appear. Whether the shoot actually happened is unclear. Anger's documentary, made during his stay, was lost by Hulton Television. What still circulates is a series of photographs of the restored Abbey. One of them depicts Anger in conversation with the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey. On the back wall is Crowley's portrait and on a door, one of the newly uncovered paintings, a mountainous landscape made in a fantasy-like style. Anger had met Kinsey when the doctor approached him to purchase a print of his first film Fireworks. While Anger was an ardent follower of Crowley's magick, Kinsey thought that Crowley was "the most prominent fraud that ever lived". Kinsey nevertheless saw Crowley as a brilliant homoerotic writer, and was interested in discovering more information about Crowley's sex magick practices. More than likely it was Kinsey who funded Anger's stay in Cefalù.
Today Cefalù is not the small Sicilian fishing village Anger and Kinsey experienced in the fifties. Situated one hour from Palermo, it's better described as a booming beachside town, or as a guidebook states: "the premier destination on the Tyrrhenian coast". The change in size and appearance of the town, and the vague directions I had managed to obtain from an older book, made finding the Abbey a challenge. As I walked through the area, which once was "the southeastern outskirts" of Cefalù, I started to doubt whether the house still existed. This area did not share the characteristics of a place that might accommodate 'leftover' or 'ambiguous' spaces. Instead of vacant lots I found my way blocked by the barrier of a gated community, or newly built condos with BMWs and Porsches crowding the parking lots. It was only after hours of walking in circles, almost by chance and out of the corner of my eye, that I caught a glimpse of a caved-in rooof near the stadium. I realized I had been within meters of the house several times before, standing in the parking lot of the stadium, scanning the sloping hillside without noticing the house right next to me, hidden behind a wall of greenery and palm trees.
The house and garden of the Abbey were completely overgrown in a strangely evocative way. As I walked the faintly visible path to what was once the main entrance, I was so overwhelmed by the scene's dormant qualities that I had to pause. It seemed to me as if sediments, pieces of leftover narratives and ideas from the individuals that once passed through this place had formed knots, as tangled as the bushes and trees that where now taking over, creating a kind of sleeping presence.
I continued my exploration wondering if the Abbey could be seen as a sort of monument, when the gaping hole in the roof reminded me of Robert Smithson's site specific sculpture "Partially Buried Woodshed". Even though Smithson, in this and other pieces, intentionally worked with a narrow but very deep historical space, the "Partially Buried Woodshed" was transformed into a political landmark by someone adding the graffiti "May 4 Kent 70", to commemorate the four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest. The later attempts by Kent University to get rid of the Woodshed were in reality efforts to obscure this particular history, since what Smithson's ruin symbolized was viewed as an embarrassment. Eventually, the university planted a circle of trees around the Woodshed so it couldn't be seen from the road. And so, the monument dissolved and came to an end, discretely hidden by a veil of trees.
Thinking about this I climbed through the only window that was not boarded up, and made my way into "The Room of Nightmares". The room bore traces of vivid green paint and I recognized a few of the frescos from Anger's photographs, though in a much worse state. Its walls were scrawled with graffiti and the rest of the house a mess of tiles, dust and discarded furniture - it felt like being in a hollow place. As I climbed out, and stood in the garden again, I suddenly noticed how close the newly built houses were - just on the other side of the bushes.
Joachim Koester, 2005
njalsgade 21 • building 15 • 2300 copenhagen s • denmark • phone:
+4532570970 • fax: +4532570971 • contact: nw@nicolaiwallner.com
http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists/joachim/morningtext.html
Morning of the Magicians by Joachim Koester
The history of the occult is also a history of the obscure. A history of ideas shrouded in secrecy seeping through the darkness of centuries, before suddenly resurfacing in the 'mystic' 1960s, and settling as a minor but constant presence within mainstream consumer culture. The 'occult' hasn't left many monuments, mostly dusty manuscripts found or 'rediscovered' in forgotten boxes in libraries or bookstores, or an occasional alchemical symbol engraved in a church or on a building, which surprisingly survived the vigilant eye of the Inquisition. Nor are the historical figures of this 'occult' easy to trace. Real identities are typically veiled by disguises and pseudonyms making me doubt if these people ever actually existed. Some relatively recent and verifiable sources can be mentioned, however. One is the French Socialist and Kabbalist, Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1857) better known as Eliphas Levi, who in his book "The History of Magic" (1861), brought together several different strands of esoteric thought - in effect, inventing occultism - and influenced artists like Arthur Rimbaud, J. K. Huysmans, André Breton and Erik Satie. Another is The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an early twentieth century esoteric society in London, and its renegade member, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley's portrait was included on the cover of The Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper" album, and his imagery finds its way into the songs of John Lennon and David Bowie among others revealing Crowley's position as a progenitor and avatar of the occult's thriving within the counter-culture.
On March 1, 1920, Aleister Crowley and a group of devotees, arrived at Cefalù, Sicily, and moved into a small house at the outskirts of town. The house, formerly called "Villa Santa Barbara", was renamed "The Abbey of Thelema", inspired by the French writer Rabelais, who in the concluding chapters of his book "Gargantua" (1534), describes an ideal community named "Theleme", which had the governing maxim "Do what you will". Though hedonistic, centered around Crowley's own version of magick - Kabbalah and yoga, with a particular empasis on tantric practices, hetero- and homosexual rituals, and the use of drugs to heighten intensity - life in the Abbey was often described as bleak. The house had neither gas nor electricity, and no plumbing. General conditions were unsanitary in the extreme, and in the summer the air was thick with flies, gnats and mosquitoes. With Crowley as a drugged, benevolent dictator at his best, and a gruesome, perverted manipulator at his worst, the days at the Abbey could be harsh. On top of that, the magical training was rigorous and unrelenting. Newcomers would spend the night in "La chambre des cauchemars" - "The Room of Nightmares" - its principle features - three large walls painted in fresco, representing earth, heaven and hell, depicting mostly demons, goblins and graphic sex scenes. Here, the new student of magick would experience "The nightside of Eden" primed by a "secret process" - probably a potent mixture of hashish and opium, administered by Crowley - as the walls came alive. The idea behind the ordeal was to contemplate every possible phantom that can assail the soul, to face the "Abyss of Horror", and thereby gain mastery over the mind. This approach was strikingly similar to what was practiced 43 years later in Timothy Leary's community, Catalina, founded in a vacant hotel in the sleepy Mexican beach town of Zihuatenjo, where members would sit alone in a lifeguard tower on the beach, dosed on LSD, summoning the forces of the 'irrational', trying to break through to the other side.
With a curriculum of ordeals like nights spent in "The Room of Nightmares", daily evocations in the Temple, and solitary and exhausting 'magical' retreats on the nearby cliff, coupled with the Spartan living conditions, it is perhaps evident why the "Abbey of Thelema" never attracted more than a small group of visitors and benefactors. So much for free love, and "Do what you will". Crowley was decidedly more lenient with his own sexual excesses than with others and there was a catch to the word 'will'. It also didn't help the cause of Thelema that a number of visitors left with a heroin habit as an unwanted souvenir. But in the end it was not the liberal use of drugs, the inherent contradictions in the teachings, or local prejudice that eventually led to the demise of the Abbey - the Cefalù locals did tolerate the community, though they were frequently shocked by the members' preference for bathing nude. It was the tragic death of Raoul Loveday - from enteric fever, contracted by drinking water from a mountain spring in the Cefalù countryside - and the ensuing storm in the British press against Crowley and the Abbey, which prompted headlines like "Orgies in Sicily", that led Mussolini to order the community closed. The directive came as part of a crackdown to suppress breeding grounds for dissent. If not exactly politically dangerous, Crowley and the others were at best undesirable. On April 22, 1923, the Abbey came to an end. The Italian authorities carefully covered the frescos, the magic circle on the floor and other traces of the previous activities with a coat of whitewash.
According to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the villa subsequently sat abandoned for more than 30 years. Maybe also forgotten - sleeping - until Anger in 1955 re-found the villa and obtained permission to remove the whitewash, which had "turned to stone". Anger spent three months working on the walls and floors, gradually revealing "all those hyper-psychedelic murals" in "The Room of Nightmares" and on doors and shutters, planning a photo shoot on location, in which the costume of the sorcerer in the dreamy film Children of Paradise (1945) - a blue velvet robe emblazoned with the word "ABRA" - would appear. Whether the shoot actually happened is unclear. Anger's documentary, made during his stay, was lost by Hulton Television. What still circulates is a series of photographs of the restored Abbey. One of them depicts Anger in conversation with the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey. On the back wall is Crowley's portrait and on a door, one of the newly uncovered paintings, a mountainous landscape made in a fantasy-like style. Anger had met Kinsey when the doctor approached him to purchase a print of his first film Fireworks. While Anger was an ardent follower of Crowley's magick, Kinsey thought that Crowley was "the most prominent fraud that ever lived". Kinsey nevertheless saw Crowley as a brilliant homoerotic writer, and was interested in discovering more information about Crowley's sex magick practices. More than likely it was Kinsey who funded Anger's stay in Cefalù.
Today Cefalù is not the small Sicilian fishing village Anger and Kinsey experienced in the fifties. Situated one hour from Palermo, it's better described as a booming beachside town, or as a guidebook states: "the premier destination on the Tyrrhenian coast". The change in size and appearance of the town, and the vague directions I had managed to obtain from an older book, made finding the Abbey a challenge. As I walked through the area, which once was "the southeastern outskirts" of Cefalù, I started to doubt whether the house still existed. This area did not share the characteristics of a place that might accommodate 'leftover' or 'ambiguous' spaces. Instead of vacant lots I found my way blocked by the barrier of a gated community, or newly built condos with BMWs and Porsches crowding the parking lots. It was only after hours of walking in circles, almost by chance and out of the corner of my eye, that I caught a glimpse of a caved-in rooof near the stadium. I realized I had been within meters of the house several times before, standing in the parking lot of the stadium, scanning the sloping hillside without noticing the house right next to me, hidden behind a wall of greenery and palm trees.
The house and garden of the Abbey were completely overgrown in a strangely evocative way. As I walked the faintly visible path to what was once the main entrance, I was so overwhelmed by the scene's dormant qualities that I had to pause. It seemed to me as if sediments, pieces of leftover narratives and ideas from the individuals that once passed through this place had formed knots, as tangled as the bushes and trees that where now taking over, creating a kind of sleeping presence.
I continued my exploration wondering if the Abbey could be seen as a sort of monument, when the gaping hole in the roof reminded me of Robert Smithson's site specific sculpture "Partially Buried Woodshed". Even though Smithson, in this and other pieces, intentionally worked with a narrow but very deep historical space, the "Partially Buried Woodshed" was transformed into a political landmark by someone adding the graffiti "May 4 Kent 70", to commemorate the four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest. The later attempts by Kent University to get rid of the Woodshed were in reality efforts to obscure this particular history, since what Smithson's ruin symbolized was viewed as an embarrassment. Eventually, the university planted a circle of trees around the Woodshed so it couldn't be seen from the road. And so, the monument dissolved and came to an end, discretely hidden by a veil of trees.
Thinking about this I climbed through the only window that was not boarded up, and made my way into "The Room of Nightmares". The room bore traces of vivid green paint and I recognized a few of the frescos from Anger's photographs, though in a much worse state. Its walls were scrawled with graffiti and the rest of the house a mess of tiles, dust and discarded furniture - it felt like being in a hollow place. As I climbed out, and stood in the garden again, I suddenly noticed how close the newly built houses were - just on the other side of the bushes.
Joachim Koester, 2005
year 3 michael morley project drawing
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/20/arts/review-art-juxtaposing-the-new-from-all-over.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=print
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 20, 1989
Review/Art; Juxtaposing the New From All Over
By MICHAEL BRENSON, Special to The New York Times
''Magicians of the Earth,'' which opened Thursday at the Pompidou Center and La Villette, brings together contemporary art from all over the world, juxtaposing artists from New Guinea and Italy, Australia and England, Tibet and the United States. Every culture and countless artistic approaches have been appropriated in a spectacular post-Modern bazaar in which everything seems equally valid and available.
With 100 artists, half from Europe and the United States and half from the rest of the world, this is the largest art exhibition in Paris in recent memory. At a cost of roughly $5 million, it is also one of the most expensive.
The aim was an artistic event that would be truly international and less submissive to nationalism and newness than the most prominent international art extravaganzas, Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition promised to consider some pressing questions: Is there such a thing as world art? How should art from one culture be approached by another? Are there basic similarities as well as differences in the work of an American Conceptual artist, an African coffin maker and an Eskimo carver of whale bone?
Installed in two very distinct spaces, ''Magicians of the Earth'' seems like two different shows. About one-third of the artists are on the fifth-floor galleries of the Pompidou Center. There are strong works by artists like Jeff Wall and Nam June Paik, whose high-speed video installation, most of it in the shape of a beat-up truck, produces a collision between different worlds and times. But the gallery spaces are often tight, the juxtapositions jarring and the weakness of some work immediately apparent.
At the glass and steel hall of the former slaughterhouse at La Villette, on the outskirts of Paris, the space is grand, the feeling more open and the forgettable work less conspicuous. Each work has the air it needs, from the two big chunks of granite, just inside the entrance, in which Giovanni Anselmo has almost buried a compass, to the immense mud drawing by Richard Long at the other end, looming like a rose window or a red sun.
The exhibition was conceived by Jean-Hubert Martin, the director of the Pompidou Center. During four years of planning, curators traveled the world and arranged for some Western artists, including Lawrence Weiner, the American Conceptual artist who builds murals with words, to travel as well.
The selection of Western artists is questionable. While the exhibition is presented as open and fresh, many of the Americans and Europeans - including Sigmar Polke, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, John Baldessari, Tony Cragg, Daniel Buren, Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski and Francesco Clemente - are veterans of the international art wars.
While the catchy, sweet-sounding title of the show may sell tickets, Conceptual artists like Dennis Adams, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger -whose installation at the entrance to the show at the Pompidou Center asks, ''Who are the magicians of the earth?'' - definitely do not see their work as magic, and they are not interested in a mystique of the earth.
With few exceptions, including the French-born Louise Bourgeois, whose presence in this show is the most recognition she has ever received from her native city, the exhibition overlooks those American painters and sculptors whose study of African and Asian art and culture has helped make the present openness to non-Western cultures possible.
Perhaps most disturbing, there are no black American artists in the show, even though many have long been concerned with African art and even though in recent years world art has almost been their issue. The absence of Betye Saar, whose installations brew voodoo, offbeat materials and political commentary, is particularly distressing.
The exhibition has its moments. The photographic installation by Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean living in New York, treats the Western dumping of toxic wastes in Africa with the pointed understatement that has made him one of the best political artists around. The sculptural tombs of Yongping Huang, from Xiamen in China, were assembled with the gray muck of newspapers from throughout the world ground up in washing machines. In his free-spirited pictorial narratives, Cheri Samba from Zaire approaches himself, his culture and the West with a bemused, committed eye.
The exhibition attacks several stereotypes. One is that non-Western artists, particularly in Africa, are nameless. Another is that many cultures outside the West are static. Although only an expert could tell what distinguishes the bark paintings from New Guinea or the tantric paintings from Nepal from the works of their ancestors, every work in the show does reflect a changing relationship to the past. To look at the contorted ebony masks by John Fundi from Mozambique is to sense how many cultures are struggling with change.
The exhibition moves in so many directions, however, that it will satisfy no one. Not political artists who want Western attitudes toward the rest of the world confronted. Not theorists who believe everything from other cultures must be seen in context. Not those who believe in a need for the kind of formal resolution that is always a sign of a mature artistic sensibility and imagination.
In some ways, the exhibition is painful. You simply cannot juxtapose highly marketable Western artists who know all the curves and angles of the international art circuit with artists from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Australia, who know nothing of its strategies and traps and for whom every work is a life-and-death matter. These artists are too vulnerable.
For example, while a few Western artists wandered about the show the day of the opening, a number of artists from outside the West not only stood by their work but also seemed to guard it. Esther Mahlangu, an artist from South Africa, remained in front of her replica of a ceremonial house, wearing a dress bearing patterns and colors similar to those she painted on the walls and fence.
After Cyprien Tokoudagba from Benin built his temple and sculptural group inspired by voodoo ritual -complete with naked father, kneeling son and eager lions and snake - he sacrificed chickens to protect himself from any wrongdoing in building the work for this show. After completing their red sand installation, six aboriginal artists announced there was no magic in their work. They waited but it did not arrive.
Joe Ben Jr., a Navajo living in Arizona, is keenly aware of the cultural differences. He spoke with eloquence about his sharply delineated floor painting, made by scattering sand like seeds. He said that curators do not understand how to collect the sand so that the painting remains within it. When the exhibition ends, he said, he will get the painting himself and carry it back to the Southwest where he will put it under a plant and return it to ''the mother earth.''
What happens when many of the artists who make nonmarketable religious work go home and no Western art official calls again? Will they feel they have been exploited by a French curatorial vision?
The exhibition also reinforces as many stereotypes as it challenges. In general, the non-Western world emerges as a place where time moves slowly, criticism is directed toward others, faith is preserved and memory, ritual and the earth are trusted friends. The West, on the other hand, appears restless, self-important, weighed down by history, tending to romanticize different cultures and unable to stop doubting itself and questioning its relations with the rest of the world. With a different selection of artists, this gulf would not have existed.
It would be nice to say that ''Magicians of the Earth'' - which continues through Aug. 14 - is a noble, ground-breaking and spellbinding exhibition. It isn't.
A replica of a South African ceremonial house, by Esther Mahlangu, is in the exhibition in Paris (Agence France-Presse)
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May 20, 1989
Review/Art; Juxtaposing the New From All Over
By MICHAEL BRENSON, Special to The New York Times
''Magicians of the Earth,'' which opened Thursday at the Pompidou Center and La Villette, brings together contemporary art from all over the world, juxtaposing artists from New Guinea and Italy, Australia and England, Tibet and the United States. Every culture and countless artistic approaches have been appropriated in a spectacular post-Modern bazaar in which everything seems equally valid and available.
With 100 artists, half from Europe and the United States and half from the rest of the world, this is the largest art exhibition in Paris in recent memory. At a cost of roughly $5 million, it is also one of the most expensive.
The aim was an artistic event that would be truly international and less submissive to nationalism and newness than the most prominent international art extravaganzas, Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition promised to consider some pressing questions: Is there such a thing as world art? How should art from one culture be approached by another? Are there basic similarities as well as differences in the work of an American Conceptual artist, an African coffin maker and an Eskimo carver of whale bone?
Installed in two very distinct spaces, ''Magicians of the Earth'' seems like two different shows. About one-third of the artists are on the fifth-floor galleries of the Pompidou Center. There are strong works by artists like Jeff Wall and Nam June Paik, whose high-speed video installation, most of it in the shape of a beat-up truck, produces a collision between different worlds and times. But the gallery spaces are often tight, the juxtapositions jarring and the weakness of some work immediately apparent.
At the glass and steel hall of the former slaughterhouse at La Villette, on the outskirts of Paris, the space is grand, the feeling more open and the forgettable work less conspicuous. Each work has the air it needs, from the two big chunks of granite, just inside the entrance, in which Giovanni Anselmo has almost buried a compass, to the immense mud drawing by Richard Long at the other end, looming like a rose window or a red sun.
The exhibition was conceived by Jean-Hubert Martin, the director of the Pompidou Center. During four years of planning, curators traveled the world and arranged for some Western artists, including Lawrence Weiner, the American Conceptual artist who builds murals with words, to travel as well.
The selection of Western artists is questionable. While the exhibition is presented as open and fresh, many of the Americans and Europeans - including Sigmar Polke, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, John Baldessari, Tony Cragg, Daniel Buren, Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski and Francesco Clemente - are veterans of the international art wars.
While the catchy, sweet-sounding title of the show may sell tickets, Conceptual artists like Dennis Adams, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger -whose installation at the entrance to the show at the Pompidou Center asks, ''Who are the magicians of the earth?'' - definitely do not see their work as magic, and they are not interested in a mystique of the earth.
With few exceptions, including the French-born Louise Bourgeois, whose presence in this show is the most recognition she has ever received from her native city, the exhibition overlooks those American painters and sculptors whose study of African and Asian art and culture has helped make the present openness to non-Western cultures possible.
Perhaps most disturbing, there are no black American artists in the show, even though many have long been concerned with African art and even though in recent years world art has almost been their issue. The absence of Betye Saar, whose installations brew voodoo, offbeat materials and political commentary, is particularly distressing.
The exhibition has its moments. The photographic installation by Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean living in New York, treats the Western dumping of toxic wastes in Africa with the pointed understatement that has made him one of the best political artists around. The sculptural tombs of Yongping Huang, from Xiamen in China, were assembled with the gray muck of newspapers from throughout the world ground up in washing machines. In his free-spirited pictorial narratives, Cheri Samba from Zaire approaches himself, his culture and the West with a bemused, committed eye.
The exhibition attacks several stereotypes. One is that non-Western artists, particularly in Africa, are nameless. Another is that many cultures outside the West are static. Although only an expert could tell what distinguishes the bark paintings from New Guinea or the tantric paintings from Nepal from the works of their ancestors, every work in the show does reflect a changing relationship to the past. To look at the contorted ebony masks by John Fundi from Mozambique is to sense how many cultures are struggling with change.
The exhibition moves in so many directions, however, that it will satisfy no one. Not political artists who want Western attitudes toward the rest of the world confronted. Not theorists who believe everything from other cultures must be seen in context. Not those who believe in a need for the kind of formal resolution that is always a sign of a mature artistic sensibility and imagination.
In some ways, the exhibition is painful. You simply cannot juxtapose highly marketable Western artists who know all the curves and angles of the international art circuit with artists from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Australia, who know nothing of its strategies and traps and for whom every work is a life-and-death matter. These artists are too vulnerable.
For example, while a few Western artists wandered about the show the day of the opening, a number of artists from outside the West not only stood by their work but also seemed to guard it. Esther Mahlangu, an artist from South Africa, remained in front of her replica of a ceremonial house, wearing a dress bearing patterns and colors similar to those she painted on the walls and fence.
After Cyprien Tokoudagba from Benin built his temple and sculptural group inspired by voodoo ritual -complete with naked father, kneeling son and eager lions and snake - he sacrificed chickens to protect himself from any wrongdoing in building the work for this show. After completing their red sand installation, six aboriginal artists announced there was no magic in their work. They waited but it did not arrive.
Joe Ben Jr., a Navajo living in Arizona, is keenly aware of the cultural differences. He spoke with eloquence about his sharply delineated floor painting, made by scattering sand like seeds. He said that curators do not understand how to collect the sand so that the painting remains within it. When the exhibition ends, he said, he will get the painting himself and carry it back to the Southwest where he will put it under a plant and return it to ''the mother earth.''
What happens when many of the artists who make nonmarketable religious work go home and no Western art official calls again? Will they feel they have been exploited by a French curatorial vision?
The exhibition also reinforces as many stereotypes as it challenges. In general, the non-Western world emerges as a place where time moves slowly, criticism is directed toward others, faith is preserved and memory, ritual and the earth are trusted friends. The West, on the other hand, appears restless, self-important, weighed down by history, tending to romanticize different cultures and unable to stop doubting itself and questioning its relations with the rest of the world. With a different selection of artists, this gulf would not have existed.
It would be nice to say that ''Magicians of the Earth'' - which continues through Aug. 14 - is a noble, ground-breaking and spellbinding exhibition. It isn't.
A replica of a South African ceremonial house, by Esther Mahlangu, is in the exhibition in Paris (Agence France-Presse)
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Back to Top
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
micheal morley year 3 project drawing
http://world.std.com/~mica/phusor03.jpg
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://world.std.com/~mica/phusor03.jpg&imgrefurl=http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html&usg=__5RevRhcvwuPnVYTuM5E8ypYtG_w=&h=480&w=640&sz=32&hl=en&start=51&um=1&tbnid=mT5Vo20mIaGBGM:&tbnh=103&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dart%2Band%2Bcold%2Bfusion%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-nz%26sa%3DN%26start%3D36%26um%3D1
PHOTOGRAPH OF PHUSOR CATHODE SHOWS ASYMMETRIC ELECTROLYSIS OF A DIFFERENT TYPE OF COLD FUSION SYSTEM
(c) Dr. M. Swartz, JET Energy, Inc., JET Thermal Products
micheal morley research
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://grog.ca/images/coldfusion_time.jpg&imgrefurl=http://grog.ca/%3Fp%3D13&usg=__dlj0QBsqEH9M2ROAORuybQ9n1f8=&h=527&w=400&sz=42&hl=en&start=13&um=1&tbnid=PLjFeI4a45OVSM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=100&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcold%2Bfusion%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-nz%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get Your Fusion Power Hot or Cold — and Sooner than Later
Published by alexg on May 24th, 2007 in Emerging Science with 3 Comments
There seems to be a disappointing lack of knowledge and interest in fusion technology — at any temperature.
While the cold fusion research of Pons and Fleishman remains controversial and even embarassing in the eyes of the media, work continues on this technology. In fact, Italian and Japanese scientists just demonstrated successful tests which produced measurable — perhaps even considerable — releases of energy.
Oddly, days before the new announcements, Popular Science “decided” to run an article calling cold fusion “mythical” and termed the work of scientists worldwide as “false progress”. Coincidences no longer surprise me so it’s not the timing I hold suspect but the odd wording. Then again, PopSci has to remain “popular” with the cool kids.
In case you consider the term “cold fusion” a punchline to a science joke, it’s important to note that the original Pons and Fleishman cold fusion experiments have been reproduced and then modified by scientists around the world. It’s a real phenomenon. The reaction is measurable. And it’s happening on a tabletop. Nobody’s powering a car or even heating water sufficiently for tea, but there’s no telling where this research might lead.
Fusion creates power with little or no waste. It’s literally star power — in hot fusion we’re not inventing anything new to the universe. Cold fusion might be another matter but there is no reason to remain skeptical — it’s real. While hot fusion power plants will need massive infrastructure, requiring multi-nation cooperation (no surprise that progress has been slow), cold fusion might be the grassroots alternative which may be able to provide the kind of decentralized energy production people seem to unamimously desire.
After all, if you’re human you know what happens when power becomes concentrated.
Make energy production clean, decentralized, and inexpensive and you’ve got everyone’s attention– even car enthusiasts.
Cold or hot, fusion is the future — and it’s within our grasp. Now all we need is backbone… and more research.
Tags: cold fusion, electricity, government, hot fusion, nuclear fusion, power, science
« Extreme coincidences: My deck attacked while I was posting about UFOsLet’s Skip the War Path to Tech Progress »3 Responses to “Get Your Fusion Power Hot or Cold — and Sooner than Later”
Johnathan Chan Says:
May 25th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
You know decentralization is a great strategy for energy policy when you see what has happened in the computer industry. Just look at what happened when mainframe computers in the early 1960’s finally became “personal” computers spurred on by Apple and a whole host of PC innovators enabled by semiconductors. We now carry miniaturized computers around and hardly anyone realizes just what a miracle in miniaturization has occurred in just three decades.
The latest Japanese and Italian news is indeed another big positive step I feel, based on what I’m reading in the press and elsewhere. As one bright scientist remarked years ago ..”the future is often right in front of us we just don’t see it until many other breakthroughs combine to make new dreams become possible.” Fusion energy is one of those items that will dominate the future much like oil does in the world I see ahead.
Years ago Michael Faraday commented on semiconductors:
http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1833-first.html
In those days, who could have foreseen the world we have today dominated by semi-conductor electronics? There are many other fields of study with similar stories from Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Medicine, Computers, Software, etc.
Analogy of sorts: The future of any new technology is usually right before our eyes as an infant - at first ,crying and screaming as it is birthed onto the world wanting its diaper changed with parents that eventually tired of babysitting and changing during long nights of feeding. The infant grows and matures with a whole host of people helping, even schools and teachers. As it grows, stands on its own legs and forms relationships, it starts to determine it’s own destiny.
Sure, like any child it starts talking back to its parents and often rebels. The first signs of an independent identity forming as a child psychologist will tell you. Smart parents let this happen, but within reasonable bounds they feel comfortable with. Poor parents let the child run wild and give it the car keys to wreak havoc before it has the proper guidance to drive. The parent’s job is to be a wise counselor to help it gain a moral footing in society. “No Amy ..at 12 you can’t legally drive! ” Without that , a children can become uncontrollable. Eventually religious virtues start to appear as the child grows. But who’s virtues? Guess what , your child may want to pick his own religion perhaps. Ok. Afterall the young adult will become part of society anfc go to college and mix with many friends from all over the world ..right? With sufficient guidance and boundary setting, hopefully maturity comes and along with wisdom the young adult learns to adapt and fit in and contributes productively to society. If it hadn’t already started way back by 2 or 3 years old, it starts to beg for even money from mom and dad as it turns 18 and 19. Dad ..I’m a growing fusion reactor..give me $$ or else!!!”. But son “I thought we agreed you would find a job to bay for your schooling and you would raise your own college funds.” We’re on a budget son ..”you’ll have to contribute some of your own son, but we can help some.” Parents who just give money to their children often get spoiled children ..right?
As historians will tell you, the key individuals who saw where the new infants of technologies were going were the ones who helped shape its destiny and capitalized on it. Of course there are those like me, who just like to observe and comment and complain as I see someone else’s child cruising the neighborhood sneeking out to borrow the car at night , or get drunk while the parents aren’t watching, and start to go-online and meet millions of new friends the world over who will now help influence the child’s development and rearing process in ways we never dreamed of when we were children. !!!
Keep at it. Lord knows there are many angels worldwide trying to help this child grow up.
M. Simon Says:
May 25th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
For real power this is a better bet:
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
tesla motors inc Says:
December 9th, 2008 at 11:19 am
WASHINGTON - The three major U.S auto manufacturers are begging Congress for a $25 billion government rescue, while the legislation clings to life support in Congress and top lawmakers and the White House suffer from bailout fatigue.
Leave a Reply
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Website
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Get Your Fusion Power Hot or Cold — and Sooner than Later
Published by alexg on May 24th, 2007 in Emerging Science with 3 Comments
There seems to be a disappointing lack of knowledge and interest in fusion technology — at any temperature.
While the cold fusion research of Pons and Fleishman remains controversial and even embarassing in the eyes of the media, work continues on this technology. In fact, Italian and Japanese scientists just demonstrated successful tests which produced measurable — perhaps even considerable — releases of energy.
Oddly, days before the new announcements, Popular Science “decided” to run an article calling cold fusion “mythical” and termed the work of scientists worldwide as “false progress”. Coincidences no longer surprise me so it’s not the timing I hold suspect but the odd wording. Then again, PopSci has to remain “popular” with the cool kids.
In case you consider the term “cold fusion” a punchline to a science joke, it’s important to note that the original Pons and Fleishman cold fusion experiments have been reproduced and then modified by scientists around the world. It’s a real phenomenon. The reaction is measurable. And it’s happening on a tabletop. Nobody’s powering a car or even heating water sufficiently for tea, but there’s no telling where this research might lead.
Fusion creates power with little or no waste. It’s literally star power — in hot fusion we’re not inventing anything new to the universe. Cold fusion might be another matter but there is no reason to remain skeptical — it’s real. While hot fusion power plants will need massive infrastructure, requiring multi-nation cooperation (no surprise that progress has been slow), cold fusion might be the grassroots alternative which may be able to provide the kind of decentralized energy production people seem to unamimously desire.
After all, if you’re human you know what happens when power becomes concentrated.
Make energy production clean, decentralized, and inexpensive and you’ve got everyone’s attention– even car enthusiasts.
Cold or hot, fusion is the future — and it’s within our grasp. Now all we need is backbone… and more research.
Tags: cold fusion, electricity, government, hot fusion, nuclear fusion, power, science
« Extreme coincidences: My deck attacked while I was posting about UFOsLet’s Skip the War Path to Tech Progress »3 Responses to “Get Your Fusion Power Hot or Cold — and Sooner than Later”
Johnathan Chan Says:
May 25th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
You know decentralization is a great strategy for energy policy when you see what has happened in the computer industry. Just look at what happened when mainframe computers in the early 1960’s finally became “personal” computers spurred on by Apple and a whole host of PC innovators enabled by semiconductors. We now carry miniaturized computers around and hardly anyone realizes just what a miracle in miniaturization has occurred in just three decades.
The latest Japanese and Italian news is indeed another big positive step I feel, based on what I’m reading in the press and elsewhere. As one bright scientist remarked years ago ..”the future is often right in front of us we just don’t see it until many other breakthroughs combine to make new dreams become possible.” Fusion energy is one of those items that will dominate the future much like oil does in the world I see ahead.
Years ago Michael Faraday commented on semiconductors:
http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1833-first.html
In those days, who could have foreseen the world we have today dominated by semi-conductor electronics? There are many other fields of study with similar stories from Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Medicine, Computers, Software, etc.
Analogy of sorts: The future of any new technology is usually right before our eyes as an infant - at first ,crying and screaming as it is birthed onto the world wanting its diaper changed with parents that eventually tired of babysitting and changing during long nights of feeding. The infant grows and matures with a whole host of people helping, even schools and teachers. As it grows, stands on its own legs and forms relationships, it starts to determine it’s own destiny.
Sure, like any child it starts talking back to its parents and often rebels. The first signs of an independent identity forming as a child psychologist will tell you. Smart parents let this happen, but within reasonable bounds they feel comfortable with. Poor parents let the child run wild and give it the car keys to wreak havoc before it has the proper guidance to drive. The parent’s job is to be a wise counselor to help it gain a moral footing in society. “No Amy ..at 12 you can’t legally drive! ” Without that , a children can become uncontrollable. Eventually religious virtues start to appear as the child grows. But who’s virtues? Guess what , your child may want to pick his own religion perhaps. Ok. Afterall the young adult will become part of society anfc go to college and mix with many friends from all over the world ..right? With sufficient guidance and boundary setting, hopefully maturity comes and along with wisdom the young adult learns to adapt and fit in and contributes productively to society. If it hadn’t already started way back by 2 or 3 years old, it starts to beg for even money from mom and dad as it turns 18 and 19. Dad ..I’m a growing fusion reactor..give me $$ or else!!!”. But son “I thought we agreed you would find a job to bay for your schooling and you would raise your own college funds.” We’re on a budget son ..”you’ll have to contribute some of your own son, but we can help some.” Parents who just give money to their children often get spoiled children ..right?
As historians will tell you, the key individuals who saw where the new infants of technologies were going were the ones who helped shape its destiny and capitalized on it. Of course there are those like me, who just like to observe and comment and complain as I see someone else’s child cruising the neighborhood sneeking out to borrow the car at night , or get drunk while the parents aren’t watching, and start to go-online and meet millions of new friends the world over who will now help influence the child’s development and rearing process in ways we never dreamed of when we were children. !!!
Keep at it. Lord knows there are many angels worldwide trying to help this child grow up.
M. Simon Says:
May 25th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
For real power this is a better bet:
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
tesla motors inc Says:
December 9th, 2008 at 11:19 am
WASHINGTON - The three major U.S auto manufacturers are begging Congress for a $25 billion government rescue, while the legislation clings to life support in Congress and top lawmakers and the White House suffer from bailout fatigue.
Leave a Reply
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Mail (will not be published) (required)
Website
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research michael morley drawing yr 3
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Archive for June 2008
Cold-Fusion Demonstration a Success
In Uncategorized on June 12, 2008 at 1:31 am
On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and — for around a month — the world was under the impression that the world’s energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair’s results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did “not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion.”
This hasn’t prevented a handful of scientists persevering with cold-fusion research. They stand on the sidelines, diligently getting on with their experiments and, every so often, they wave their arms frantically when they think have made some progress.
Nobody notices, though. Why? These days the mainstream science media wouldn’t touch cold-fusion experiments with a barge pole. They have learnt their lesson from 1989, and now treat “cold fusion” as a byword for bad science. Most scientists agree, and some even go so far as to brand cold fusion a “pathological science” — science that is plagued by falsehood but practiced nonetheless.
There is a reasonable chance that the naysayers are (to some extent) right and that cold fusion experiments in their current form will not amount to anything. But it’s too easy to be drawn in by the crowd and overlook a genuine breakthrough, which is why I’d like to let you know that one of the handful of diligent cold-fusion practitioners has started waving his arms again. His name is Yoshiaki Arata, a retired (now emeritus) physics professor at Osaka University, Japan. Yesterday, Arata performed a demonstration at Osaka of one his cold-fusion experiments.
Although I couldn’t attend the demonstration (it was in Japanese, anyway), I know that it was based on reports published here and here. Essentially Arata, together with his co-researcher Yue-Chang Zhang, uses pressure to force deuterium (D) gas into an evacuated cell containing a sample of palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide (ZrO2–Pd). He claims the deuterium is absorbed by the sample in large amounts — producing what he calls dense or “pynco” deuterium — so that the deuterium nuclei become close enough together to fuse.
So, did this method work yesterday? Here’s an email I received from Akito Takahashi, a colleague of Arata’s, this morning:
“Arata’s demonstration…was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there…Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers…This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata’s lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active.”
I also received a detailed account from Jed Rothwell, who is editor of the US site LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and who has long thought that cold-fusion research shows promise. He said that, after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.
Rothwell also pointed out that Arata performed three other control experiments: hydrogen with the ZrO2–Pd sample (no lasting heat); deuterium with no ZrO2–Pd sample (no heating at all); and hydrogen with no ZrO2–Pd sample (again, no heating). Nevertheless, Rothwell added that Arata neglected to mention certain details, such as the method of calibration. “His lecture was very difficult to follow, even for native speakers, so I may have overlooked something,” he wrote.
It will be interesting to see what other scientists think of Arata’s demonstration. Last week I got in touch with Augustin McEvoy, a retired condensed-matter physicist who has studied Arata’s previous cold-fusion experiments in detail. He said that he has found “no conclusive evidence of excess heat” before, though he would like to know how this demonstration turned out.
I will update you if and when I get any more information about the demonstration (apparently there might be some videos circulating soon). For now, though, you can form your own opinions about the reliability of cold fusion.
Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 23, 2008 3:05 PM | Permalink
▶ View 1 Commentreprap
RepRap - Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself
In Uncategorized on June 11, 2008 at 9:07 pm
RepRap - Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself
Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.
By News Account
Created Jun 3 2008 - 11:29pm
Technology
Dr Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in engineering in the Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath, has created RepRap, an open source prototype machine that has succeeded in making a duplicate of itself - by printing its own parts and building a clone.
RepRap is short for replicating rapid-prototyper. RepRap employs a technique called ‘additive fabrication’. The machine works a bit like a printer, but rather than squirting ink onto paper, it puts down thin layers of molten plastic which solidify. These layers are built up to make useful three-dimensional (3D) objects.
RepRap has, so far, been capable of making every day plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. Now, the machine has also succeeded in copying all its own 3D-printed parts.
These parts have been printed and assembled by RepRap team member Vik Olliver in Auckland, New Zealand, into a new RepRap machine that can replicate the same set of parts for yet another RepRap machine and so on ad infinitum. While 3D printers have been available commercially for about 25 years, RepRap is the first that can essentially print itself.
The machine will be exhibited publicly at the Cheltenham Science Festival (4-8 June 2008).
Dr Bowyer said: “These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn’t they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too?
“The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too.”
Recently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manage at Google Inc, encouraged people to: “Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.”
Sir James Dyson, Chief Executive of the Dyson Group, said: “RepRap is a different, revolutionary way of approaching invention. It could allow people to change the ergonomics of a design to their own specific needs.”
Dr Bowyer hopes people will come to the Cheltenham Science Festival and see both the ‘parent’ and the ‘child’ RepRap machines in action for the first time together.
“RepRap is the most enjoyable research project I’ve ever run,” he said. “And without the many talented and selfless volunteers the RepRap project has all round the world, it would have never succeeded so quickly.”
Complete plans for the prototype RepRap 3D printer and detailed tutorials to aid motivated amateurs (and professionals) in assembling one are available to everyone free at the RepRap website (details below). The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about £300. All those non-printed parts can be bought at hardware shops or from online stores.
Adrian and several of the other Reprap team members will be available to answer questions and exhibit the parent and child Darwin printers in operation at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 4 – 8 June 2008.
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Archive for June 2008
Cold-Fusion Demonstration a Success
In Uncategorized on June 12, 2008 at 1:31 am
On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and — for around a month — the world was under the impression that the world’s energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair’s results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did “not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion.”
This hasn’t prevented a handful of scientists persevering with cold-fusion research. They stand on the sidelines, diligently getting on with their experiments and, every so often, they wave their arms frantically when they think have made some progress.
Nobody notices, though. Why? These days the mainstream science media wouldn’t touch cold-fusion experiments with a barge pole. They have learnt their lesson from 1989, and now treat “cold fusion” as a byword for bad science. Most scientists agree, and some even go so far as to brand cold fusion a “pathological science” — science that is plagued by falsehood but practiced nonetheless.
There is a reasonable chance that the naysayers are (to some extent) right and that cold fusion experiments in their current form will not amount to anything. But it’s too easy to be drawn in by the crowd and overlook a genuine breakthrough, which is why I’d like to let you know that one of the handful of diligent cold-fusion practitioners has started waving his arms again. His name is Yoshiaki Arata, a retired (now emeritus) physics professor at Osaka University, Japan. Yesterday, Arata performed a demonstration at Osaka of one his cold-fusion experiments.
Although I couldn’t attend the demonstration (it was in Japanese, anyway), I know that it was based on reports published here and here. Essentially Arata, together with his co-researcher Yue-Chang Zhang, uses pressure to force deuterium (D) gas into an evacuated cell containing a sample of palladium dispersed in zirconium oxide (ZrO2–Pd). He claims the deuterium is absorbed by the sample in large amounts — producing what he calls dense or “pynco” deuterium — so that the deuterium nuclei become close enough together to fuse.
So, did this method work yesterday? Here’s an email I received from Akito Takahashi, a colleague of Arata’s, this morning:
“Arata’s demonstration…was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there…Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers…This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata’s lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active.”
I also received a detailed account from Jed Rothwell, who is editor of the US site LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and who has long thought that cold-fusion research shows promise. He said that, after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.
Rothwell also pointed out that Arata performed three other control experiments: hydrogen with the ZrO2–Pd sample (no lasting heat); deuterium with no ZrO2–Pd sample (no heating at all); and hydrogen with no ZrO2–Pd sample (again, no heating). Nevertheless, Rothwell added that Arata neglected to mention certain details, such as the method of calibration. “His lecture was very difficult to follow, even for native speakers, so I may have overlooked something,” he wrote.
It will be interesting to see what other scientists think of Arata’s demonstration. Last week I got in touch with Augustin McEvoy, a retired condensed-matter physicist who has studied Arata’s previous cold-fusion experiments in detail. He said that he has found “no conclusive evidence of excess heat” before, though he would like to know how this demonstration turned out.
I will update you if and when I get any more information about the demonstration (apparently there might be some videos circulating soon). For now, though, you can form your own opinions about the reliability of cold fusion.
Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 23, 2008 3:05 PM | Permalink
▶ View 1 Commentreprap
RepRap - Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself
In Uncategorized on June 11, 2008 at 9:07 pm
RepRap - Open Source Machine ‘Prints’ 3-D Objects, Including Copies Of Itself
Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.
By News Account
Created Jun 3 2008 - 11:29pm
Technology
Dr Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in engineering in the Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath, has created RepRap, an open source prototype machine that has succeeded in making a duplicate of itself - by printing its own parts and building a clone.
RepRap is short for replicating rapid-prototyper. RepRap employs a technique called ‘additive fabrication’. The machine works a bit like a printer, but rather than squirting ink onto paper, it puts down thin layers of molten plastic which solidify. These layers are built up to make useful three-dimensional (3D) objects.
RepRap has, so far, been capable of making every day plastic goods such as door handles, sandals and coat hooks. Now, the machine has also succeeded in copying all its own 3D-printed parts.
These parts have been printed and assembled by RepRap team member Vik Olliver in Auckland, New Zealand, into a new RepRap machine that can replicate the same set of parts for yet another RepRap machine and so on ad infinitum. While 3D printers have been available commercially for about 25 years, RepRap is the first that can essentially print itself.
The machine will be exhibited publicly at the Cheltenham Science Festival (4-8 June 2008).
Dr Bowyer said: “These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn’t they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too?
“The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too.”
Recently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manage at Google Inc, encouraged people to: “Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.”
Sir James Dyson, Chief Executive of the Dyson Group, said: “RepRap is a different, revolutionary way of approaching invention. It could allow people to change the ergonomics of a design to their own specific needs.”
Dr Bowyer hopes people will come to the Cheltenham Science Festival and see both the ‘parent’ and the ‘child’ RepRap machines in action for the first time together.
“RepRap is the most enjoyable research project I’ve ever run,” he said. “And without the many talented and selfless volunteers the RepRap project has all round the world, it would have never succeeded so quickly.”
Complete plans for the prototype RepRap 3D printer and detailed tutorials to aid motivated amateurs (and professionals) in assembling one are available to everyone free at the RepRap website (details below). The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about £300. All those non-printed parts can be bought at hardware shops or from online stores.
Adrian and several of the other Reprap team members will be available to answer questions and exhibit the parent and child Darwin printers in operation at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 4 – 8 June 2008.
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
micheal morley project drawing year 3
the institute for figuring
http://www.theiff.org/reef/index.html
micheal morley project drawing year 3
http://www.theiff.org/reef/index.html
crocheted hyperbolic reef gallery
michela morley year 3 project drawing, article
Hyperbolic crochet coral reef
-
Crochet reef contributors
- Ernst Haeckel, Patron Saint
- Daina Taimina, Inventor of Hyperbolic Crochet
- Christine Wertheim, Crochet Reef Co-Creator
- Margaret Wertheim, Crochet Reef Co-Creator
- Evelyn Hardin
- Sarah Simons
- Ildiko Szabo
- Kathleen Greco
- Dr. Axt's Reefer Madness
- Aviva Alter
- Sue Von Ohlsen
- Nadia Severns
- Helle Jorgensen
- Inga Hamilton
- Helen Bernasconi
- Rebecca Peapples
- Marianne Midelburg
- Eleanor Kent
- Other Crochet Reefs
OTHER WEB RESOURCES
- Crochet Reef Press Archive
- Crochet Reef Bulletins Archive
//
About the Crochet Coral Reef
The Institute For Figuring is crocheting a coral reef: a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.
Designed and curated by IFF co-directors:
Christine and Margaret Wertheim
"Crochet Coral and Anemone Garden" with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg.
Photos by Alyssa Gorelick.
One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland like a psychadelic serpent, a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile monster that scientists now believe the reef will be devastated in coming years. As a homage to the Great One, IFF co-directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim - who grew up in Queensland - have instigated a project to crochet a woolen reef. Using the techniques of hyperbolic crochet discovered by mathematician Dr. Daina Taimina, the Institute has been evolving a wide taxonomy of reef-life forms - loopy "kelps", fringed "anemones", and curlicued "corals." While the process that brings these models into being is algorithmic, endless permutations of the underlying formulae result in a constantly surprising panoply of shapes. The quality of yarn, style of stitch and tightness of the crochet all affect the finished model so that each is as individual as a living organism. As a whole, the Crochet Reef is made up of various different “sub-reefs,” each with its own colors and styling: there is the Red Reef, the Blue Reef, the Bleached Reef, the Branched Anemone Garden, and our largest work, The Ladies’ Silurian Atoll, a ring-shaped installation with close to 1000 individual crochet forms made by dozens of contributors from around the world. In addition to these woolen sub-reefs is the massive Toxic Reef, crocheted from yarn and plastic trash.
Crochet Hyperbolic Reef Gallery
Large scale anemone with brain coral head.
Each model results from the application of an iterative recipe repeated over and over. Like fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set, these forms come into being only through the process of doing some “boring” step again and again and again. Though experience often serves as a guide, there is no way to know in advance what a specific algorithm will achieve and we have many times been surprised when seemingly insignificant changes in the underlying pattern have led to fundamentally new results. This is, in a very real sense, a kind of experimental mathematics and we invite crocheters everywhere to join us in exploring the myriad possibilities inherent in these techniques.
For more indepth information, see the Institute's book A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space.
Orange brain coral with urchins.
Getting started on your own hyperbolic models is easy. The basic insight is to understand that these forms result from the simple process of increasing the number of stitches in every row. The more often you increase stitches the faster the model will grow and the more crenellated will be finished form. Models can begin with a simple line, resulting in a hyperbolic plane; or from a single point with the crochet spiraling around to gradually fan out like a cone, resulting in what is known as a pseudosphere. You may also begin from a circle, which will produce a tubular, bell shaped, or trumpeted configuration. Once you start to experiment, the variety is endless. We recommend that beginners read the IFF’s online exhibit on Hyperbolic Space and study the introductory gallery for helpful tips.
Crochet coral and anemone garden.
As you explore, be playful – don’t worry about sticking too closely to the formal rules, though it’s interesting and important to understand what the rules do. Try things out for fun. Experiment with different types of yarn. Try mixing yarns together, say a thick worsted and a fine mohair. Try varying the rate of increase in a single model. Consider using string, plastic and wire or anything else that takes your fancy. Try felting – throw the finished model in a washing machine with really hot water and let it churn for half an hour. This only works with pure wool (acrylics and cotton will not felt) but the results are wild! Finally – send us photos of your models and we will put them online in our People’s Hyperbolic Gallery.
Get involved
We invite crocheters everywhere to contribute models to the reef. This is a collective project and all contributors will be fully acknowledged online and in future exhibitions. If you want to send a model please contact us by email .
© 2008 The Institute for Figuring
-
Crochet reef contributors
- Ernst Haeckel, Patron Saint
- Daina Taimina, Inventor of Hyperbolic Crochet
- Christine Wertheim, Crochet Reef Co-Creator
- Margaret Wertheim, Crochet Reef Co-Creator
- Evelyn Hardin
- Sarah Simons
- Ildiko Szabo
- Kathleen Greco
- Dr. Axt's Reefer Madness
- Aviva Alter
- Sue Von Ohlsen
- Nadia Severns
- Helle Jorgensen
- Inga Hamilton
- Helen Bernasconi
- Rebecca Peapples
- Marianne Midelburg
- Eleanor Kent
- Other Crochet Reefs
OTHER WEB RESOURCES
- Crochet Reef Press Archive
- Crochet Reef Bulletins Archive
//
About the Crochet Coral Reef
The Institute For Figuring is crocheting a coral reef: a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.
Designed and curated by IFF co-directors:
Christine and Margaret Wertheim
"Crochet Coral and Anemone Garden" with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg.
Photos by Alyssa Gorelick.
One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland like a psychadelic serpent, a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile monster that scientists now believe the reef will be devastated in coming years. As a homage to the Great One, IFF co-directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim - who grew up in Queensland - have instigated a project to crochet a woolen reef. Using the techniques of hyperbolic crochet discovered by mathematician Dr. Daina Taimina, the Institute has been evolving a wide taxonomy of reef-life forms - loopy "kelps", fringed "anemones", and curlicued "corals." While the process that brings these models into being is algorithmic, endless permutations of the underlying formulae result in a constantly surprising panoply of shapes. The quality of yarn, style of stitch and tightness of the crochet all affect the finished model so that each is as individual as a living organism. As a whole, the Crochet Reef is made up of various different “sub-reefs,” each with its own colors and styling: there is the Red Reef, the Blue Reef, the Bleached Reef, the Branched Anemone Garden, and our largest work, The Ladies’ Silurian Atoll, a ring-shaped installation with close to 1000 individual crochet forms made by dozens of contributors from around the world. In addition to these woolen sub-reefs is the massive Toxic Reef, crocheted from yarn and plastic trash.
Crochet Hyperbolic Reef Gallery
Large scale anemone with brain coral head.
Each model results from the application of an iterative recipe repeated over and over. Like fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set, these forms come into being only through the process of doing some “boring” step again and again and again. Though experience often serves as a guide, there is no way to know in advance what a specific algorithm will achieve and we have many times been surprised when seemingly insignificant changes in the underlying pattern have led to fundamentally new results. This is, in a very real sense, a kind of experimental mathematics and we invite crocheters everywhere to join us in exploring the myriad possibilities inherent in these techniques.
For more indepth information, see the Institute's book A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space.
Orange brain coral with urchins.
Getting started on your own hyperbolic models is easy. The basic insight is to understand that these forms result from the simple process of increasing the number of stitches in every row. The more often you increase stitches the faster the model will grow and the more crenellated will be finished form. Models can begin with a simple line, resulting in a hyperbolic plane; or from a single point with the crochet spiraling around to gradually fan out like a cone, resulting in what is known as a pseudosphere. You may also begin from a circle, which will produce a tubular, bell shaped, or trumpeted configuration. Once you start to experiment, the variety is endless. We recommend that beginners read the IFF’s online exhibit on Hyperbolic Space and study the introductory gallery for helpful tips.
Crochet coral and anemone garden.
As you explore, be playful – don’t worry about sticking too closely to the formal rules, though it’s interesting and important to understand what the rules do. Try things out for fun. Experiment with different types of yarn. Try mixing yarns together, say a thick worsted and a fine mohair. Try varying the rate of increase in a single model. Consider using string, plastic and wire or anything else that takes your fancy. Try felting – throw the finished model in a washing machine with really hot water and let it churn for half an hour. This only works with pure wool (acrylics and cotton will not felt) but the results are wild! Finally – send us photos of your models and we will put them online in our People’s Hyperbolic Gallery.
Get involved
We invite crocheters everywhere to contribute models to the reef. This is a collective project and all contributors will be fully acknowledged online and in future exhibitions. If you want to send a model please contact us by email .
© 2008 The Institute for Figuring
micheal morley year 3
well have realised that the the anti matter space is 80 percecnt and the matter space is 20 percent so am wondering abit how to incorporate this in my artwork
possibly wont though kindof like the idea of working on one for 80 percent of the time and the other 20...also thinking of the negative space side of anti-matter like a film negative or something i guess anyway i dont need to be a scientist so i guess accuracy is not completely necessarybut it would be good to be mainly accurate... though portraying quantum physics with a piece of wool is a bit of a conundrum in itself....the crochet coral reef is very interesting... parallelling the process and evolution of the crochet pieces coming in, to the process and evolution of DNA... nice... from www.inhabitat.com/2008/03/15/crochet-coral-reef/
possibly wont though kindof like the idea of working on one for 80 percent of the time and the other 20...also thinking of the negative space side of anti-matter like a film negative or something i guess anyway i dont need to be a scientist so i guess accuracy is not completely necessarybut it would be good to be mainly accurate... though portraying quantum physics with a piece of wool is a bit of a conundrum in itself....the crochet coral reef is very interesting... parallelling the process and evolution of the crochet pieces coming in, to the process and evolution of DNA... nice... from www.inhabitat.com/2008/03/15/crochet-coral-reef/
Own This City tme out new york issue /653 April 2 -8 2008
Coral fixation
Reef madness strikes the World Financial Center.
By Adam Rathe
WHO NEEDS ANEMONES? Crocheted coral raises awareness and eyebrows.
Photograph: Aaron and Cassandra Ott/Institute for Figuring
Some people help the environment by reusing grocery bags or driving a Prius; Margaret Wertheim uses crocheting needles. Along with her twin sister, Christine, the 49-year-old Los Angeleno helms the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project, a handicraft-science hybrid that raises awareness about the world’s disappearing reefs through weird, woolly simulacra. Starting Monday 7, the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden will showcase thousands of feet of the project’s crocheted coral, sea urchins, kelp and the like. (A smaller display unfurls at NYU’s Broadway Windows on Sunday 6.)
Born in Queensland, Australia, the Wertheim sisters have long been concerned with the future of their homeland wonder, the 135,000-square-mile Great Barrier Reef, which is under constant threat from pollution and rising temperatures. But “hyperbolic crochet”—a method of re-creating, through knitting, the natural surface patterns found in coral and other crenelated organisms—was only discovered in 1997 by Cornell researcher Daina Taimina. “Mathematicians thought you couldn’t reproduce hyperbolic geometry, but Daina showed you could do it with crocheting—if you increased your stitch at a steady rate,” explains Margaret, a science writer by trade. Along with Christine, she’s also a founder of the Institute for Figuring (theiff.org), which explores artistic applications for science and math.
The twins used Taimina’s formula for some time, but monotony took its toll. “One day Christine shouts, ‘I’m sick of mathematical perfection!’ and started making her stitches more random, which made the pieces look a lot more organic,” says Margaret. “Nothing in nature is ever perfect.”
In 2005, the pair started training a core group of 15—mostly conservationists who learned to crochet—and a hobby blossomed into activism. Then it became something of an obsession: “These little fluffy things have taken over our lives; it’s like something out of ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’!” jokes Margaret. “We’ve got probably 3,000 models now.” The smaller, one-inch pieces can be completed in as little as 30 minutes, but larger models take substantially longer. (Christine has been working on one for three years.)
Both the art and preservation worlds have taken notice of the project, with institutions like Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center hosting exhibitions. A reef made of textile coral sewn by Windy City activists will be on display at the World Financial Center show, as will one crocheted by a group of 100 New Yorkers (some seasoned crafters, others new to the trade) and a yarn-and-trash model called the Toxic Reef. “People ask if this is art-and-crafts or science or consciousness-raising or a feminist statement. It’s all of that—that’s the beauty,” says Margaret.
Also on view in the Winter Garden is Helle Jorgensen’s Rubbish Vortex, a crocheted-plastic-bag representation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a floating garbage dump that’s been accumulating man-made detritus in the middle of the Pacific Ocean since the 1950s. (It’s currently twice the size of Texas.) “Coral reefs are under stress—we’ve got to get the message of conservation out there,” says American Museum of Natural History marine biologist Kate Holmes, who will join Margaret at a lecture at the AMNH on Tuesday 8. “The crochet project takes a new and interesting twist by looking at the mathematics of coral. It’s another entrance point…and it allows us to involve craftspeople who might not be into conservation.”
Margaret is confident that with two New York shows and an upcoming exhibit in London, her and her sister’s efforts are resonating with an increasingly eco-conscious public. “The crocheted reef will have a long lifespan,” she predicts. “But let’s hope not longer than the reefs themselves.”
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is on display at the World Financial Center Mon 7–Aug 31, 2008
.www.timeout.com/.../28221/coral-fixation
Reef madness strikes the World Financial Center.
By Adam Rathe
WHO NEEDS ANEMONES? Crocheted coral raises awareness and eyebrows.
Photograph: Aaron and Cassandra Ott/Institute for Figuring
Some people help the environment by reusing grocery bags or driving a Prius; Margaret Wertheim uses crocheting needles. Along with her twin sister, Christine, the 49-year-old Los Angeleno helms the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project, a handicraft-science hybrid that raises awareness about the world’s disappearing reefs through weird, woolly simulacra. Starting Monday 7, the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden will showcase thousands of feet of the project’s crocheted coral, sea urchins, kelp and the like. (A smaller display unfurls at NYU’s Broadway Windows on Sunday 6.)
Born in Queensland, Australia, the Wertheim sisters have long been concerned with the future of their homeland wonder, the 135,000-square-mile Great Barrier Reef, which is under constant threat from pollution and rising temperatures. But “hyperbolic crochet”—a method of re-creating, through knitting, the natural surface patterns found in coral and other crenelated organisms—was only discovered in 1997 by Cornell researcher Daina Taimina. “Mathematicians thought you couldn’t reproduce hyperbolic geometry, but Daina showed you could do it with crocheting—if you increased your stitch at a steady rate,” explains Margaret, a science writer by trade. Along with Christine, she’s also a founder of the Institute for Figuring (theiff.org), which explores artistic applications for science and math.
The twins used Taimina’s formula for some time, but monotony took its toll. “One day Christine shouts, ‘I’m sick of mathematical perfection!’ and started making her stitches more random, which made the pieces look a lot more organic,” says Margaret. “Nothing in nature is ever perfect.”
In 2005, the pair started training a core group of 15—mostly conservationists who learned to crochet—and a hobby blossomed into activism. Then it became something of an obsession: “These little fluffy things have taken over our lives; it’s like something out of ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’!” jokes Margaret. “We’ve got probably 3,000 models now.” The smaller, one-inch pieces can be completed in as little as 30 minutes, but larger models take substantially longer. (Christine has been working on one for three years.)
Both the art and preservation worlds have taken notice of the project, with institutions like Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center hosting exhibitions. A reef made of textile coral sewn by Windy City activists will be on display at the World Financial Center show, as will one crocheted by a group of 100 New Yorkers (some seasoned crafters, others new to the trade) and a yarn-and-trash model called the Toxic Reef. “People ask if this is art-and-crafts or science or consciousness-raising or a feminist statement. It’s all of that—that’s the beauty,” says Margaret.
Also on view in the Winter Garden is Helle Jorgensen’s Rubbish Vortex, a crocheted-plastic-bag representation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a floating garbage dump that’s been accumulating man-made detritus in the middle of the Pacific Ocean since the 1950s. (It’s currently twice the size of Texas.) “Coral reefs are under stress—we’ve got to get the message of conservation out there,” says American Museum of Natural History marine biologist Kate Holmes, who will join Margaret at a lecture at the AMNH on Tuesday 8. “The crochet project takes a new and interesting twist by looking at the mathematics of coral. It’s another entrance point…and it allows us to involve craftspeople who might not be into conservation.”
Margaret is confident that with two New York shows and an upcoming exhibit in London, her and her sister’s efforts are resonating with an increasingly eco-conscious public. “The crocheted reef will have a long lifespan,” she predicts. “But let’s hope not longer than the reefs themselves.”
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is on display at the World Financial Center Mon 7–Aug 31, 2008
.www.timeout.com/.../28221/coral-fixation
drawing project with micheal morley year 3
Crocheters Gone Wild
Craftivists join forces for an homage to the Great Barrier Reef.
The Institute for Figuring’s crochet coral and anemone garden
The Institute for Figuring/Alyssa Gorelick
By Tasneem Paghdiwala
October 4, 2007
Last year an LA gallery exhibited a paper model of the Menger sponge, a curiosity of geometry that resembles a Rubik’s Cube eating itself from the inside out. It took 66,048 business cards, nine years, and hundreds of folders to make. The show was set up by the Institute for Figuring, an organization tickled by big, brainy concepts expressed through everyday objects. On October 13 the IFF brings its latest exhibit to the Cultural Center: a 40-foot-long (and growing) crocheted model of the Great Barrier Reef that doubles as a model of hyperbolic space. The Chicago reef’s colors are as shocking as the ones in undersea photos of the real thing—hot pink, Bakelite orange, ice blue, and white in spots to show how the reef “bleaches” and dies. The project has been likened to the AIDS Memorial Quilt—both a form of collective protest and a tribute to life that’s being destroyed.
The IFF was founded in 2003 by Margaret and Christine Wertheim—twin sisters from Queensland, Australia—and according to its Web site is “dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.” It organizes exhibits and lectures (recent talks were on “the mathematics of paper folding” and “the physics of snowflakes”) around LA, where Margaret, a science writer, and Christine, a professor of critical studies at CalArts, are now based. In 2005 Margaret Wertheim heard about a breakthrough in geometry involving crochet; the sisters immediately wanted to make an IFF project out of it.
The discovery concerned non-Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry has been around since about 300 BC, when the Greek mathematician Euclid wrote what remains the best-selling math textbook of all time, Elements. It includes five short statements about basic geometry. The first four, which concern the nature of straight lines, circles, and right angles, are easy to swallow and universally considered mathematically sound. But the fifth, “parallel” postulate is trickier. It says that if you’ve got a straight line and a point outside that line, you can draw exactly one straight line through that point that won’t ever collide with the first line—no more, no fewer. Mathematicians realized that number five held up only if you stayed on the Euclidean playing field—that is, as long as the plane on which the lines were drawn was flat. If space itself was curved, there might be zero or hundreds of lines through a given point parallel to another line.
By the 19th century mathematicians were imagining space that grows exponentially; they called it hyperbolic space. An infinite number of lines could be drawn through a point in hyperbolic space that would never touch the first line, since the space between them was always growing.
Catherine Chandler and Julie Smith at the Hull-House Museum
Jon Randolph
Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef
Sat 10/13 through Sun 12/16, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630, free
It’s a complicated theory to ask someone to envision, like trying to explain an Escher print without having one handy. In the 1970s mathematicians starting using 3-D paper models folded like origami to show hyperbolic space, but the models were difficult to make and too delicate to be practical.
In 1997 a Cornell math researcher named Daina Taimina made the connection between hyperbolic space and one of her hobbies, crochet. Taimina grew up in Latvia in a family full of crafty women and has been an avid crocheter all her life. She knew that hyperbolic space is supposed to “ruffle up” along its outer edge—the edge constantly grows from a given point and crinkles as it spreads, like the edge of a lettuce leaf. Taimina crocheted a tight circle of loops using a simple chain stitch. She added a longer row around it, and then a longer one around that. When the circle got wide enough, its edge started to ruffle. There was nothing special about the method she used; it’s an old crochet technique called “increasing.” Crocheters know they can get a tight ruffle by adding lots of stitches with each new row, or a loose wave with just one or two extra stitches each go-round.
If you took one of Taimina’s crochet models of hyperbolic space and stitched onto it the components of Euclid’s fifth postulate—a straight line and a point outside of it—you could stitch any number of lines through the point that would never intersect with the original line; you need just two such lines to disprove the postulate. The secondary lines look curved when viewed from above, but folding along them proves they’re perfectly straight. Taimina’s discovery is what mathematicians had been hunting—a physical model of hyperbolic space, one that could be folded this way and that without falling apart.
When the Wertheims learned about Taimina’s work, they immediately thought of the reef forms off the coast of Queensland where they grew up. In Taimina’s geometric shapes, they saw wispy kelp, columnlike sea anemones, and bunchy corals. Thanks to global warming and pollution, scientists had predicted the Great Barrier Reef would be gone in another 30 years. On the IFF’s Web site, the Wertheims posted instructions on how to crochet a model of hyperbolic space and invited crafters everywhere to send in their own pieces in homage to the reef.
In the spring the Wertheims contacted the organizers of the Chicago Humanities Festival about exhibiting the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. Over the last several months, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum has organized locals to crochet small pieces to be added to contributions the IFF has already received and is still soliciting from people around the world for upcoming shows. All summer there were gatherings—at the museum, yarn shops, schools, and in crocheters’ living rooms—where (mostly) women stitched their individual pieces into a subreef. The Hull-House Museum sits on the UIC campus in the former home of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, founders of the Hull House settlement for working-class women. “Addams believed that every member of society needed to vote, but that it was also important for every member to contribute to the ‘cultural capital’ of society,” says Catherine Chandler, a museum staffer. She says the subreef includes the work of more than 100 crocheters and expects that when it’s joined with the IFF’s reef, the exhibit won’t even fit in the Cultural Center’s Chicago Rooms. If there’s overflow, the museum will host a smaller exhibit.
Arcadia Knitting, run by sisters Kathy and Sharon Kelly in Edgewater, donated yarn and hosted a crochet circle. Kathy Kelly says the project relieved many crocheters’ closets of the “pound of love,” or heap of too-bright or too-weird yarn remnants that never fit into new projects. “On the coral reef, it turns out, shocking pink is a natural color,” she says. “And, I don’t want to sound like a yarn snob, but these hyperbolic forms respond better to the cheap, squeaky acrylic. People were able to use up all the crazy stuff they had.”
In some places Jewel and Dominick’s bags were used instead of yarn, both to recycle and to protest the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—roughly three million tons of trash, much of it nonbiodegradable plastic, trapped at the center of the North Pacific Gyre.
Cheryl Rogers, a life coach, grandmother, and lifelong Stony Island resident, was leading a summer-camp crochet circle made up of fourth- to seventh-grade girls from Phoebe A. Hearst Elementary, near Midway, when she found out about the Chicago Reef Project. “The first day of camp, they were literally crying. They wanted to quit. They threw their needles across the room. And they kind of segregated themselves, into blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. Somewhere around the third or fourth week, they started sharing stitches. They started laughing. Then they started sitting in one big group.”
Rogers took them to a Chicago Reef Project workshop at the Cultural Center in August, where Margaret Wertheim showed slides of the work in progress. “The girls had brought their hooks and they were sitting there duplicating what they were seeing in the PowerPoint presentation. On the bus back to school they all sat in the back, starting their contributions for the reef. They called me to the back because they really wanted to talk about the environment. One girl said she had been proud that her family recycles, but now that she thought about it, if they stopped using plastic altogether, there wouldn’t be a need to recycle. By this time, camp was over. So I said, ‘Let’s meet one more time.’ I bought yarn from Wal-Mart one afternoon the next week and headed to the school. There was no one there but the cleaning crew, getting ready for school to open. The whole building was empty. Then the girls came in and they were all carrying bags of contributions they had made at home. When we put them all on the table, it was stacks and stacks and stacks. These were girls who had never heard the words ‘crochet’ or ‘coral reef’ in their lives.”
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Craftivists join forces for an homage to the Great Barrier Reef.
The Institute for Figuring’s crochet coral and anemone garden
The Institute for Figuring/Alyssa Gorelick
By Tasneem Paghdiwala
October 4, 2007
Last year an LA gallery exhibited a paper model of the Menger sponge, a curiosity of geometry that resembles a Rubik’s Cube eating itself from the inside out. It took 66,048 business cards, nine years, and hundreds of folders to make. The show was set up by the Institute for Figuring, an organization tickled by big, brainy concepts expressed through everyday objects. On October 13 the IFF brings its latest exhibit to the Cultural Center: a 40-foot-long (and growing) crocheted model of the Great Barrier Reef that doubles as a model of hyperbolic space. The Chicago reef’s colors are as shocking as the ones in undersea photos of the real thing—hot pink, Bakelite orange, ice blue, and white in spots to show how the reef “bleaches” and dies. The project has been likened to the AIDS Memorial Quilt—both a form of collective protest and a tribute to life that’s being destroyed.
The IFF was founded in 2003 by Margaret and Christine Wertheim—twin sisters from Queensland, Australia—and according to its Web site is “dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts.” It organizes exhibits and lectures (recent talks were on “the mathematics of paper folding” and “the physics of snowflakes”) around LA, where Margaret, a science writer, and Christine, a professor of critical studies at CalArts, are now based. In 2005 Margaret Wertheim heard about a breakthrough in geometry involving crochet; the sisters immediately wanted to make an IFF project out of it.
The discovery concerned non-Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry has been around since about 300 BC, when the Greek mathematician Euclid wrote what remains the best-selling math textbook of all time, Elements. It includes five short statements about basic geometry. The first four, which concern the nature of straight lines, circles, and right angles, are easy to swallow and universally considered mathematically sound. But the fifth, “parallel” postulate is trickier. It says that if you’ve got a straight line and a point outside that line, you can draw exactly one straight line through that point that won’t ever collide with the first line—no more, no fewer. Mathematicians realized that number five held up only if you stayed on the Euclidean playing field—that is, as long as the plane on which the lines were drawn was flat. If space itself was curved, there might be zero or hundreds of lines through a given point parallel to another line.
By the 19th century mathematicians were imagining space that grows exponentially; they called it hyperbolic space. An infinite number of lines could be drawn through a point in hyperbolic space that would never touch the first line, since the space between them was always growing.
Catherine Chandler and Julie Smith at the Hull-House Museum
Jon Randolph
Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef
Sat 10/13 through Sun 12/16, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630, free
It’s a complicated theory to ask someone to envision, like trying to explain an Escher print without having one handy. In the 1970s mathematicians starting using 3-D paper models folded like origami to show hyperbolic space, but the models were difficult to make and too delicate to be practical.
In 1997 a Cornell math researcher named Daina Taimina made the connection between hyperbolic space and one of her hobbies, crochet. Taimina grew up in Latvia in a family full of crafty women and has been an avid crocheter all her life. She knew that hyperbolic space is supposed to “ruffle up” along its outer edge—the edge constantly grows from a given point and crinkles as it spreads, like the edge of a lettuce leaf. Taimina crocheted a tight circle of loops using a simple chain stitch. She added a longer row around it, and then a longer one around that. When the circle got wide enough, its edge started to ruffle. There was nothing special about the method she used; it’s an old crochet technique called “increasing.” Crocheters know they can get a tight ruffle by adding lots of stitches with each new row, or a loose wave with just one or two extra stitches each go-round.
If you took one of Taimina’s crochet models of hyperbolic space and stitched onto it the components of Euclid’s fifth postulate—a straight line and a point outside of it—you could stitch any number of lines through the point that would never intersect with the original line; you need just two such lines to disprove the postulate. The secondary lines look curved when viewed from above, but folding along them proves they’re perfectly straight. Taimina’s discovery is what mathematicians had been hunting—a physical model of hyperbolic space, one that could be folded this way and that without falling apart.
When the Wertheims learned about Taimina’s work, they immediately thought of the reef forms off the coast of Queensland where they grew up. In Taimina’s geometric shapes, they saw wispy kelp, columnlike sea anemones, and bunchy corals. Thanks to global warming and pollution, scientists had predicted the Great Barrier Reef would be gone in another 30 years. On the IFF’s Web site, the Wertheims posted instructions on how to crochet a model of hyperbolic space and invited crafters everywhere to send in their own pieces in homage to the reef.
In the spring the Wertheims contacted the organizers of the Chicago Humanities Festival about exhibiting the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. Over the last several months, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum has organized locals to crochet small pieces to be added to contributions the IFF has already received and is still soliciting from people around the world for upcoming shows. All summer there were gatherings—at the museum, yarn shops, schools, and in crocheters’ living rooms—where (mostly) women stitched their individual pieces into a subreef. The Hull-House Museum sits on the UIC campus in the former home of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, founders of the Hull House settlement for working-class women. “Addams believed that every member of society needed to vote, but that it was also important for every member to contribute to the ‘cultural capital’ of society,” says Catherine Chandler, a museum staffer. She says the subreef includes the work of more than 100 crocheters and expects that when it’s joined with the IFF’s reef, the exhibit won’t even fit in the Cultural Center’s Chicago Rooms. If there’s overflow, the museum will host a smaller exhibit.
Arcadia Knitting, run by sisters Kathy and Sharon Kelly in Edgewater, donated yarn and hosted a crochet circle. Kathy Kelly says the project relieved many crocheters’ closets of the “pound of love,” or heap of too-bright or too-weird yarn remnants that never fit into new projects. “On the coral reef, it turns out, shocking pink is a natural color,” she says. “And, I don’t want to sound like a yarn snob, but these hyperbolic forms respond better to the cheap, squeaky acrylic. People were able to use up all the crazy stuff they had.”
In some places Jewel and Dominick’s bags were used instead of yarn, both to recycle and to protest the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—roughly three million tons of trash, much of it nonbiodegradable plastic, trapped at the center of the North Pacific Gyre.
Cheryl Rogers, a life coach, grandmother, and lifelong Stony Island resident, was leading a summer-camp crochet circle made up of fourth- to seventh-grade girls from Phoebe A. Hearst Elementary, near Midway, when she found out about the Chicago Reef Project. “The first day of camp, they were literally crying. They wanted to quit. They threw their needles across the room. And they kind of segregated themselves, into blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. Somewhere around the third or fourth week, they started sharing stitches. They started laughing. Then they started sitting in one big group.”
Rogers took them to a Chicago Reef Project workshop at the Cultural Center in August, where Margaret Wertheim showed slides of the work in progress. “The girls had brought their hooks and they were sitting there duplicating what they were seeing in the PowerPoint presentation. On the bus back to school they all sat in the back, starting their contributions for the reef. They called me to the back because they really wanted to talk about the environment. One girl said she had been proud that her family recycles, but now that she thought about it, if they stopped using plastic altogether, there wouldn’t be a need to recycle. By this time, camp was over. So I said, ‘Let’s meet one more time.’ I bought yarn from Wal-Mart one afternoon the next week and headed to the school. There was no one there but the cleaning crew, getting ready for school to open. The whole building was empty. Then the girls came in and they were all carrying bags of contributions they had made at home. When we put them all on the table, it was stacks and stacks and stacks. These were girls who had never heard the words ‘crochet’ or ‘coral reef’ in their lives.”
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