Santa Fe Complex

Woody Vasulka continues his retrospective at Santa Fe Complex with the first of two conversations on the changing relationship between art and technology over his 40-year career, each decade of which represents a distinct phase in the evolution of that relationship, says Vasulka. “It has been a dialogue with the machine that began in the political environment of the 60s with a time of continual interaction within an art community,” he explains. The first conversationwill occur at Santa Fe Complex at 6:00 on August 27. Vasulka will return for the second talk a week later on September 9. Continue Reading »

Pioneering digital artist Woody Vasulka brings a retrospective exhibit and three work sessions to the complex in August and September. His show opens on Wednesday, August 13; his workshops will follow through the next month. The retrospective revisits a generation of “continual interaction within an art community,” according to Woody, which was lost as “the idea of realism slowly came to dominate art in the digital era.” The irrepressible artist believes the hyperrealistic phase is fading. He offers this exhibit as a bridge between the earlier period it represents and modern trends. Woody’s show begins at 5:00 pm.

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Missoula Oblongata is coming, Meow Wolf is moving, the Process held firm and Santa Fe Complex is ready. The three-person theater company alights briefly in Santa Fe Wednesday night, August 5, after its Monday night show in Ft. Worth and before moving on to Phoenix, Tucson, LA, San Francisco and points beyond. Long-time friends Donna Sellinger, Madeline ffitch and Sarah Lowry are the core of the company, which travels light to perform in any venue with electricity and space. St. Louis Magazine says they have the “romance of vaudeville, the adrenaline of punk, and the playfulness of the Children’s Television Workshop;” thanks to the efforts of many supporters, Santa Fe will get a chance to taste their eclectic mixture. Continue Reading »

Samantha Giron Dance Project will be presenting work from two distinct shows: a premiere entitled “Quickly Going Somewhere and Back,” and two excerpts from “Women and War,” called “Fire Diary” and “Interrogations.” Continue Reading »

Mathematician Jack Douthett and music theorist John Clough wrote the book on music theory and mathematics, so to speak, in their 2008 publication titled, curiously enough, Music Theory and mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations. Douthett visits Santa Fe Complex on Thursday night, August 14 at 6:00 to review the theory of maximally even sets, an algebraic structure initially designed to model musical scales and chords, with an emphasis on visualization.

Traditional structured database tools are limiting because they require pre-defined structures and fields. Chris Feola, president of xextPression and named one of the 50 most influential people in new media by Online Journalism Review, describes the ins-and-outs of information overload in the computer culture. In particular, he will discuss imposing order of data to extract meaningful information from it. Light refreshments will be provided. Admission is free but donations to defray costs are appreciated. Continue Reading »

The acequias of Northern New Mexico create a rich network of physical and social features that extends back through the history of Spanish New Mexico to the Moors of North Africa and the Native Americans who independently conceived of moving water through the communal irrigation systems that survive today. They also create a complex system with local agents (parciantes) creating demand for its services, external forces (precipitation and economic development, among others) creating limits on the system, and control points (topography and mayordomos) that influence its operation. Continue Reading »

Jonathan Wolfe, executive director of  the Fractal Foundation and inspiration behind the wildly popular First  Fractals at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, journeys north to demonstrate the power and beauty of his electronic images. Continue Reading »

Dinosaurs have a magical grip on the imaginations of young and old so we begin this blender with the perspective of a paleontologist in the making, six-year-old Ulysses Yarbrough. Uly, as he is known, admits to confusing the Jurassic and Triassic eras upon occasion but he is not confused about his passion for the ancient creatures known to us today only by the fossil remnants they left behind. Continue Reading »

Image: Datasets published in the Linking Open Data community project, from Richard Cyganiak.

UPDATE: Emil Eifrem will offer a TechTalk at 1:00 at the complex on Neo, a high-performance graph database he has developed. The talk will dive into the Neo4j graph database from a software developer’s perspective while looking at some of the pros/cons of working with graph databases in enterprise software development. Admission is free. More information is available in the full article.

The information revolution can seem more like an algal bloom of data overwhelming us as we try to make sense of it all. We’re told it’s all part of a network, as though that makes the millions of web pages and trillions of data points understandable. The word has become part of popular culture, as we network in our jobs and social lives or join virtual communities like MySpace and LinkedIn to expand our physical networks exponentially. What is a network, really? And how do modern networks make sense of the bits of information flowing through them? This industrial strength blender will present an eclectic mix of speakers who will discuss their application of the network data model for various problems in academia and industry.

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