Diane Burko: Eagle Glacier, Juneau, 1982–2005, from Landsat Series, oil on canvas, 2015
My conversation with climate artist Diane Burko has just been posted on Creative Disturbance, a podcasting platform for dialogue among artists and scientists on sustainability and environmental issues. We’re happy to join others on their Art & Earth Sciences channel, shining different lights on urgent issues relating to climate change—especially this week, as the international community gathers in Paris with the goal of reaching a universal agreement to slow global warming.
In the podcast, we talk about how Diane made the transition from painter of large-scale landscapes to an artist/advocate who has traveled to the Arctic and Antarctic, witnessing and documenting the loss of glaciers; and how she tries to convey the scale of climate change through her paintings and photographs, making her work a kind of bridge between scientists and the rest of us. In this painting, for instance, she has overlaid a sky-view image of the Eagle Glacier in Alaska with recession lines, brightly marking the retreat of the ice over 30-some years.
Elegy for Tesla, installation by Jeanne Jaffe at Rowan University Art Gallery, detail
Jeanne Jaffe’s ambitious Elegy for Tesla is a high-tech, dreamlike and heartfelt meditation on Nikola Tesla, the legendary scientist and inventor. Jaffe’s multimedia installation fills the Rowan University Art Gallery with videos and sound, 3‑D printed models of his iconic inventions, and animatronic, motion-activated figures of Tesla that move and, in some cases speak.
Tesla stands as an avatar of massive creativity, with his hundreds of patents, and basic breakthroughs in alternating current, radio, robotics, and even computer circuitry. Jaffe pays homage to his achievements, while embedding them in the medium of a life that had strangely mythic elements. She’s particularly sensitive to the poignancy of the older Tesla, the eccentric loner who fed and cared for pigeons, whose limitless imagination had run up against the limits of the public’s reception of his work.
This aspect of Tesla is part of what drew me to work with composer Jon Gibson on Violet Fire, an opera that tried to capture the inner life of Tesla in all its strangeness through music, movement and video. So I was delighted to be asked to write the catalogue essay for this exhibit. One part of the Tesla mythos is the white pigeon he befriended, and who triggered in him a vision of blinding light. Jaffe, who has cared for birds herself, surrounds Tesla with a flock of tenderly modeled pigeons; for me, they can be seen as carriers of his ongoing inspiration, and markers of his intense, intuitive connection with the natural world.
Elegy for Tesla, gallery view
But Tesla, in the form of his motion-activated doppelgangers, steals this show. Curator Mary Salvante coordinated an NEA-funded collaboration between Jaffe and students and faculty in Rowan’s Engineering Department to create the systems that animate her sculptures. They stand, and move, in a perfect salute to Tesla as “magician” of wireless electricity.
I’ll be at the reception on Thursday – if you can’t make it, the show will be up through January 30.
Carolyn Healy & John Phillips, installation in Emanations: Art + Process
Carolyn Healy and John Phillips have done it again: they’ve created an art installation piece that both transforms the space it’s housed in, and crystallizes some essence of the place.
This time they did it inside a one-room schoolhouse on the grounds of WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey, a nationally known center for glass art. Their piece is part of Emanations: Art + Process, an ambitious exhibit bringing in eleven invited artists—some of them experienced glass artists, and others, like Phillips and Healy, who would encounter Wheaton’s impressive glassmaking studio for the first time.
The inside of the schoolhouse has become a kind of snow globe, documenting the history of glassmaking at Wheaton, once the epicenter of the American glass industry. The open room is filled with glass objects that Healy unearthed from the back rooms and storage bins of WheatonArts, from big bell jars and old pharmacy bottles to bear-shaped honey bottles. Light-filtering film on the windows, along with a few spotlights, makes for a singular atmosphere filled with odd sparkles and flashes, and reflections that seem to hover in midair. Suggestive videos on the wall and sound elements by Phillips, seemingly exploring the inner qualities of glass, somehow complete the transformation of the space into “a semi-transparent vessel itself, a crucible for contemplation,” as I wrote in the essay for a catalog to accompany the exhibit.
Donald Lipski, Emanations: Art + ProcessJudy Pfaff installation, Emanations: Art + Process
Most of the Emanations exhibit can be seen in the Museum of American Glass, and includes such standouts as Judy Pfaff’s exuberant and gaudy fantasia on a theme of chandeliers; Donald Lipski’s mischief-making interventions into lovely glass objects; Virgil Marti’s dizzying faux-collection of exquisitely hued vases; and the surreal “barnyard animal” forms of Paula Hayes.
Discovering this adventurous show at Wheaton, set in a shady pine grove on the sandy soil that made the glass industry possible, is like finding the sparkling innards of a geode. If you go, don’t forget to walk down the path to the little schoolhouse with the extraordinary interior, courtesy of Phillips and Healy.
EMANATIONS: ART + PROCESS Artists include Mark Dion, Paula Hayes, Carolyn Healy and John Phillips, Donald Lipski, Virgil Marti, Michael Oatman, Judy Pfaff, Jocelyne Prince, Rob Wynn and Mark Zirpel
Leah Stein, a master of site-specific choreography, is known for creating outdoor dances that work a kind of alchemy on the places where they happen. She proceeds inclusively, allowing her dancers, the audience, the place itself, and random elements including passersby and even the weather, to come together into a new kind of communal zone.
In TURBINE, the collaborative piece created with the Mendelssohn Club to mark the 200th anniversary of Philadelphia’s historic Fairmount Water Work’s complex, we in the audience followed the fifteen dancers and several dozen singers as they moved through the outdoor site, and sometimes surrounded us. Immersion was a fitting strategy for this place, once an early-industrial marvel that supplied clean water to the city, and now an eerily beautiful collection of open Greek-Revival structures, cliffs, trees and lawn set between the Philadelphia Museum and the Schuylkill River.
Beginning in a grove of trees, the dancers and singers appeared without fanfare among the audience, offering simple arcing gestures and short, overlapping musical phrases. We followed them as they moved across the grass, entered a riverside gazebo, and then made their way along a short palisade to a wide plaza. The dancers, in bright orange, and the singers in blue-green vests or scarves, seemed to be making a new map of the place while moving across the surface it described.
Writers including Charles Dickens and Mark Twain visited the renowned Water Works in their time, and composer Byron Au Yong culled haiku-like fragments from their descriptions to create flexible sonic modules. Au Yong, who has made site-based work before, allowed the singers some liberty in the timing of their own phrases, which interwove, sometimes fading in the air, sometimes resonating like depth charges. For the choir members of the Mendelssohn Club, who have worked with Stein before, the piece offered a uniquely challenging adventure, and we felt their bravery as they balanced walking and expressive gestures with outdoor singing. Meanwhile, the dancers held the space like sentries—moving, or often still; offered rituals of pouring water; and danced, all with never-flagging concentration.
Dancers and singers on the plaza
As we attended to what was happening, the site came to life around the performers. Standing in the early evening light, I was struck by the uncommon gracefulness of this place, and simultaneously felt it as it is right now: a place ringed by parked cars and traffic noise, part of a living city.
Experiencing a work by Leah Stein, I’ve found, has aftereffects. Some good art does this—by destabilizing our perception, it makes us see differently. It may be partly the shock of displacement into an unexpected venue that intensifies our attention, pushing us into the present moment (like coming on a flash-mob performance, which may be a new folk form of site-specific dance). But her outdoor events, although large-scale, are anti-spectacles, inducing a sense of wonder through an almost hypnotic sense of heightened receptivity. After the last mingling of performers and audience on the plaza, we left transformed, released into the surroundings and suddenly seeing the colors of dusk as more saturated, the sounds more crisp, and every movement as a signal.
TURBINE was performed on June 28, 2015 at the Fairmount Water Works.
From an engraving of Giulia Grisi as Norma, 1844, Wikimedia Commons
With all the great women’s roles in opera, from Aida to Norma to Tosca, bringing up the issue of increasing women’s role in opera could seem like begging the question. Or like the setup for a punch line—how many sopranos do you need to put on an opera? But at the recent Opera America conference, held earlier this month in Washington D.C., a session on Women in Arts Leadership drew about 100 people, most of them women, for an energetic discussion prompted by questions like: Why are there so few women leading opera companies? Why are most of the new operas produced still written by men? If more women could make decisions, would the subjects of new operas change somehow—maybe featuring more parts for women?
The all-women panel, including three opera company directors, was eager to move past such questions and start acting on solutions. One panelist suggested a goal of reaching thirty percent participation in each category of opera production, from directors to composers, set designers and more—a level that’s considered a tipping point after which further changes can begin to take care of themselves.
Opera America has already begun one strategic initiative: offering commissioning grants to women composers, and to opera companies willing to help produce their work. I was there at the conference with one of the seven recent grant winners, Kitty Brazelton, a fantastic composer and an old friend from college. We’re working together on a new opera project, and the grant she received will make possible a workshop performance this fall, in New York. We’ve both worked on opera projects before, with collaborators who happened to be men—although the first music project Kitty and I worked on, playing in a four-piece folk-rock band she organized in our freshman year, was also an all-women venture.
Will our project, called Art of Memory, be flavored differently somehow because of our gender? Since the subject is the struggles of two male saints—St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, who knew each other in Milan in the 4th century—it wouldn’t seem to be nudging any gender shift in subject matter. But Kitty is writing both leading parts to be sung by women. In fact, she plans to sing St. Ambrose herself, contrasting her rock-mezzo vocals with more traditional opera vocal style. Very cool!
Women have traditionally played some male roles, called “trouser roles,” often when the male character is young. Our project’s cross-casting is meant as a way to shake up the audience’s encrusted ideas about two long-revered saints. In my last opera project, Judgment of Midas, Kamran Ince rewrote the part of the god Pan for a soprano. Another composer, Melissa Dunphy, used a similar approach in her 2009 piece, The Gonzales Cantata, with music set to the transcribed testimony of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dunphy neatly flipped the casting of the piece, so that the nearly all-male participants in the original hearings were all sung by sopranos; only Sen. Dianne Feinstein was sung by a man. In this case, the number of sopranos needed to put on an oratorio, at least, was fourteen.
Change is happening in opera, and we don’t know where it will lead. It’s exciting to be part of that.
During a hiatus from feline companionship last year, I daydreamed about naming our next cat Isis—after the goddess Isis so central to the religion of ancient Egypt, which is also known for its reverence for cats. Then came the news reports from Iraq and Syria about the horrifying actions of a terrorist militia calling itself by the acronym ISIS—or ISIL, or IS; but the first name seemed to stick. I silently shelved my thought, but couldn’t come up with a better name.
Ancient Egypt has fascinated me almost my whole life, and Isis makes an appearance in the novel I’m working on, which takes place partly in ancient Alexandria. Isis was worshiped in ancient Egypt as a kind of world-mother. The hieroglyph of her name includes the image of a throne, and it was believed that Isis was the source or “seat” of the Pharaoh’s power. Here’s a wonderful discussion of the meaning of her name. As the sister of Osiris and mother of Horus, Isis played the lead in the primal drama of Osiris’ death and resurrection. Her grief for her dead brother Osiris made her an emblem of deep feeling for others’ suffering, as her worship spread through the late Classical world.
Last summer, my husband Steve told me about a kitten he’d noticed at our local cat rescue: a beautiful, self-possessed little black cat, who might have some Siamese in her. And, he mentioned, her name was Isis. The woman who fostered her after she was found had given her the name. I knew we had found our next cat.
So Isis entered our lives with her name already bestowed. She wears it well: when she sits at attention, she’s the regal image of the Egyptian cat represented in statues, reliefs and paintings. Telling people her name leads to a variety of responses, often reflecting discomfort with the terrorist-militia association. I may answer with something like, “We’re trying to uphold the good feelings around her name.” The truth is, it pains me to think of the Goddess being overshadowed by a group that represents the most heinous actions of which humans are capable. Google doesn’t distinguish very well between the acronym and the ancient Goddess, and I’m afraid humans can get mixed up too.
On the other hand, I keep thinking that those who cover the news may have settled on the ISIS acronym out of the various choices, partly because of its lingering mythological resonance. We need our myths and ancient stories, as a storehouse of symbols to help us move forward. Maybe it’s a good thing that when people hear the next shocking news from that terrorist group, they feel the breath of Isis reminding them of something else.
Limited-edition press of a Sun Ra remix by Brendan Lynch/deUS
Space is the Place—the wild space-fantasy film starring Sun Ra, the legendary experimental jazz artist—came out in 1974. It follows Sun Ra and his Arkestra as they travel to another planet, where they hope to create an off-earth home for African Americans. Back on Earth, they do battle with a pimp-overlord over the fate of their mission, and play some fantastic music.
This Friday, Bowerbird will screen a newly restored, digital version of this one-of-a-kind film at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. The event celebrates (just a little late) the movie’s 40th anniversary, and the centenary of Sun Ra’s “arrival,” as he called it, in 1914 in Alabama, as Herman Poole Blount. He settled in Philadelphia for the final chapter of a long and prolific career, “leaving” in 1993.
I saw Sun Ra and his Arkestra in the early 1970s, a little before Space is the Place premiered. I was a college freshman, and I’d never heard of him. A friend who was a musician took me to a little club in West Philadelphia that looked like a bar on the outside—maybe it was a bar. Crowded in at small tables, we sat just feet away from a phalanx of psychedelic Pharaohs: the members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, dressed in shiny, many-colored robes, and headgear that included some tinfoil. They proceeded to blast me out of any thought I’d ever had about music and what it could be, building to a wailing, clanging, pounding wall of sound, even while the musicians seemed to know exactly what they were doing. That night the Arkestra played their guts out, making sounds that seemed devised to lift the club into earth orbit. Sun Ra may have intended to give black people a sense of transcendence and galactic-level freedom, but he also made room for someone like me, a white teenaged girl who’d studied classical music, to sense the far horizons he was aiming toward.
That night became a touchstone for me. Sun Ra’s joining of costumed spectacle and no-holds-barred playing made a kind of alchemy happen, and over the years I measured other experimental music and performance against it. No question, Sun Ra achieved serious regard in the jazz world, even as he influenced many other musicians, from George Clinton to Deep Purple to Phish. He may not have managed to transport his people to another planet, but he made music that suggested it was possible.
Space is the Place, screening as part of Bowerbird’s GATE @ The Rotunda
Friday January 16, 8 pm / 4014 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Introduction by Sun Ra biographer John Szwed / Free / more info at bowerbird.org
The Aurora Borealis—that mysterious shimmer of light appearing sometimes in the night sky—is a great thing to contemplate now during Hanukkah, our Festival of Lights, and so close to the Winter Solstice. You can’t even plan to see the Aurora, this huge, otherworldly phenomenon, one of the strangest of light events on earth. You just have to show up where it might be seen and hope one will reveal itself.
What is the Aurora Borealis, anyway? It was named for Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and for Boreas, the north wind, in the 17th century, and often just called the Northern Lights.
Before scientists teased out the secrets of the Northern Lights, the Kwakiutl and Tlingit people of Alaska interpreted them as the dancing of human spirits. The Inuit people of Labrador identified them as the torches held by spirits from the true heavens beyond the sky, meant to lead newly arrived spirits on the right pathway. The Algonquin Indians said that they were the reflection of fires built by the Creator, who retired to the north after he finished his work, kept burning to remind the people that he still thinks of them.
The story told by scientists is just as incredible. Our sun throws off constant small storms of plasma—masses of electrified gas ejected out from its surface. These fly out in all directions on the solar wind. When they get near enough to the earth, they slide across our magnetosphere—the giant electromagnetic body that surrounds us, basically shielding us from getting too much radiation from the sun and the cosmos.
Earth’s magnetosphere absorbing solar plasma, still from animation at http://wimp.com/borealisaurora/
Some of the plasma is pulled in and sucked toward the north and south poles, where it interacts with elements in the stratosphere. Here’s a great animation showing this process.
This interaction of particles of sun and earth creates the Aurora Borealis, as well as the Aurora Australis in the southern hemisphere. A green light show, the most common, means that oxygen particles have been more excited by the flux of free electrons and positive ions, at an altitude of up to 150 miles. The rarely appearing red Aurora means it’s happening even higher than that. Blue or violet light shows reveal the involvement of nitrogen particles at a lower altitude. Sometimes the Aurora appears as undulating curtains, sometimes as swirling lines, or merely a soft allover glow. We now have numerous images, and even videos taken from space, showing how globe-spanning a single event can be.
Aurora seen from space, Wikimedia Commons
Have you seen the northern lights? I haven’t, but I hope I’ll be lucky enough to see them with my own eyes someday. It will be a chance for an up-close encounter with an off-world astrophysical effect, without the need for filters or lenses—a direct experience of the vast electromagnetic environment around us as it briefly drops into the visible realm, to become a stunning spectacle of light in the darkness.
Burchfield’s “Early Spring,” 1966–67, Burchfield Penney Art Center
In the paintings of Charles Burchfield, the trees vibrate, the air pulses with rhythmic patterns, and birdsong takes on shape and color. Everything is alive, even a dead branch, even a house. At the major exhibit of Burchfield’s work at the Brandywine River Museum, up through November 16, you can see the early and later paintings in which he worked full-out to translate his visionary experience of the natural world.
Burchfield lived from 1893–1967, in Ohio and upstate New York, away from the centers of art-world activity. But he kept up with the currents of modern art. It’s possible that learning about the daring art of the 1913 Armory Show helped him make his own breakthrough work in 1915, when he first began to make connections between his own intense responses to nature and music, and his painted landscapes. In the 1930s he became known for sometimes brooding portrayals of small towns and industrial scenes. Then, in the midst of World War II, he returned to his earlier desire to convey the strange aliveness of nature.
Burchfield’s Early Spring, 1966–67, Burchfield Penney Art Center
Birds transforming into air currents, the sound of cicadas appearing like jagged leaves around a tree—was there some hallucinogenic stimulation involved here? Very unlikely. Nancy Weekly, who co-curated the Brandywine exhibit, has highlighted the idea that Burchfield had synesthesia—the ability to experience trans-sensory perceptions, such as sound as color or vice versa. It may be that I love his work so much because I have synesthesia too—along with many others in my family, from my father, my sister and brother through nieces and nephews. We have the most common type, seeing numbers and letters as specific colors. Although it’s relatively rare, at least one study has shown that synesthesia is more common among visual artists, and I suspect that may be true of poets, musicians and composers too.
Synesthesia runs strongly through early modern art: Kandinsky wrote about trying to achieve color-sound consonances through painting, and it can be seen as a motivator toward abstraction in his work and others, including artists of the Blue Rider school. Burchfield was aware of all this, yet he didn’t follow the path of pure abstraction. For him, those sensory correspondences were inextricably linked to the blooming, buzzing profusion of the natural world. He persisted in making pictures showing how, for him, everything around us vibrates along many interconnected spectrums—sound, color, energy.
Does any of this strike a chord? If so, what color is it?
I was one of the 300,000-plus people in the People’s Climate March in New York on September 21 – and like many others there, it had been a long time since I joined a march. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be part of a big crowd, all sharing a growing feeling of alarm over patterns of climate change, and deep dismay over patterns of denial among those who could and/or should know better.
The low clouds held back except for a brief spatter of rain, and the mood held too: a lovely parade buoyancy, and a palpable excitement at being part of a visible expression of something we all cared about. I went on one of dozens of buses from Philadelphia organized by 350.org, carrying my handmade sign, saying WAKEUP. My partner for the day was Diane Burko, an artist who has been making powerful paintings and photographs documenting the melting of glaciers and other effects of climate change. Diane has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Greenland, and Antarctica, and to scientific conferences to speak about her work.
This group’s slogan was Give Bees a Chance
The parade had seven thematic groupings, starting with FRONTLINESOFCRISIS, FOREFRONTOFCHANGE and ending with the inclusive TOCHANGEEVERYTHING, WENEEDEVERYONE. Diane and I joined the group behind the banner THEDEBATEISOVER, whose float was a giant rolling blackboard with drawings charting rising CO2 and ocean temperatures. We were surrounded by scientists—old and young, men and women, of many backgrounds, and many with their children—representing fields from geology to psychoanalysis.
Because the turnout was so much higher then expected – estimates had been around 100,000 beforehand – the street backed up with participants, and those of us in the back stood for several hours before actually marching. Pizzas were delivered, snacks and water were shared. Finally, we set off down Central Park West, walking with people who had lost homes to Katrina and Sandy, young activists, old activists, dignitaries, working people, stilt walkers, musicians, people representing Pacific island nations whose very land is in danger of disappearing under rising seas.
The Statue of Liberty in rising waters, wearing a life jacket
The parade ended at 11th Avenue, near the Hudson River. It’s not far from here, I realized, that a scene takes place toward the end of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. In Egan’s brilliant vision of the ways we are changed by technology and other forces, climate change has become part of the background of city life: a few decades from now, on a warm day in February, a young family gathers with others on the ramparts of the giant sea wall that’s been built to keep the rising waters out of New York. Climbing up to watch the sunset from there has become a new tradition, since the view has been blocked out by the wall.
What will we have to face as a result of the climate change that has already been set in motion? People whose cities have the resources to build sea walls will be the lucky ones. We need to acknowledge what scientists are telling us, and we need help from artists and others to visualize what’s happening now, and to imagine what’s in store. We need to wake up.
Chestnut Hill Skyspace, photo by Greg Benson for Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting
My friend and I arrived at James Turrell’s Skyspace, at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill Friends Meetinghouse, just before sundown. When I asked another visitor if we could take photos, the man—who had visited a number of times before—told us the artist had asked that no one take pictures, so that we could keep the experience “in here”—he tapped at his heart.
Turrell has built dozens of these perceptual environments around the world, but only two in the context of Quaker worship. This newest Skyspace encompasses the small, white-walled meetinghouse room, with a carefully constructed, rimless opening in the center of its roof, and a bank of hidden, digitally programmed LED lights high on the walls.
If it rains, the Skyspace viewing is cancelled, since the rain would come right in through the opening, which is usually covered. It had rained just a few hours before, but thankfully, the sky cleared up: when the covering retracted, we looked up into a softly blue sky with puffs of gray clouds. I took the invitation to lie on the floor, right under the opening. This made it different from a Quaker Meeting for Worship, though the silence that fell over the visitors through the next fifty minutes felt very close to a Meeting.
The open, rimless rectangle, framing a piece of deep sky, at first touched off a sense that I was looking at a painting—although a painting that moves—against a white background. Paintings traditionally aspired to be windows onto another view, right? It’s as if Turrell knew how hard it is to keep our eyes and brains still enough to pay attention to the sky, and offered us this one bite-sized piece.
Slowly, like a curtain rising, the hidden lighting in the room changed, and with that, we were transported into another place. Turrell the perceptual magician ushered us into worlds where our sky was intensely green, soft orange, deep lilac or faded yellow—a startling result of our eyes adapting to the changing ambient hue in the room. More amazements followed: was that a halo around the sky? Was I maybe standing in front of a window, rather than lying under it—and could I just get up and walk through it now? Finally, we blinked under the coal-black aperture, and walked outside to a sky of midnight blue.
Lying under the window of sky, I found myself wanting to share the experience with others—particularly with my father. He is in his final illness; he sleeps a lot and talks only a little. I wished I could convey to him some of the light we saw, taking it out of my heart and putting it in his. Still, I know the experience is different each time and for each person: everybody has to see his own light.
Chestnut Hill Skyspace is open to visitors
at sunset on Sundays and Thursdays,
and at sunrise on Thursdays.
Opening is subject to temperature and precipitation.
Tesla featured on the cover of the Electrical Experimenter, 1902
Nikola Tesla is a hero to geeks everywhere, who will be celebrating his birthday this week. World-famous in his lifetime, the prodigiously gifted inventor fell into semi-obscurity after his death in 1943, even though his inventions helped create the world we live in now.
Tesla’s fans know about his groundbreaking work in many fields: his invention of radio (sorry, Marconi), his creation of the alternating-current motor, his singlehanded development of remote-control robotics, to name a few—all before 1900. Like some virtuoso of invention, Tesla worked solo, perfecting most of his inventions in his head. Eventually, he held several hundred patents.
But there is one development for which he hasn’t gotten credit, even as a collaborator. And if you’re thinking it may be the electric car—that’s not it. We should also give Tesla his due for contributing to the birth of modern science fiction.
Tesla’s imagination never turned off, and he continued to churn out ideas with world-changing implications—if they had been realized. His World Broadcasting System, anticipating the Internet by decades, ended as a half-built ruin on Long Island. He thought up “death rays” made of charged-particle beams, experimented with using principles of resonance to cause earthquakes, and even proposed pulling electricity down from the ionosphere, to provide virtually free energy around the globe.
These and other huge-scaled projects didn’t come to be, but they inspired others who were part of Tesla’s circle. One of them was Hugo Gernsback, a young writer, inventor and publisher of popular science and science fiction—a term that he coined. (The Hugo award, one of science fiction’s highest honors, is his namesake.) Tesla’s inventions and ideas resonated intensely with Gernsback: articles about Tesla ran regularly in his early magazine, The Electrical Experimenter, and Tesla’s autobiography, My Inventions, appeared in its pages. The young author inserted Tesla into a sci-fi story of his own, The Magnetic Storm, in 1918. A few years later, Gersnback founded the legendary Amazing Stories—the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction.
Tesla’s work can be seen as a kind of template for early science fiction: they both share a worldwide focus, speculation on war and peace, and a general hope in the possibilities of human progress. The way I see it, it was as if some of the visions Tesla was offering couldn’t be encompassed by society in his time, and had to spill over into the arena of imagination. There they fed the blossoming of a new art form—the first in human history to focus on the future.
Science fiction has become an immersive background to our lives, via Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, the Matrix and many other imagined future worlds that owe their existence to the genre of popular science fiction. It’s almost second nature for us now to slip into these virtual environments, trying on possibilities and working through ominous scenarios, using the future as a canvas to help us figure out what’s happening now, and where we want to go. We take this time-shifting between present and future for granted—as much as we take for granted the electrical power that surrounds us, thanks to Tesla’s worldwide electrical grid.
Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla, and thank you for helping to introduce us to the future.
The Asteroid Belt Almanac celebrated its launch yesterday, at a great event put together by the publishers, The Head & the Hand Press. Great venue too — Indy Hall, a loft-style co-working space in Old City Philadelphia for tech workers, startups and other creative folks.
I’m so happy to be part of this forward-thinking project. This beautiful little Almanac re-imagines Benjamin Franklin’s iconic format, bringing together contributors who share an interest in the intersection of technology and science with our lives today. There are essays (including mine), a graphic novel script, some actual science fiction, art and more. In a nod to the old almanac form, this one even includes a guide to 2014 meteor showers, and a Weather Glossary — but this one’s geared toward climate change literacy. (Do you know what anvil zits are?) Really, it’s a must have!
I’ve just written a guest post for The Head & The Hand Press, considering how Mark Twain’s innovations in publishing could be seen as a precursor to the growing trend of crowdfunding for books. Twain/Clemens thought outside the box not only in his writing, but in the business of books.
Twain’s passion for innovation and invention led him to admire the work of Nikola Tesla. Here’s a picture of him in Tesla’s New York laboratory, holding what looks like one of Tesla’s wireless light bulbs. You can just make out Tesla on the left.
And speaking of crowdfunding, the preorder campaign for The Head & The Hand’s Asteroid Belt Almanac is in its final week. Order a book, support a great independent press, and get a beautiful anthology of new writing and art, all at once!
What if Poor Richard’s Almanac were reimagined for today? The Asteroid Belt Almanac, coming soon from The Head and the Hand Press in Philadelphia, is all about using this homey literary form to help us imagine the futures we’re moving toward. The old Farmer’s Almanac offered stories and interpretations of the stars to help farmers with their planting. The Asteroid Belt Almanac is a place to consider the strange intersections of creativity, science and technology that we’re experiencing now.
It will include my essay, Gravity and the Cloud, an expansion on my blog post Gravity and the Noosphere (both inspired by seeing the movie Gravity), as well as the script for a graphic novel about travel to Mars, thoughts on music in the digital age, star charts, and much more. The publishers hope that it will “help to measure the kind of atmospheric pressure felt between daring hypotheses, between small steps and giant leaps.”
Preorder the Asteroid Belt Almanac! For $15, or more if you would like extra rewards, you’ll get a beautiful book, craft-printed on recycled paper. I love how with this project, The Head and the Hand Press is linking its commitment to fine artisanal printing with a new way of funding, via Pubslush, a site dedicated to crowdfunding for books.
“Opera permits us to go into a world that is not real.”
This was spoken by Nicole Paiement, artistic director of Opera Parallèle, about halfway through a panel discussion of storytelling in opera at Opera America’s New Works Forum, held last week in New York. I was there because Judgment of Midas, the new opera I’m involved with, was scheduled for a showcase performance—an excerpt with singers and piano.
I heard these words with a sense of relief and recognition. After this, others in the room acknowledged that many opera companies have gotten into a “quasi-naturalistic groove,” developing new operas that share with much of traditional opera a straight-ahead, scene-by-scene narrative arc.
It’s been almost forty years since the 1976 premiere of Einstein on the Beach, with its shocking mix of enigmatic text, Robert Wilson’s hypnotic movement and the propulsive sound of Philip Glass—and it’s been eighty years since Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, sung to a blithely out-there libretto by Gertrude Stein. Since the groundbreaking Einstein, new opera and music-theater have staked out a wider range of possibility for the story, or in some cases, the text that goes with the music. Operas like John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, about the first atomic blast, expand the story with diversions into poetry and myth, while Anna Nicole borrows TV talk-show format and flashbacks to create a large-scale version of the would-be Pop goddess.
At the New Works Forum, Nicole Paiement described an upcoming production planned for her Opera Parallèle in San Francisco, a mash-up of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny-Songspiel and the Baroque-era Les Mamelles de Tirésius by Poulenc, which sounds—well, I can’t even imagine how this will turn out, which makes it pretty interesting. In some ways, a lot of new opera has more in common with Baroque opera, with its stories of mythical heroes, gods and goddesses. With Judgment of Midas, the libretto I wrote offers a place where Greek gods interact with present-day humans. In the libretto for Violet Fire, I tried to create a dream-like space in which the events, people and visions experienced by the inventor Nikola Tesla could intermingle.
People still respond to the big characters and passionate stories that are the stuff of traditional opera. But it may be that now, with our lives marked by a dizzying interplay of the virtual and real, we need art forms to reflect that multiplicity of experience—the feeling of living in different realities. That kind of multiplicity is coded into the structure of opera, with its synthesis of story, movement, visuals and the human voice at its most powerful. You could see this multi-layered approach as stretching back to the earliest human storytelling, which combined rhythm, movement, costume and voice to create an experience of a greater, expanded reality shared by humans and gods.
I came away from the New Works Forum recharged and inspired by the work of some gifted artists in the field, and the dedication of the opera professionals who want to see new work happen. Here’s to the making of crazy, weird new operas that help us make sense of our strange, fast-changing world.
I loved seeing Gravity. In my opinion, the Planet Earth should be nominated for a supporting-player Oscar. I drank in the massive, stunning views of the earth in the background of so many scenes—completely convincing, thanks to high-level CGI effects. At those screen-filling distances, you could make out the thin, blue-white film of the atmosphere, the delicate outer membrane that makes life on earth possible. There they were: the biosphere and the atmosphere, as seen from space for real by just a few hundred people so far.
That soft shell of atmosphere offers a visual analogue to other, unseen layers, both actual and imagined. There’s cyberspace—a zone of reality that’s tied to physical things like computers, servers, satellites and fiber-optic cable, but can’t be seen or felt. We call this domain digital, but what does that mean? It doesn’t seem farfetched to think of this quickly filling-in worldwide web as another, invisible shell surrounding the earth’s surface.
And then there’s the noosphere, an idea put forward by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin about 90 years ago. He was inspired by Vladimir Verdansky, a Russian scientist who himself gets credit for coming up with the term “biosphere.” With the noosphere (the prefix comes from Greek nous, for mind) Teilhard invites us into a kind of thought experiment: imagine that all of human thought surrounds the earth in an invisible shell. As our mental outpourings grow and intensify, this “thinking layer” fills in and comes into its own. Teilhard suggested that the noosphere would emerge out of technologies “extending a closely interdependent network” around the world. At that time he was referring to radio, teletype and television—but his description seems to eerily anticipate the Internet and our current web of digital communication.
This promise of the noosphere pulled me in when I first heard about it. It was there when I wrote in the libretto for Violet Fire about Nikola Tesla’s vision of the earth becoming “a single brain” through his planned World Broadcasting System. In Leaving Alexandria, the novel I’m working on, it has helped me envision the accumulation of knowledge, from ancient libraries to our expanding digital cybersphere. We can’t see any of these the way we can see the translucent envelope of our atmosphere, but that doesn’t stop us from experiencing them around us.
James Turrell’s installations at the Guggenheim left me in an altered state. Using light as his primary medium, Turrell’s art requires slow looking and an active acceptance of ambiguity—both conducive to entering a kind of contemplative trance.
He’s pursued his singular work, from early experiments with slide projectors in dark rooms to Roden Crater, his monumental environmental work-in-progress in the Arizona desert. Since most of us won’t get to Roden Crater—though I sure would like to—this year’s major shows in Los Angeles, New York and Houston offer a rare chance to see some big work by Turrell. Aten Reign, his transformation of the Guggenheim’s atrium into a massive cone of gradually shifting light and color, is the biggest temporary piece he’s created so far. The experience of it is quiet and meditative, shared with a crowd of people, and lasting about an hour. In other words, it feels less like an art exhibit than the sacred experience you might have with others in a temple or church.
Turrell has been open about this side of his work; he talks about light as revelation. A Quaker, he has designed a space for a Quaker meetinghouse in Houston that brings the sky directly into the room, translating the Quaker idea of finding the light within into outward form. But, given the times we are living in—many centuries after the ages of great sacred architecture—the art world can be a more or less welcoming alternative for such impulses. It’s less welcoming to the extent that talking about the connection of light with spiritual life can and does make some people uncomfortable (see Jed Perl’s piece in the New Republic).
Turrell may be better understood in the context of his predecessors in sacred architecture—including those who created the stained-glass light shows inside the great Gothic cathedrals. The Abbé Suger, who lived in the 12th century, brought together glass artists from all over Europe to make the innovative stained glass windows of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, the first truly Gothic building. The Abbé developed his own theology of light, involving three aspects: lux, lumen and illumination. Lux is physical light, from the sun or another source. Lumen is light transformed by sacred intention—having passed through the artist’s sparkling glass panels into a consecrated space. And illumination is that transformed light, standing for a divine, invisible light, apprehended within the viewer’s heart. This way of exploring how physical light can be transformed feels more useful to me in responding to James Turrell’s work than limiting the conversation to perceptual psychology—how the mind works to interpret the tricky behavior of photons.
Turrell knows all about the photons, and how we perceive them—he’s a mage of light and its effects. His predecessor, Abbé Suger, reminds us not to get hung up on the photons—to be open to the illumination within.
We’re living through a slow-motion earthquake in the world of books. The massive shift from printed books to e‑books and other digital formats may be as momentous as the arrival of the printing press five hundred years ago. This is one of those big changes that, even though it’s affecting our lives profoundly, is hard to talk about—maybe in part because it’s so new. As Lev Grossman said in a 2011 article, “if anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.”
A new documentary by Vivienne Roumani, Out of Print, aims to get us talking about this phenomenon. How many of us still read printed books, or any long-form books at all? What is the effect of the e‑book revolution, and the broader, internet-induced change in our reading habits: on publishing companies, on writers, on libraries? What about children and teenagers coming to reading now—how will it affect how they learn, even how they think?
The film, narrated by Meryl Streep, is on the festival circuit, and will be shown this Saturday, July 20, in New Hope as part of the New Hope Film Festival. Roumani gets a kind of virtual conversation started through interviews with an impressive array of experts. In one corner, there’s a surprisingly eloquent Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon—the big gorilla of both e‑book and print book sales—who speaks with passion about the book as an elegant object, and about how reading a novel can transport you to an alternate world. In the other corner, there’s Scott Turow, who as president of the Authors Guild acts as a kind of pit bull for writers, arguing for their right to earn money from their work against initiatives like Google’s controversial plan to digitize thousands of books.
And then there’s the late, great Ray Bradbury, speaking about his discovery of reading at his local library in Waukegan. In the basement of that library, he banged out the first draft of Fahrenheit 451, the book that presciently imagined a future where most people live with immersive entertainment screens, and where books are in danger of disappearing in a different way. Is our new world as strange as that, or stranger? This elegant and thoughtful film opens a door on that question too.
Out of Print will be shownSaturday, July 20, 7 p.m. at the New Hope Arts Center, 2 Stockton Ave. @ Bridge Street, New Hope, PA 18938, as part of the New Hope Film Festival
There’s something about the inventor Nikola Tesla that has strongly attracted artists—much more than his arch-rival Edison, let’s say. Tesla’s amazing life and grand visions have pulled artistic creations from those he captivates—a stream of operas, music, plays, novels and stories, film and video. I know about this firsthand, because it happened to me. Discovering his story led me to write a libretto for what became the opera Violet Fire.
Nikola Tesla, born in 1856 to Serbian parents in Croatia, was a visionary scientist/inventor who helped create the bedrock of our technological world, with his groundbreaking discoveries in electricity, radio, robotics and even computer circuitry. His intense stream of visualizations led him to amass over 700 patents. Some of his visions, like his idea to pull electrical energy from the upper atmosphere, still sound like science fiction. He was a charismatic figure who moved through New York’s Gilded Age high society, befriending Mark Twain and others, but lived and died alone.
From top: Nikola Tesla as an old man; a still from Violet Fire
When I first learned about him, Tesla’s story knocked me over. How could he not be universally known? His visions seemed like those of a mystic, yet they had led to inventions that have had global effects on how we live. With his strange, outsized life and visions, it seemed to me that only an opera could hope to portray him. I centered the story on Tesla’s relationship with a white pigeon, whose death brought him a vision of powerful light. Violet Fire was brought to life by the beautiful, haunting music of Jon Gibson, and the contributions of director Terry O’Reilly, choreographer Nina Winthrop, and video designers Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons. Exactly seven years ago, on Nikola Tesla’s 150th birthday, my collaborators and I had the great honor of seeing the premiere of Violet Fire at the National Theater in Belgrade.
Our opera isn’t the only one inspired by Tesla. A large-scale opera, Lightning in His Hand, has been mounted in Hobart, Tasmania. Melissa Dunphy’s song cycle, Tesla’s Pigeon, was recently performed in New York, and a new opera by Jim Jarmusch and Phil Kline is in the works. As Tesla is rediscovered, I’m sure there will be more works inspired by him—maybe in artforms we haven’t yet imagined. Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla.
ees, the dancers and singers appeared without fanfare among the audience, offering simple arcing gestures and short, overlapping musical phrases. We followed them as they moved across the grass, entered a riverside gazebo, and then made their way along a short palisade to a wide plaza. The dancers, in bright orange, and the singers in blue-green vests or scarves, seemed to be making a new map of the place while moving across the surface it described.
