There are tons more photos and some reviews of the SRL show in Berkeley at the SRL website. The people taking these photos were much closer to the action than me, so you should definitely check them out. They also took a bunch of very cool pre-show photos. Also, because of where I was standing, I completely missed out on the flame tornado.
On November 12, 2003, I attended a live performance by Survival Research Labs at the Berkeley Art Museum. In addition to taking a couple photos, I used my Canon S400 to shoot some video. I've finally gotten around to scaling the video down enough in iMovie to post here. Get ready to see and hear the firing of a V1 rocket engine, a Tesla coil sending 20+ foot sparks into metallic sheets hanging from trees, and a set of 150 dB pulse jets.
The original videos were 320x240 resolution, 15 fps AVI files. The S400 lets you shoot three minutes of video before it needs to dump the audio and video from internal memory to a Compact Flash card. Three minutes of video at that resolution ends up being close to 45 MB. I used iMovie to get the two clips down to 7 and 3 MB.
The last two segments ended up being the best. This first segment highlights the firing of the V1 rocket engine. Near the end, there is some good footage of the huge Tesla coil sending 25-30 foot sparks into what appears to be sheets of mylar hanging from large trees.
The Hovercraft also makes an appearance. You can see it in the background as a couple people drag it out of the path of the V1. It has 4 pulse jets. Each one is four feet long and glows red hot while in operation. The two pairs of jets can be rotated around on the top of the Hovercraft, giving it sort of a radar antenna feel. The jets glow red hot when in operation and they make a very cool wailing sound that you hear throughout most of the video. The SRL website describes the Hovercraft as:
The loudest robot in the world at 150 decibels. Louder than a cruise missile until it blows up.
The Hovercraft didn't blow up during the show, although two of the pulse jets did burst into flames. Maybe that counts as blowing up. At an SRL show, it's hard to know whether something has caught on fire on purpose or by accident.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This QuickTime movie is about 7 MB and the video lasts three minutes.
The second segment starts with some absolute Tesla coil mayhem, before the V1 kicks back in with full effect. As you watch these videos, keep reminding yourself that this is happening in the courtyard of a University art museum in the middle of Berkeley.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This QuickTime movie is about 3 MB and the video lasts just under two minutes.
Survival Research Labs performed a brief show starting a little before 8 pm Wednesday night in the courtyard of the Berkeley Art Museum. The performance was part of a CIMAM (International Committee of ICOM (The International Council of Museums) for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) conference.
Below are a couple photos I took before, during, and after the show. I didn't get many good pictures during the show, but I shot a couple minutes of video that came out quite well. I'll post some of the video after I have time to edit it down a bit. Photos were hard to take during the show, as the scene varied from very dark to very bright. The rocket engine put out quite a large flame.
I took these photos before the show started. The bicycle was riding on top of a wire that ran across the courtyard. The huge spliff in the Smoke Bear's mouth exploded during the show and the bear ended up kind of smashed up on the ground. A Jesus looking figure was flying below the bike in a Superman pose. You can see Hippie Jesus in the second photo, albeit a little fuzzily due to me having trouble keeping the camera steady during a long low-light exposure.
Inchworm, one of the bigger machines, started the show by crawling very animal-like across the courtyard and interacting with the Running Machine, one of the smaller machines. Most of that action was going on around the corner to the right where I couldn't see it. Then, Big Arm, this machine with a really long articulating arm walked out and started spewing flames. A little later, one of the other machines started flaming. You can see the V1 to the left in both of these pictures. It's the long horizontal tube.
Here's the aftermath of the show soon after it ended. The remains of the bear are attached to the big plywood sheet up front. Note the huge Tesla coil in the background. It was making 20+ foot blue sparks during the show. The trees were covered with long sheets of aluminum foil. The Tesla coil and the foil made for lots of fun. The next pictures show the foil trees and the Tesla coil a little better.
Finally, here are some closer up photos of the crawling machines after the show. You can see most of the V1 on the left side of the first photo.
I tried to use PhoneBlogger at tonight's SRL performance, but the V1 rocket engine was just too loud. Huh, what a surprise. When I wrote PB, I never did take into account the requirement of being able to phone blog the firing of a rocket engine.
Oh, well. I'll put up some photos and videos from the show soon. It was most excellent.
If things go smoothly, I'll be using PhoneBlogger later tonight to post from a Survival Research Labs performance in Berkeley. I'm just hoping the sound from the V1 rocket engine doesn't blow out the circuitry on my cellphone, much less my ears.
Judith is just one, albeit the most famous, of many talented artists with physical, developmental, or emotional disabilities who work at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland. Sandra and I donate money to Creative Growth every year and we have purchased several very nice works of art at their big annual exhibit and sale. We purchased this very intense drawing by an equally intense artist named Maureen Clay last year.
Global Elegies: Art and Ofrendas for the Dead is the title of the 10th annual Días de los Muertos exhibition at the Oakland Musem of California. Sandra and I went to see it today and I can highly recommend it.
This exhibit was a bit different than other Day of the Dead exhibits I've seen. The curator, Enrique Chagoya, included some interesting non-Latino works along with some great traditional and non-traditional Latino works. You've got your lobster-shaped coffin from Ghana, acrylic crosses embedded with ashes of an artist who died of AIDS, a terrarium (with projected video) containing live ants listening to electronic music and eating alfeñiques/calaveritas (sugar skulls), and a purple papier-mâché skull with a devil on top having several teeth removed by skeletons. How could you not get incredibly excited about an exhibit like this one?
The Oakland Museum store also has some great stuff, especially the items related to this show. We bought a very cool mirror that is surrounded by paintings based on prints by José Guadalupe Posada, my favorite printmaker.
It's nice to read an opinion piece every now and then that you can completely identify with. Daniel Dennett's recent NY Times piece on having a naturalist world view really struck home for me. Dennett's name was a familiar one from philosophy courses I took long ago, particularly one taught by Derek Parfit and Christopher Peacocke.
I just wish the two people who came up with the name "bright" had brainstormed a bit longer or had a bit more creativity. Dennett's comment:
"Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view"
is one the rest of us will need to repeat over and over to minimize misunderstandings.
I'm not sure I can think of a much better name, though, so I will throw only small stones. Maybe, "inquisitive", and therefore, "Inquisitives". Obviously, we wouldn't be trying to make an exclusive claim on being inquisitive, but I think most people would find it far less insulting than a name that on first hearing appears to be putting a similar claim on intelligence. Naturalist wouldn't be too bad, although people might think you are just talking about your love of the outdoors, or they may confuse you with an au naturalist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The semi-annual letter from Rice president Malcolm Gillis just showed up in my mailbox. The letter isn't published to the Rice website, yet, but click on alumni letters on the Office of the President's page if you care to see old alumni letters and eventually, the fall 2002 letter. In addition to pointing out the top ranking in Seventeen Magazine, he notes the following awards and results for Rice this year:
- Named "Best Academic Bang for the Buck" by Princeton Review
- U.S. News top five colleges for educational value
- Fiske Guide to Colleges - Best Buy
- USA Today/NCAA Academic Achievement Award for highest graduation rate of student-athletes among Division I-A schools: 91 percent
- Second lowest student-to-faculty ratio (after Caltech)
- Full-time faculty teach 96% of undergrad classes
- Despite the Hopwood decision that prohibited most affirmative action programs, the student body diversity has returned to a level close to before the Hopwood decision
- Student tuition is only 40% of actual cost of undergraduate education
- Ranked second among private universities for lowest debt per student
Ed Felten is excited that Princeton ranked #22 on Seventeen Magazine's list of 100 Coolest Colleges. I was quite surprised to find my alma mater, Rice University, ranked #1.
Rice is a fantastic school and I had an incredible experience there, but the first item on Seventeen's list of desirable qualities "From frat parties to professors' involvement, from campus safety to great shopping," is not a possibility at Rice, since Rice does not allow for the existence of social fraternities on campus. This is a good thing. Instead, Rice has a residential college system that Rice's first president Edgar Odell Lovett wisely borrowed from Princeton.
I wonder if the writers at Seventeen Magazine researched the Night of Decadence party?
