Lecture: Working Across Disciplines: Figuring Out How to Figure it Out Together

Working Across Disciplines: Figuring Out How to Figure it Out Together with Tedi Asher and Trevor Smith
Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2020, 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Trevor Smith, Curator of the Present Tense, and Tedi Asher, Neuroscience Researcher, will share their own collaborative experiences at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) to reflect on reciprocity between the arts and sciences in a museum context, processes relevant to cultivating connections (institutionally and interpersonally) between these fields, and the role that field-specific content (e.g. artwork, data), and our experience of that content, can play in mediating such connections and reciprocal exchange.

Register: https://theopenscholar.com/event/tedi-asher-and-trevor-smith

Featured in Diatrope Books

Click here for entire Diatrope Books inventory

Book cover. Artful AnimalsTerry, Colleen M. Artful Animals. 2013. ISBN: 9780884011385. Unmarked text. Very Good in very good dust jacket. Hardcover. (#30476) $14.00

Beautiful color plates. Artists include John James Audubon, Chokha (attributed to), Durer, Rupert Garcia, Heinrich Kley and Wes Wilson, Picasso, Ed Ruscha, Takeuchi Seiho, Wayne Thiebaud, Beth Van Hoesen, Walt Disney Studios, Andrew Wyeth, and others. 79p.

Buy it Now

 

Click here for entire Diatrope Books inventory

CFP: “Weather the Weather,” a group exhibition by SciArt Center

A group exhibition by SciArt Center at the New York Hall of Science
September 10th, 2019 – January 10th, 2020

Deadline to submit: June 3rd, 11:59pm EST
More information

The weather is ever-present, often dramatic, and always uncontrollable. SciArt welcomes submissions surrounding the topics of studying, understanding, and experiencing the weather.​

Continue reading “CFP: “Weather the Weather,” a group exhibition by SciArt Center”

New Publication: Essential Mysteries in Art and Science (Trudy Myrrh Reagan)

Essential Mysteries in Art and Science, book coverMyrrh (AKA Trudy Myrrh Reagan), with her bright circular abstractions, “portholes into the unknown,” interprets a dozen different realms of science. In her new book, Essential Mysteries in Art and Science, she elaborates on the science behind the paintings in a dozen well- researched essays about these realms.

The friendly aspect of this book is its visual appearance. The first section is an art book, presenting Myrrh’s Essential Mysteries series of vivid paintings. The second section is a charming personal account of the artist’s encounter with science, illustrated with her other science-related works, together with many small illustrations that support points in the essays.

This has been Myrrh’s 50-year project. She began as a “newbie” married to a physicist, picking out patterns in nature to use in her work. She soon fastened onto the powerful ideas in science, those that define the outlines of the cosmos in which we live. “As I changed, so did science,” she says halfway through the book. It includes several sections on the explosion of interest, beginning in the late 1980s, in complex, dynamic, and chaotic phenomena. As well, she explores questions under investigation and those that are simply enigmas. In an age where cultural ideas and branches of sciences themselves are silos that do not communicate well, hers is an account that gracefully relates them all.

$45.00 + tax and shipping, available at http://www.myrrh- art.com/gift shop or directly from the artist at trudy@myrrh-art.com.

Book Review: Amy Ione reviews A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Review of  A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

Reviewed by Amy Ione, posted in Leonardo Reviews,August 2017
Download PDF

As a fan of biographies, I was excited to learn about A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. Not only is it a timely biography, this well researched and easy to read book also captures the imagination. Because Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman take care to situate Shannon’s contributions in their cultural context the volume encourages the reader to explore their broader implications. Claude Shannon’s legacy is no doubt of particular interest to Leonardo readers due to the range of his work. If Shannon’s training and conception of Information Theory brings the current elevation of STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to mind, many of his lesser known projects clearly align with projects associated with the STE(A)M (the inclusion of Art) community, although the authors never speak of STEAM per se. These include the playful spirit evident in his ongoing tinkering with electronic toys, his multi-faceted studies of juggling, and his unicycle experiments.

So, who was Claude Shannon? Born in 1916 in Michigan, by all accounts Shannon had an ordinary childhood. Noteworthy traits included a love of math and science, a dislike of facts, and mechanical inclinations. These proclivities led him to purse a dual degree in mathematics and engineering at the University of Michigan. After Michigan, Shannon was hired by the well-connected Vannevar Bush, then at MIT and later founder of the National Science Foundation (NSF), to help with his differential analyzer. This was a mechanical analog computer that depended on combinations of equivalent equations, using a wheel-and-disc mechanism for computation. A major problem was that the equations needed to be reconstructed for every problem, in effect annihilating the very efficiency the machine was intending to add to problem solving. The resounding question was how could it reassemble itself on the fly? Shannon, who was conversant with both symbolic logic and electrical circuitry, produced a landmark master’s thesis with an innovative solution. Titled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” the young Shannon tied Boolean logic and circuitry together, conceptualizing a path where 1’s and 0’s could represent logical operators of Boole’s (AND, OR, NOT) system, with an on switch standing for “true” and an off switch for “false.”

After a brief stint at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey) Shannon joined Bell Labs to work on World War II projects. Here he found an environment that fostered cutting-edge discovery and even met a visiting Alan Turing, another key figure of the Information Age. The sections discussing the shared interests of Shannon and Turing are among the book’s high points, particularly in light of the role of computers in contemporary life. Both probed machine intelligence, feedback and programming commands, and cryptology. The authors tell us that, according to Shannon, much was also left unsaid between them. He did discuss his notions about Information Theory with Turing, but they needed to avoid cryptography because of security concerns.

Continue reading “Book Review: Amy Ione reviews A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age”