Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture

Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes

EXHIBITION:
Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes

WHEN:
January 21–April 15, 2012

WHERE:
The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

WHAT:
“Please DO NOT touch” is the message that we are all used to seeing on signs near works of art in most museums. This is necessary to preserve the art, but we all want to touch! This focus show invites you to touch…and hold, and stroke and to think about why and how physical contact with works of art can be so satisfying. As a continuation of the Walters’ partnership with The Johns Hopkins University Brain Science Institute, this installation incorporates 12 works of art from the collection and 22 models for visitors to touch and rate. This melds research interests of Steve Hsiao, a John Hopkins neuroscientist specializing in the many facets of touch, with those of Joaneath Spicer, Walters curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, exploring the new importance of touch in the Renaissance, specifically the popularity of collecting statuettes and other objects, including new hand-held technology.

Visitors will learn about this new interest on the part of Europeans around 1500, in art that was pleasurable to hold—such as a statuette of Venus the ancient goddess of love that nestles into your hand—and objects apparently made to fit in the hand such as the earliest watches or the evolving shape of the personal firearm.

The special appeal of this installation, however, will surely be the opportunity to join in comparative experiments with statuettes (replicas) and other thought-provoking hands-on touch comparisons. What types of surfaces do you prefer? Does knowledge of the subject of a sculpture influence how you react to it? What happens to our satisfaction in a piece if something about it changes? What is the impact of sight on the sense of touch? Visitors will register their preferences through “touch pads,” thereby reminding visitors of yet another aspect of touch as a vehicle for communication. To extend an awareness of touch and how painters have taken advantage of our sensitivity to touch, photographic details of paintings and sculptures throughout the museum will provide visitors with incentives to explore the topic further on their own. With the assistance of the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, all text materials will be available in Braille and visits by the visually challenged can be scheduled.

SPONSOR:
Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes has been organized by the Walters Art Museum in partnership with The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Brain Science Institute (BSI), which has also provided generous support for the project. The BSI’s mission is to solve fundamental questions about brain development and function and to use these insights to understand the mechanisms of brain disease and health.

INFORMATION:
General museum information: 410-547-9000 or www.thewalters.org

Augmented Reality Tshirts and business cards

In our sample DNA of Creativity application we give a link to Elipse augmented reality. You can use your phone to see added featured on images that are processed to be recognizable by the camera of your smart phone.

One example is Tshirts
Augmented Reality Tshirts

Another is business cards
Augmented Reality Business Cards

There are many many other applications. Perhaps a billboard could be overlaid with your art image viewable only to those with the app on their phone.

Jill Bolte Taylor My Stroke of Insight

If you have not seen this TED video before, then take a look, or just watch again as a reminder of the magic of science and art. I was reminded of this video by a new local acquaintance Ellen Stiefler who is in the process of making a movie of the life of Jill Bolte Taylor.

Scientist Figure out how to cloak time at Cornell U.

My 91 year old mother actually found reference to this article in the Local Palm Springs Paper.

CBS News WASHINGTON - It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.

Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible - his whole activity is.

What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature. We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it's a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just an instant.

Other newly created invisibility cloaks fashioned by scientists move the light beams away in the traditional three dimensions. The Cornell team alters not where the light flows but how fast it moves, changing in the dimension of time, not space. They tinkered with the speed of beams of light in a way that would make it appear to surveillance cameras or laser security beams that an event, such as an art heist, isn't happening.

Another way to think of it is as if scientists edited or erased a split second of history. It's as if you are watching a movie with a scene inserted that you don't see or notice. It's there in the movie, but it's not something you saw, said study co-author Moti Fridman, a physics researcher at Cornell.

Time hole

The scientists created a lens of not just light, but time. Their method splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another. It creates a gap and that gap is where an event is masked.

"You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place," said study co-author Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell's School of Applied and Engineering Physics. "You just don't know that anything ever happened."

This is all happening in beams of light that move too fast for the human eye to see. Using fiber optics, the hole in time is created as light moves along inside a fiber much thinner than a human hair. The scientists shoot the beam of light out, and then with other beams, they create a time lens that splits the light into two different speed beams that create the effect of invisibility by being too fast or too slow. The whole work is a mess of fibers on a long table and almost looks like a pile of spaghetti, Fridman said.

Time-space cloak seen within reach
German researchers report invisibility breakthrough
Video: Science moves closer to invisibility breakthrough

It is the first time that scientists have been able to mask an event in time, a concept only first theorized by Martin McCall, a professor of theoretical optics at Imperial College in London. Gaeta, Fridman and others at Cornell, who had already been working on time lenses, decided to see if they could do what McCall envisioned.

It only took a few months, a blink of an eye in scientific research time.

New direction in science

"It is significant because it opens up a whole new realm to ideas involving invisibility," McCall said.

Researchers at Duke University and in Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have made progress on making an object appear invisible spatially. The earlier invisibility cloak work bent light around an object in three dimensions.

Between those two approaches, the idea of invisibility will work its way into useful technology, predicts McCall, who wasn't part of either team.

The science is legitimate, but it's still only a fraction of a second, added City College of New York physicist Michio Kaku, who specializes in the physics of science fiction.

"That's not enough time to wander around Hogwarts," Kaku wrote in an email. "The next step therefore will be to increase this time interval, perhaps to a millionth of a second. So we see that there's a long way to go before we have true invisibility as seen in science fiction."

Gaeta said he thinks he can get make the cloak last a millionth of a second or maybe even a thousandth of a second. But McCall said the mathematics dictate that it would take too big a machine - about 18,600 miles long - to make the cloak last a full second. "You have to start somewhere and this is a proof of concept," Gaeta said.

Still, there are practical applications, Gaeta and Fridman said. This is a way of adding a packet of information to high-speed data unseen without interrupting the flow of information. But that may not be a good thing if used for computer viruses, Fridman conceded. There may be good uses of this technology, Gaeta said, but "for some reason people are more interested in the more illicit applications."

The Third Act

This video was sent by Linda Nimmerrichter and no matter what you may think of Jane Fonda we can all certainly agree she is a surviver. Exploring the last 30 years of a life is an exciting opportunity for many of us.

Random Exhibition Title Generator

Here is a great link sent to us by Marti Kranzbert:

Here is a GREAT link from Kelley Padrick, a wonderful "Marketeer" who works with Mark Murphy in San Diego
Click here for the Random Exhibition Title Generator

http://www.mit.edu/~ruchill/lazycurator.html

For more about Marti Kranzberg: Breathing life into your words

Go hear: www.TheVoiceTalent.net and also here to hear demos: www.MartiKraneVoiceTalent.com