Weekend Cat Blogging #333: Works of Art

Luna contemplates the sculpture Pierced Screen by Joshua-Tree-based artist J Michael Smiley.

She has a good sense for how to contrast her natural shape against stark geometric lines. Actually, given our art and decor, she doesn’t have much choice in the matter.

I bring the outdoor sculptures inside every winter. This month has been rather volatile, ranging from a heatwave to violent rainstorms and now to more typical crisp autumn weather. We were caught completely by surprise with the storms, with both heavy rain and winds. A particularly strong gust of wind one of the outdoor sculptures crashing to the ground.

Fortunately, it was not damaged, perhaps a few scratches but nothing worse than usual wear and tear. I consider the rust sculpture more sensitive to rain, so that one came indoors for storage. Luna has been fascinated by it ever since.

I would like to clean it and fix the rust surface a bit, but I don’t have much expertise in this despite owning multiple rust sculptures.

Our friend Parker of Perfectly Parker has received some very sad news this past week. Our thoughts are with Parker and her family.

Weekend Cat Blogging #333 is hosted by Billy Sweetfeets.

Carnival of the Cats will be up this Sunday at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Weekend Cat Blogging will be here for Hallowe’en next week!

Art Practical Year 3 Launch, with Music and Super-8 film

Today we look back at the launch party for Year 3 of Art Practical, an online magazine that documents and discusses Bay Area visual arts through reviews and analysis. The event took place at Fivepoints Arthouse. Upon entry, we were offered the opportunity to purchase a logo shot glass (which I did). During the evening, it was filled a few “Shotgun Shots” (Shutgun! being the title of their first issue for the year).

However, the highlight of the evening was in basement of Fivepoints, where artists/musicians Joshua Churchill and John Davis presented live experimental music set against a hand-solarized Super 8 film. It’s pretty rare these days to see actual Super 8 films, but it definitely added something to the piece. They images were purposefully grainy, and even more distorted as a result of the solarization and other treatments of the film – it reminded me of some of the effects on the Hipstamatic (see examples here and here), but on a much larger scale and with a richer depth of intensity and contrast.

Joshua Churchill sat in front of the screen and performed the live with electric guitar and an array of electronic effects. There were echoes, distortions, some elements that sounded like looping, and synthetic sounds from the combination of effects. There was a noisiness and graininess to the music that seemed to reflect the quality of the film. The overall effect was quite beautiful and evocative, and mesmerizing.

Through small slots in the ceiling, light poured in from the main floor gallery, creating a series of light streaks that worked both in concert and contrast with the images from the film and heightened the overall presentation. Even though the space was quite crowded, I found myself completely immersed in the visuals and sounds of the piece.

The piece would have been a great event to see on its own even without the party, but I am happy it was there otherwise I might have missed it. All in all, a great evening. And now Art Practical is already on its third issue of Year 3.

#OccupySF

#OccupySF, our local incarnation of the increasingly global Occupy Wall Street movement, has had its ups and downs. I first visited the camp, located in front of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Building at 101 Market Street, a little over a week ago, a few days after a major confrontation with SFPD on October 6.

At that particular moment, the camp and protests were quite small, mostly situated on the sidewalk in front of 101 Market. The Federal Reserve Building itself was blocked off with large fences, and eerily quiet.

There was a large police presence at the front of the gate, but things were quite peaceful and orderly, and seemingly cordial. Inside the camp itself, a relatively relaxed but serious atmosphere also prevailed. But there was a friendly and welcoming atmosphere, and certainly a lot of humor in the protest signs that participants were creating and holding up towards Market Street. This one was by far my favorite:

But I did also like this one with its Sci-Fi mixed metaphors:

I did take a turn at standing in protest with the other participants, holding up a couple of different signs, and enjoying the support from the MUNI operators of streetcars and busses that came by and honked/chimed in support. I also got a chance to participate in the now well-known technique of call-and-response that was used for conveying information and having discussions. Basically, each phrase of a speaker is echoed by the others assembled. It is efficient to amplify words and meaning without using megaphones or electrical equipment, but it also gives the communication a musical quality.

There was also the juxtaposition of the Blue Angels flying around the buildings of the city during Fleet Week. I always find the presence of loud airplanes among downtown buildings extremely disconcerting, but set against the protests it became rather surreal.

Since my visit, the encampment has grown and moved to nearby Justin Herman Plaza (home of the Vaillancourt Fountain of which I am quite fond). There was a large march through the Financial District (which I wished I had been able to attend), and a larger rally this weekend ended at Civic Center Plaza. However, in addition to these positive developments, there was also a raid on the camp late this past Sunday night. I was not there myself, but you can see a bit of what happened in this video by Josh Wolf:

Since then, my own city representative has visited the camp in support. And a march and rally at City Hall occurred today in support of #OccupySF’s right to assemble and protest. This is one of the days my work takes me out of the city, and I don’t yet know how things turned out…

RIP Dennis M Ritchie

Last week we lost Dennis M. Ritchie, whose work influenced much of what we do with computers today both as users and software developers.

From the New York Times obituary:

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator…

It was only a week earlier that we were marking the passing of Steve Jobs and noting the contributions he made to Apple via NeXT. The operating system of NeXT which became Apple’s Mac OSX are Unix systems. Similarly, the much of the heavy computer programming from large-scale servers to iPhones is done with C and its descendents C++ and Objective C.

“The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,” said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.

A great many of us who studied computer science and practiced computer programming have the classic text that Kernighan and Ritchie co-wrote, The C Programming Language, known affectionately as authoritatively as “K&R”.

C is at hits heart a “systems programming language.” It’s a small language, structured in the imperative programming style of Algol and PASCAL, but the individual functions and operations are close to the machine language, simple bit-shift, arithmetic and memory location (pointer) operations. As such, it is very unforgiving compared to some of its predecessors, but it was efficient and simple and has enough expressive power to build operating systems like Unix, scientific computing, and the inner works of most software applications through the object-oriented successors, C++ and Objective C. Much of my software work has centered around these descendent languages, but when it comes to doing actual computation, it’s still C.

“C is not a big language — it’s clean, simple, elegant,” Mr. Kernighan said. “It lets you get close to the machine, without getting tied up in the machine.

Higher-level languages, like the PHP used to build this site, are ultimately implemented as C and C++ programs. So both this website and the device you are using to read it are products of Dennis Ritchie’s work.