CrumpArt

August 21, 2009

An Open Letter to Phoenix Drinks

Filed under: Melbourne, Random, food — Tags: , , , , — Crumpet @ 5:00 pm

Science Labs ad

Yesterday morning, knitting happily on the tram while travelling to work, I happened to look out the window and noticed a truck driving past. It told me not to drink science, because I don’t know where it’s been. This, quite frankly, horrified me. And what disappointed me even more is that the brand in question was Phoenix Organic Drinks. Phoenix are a New Zealand company who make tasty, tasty beverages that I like a lot, and now I can’t drink them because their marketing people are happily, blatantly promoting ignorance and stupidity. It’s almost as if Phoenix have taken a leaf from Barbie’s book and proclaimed, “Math is hard! Let’s go shopping!” And I say all this as a public servant who votes Green, studied fine art, has been vegetarian for over ten years, makes her own soap, and whose pantry contains vast amounts of brand-free dried legumes and 5kg cotton bags of rice.

1 : the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
2 a : a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study [the science of theology] b : something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge [have it down to a science]
3 a : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science
4 : a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws [cooking is both a science and an art]

As noted in the dictionary definition above, science is not something separate from the natural world. It is a study of the natural world. Science is not merely random equations, chemicals and words that are hard to spell. It is a continual system of knowledge and understanding. I would never buy a mass-produced food item from a company that is proud of not having a science department. I want to know that the products I consume have been formulated, tested and proven not to make me sick, regardless of them being made from natural or synthesised ingredients. Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it won’t hurt me. Like anthrax. Or arsenic. Or any number of ingredients or components of common ‘natural’ items. Hell, even regular issue Coca-Cola is made of all-natural products in Australia. We even still make it with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. Doesn’t mean it’s good for me. And you know what I do when I don’t know what something is, what a word means or how to spell an ingredient? I look it up. Simple as that. I’m sick to death of the anti-science ignorance that proponents of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ lifestyles banter about. Science is not the enemy, and until you learn that I won’t be your friend. Or buy your things.

Don't Drink Science ad

I wanted to add, I lifted these images off the Phoenix website because I think it’s important in this instance to see a physical representation of what I’m criticising. But I’m hosting them here as I’m not mean enough to hotlink.

July 4, 2009

On doubt.

Filed under: geekery — Tags: , , , , , — Crumpet @ 12:55 pm

This one’s courtesy of PZ.

November 13, 2008

vertexere

vertexere

So, I finished installing my work for assessment last night (and holy crap the studios were so frakking hot and humid yesterday… worst day for installing work ever), and it’s being assessed today and tomorrow. We’re not allowed in for the assessment — the print shop is closed to everyone bar staff and a mystery external assessor until Monday, when we go in and deinstall. As such, I’ve spent today in various states of lying down and doing not much.

manifold detail

Personally, I’m quite impressed with how restrained I was when putting my installation together. There’s always a tendency to be indecisive and put up as much as possible, but I feel like I’m getting better at that.

The crocheted Lorenz Manifold was the central part of my work, and all the printmaking pieces evolved from it.

a leaf on the wind

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth." [Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’]*

As stated in the excerpt from my proposal posted with the Flickr set, my work is about the connection between story and science, and further, the way that textile metaphor connects all those things.

text book detail

I produced a series of books and fabric scroll-like pieces that reference the mathematics of chaos theory combined with lines from stories that reflect the concepts of change and chance that the theory encompasses. The silk I used to print on was purchased as recycled scrap offcuts from Kazari warehouse, and the shapes of each piece strongly informed the resulting work.

chaos theory

In this book, titled Text Book, I have started to embroider between the lines of the chaos theory definition and the lorenz manifold pattern, hinting at the idea that we read into the technical details to find meaning and purpose in the way we lead our lives. I do plan on embroidering some more on this before the graduate show. I also intend to finish the entire lorenz manifold crochet, which I didn’t do yet because the back of my right knee has been achy and sore for a while and I’ve been hesitant to spin as a result.

in his book

Gotta say, it felt very good to embroider again. I haven’t done much since burning myself out on the Wayne Coyne and Jenny Hart portrait from a few years back, and I really loved getting back into it.

One piece I didn’t embroider on was this long scroll…

scroll

…instead, the text on this one (from Neil Gaiman’s latest offering, The Graveyard Book) was transferred in that wonderful way from days gone by, carbon paper. I swear, one of my favourite things to play with at my grandparent’s house as a kid was my grandma’s notepad with carbon paper in it. Maybe that’s where the printmaking obsession started.

infinite potential

There’s something especially lovely about rolled up fabric.

'infinite potential' detail

As a companion piece to Text Book, I made another book, this one from my collection of paper offcuts saved from the previous years of my course. This one is called, of course, Picture Book.

picture book

Inside, it contains a chronological selection of the progress documentation photos that I’ve been taking, along with the metadata concerning time taken and the camera settings for each picture. I hope that it helps tell the story of the more abstract work in the rest of the project.

picture book inside

But I go back to my man Galileo who was maybe the first, in western tradition anyway, to honour mathematics as the primal force of knowledge. ‘The logic of the universe,’ he said in his book The Assayer, ‘is written in the language of mathematics, without which one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.’ But having honoured math, Galileo was very happy to create beautiful metaphors, to invent marvellous characters, to draw pictures. He knew how to light that labyrinth so the rest of us could see inside. Because the more abstract and mathematical science gets, the more we need to imagine something concrete. As the physicist Alan Lightman has said, ‘We are blind people inventing what we don’t see.’**

*Harper, D. 2001, Online Etymology Dictionary [Accessed: 31.7.2008]

**Radiolab,‘Tell me a story’ scienctific education podcast, WNYC, New York [Accessed: 22.8.2008]

August 24, 2008

“Little Ewoks. An entire empire brought to its knees by small, furry creatures.”

Filed under: art, craft, geekery, yarn — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Crumpet @ 12:46 pm

Remember these?

A Lace Odyssey

Well, the green and white Pi circles have now been frogged and turned into these…

Chaos yarn #1

Chaos yarn #3, bright section

Chaos yarn #3, murky section

Yarn with Table

I dyed them using the d20 die set method. As you can see in the following picture, Mr C’s 8-sided die determined the colour, the 20-sided die indicated the length in centimetres of the colour and the 10-sided die determined the overlap of colour.

Dye by Die

All of this is part of my latest art project, crocheting the Lorenz Manifold. This stems from my interest in space, the universe and Chaos Theory.

As the Oxford Amercian Dictionary on my laptop puts it, chaos theory is

the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.

Lorenz Manifold

My lecturer at uni did advise me to go all out with my geek this semester, and as such, I’m lovingly referring to this project in my head as Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets.

Jaffa Cakes and Coat Pockets

This was my Ravelympics project, but I didn’t have the yarn ready in time for the opening ceremony and ended up starting this a week ago instead. There is no way I’ll be getting Ravelympic gold here, but at 23 rounds of a total 47 in, I’m pretty damn proud of my progress anyway. Before this project, the only crochet I knew was the basic stuff needed for knitting, so I’ve learned how to crochet on the coolest (“cool” in geek terms…) project ever.

23 rounds in

I’ll give more details as the project goes on, but my proposal this semester is looking at the links between fabric, stories, creation, science and the universe.

ripple effect

As such, this podcast, which I listened to on the tram coming home from work the other night, almost made me cry with its wonderfulness. Thanks to Alex for turning me onto Radiolab.

negative curvature

Happy National Science Week everyone!

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