Civilization as an Art Form

December 3, 2008
6:00 pm	to	8:00 pm

Join Ann Racuya-Robbins, founder of the World Knowledge Bank, as she discusses her career exploring the concept of “wholeperception” and the corresponding concept of civilization as an art form. Racuya-Robbins proposes that each human being’s life experience is an intrinsically creative insight into life and argues that all lives, in the composite, create a work of art called civilization. She will discuss what that means and how it can serve humanity and life on earth.

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Mixing Water and Whiskey, Again

Water is complex. It defies physics in its ability to form and reform, it defies humans in their efforts to corral it into narrow channels, and it defies economics when it is viewed as a commodity rather than a scarce resource. Join Santa Fe Complex practitioners Paul Paryski and Kim Sorvig as they discuss their proposed project to examine the social and physical dynamics of water in the arid Southwest.

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Scanning the Horizon and More

Three-dimensions are the rage in this fall’s movie line-up. They’re also increasingly important in historical, archeological and paleontological research, as we’ve seen in three prior blenders at Santa Fe Complex. We continue our series on Stereo-Computational Photography with an in-depth look at 3D laser scanning in modern research. Read more

Missoula Oblongata

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. Read more

Whiskey’s for Drinking

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. Read more

DinoBlender

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. Read more

Industrial Strength Networks

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

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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. Read more

Stereo/Computational Photography/Holography III

We continue the discussion started with the Stereo/Computational blender of March 27 (Jason Ordaz, Pete Rogina, Tim Thomas) and the Holographic Blender of June 25 (Fred Unterseher, Rebecca Deem, August Muth).

Stereographer and Book Artist Georgette Freeman will present her stereo camera and viewing rigs, her stereo card designs, digital stereo imagery, and talk about her experiences as a stereographer and artist.

Fred Unterseher and Rebecca Deem will present new work with colleagues on the development of Digital Holography. The Holography exhibit by Fred, Rebecca and August remains up through July 14th.

Stereographer and Computational Photography enthusiast Pete Rogina of WorldScape Inc. will attend virtually via (stereo?) Webcam.

Los Alamos Visual Analytics (LAVA) is sponsoring and facilitating this series and will be presenting some of the materials on their 3D DLP system at the Complex. LAVA is developing systems for immersive capture and display of objects and scenery with WorldScape and others.

Georgette Freeman: Vaporlock and high gas prices couldn’t stop photographer and book artist Georgette Freeman as she crossed and recrossed the continent this year, in yet another quest for “[q]uestions never dreamed of at home . . . and the answers, well, the answers are, literally out of this world.” Fortunately for Santa Feans, the San Franciso-based Freeman’s 2008 wanderlust found pause in our neighborhood and she’s agreed to continue May’s discussion of stereo and computational photography Read more

Holy Holographs, Batman!

Holographic artists Rebecca Deem, August Muth and Fred Unterseher are back. Thanks to the strong interest their work garnered in sfComplex’s grand opening, they’ve agreed to host a blender this Wednesday night, June 25. They’ll discuss the history of three dimensional art and give us a back-of-the-lens perspective on the work the do. More info to come.

Numbers and Metaphor

Morphology, Metaphor and Category

Ralph Chapman, Tiha von Ghyczy, Thomas P. Caudell,
Steve Smith

Wednesday, June 18, 6-8 PM

Blenders are a Wednesday night feature at Santa Fe Complex, located at 632 Agua Fria St. Entrance is on Romero St. Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served; donations to defray their costs are welcome.

Numbers are metaphor: they describe the world in an abstract manner that implies their object. They can tell us how much something weighs, how tall its is or how fast it is going. Or, they can delve deeper into their objects and help us understand them in an almost intuitive way. Read more

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