Here are some books that have made an impression on me.  At first view my selection must seem somewhat haphazard, but I do believe the books have a common denominator of sorts: each writer applies a new algorithm to a well-known field,  making me look at the subject with different eyes.

Seeing Gardens

A photobook by Sam Abell, who sees gardens where no one else does. He poses the question of what, in its essence, a garden is.  A quote: “some of the gardens that mean the most are impromptu arrangements, like this still life of pears on a windowsill in Moscow.  This garden came into being casually, existed for a day or two, and vanished – in this case it was eaten. But while it lasted it was consoling.”

Rembrandt’s eyes by Simon Schama – amazing! Rembrandt left so many self-portraits, painted at every stage in his life. His is a ‘merchandised’ face – met everywhere,  a recognizable presence in galleries across Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the man himself remains a puzzle. Rembrandt was a  difficult man and a great risk taker in life and art: his aspirations to a bohemien Amsterdam lifestyle bankrupted him, and he died in relative poverty.

Schama gives us a lot of  intelligent detail about the influences on Rembrandt, for example the 80 years war of liberation against Spain, protestants against catholics,  also writes about Rubens, the italians versus the flemish painters et cetera. So interesting!  Great to read about how painters were trained in those days. An example: they were made to sketch eyes for weeks and weeks, then graduating to other parts of the body until they could draw a human anatomy practically from memory. HKU, eat your heart out!

The Power of Art, also by Simon Schama.

Wanted more Schama – the man can write! – so  I checked out a copy of the Power of Art from the local library (feb 2011) and went for a ride.  Schama focuses on the creation and story behind a single, pivotal artwork by eight giants of western art: Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt,  David, Turner, van Gogh, Picasso and  Rothko. He really keeps the tales of these artists going towards high drama, which makes the book a joy to read. The only big minus that I see is that the book’s reproductions are all in black-and-white, which is no good to anyone at all.

Second Nature – a gardener’s education

Written by American writer-cum-gardener Michael Pollan. I got it as a gift from a colleague about 8 years ago. This guy noticed my passion for gardening and we got talking about what rights we humans have to interfere with nature. He used to be a gardener of the laissez faire – laissez aller variety where I positively adore pruning and weeding and making order. Pollan discusses this theme very intelligently, and is a great writer into the bargain.  Don’t know yet  if the book is pertinent to my research. Maybe it will be, as my labyrinth plans for the outdoors lab will involve interfering with nature.  Also: will like to spend some time out of doors, the art theory we get in such great measure needs airing every once and a while.

The Caves of Steel

First published as a serial in Galaxy Magazine, October to December 1953. I re-read it because it is such a contrast to ‘second nature’. In it, the whole population of Earth never sets foot on the ground at all ……  It is set roughly three milennia in the future, a time when  hyperspace travel has been discovered and a few worlds relatively close to the Earth have been colonised. These worlds are rich and have low population density, Earth is overpopulated and people have decided to live in ‘caves of steel’: vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes. People never go outside, are even positively shocked by the idea of sunlight, wind, direct contact with the earth. Quote, page 217 (my translation): ” Shall we have a nails worked one of the sides of the cube, and a corner of the Commissar’s office disappeared, then lighted up in a strange three-dimensional scene. The scene was displayed floor to ceiling, appeared to extend outside the walls of the office, and floated in a sort of greyish light of a kind that the City’s electricity companies never delivered.  Baley thought, with a shock that was half aversion and half perverse attraction: This must be the dawn they are sometimes talking about.”

108 Tips for Time Travellers

A book I can really recommend. Peter Cochrane, head of BT’s famous Research Laboratory, takes today’s technology and projects it into the future. Like Jules Verne did, and Asimov. I like his thought experiments, also he’s very well informed about new technological developments in the fields of computer science and communication technology.

Homo Ludens

A classic on man-the-player by dutch historicist Huizinga. His ideas on how play permeates culture have been set down in 1938 but are still very much quoted today. See blog to check my notes on his book. The strange thing was that Huizinga’s book was so much easier to read in the english translation than in the original dutch version – his language is archaic….

Brilliant Orange

- A book about Dutch football between 1960 and 2000 by David Winner. Deals with the Dutch mastery of space both in real and in psychological terms, applied to the football field. A true page turner – wish philosophers would write like this. They’d probably get kicked out of their profession if they did, or have problems being taken seriously. Anyway, the book deals with with I have come to call ‘meta-perception’  ’perception’ and ‘immersed perception’ and has a lot of interesting quotes.

Gaming – essays on algorithmic culture by Alexander Galloway.  Now here is a fellow mind, an exact thinker on the subject of computers used for gaming.  Exellent essays, learned a lot. He considers the video game as a cultural form, demanding a new interpretative framework. Then he develops this framework, using examples from film critique for instance.  He links the philosophers I have been wrestling with to the world of philosophy, and so makes  me cover new ground. A quote from page 100: “Flexibility is one of the core political principles of informatic control, described both by Deleuze in hes theorization of  ’the control society’ and by computer scientists like Crocker’.

Under the title ‘beautiful, magnificent, sublime’ press reporter Henny de Lange describes how beauty is creeping back into the contemporary art scene. She does so because of the opening of the exhibition More Light at the Fundatie  in Zwolle. More Light deals with the sublime and how it applies to contemporary art.

The curator Hans den Hartog Jager is quoted as follows:  ”There is no objective norm for beauty. Then again, I never meet with people denying the existance of beauty in the arts, either.  …  Apparently we, even taking into account different tastes, were convinced deep in our hearts that these works touched on a certain universal quality. That is when I thought: hey, I must make this exhibition about beauty in contemporary art after all. And I will take this Turner painting as a point of reference.”

Of course, a museum in Zwolle cannot be called mainstream, but the idea of beauty coming back into the art world tickles my fancy anyway. So I did my own research into the Sublime, based upon the list of artists that are represented in More Light. My algorithm for composing a top-10 was as follows:

1. As long as there are names on the More  Light list:
2.      Take (next) name from list
3.      Google name of artist using Google Images
4.       Take first pic:
5.           If  pic relates to Sublime copy pic to blog
6.           else take next pic
7.       go to 2.

I ended up with a series of  images that have ‘the sublime’ written all over them. They are posted below, in rather random order. Go over them with the mouse to find the artists, use my algorithm to reproduce my findings. I will come back to this series of images, but for now these are my conclusions:

1. sublime = nature
2.[ man :  nature ]= [small : big]

Later: how to apply this to my Afsluitdijk work? Sublime nature [not equal to] Dutch nature. Nor does the sublime appeal to  Dutch culture, which prefers to have everybody and everything on one and the same level. Yet there are a number of very convincing Dutch artists on the list below. None of them situate their work in the Dutch outdoors, though.

Later: put my Afsluitdijk drawing in with the list below. Conclusion: there is a sublime quality to Dutch landscape – the clouds. And a heroic quality – the incessant struggle against the elements. How to convey the idea that struggling against the elements is like building a sand castle when the flood is making?

What Googlers looked for, too:

• wolfgang leib

I’ve been visiting friends at Tractieweg, the Utrecht place where I had an atelier when studying at HKU. Nice to go back, but a relief not to be in that system any more. The first two years were good, the third indifferent, the fourth plain bad – glad I switched to the masters for that last year.

Pic is taken in Mieke Vera’s atelier – she started out as an evening student in my class, but had to drop out due to trouble in her private life. She’s back, now, and in her fourth year. Nice to have an atelier for oneself  – up until now I always shared. 

Studio visit reminded me of Moniek Toebosch’ spiel about atelier space (SMBA book launch):
“The thing I most desired was my own studio, a place where new things could take shape, a physical and chiefly a mental space that was larger than ‘outside and inside’ combined. Back then, I could never have suspected that fifty years later this physical space would have been reduced to nothing more than a keyboard and a screen. Back then there was the deep yearning for the physical and simultaneously aimless studio space, the profound sense of it being the locus where something could happen. A space where objects, casts, lumps of clay, plaster of Paris, firing ovens, welding equipment and hundreds of little models stand on narrow shelves, a chaise longue and especially the aroma of warm wax. I have never shaken off that romantic image of the studio of my parents’ friends, even though the modern-day studio looks very different., I would even venture to state that having one’s own studio is the ultimate precondition for happiness, from which everyting else stems. It is the professionally magnified happieness of people who have a little shed in the garden and can rummage around there, make or repair something, briefly shut themselves away”.

I am about to create the famous ‘room of my own’ – the big girl having left the house for pastures far far greener. I am a day’s worth of toil away from having this room cleared - yet I keep postponing. Why?  ”A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” …

What Googlers looked for, too:

• moniek toebosch

I went to a book presentation at SMBA in Amsterdam two weeks ago. They did a tiny symposium on the artist as researcher in honor of  a book about artistic research. Book is titled ’See it Again, Say it Again’, written by art critic and art professor Janneke Wesseling. Bought the book, have yet to read it.

I’m still puzzled by the artistic research thing. If it is a question of making stuff, then reflecting on it, then making some more stuff, etc etc etc, that is something I can relate to. What I don’t get is how knowledge can be produced by artistic research – artistic research trajectories are so individual. Artistic research trajectories do not lock into each other, nor do they build on or expand other’s finds. Which is a big difference with scientific research. In the sciences, any new find needs to be reproduced by another research group in order to be accepted. Also scientific research is transmissible, where artistic research seems noninheritable.

Why would artists want to produce knowledge, anyway?

The word “algorithm” has an interesting past. Here’s a quote from S. Schwartzman’s The Words of Mathematics: