What a Time to Be Alive

By Bill Crandall

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"To see the rot in no disguise, oh what a time to be alive"

Talk about art that is 'about something'. As Superchunk slides well into middle age, they come roaring back with a catchy-but-angry punk-pop fusillade of hooks and riffs that leave no doubt where they are aimed.

First Listen: Superchunk, 'What A Time To Be Alive'

It seems artists have sometimes struggled to respond to the scope of the great upheavals of the recent past. After 9/11 artists and musicians largely kept their heads down in the 'patriotic' furor. There were those all-star concerts to make us feel better, which is fine. But artists (like journalists) too often abandoned their contrarian impulses. Ask the Dixie Chicks - Bruce Springsteen was the only one to prominently come to their defense after they were blacklisted for speaking out against Bush. Tom Waits was one of the few singers to put what was going on into their work, and even he was pretty indirect and hesitant about it in the song "Day After Tomorrow".

Currently I'm reading "The Great Derangement" by Amitav Ghosh, about the absence of climate change as a topic of serious fiction and other arts. (It's something I'm thinking about and working on for a followup to my Mars concept album. What was going on back on Earth as humans made the great leap to space colonization? Was it calamity that drove them to consider leaving Earth forever?)

Where Is the Fiction About Climate Change?

All the more reason Superchunk's ferocious, melodic clarion call is so stirring. It's an un-hesitant punch in the face to those who, frankly, most deserve it. Using the tools and weapons they possess. And poignant coming from those one might presume to be weakened, on the decline. Will it matter, change anything? Well, only if you still believe that anything still matters. Music itself has never changed anything directly. But if it can change and bolster us, then who knows what we can do?

Georgians in Mykolaiv: Preserving Language and Culture

By Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

During the Soviet era, the expression of ethnic identity was discouraged or even punished, so people of many backgrounds were forced to suppress any public celebration of their roots. But after Soviet rule collapsed, the public embrace of one’s origins once again became possible. That is the case in Mykolaiv, where people from more than 130 different nationalities live together peacefully. Many of them are taking strong action to preserve their language and culture.

One of the best examples is the Georgian community. When conflicts broke out in the Abkhazia region of Georgia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of ethnic Georgians were killed and as many as 250,000 were forced to flee, some to Southern Ukraine. Now they are fighting to preserve their language and culture in their new homeland.

At the Mykolaiv College of Culture and Arts, we were invited into a classroom where the Georgian language is being taught to children of different ages. This language, which is unique among world tongues and employs its own very beautiful, rounded script, is alive in Mykolaiv thanks to the ongoing efforts of teacher Valeriy Ekhvaya, a leader of the Mykolaiv Georgian community who carefully tutors students in both reading and writing.

On the day we met him, he was awarded a certificate commending him for his work cultivating ties to other local minorities by Lalita Kaimarozova, an official responsible for outreach to all the national communities in Mykolaiv. His friends Yunus Aliev and Shamil Ismailov, members of the Azerbaijani community in Mykolaiv, attended to support him and to celebrate the long-term friendship of Georgians and Azeris. Among other things, when Georgia was attacked by Russia in 2008 following conflict in the South Ossetia region, Azerbaijanis offered support to the Georgian people.

But it is not only language that Georgians seek to preserve. We were invited to move from the classroom to the dance studio, where Georgian dance was joyously and energetically performed by beaming young people. And from there, we moved to a modern Georgian restaurant, complete with painted replicas of famous Georgian paintings, where we shared unique Georgian dishes, such as a flat bread with cheese and spicy stuffed pasta pillows filled with juices that must be slurped down before they are consumed.

The evening ended with numerous toasts about the importance of friendship among different peoples, and with the ceremonial drinking of wine from handmade, horn-shaped flasks, which have a unique construction: they cannot be put down until they are empty!

Art on social media

Bill Crandall

Of course plenty has been written about social media and art, I’m not sure I can add something new of value.

Like most artists, I’ve wrestled with the limitations of social media as a platform for art. I’ve seen too many artists post their work online, let’s say on Facebook or Instagram, only to receive a somewhat dispiriting number of responses even if the work itself is quite strong and interesting. Obviously people are deluged by the torrent of social media content, and increasingly task number one is not to let it take over one’s day completely. So the endless scroll requires extreme vetting - what is worth clicking on? The latest Trump outrage? Your friends’ smiling group shot at a hip event? Hedgehog Azuki’s daily cuteness? Since you know in advance you might click on a number of things that could really add up in terms of time, you can’t afford too many missteps.

For the record I enjoy Facebook quite a lot (probably too much), in part because I try to post quality stuff and my friends generally do as well. There’s some fluff to wade through, but not too much. I truly feel like I discover things I wouldn’t otherwise, in addition to keeping up with the (mostly) worthwhile musings of friends.

Personally I am somewhat averse to clicking on videos unless I know they are very short. For some reason even though I’ll read articles that take several minutes, those same minutes watching a video feel more like I’m falling down the rabbit hole.

So why would I post, as I did the other day, a 10-minute video? Which I myself wouldn’t be likely to click on? Who feels like they have ten minutes for anything? It’s some of my finest recent work: a song sequence from my music album that I’m quite proud of, thoughtfully paired with images in an interesting conceptual narrative. But not only is it long, it’s SLOW. Slow like a Bela Tarr film scene, I’d like to think. Actually not quite that slow. Maybe slow like 1970s movie pacing. It requires (and rewards) patient attention. Can our brains even handle that anymore? There’s been plenty of evidence that consuming short online reading has made it harder for the brain to settle into reading a novel. Our wiring is evolving. Is long-form anything already toast?

The video is part of a loose, experimental narrative of sorts, about the first people to leave Earth for another planet, knowing they won't return. It uses my original music and my photos combined with NASA public domain images. This is the segment toward the end as they approach their new home (Mars), descend in pure terror, and somehow land safely and begin to build a life. After a few years Earth has stopped responding to their communications. Has something happened back home, are they more alone than they realize? I tested it on a few of my high school students, they hung there and seemed to like it, but that was a projection in a darkened classroom, by request of the teacher. What realistic expectation should I have that people will pause their day for such an absurd proposition: “click here for ten minutes of something I created”?

Ukraine Sketchbook: Photo Workshop in Antonivka

by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

Since we’ve been in Ukraine, we’ve met some incredibly warm and giving people, who have been kind enough to let us into their lives. One of those individuals is Dmytro Say, who is involved in so many projects locally that it’s impossible to know when he sleeps.

One of Dmytro’s most important efforts is on behalf of an orphanage in a small village north of Mykolaiv called Antonivka. Dmytro taught there for several years and now he returns to assist them with a variety of programs. He asked us to come with him to the orphanage and conduct a photo workshop for the kids there, who range in age from about 5 to 16.

Dmytro used an older car for the drive, which he warned is on one of the worst roads in Ukraine. After some truly outsized bumps along the way, we arrived in Antonivka and were warmly welcomed by the staff, who took us on a tour of the facility, which includes a museum of Antonivka’s history, first as a place dominated by a wealthy landowner, then as a very productive collective farm, and now as a place where many have volunteered to fight in the East.

But the most important part of the visit was the kids, of course. We met them first in a classroom, offering some pointers on photo taking strategies that would move them beyond the selfie. Then we all walked out on the steppe, known for its constantly blowing winds, sharing cell phones to take some experimental portraits and landscapes. When we were safely back in the classroom, we downloaded the photos, projected them on a wall, and discussed the results. The kids participated enthusiastically, showing a surprisingly advanced intuitive command of composition.

We don’t know if any of them will go on to become professional photographers, but we do know that Dmytro has forged a wonderful bond with some very loving and talented young people, and we were glad to become a small part of their lives.

Mykolaiv Sketchbook: Roma Remembrance

By Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

We were exceptionally honored and pleased to be welcomed yesterday on a bus by members of the Romani Bacht ensemble to travel more than 200 kilometers northwest of Mykolaiv to a site that is very important to Roma history and remembrance. We joined local Romas and their friends in commemorating a massacre of 5,000 Romas, many of them women and children, that occurred in World War II during German occupation of this territory. A wreath was laid, songs were sung, and poems were recited near the village of Krivoe Ozero (Crooked Lake) where  a monument marks this terrible event. After solemnly remembering this tragedy, local residents also embraced their heritage with a celebration in song and dance -- and a meal -- before the long ride back to Mykolaiv. By the time we returned, late in the evening, we felt we had made a lasting link to new friends -- and we certainly honor and respect their outstanding contributions to local culture and their history. We are sharing a small number of photos that document the proceedings, but we also made connections that will further our project on ethnic identity and the reasons why so many peoples of different backgrounds have been able to live together peacefully in Southern Ukraine.

Mykolaiv Sketchbook: Druzhba Festival

Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac

Following a whirlwind of activity in Kyiv, we took the night train to our new home in Southern Ukraine: Mykolaiv. Mykolaiv was named by its founder, Prince Grigory Potemkin, in honor of St. Nicholas, on whose day he won a significant military victory. The city is at the confluence of two major rivers, the Southern Bug and the Ingul. After they join, they flow to an estuary where they meet the Dnieper and then the Black Sea. For years, Mykolaiv was one of the most significant shipbuilding cities in the entire region, and because of its contributions to the military might of the Tsars and the Soviet Union, it was a closed, secret city. People from other parts of the Soviet Union were not permitted to visit the city, and if people from Mykolaiv wanted to visit relatives from other places, they needed to leave the city and meet them somewhere else. In the post-Soviet era, the three major shipbuilding centers in Mykolaiv are all closed, and the city is now open to all, though few tourists venture here.

Here in Mykolaiv, we are working closely with our affiliate institution, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, including the Dean of the Philology Department, Professor Oleksandr Pronkevych, a noted Cervantes scholar, and other faculty and students to create two projects. First, we are focusing on the reasons why people of so many ethnic backgrounds have been able to live together peacefully in Mykolayiv for many generations. Second, we are creating a documentary on the relationship of the people of Mykolaiv and the surrounding region to the water that is such an important part of their lives.

On the first full weekend we spent in Mykolayiv, a new friend alerted us to the planned Druzhba, or Friendship, Festival. We packed our cameras and started walking to the location to check it out. As we turned onto the main pedestrian street, formerly Sovietskaya and now Soborna Street, we were surprised to see a colorful parade of diverse nationalities marching together. We followed them to the Cultural Palace, where a program of dancing, singing, and ethnic food unfolded. Although the city is dominated by people of Ukrainian and Russian heritage, there are dozens of different ethnic groups living here, and many of them participated in the Festival. In our first sketchbook from Ukraine, here are some very colorful and proud moments from this demonstration of cultural friendship.

Village Life Along the Danube

We’re continuing our 6 week sojourn in Southern Slovakia, along the Hungarian border, before we move to Ukraine. This is a region of small, rural villages in which contemporary and historic influences coexist in an uneasy patchwork. In the last two days, we helped the women of Chl’aba clean the village church, took a long walk along the Ipel River, which together with the Danube forms the border with Hungary, and took a bus trip with the choir to the nearby village of Letkes, where they performed folk songs in traditional dress at the yearly village festival.

The experience in Letkes was particularly surreal. The women performed their songs early in the program of the festival, then were joined by a Slovak-Hungarian sitar band for musical accompaniment. Up next was a Hungarian pop duo whose upbeat songs inspired an eccentric couple to dance wildly and french kiss near the stage while the audience applauded. (The man later kissed Mark on the neck; the woman sat uninvited in Gabriela’s lap; and they both refused to believe that we didn’t understand their language.) Then a Hungarian heavy metal band called Crazy Granat started its screeching warm-ups, sending the choir and the rest of the Chl’aba contingent scurrying back onto their rental bus.

The Chl’aba choir is an example of a key generational challenge facing Chl’aba and other rural communities. The choir is overwhelmingly elderly, and the women don’t know how much longer they will continue performing. The next generation is absent -- in part because working age people are drawn abroad for better opportunities. While there are some children who perform, there aren’t enough to replace the older generation, and thus no certainty about whether local folk traditions will be preserved.

In this post, we’re sharing some images from Letkes -- images gathered in support of our long-term project, Returns, which documents village life in Chl’aba and also focuses on several generations of Gabriela’s family. Our eventual goal is to create a book that captures all the intricacies of this village and its environs.

RED AND BLUE DAYS (Experiments on the Banks of the Danube)

Greetings from Central Europe, where we’ve begun a year-long adventure  that will have multiple components, including a photo/video Fulbright project, learning about and reporting on contemporary life in Central and Eastern Europe, reconnecting with family, and exploring family origins.

Our first stop is Chl’aba, Slovakia, the hometown of Gabriela’s mother, and the site of a joint project we’ve pursued for almost a decade. Called “Returns,” it’s a very intimate account of village life along the Danube, with chapters that dwell on different generations and try to come to terms with the tragic and unexpected loss of Gabriela’s father and other family members in recent years. We’ve collected a voluminous amount of photographic and video documentation of Chl’aba over ten years, so much that it’s hard to fit on a burgeoning array of hard drives. One key goal is to turn this material into a book, and we hope to make progress on that this month. It’s also likely that Returns will never come to a complete close as we continue to visit, document, and improvise.

In terms of the latter, Chl’aba has become ground zero for experiments on our documentary approach and our aesthetics. On the one hand, when we get here, we’re usually ripe for relaxation on the pebble beaches that line the Danube River. On the other, we quickly get itchy about image-making. While sitting on the banks of the river the last several years, we’ve explored a plethora of new approaches to image capture, many of them centering around alternative (and sometimes found) lenses and alternative surfaces. That process is continuing this year, with a burst of new images that we hope are pushing the boundaries in terms of what one expects to see in a photograph or a video. We’re living in a world that gives birth to more than a trillion photographs per year, so when planning to gestate new ones, it’s a good idea to make sure they have something new or special to say.

We’re sharing a few of the latest experiments today, in keeping with the spirit of Atlantika, which embraces transparency on process, and also in the hope of getting some feedback. We’ll share more as the summer continues, and it will be interesting to see if they influence our approach to the Fulbright in Ukraine (which will begin in mid-September) and our work more generally. We invite you to react, reply and become a part of an “Open Circle” of collaborators who are informing our work in the coming year and beyond.

I guess we're going to need a few more members...

This 140-Person Art Collective Is Pursuing an Alternative Model for Artists to Make a Living

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-140-person-art-collective-pursuing-alternative-model-artists-living

The Geography of Creativity

Bill Crandall

It’s interesting how obsessions that have directed the course of my life - and my art - have always been about culture intertwined with place. As I’ve felt somewhat alien in my own country for much of my adult life, usually 'place' meant somewhere else.

London

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With friends on Carnaby Street

In my teens and early 20s, London was everything. The mother lode of just about every cultural touchstone that mattered, especially musically. In high school I went there on a school trip - which for me was more like a pilgrimage - and was hooked.

So a few years later I picked up and went there with a guitar and too-few bucks. My band at the time, Modest Proposal, had been offered to play at the famed 100 Club, so we all went and I tried to stay on.

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Modest Proposal at the 100 Club

The record label guy who got us the show, Mark Johnson, was also managing The Sharp, a band which was basically The Jam minus Paul Weller, with Jimmy Edwards on guitar and vocals. Mark said he was going to try to get me in on second guitar. The Jam’s drummer Rick Buckler was in attendance at our 100 Club gig, and one afternoon we got to hang with him at his London recording studio, Arkantide. Unfortunately, Mark clearly had other, um, personal designs on me as well, so that all evaporated pretty quickly when he learned I didn’t roll that way. I was 20 years old and, suddenly, completely alone. It was just too hard, soon I was back home. (Years later we heard rumors Mark had died of AIDS in Morocco or someplace. There's a pretty extensive thread about him on this mod revival forum from a while back.)

A few years passed and I tried again. My longtime friend and mod-mate David T had moved to London for his PhD, so I took a fall semester abroad, which was really just a cover for trying to get a band going with David.

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A couple dudes who auditioned with David (right) on his balcony in Primrose Hill

I was living in a one room bedsit in north London, with an electric meter I had to pump with 50p coins to keep the heat on. The band never got off the ground unfortunately. As the weather turned colder I remember being riveted to a crappy little TV in a friend’s freezing flat, watching what would become known as the Velvet Revolution in Prague. I thought about going there, as I was getting more into photography and it seemed a golden opportunity. But I was headed home to the US in a matter of days, and my mother was coming for a visit, so I didn’t even try. Probably best, I was way too green.

Prague

Around the same time I was reading Milan Kundera and poring over the photography of Josef Koudelka, tapping into new physical and psychological terrain via art. My cultural compass was shifting east, especially with the London yearning seemingly tapped out. While I missed the Velvet Revolution, by 1991 I was in Prague teaching English. Never in my life had I felt such affinity with the textures, smells, sounds, and general vibes of a place. Communism was gone but the ghosts hadn’t cleared out yet and globalism hadn’t arrived. There were few tourists. It was that in-between period, when things were gorgeously rough and all seemed possible.

I learned some Czech, met a girl, went back several times over the next few years. The girl didn’t work out in the end, maybe I was more in love with the place. I remember thinking of the city at the time as feeling like a comforting, motherly embrace. The complex sensibility of the people - unsentimental yet warm, understated but with that dark humor, without some of the American excesses I disliked - made a deep and lasting impression. As did Czech photography and photographers that I met, which became hugely formative influences. I began to understand the link between sensibility and being an artist. On one hand I used to think, well, damn, once again the dreams didn’t work out. But they did in other unexpected ways. I’d go so far as to say that Czech people helped make me the person I am, and Czech photography helped make me the photographer I am.

DC

Starting a family obviously grounded me at home in the US. Not without some leftover wanderlust, if I’m being honest. So I kept going, when I could. From Prague’s maternal lap I hopscotched to the Baltics, the postwar Balkans, Belarus, and other parts of Eastern Europe.

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In Riga (left) and postwar Kosovo

Of course I was making photos, that was a big driver along with basic curiosity. But I also still had that almost primal urge to situate myself in a different place, to breath different cultural air, even if I always snapped back home in the end.

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My daughter in her bedroom

Finally, with a young daughter and a ‘normal’ job, I found a way to work photographically with what was right under my nose in DC. But while I was feeling more invested at home, I couldn’t shake the sense that maybe all I was doing was projecting my Eastern inclinations onto my hometown. Maybe it was wishful art-making, seeing what I wanted to see.

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Tove Jansson's sketch of herself with the cast of Moomins characters she created.

But soon there was a shift again, this time to the north. My fixations began to skew toward the Nordic countries, and as always, dovetailed with their cultural creative output. I love Finland’s Tove Jansson and her Moomins stories and art. She knew something about wishful art-making: as a lesbian, anti-fascist artist in WWII Finland, she constructed the Moomins’ humanitarian paradise partly as a rebuttal and antidote to the ugliness and despair of wartime.

There was Denmark’s bike culture. The Swedish film Let the Right One In, such a beautiful and atmospheric thriller. Iceland’s music scene, beginning with Sigur Ros like most people but there are so many more. I find it perhaps the most creatively fertile region at the moment, but that’s a different post.

As I became less restless and more concerned with making the art I needed to make, these became new inspirations. And while the north pulled at me through its creative ambassadors, I felt I could tap into them without needing to be there, it was almost enough to let them live in my head. I discovered the evocative soundscape approach and new musical vocabularies of bands like Sigur Ros and Norway’s Royksopp. Suddenly, after many years away from making music, I started having ideas again, new ways of assembling a palette of sounds, melodies, and song structures. This helped lead to my 2016 solo album New World Voyage, a concept album that imagined the first people to leave Earth forever for a distant planet.

So maybe heading East made me a photographer, and looking North resurrected me as a musician. As I work on stripped-down acoustic versions that I can manage playing live, and new songs for the followup record, I find that, finally, maybe I’m turning to my own country for inspiration. (Lately I do find myself listening to more Jackson Browne than I ever thought I would, does that count as a guilty pleasure?)

What’s hard though is finding current American musicians pushing the envelope, going beyond genre, in ways I find as satisfying as what Nordic artists like Jonsi, Pascal Pinon, and Farao are doing. So I try to do it myself, to bring some of that into my own work as I tried to bring Eastern Europe into my photography.

As my friend and mentor the great Czech photographer Viktor Kolar - who himself has a tremendous affinity for place, in his case his industrial hometown of Ostrava - told me, if you have a vision and are able to create, then you have a duty to do so. So much of that vision has been shaped by where I've been, where I've been drawn to like a magnet.

Impact of Incarceration on Families Highlighted in ZEKE Magazine

The work of Atlantika Collective members Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac, focused on the impact of incarceration on families and children, was published in ZEKE Magazine. This project, titled "Locked Apart: The Koger Harris Family," is one chapter in a series of documentaries that focus on the impact of incarceration on families. More than 2.7 million children currently have a parent in prison, and children missing their parents are seven times more likely to get involved with the criminal justice system themselves. You can check out the full story here: http://www.zekemagazine.com/forum/incarceration/locked-apart-the-koger-harris-family

How’d You Get a Gig Like That? - Part I

Music at a photo festival
With two collaborators I did a live music set at FotoweekDC. We live-scored a projection of photography from New World Voyage, my music-photo hybrid project that came out over the summer (see mistochord.com). It’s a story of sorts of the first space colonists at the moment of leaving Earth, knowing they won’t come back. It was interesting how the balance of photo and music components jostled for attention and importance. Is it a slideshow, a concert, an art project? The album download comes with a PDF booklet of images, but in some ways the live format better integrated both elements into an immersive whole.

Hey, that sounds cool, how does one get a gig like that?
Well, in my case, doing the hard work over an extended period of time, against all odds and battling through all kinds of uncertainty and limitations. Doing things and building on them to do other things. I recommend remaining flexible, open, and yet stubborn in your creative approach. Have ideas and chase them, but don’t be afraid to go where the path takes you. I’ve always played music in bands, but this is material that is totally new for me, ideas I didn’t have twenty years or five years ago. I left a good and successful indie band, Dot Dash, to pursue those ideas. And yet for a fair stretch of time it really wasn’t working, until finally it was. So that’s what I mean by stubborn.

Bringing it to the micro-local level
The next night we had a cool listening/watching party in my DC neighborhood, Petworth, in the small venue called Third Floor above a diner. This was a different 40-minute video version (that I finished editing and exporting about 30 mins before doors opened, I think I got a ticket on the way back to the venue...) accompanying the full recorded album, plus Q&A at the end. Nice little turnout and very grass roots, some people lying on the floor on pillows for the screening. The event again made me realize (along with the live version) that the material is most powerful when all the elements are together - the music, photos, and even the writing I did to flesh out the story, in the form of the crew’s communications back to Earth. Now I’m thinking where else to take both formats, live and prerecorded. I’m thinking the whole spectrum from living-room listening parties to theater-scale projections with live score. Some new possibilities are already in the works.

How did you hook that up?
By being active both in my work and in the community, and a bit of karma. I’d become friendly with the guy that owns the Third Floor and a number of other local establishments. A while back I took some photos when his family closed their long-running art space downtown and moved their various businesses to Petworth. I took them for myself, but gave them the photos gratis as I knew how momentous it was for the family. Recently he offered the Third Floor as a venue for a listening party so I came up with ideas on how to do it. Not really a quid pro quo in the sense of either side expecting anything, more like what goes around comes around. Which might not get you ‘into the art world’ but is not a bad approach to building *your* art world.

You work for months and even years on projects that have no guarantee of coming to fruition. But then suddenly, sometimes they do. I can remember asking for creative advice in the past and would often hear, 'stick with it, do the work’. Now I'm seeing why that's the best advice of all.

Bill Crandall

The Watershed Project: Testing the Installation

Mark Isaac

Part of what makes Atlantika different as a collective is transparency. As our inaugural blog post made clear, “We’ll offer a more public view of our creative process than is typical, to provide some insights into our methods for shepherding work from idea to completion.”

That’s not always so easy to do. It offers a peek behind the curtain to moments of uncertainty, chaotic experimentation, and even outright failure. It risks having the veneer of a poised, highly skilled, confident artist stripped away and replaced with something a lot more fallible and human.

So in the interests of taking this goal seriously, here’s a rare glimpse behind the scenes to the very first test of the collaborative installation I’m creating with Gabriela Bulisova. In this video -- that somehow managed to become partially corrupted, adding to its charm -- you’ll see us testing our first concept of the installation using, what else? A baby pool, a mirror purchased at Target, and droppers left over from Trader Joe’s liquid stevia drops! If that doesn’t lead to great art, I don’t know what will!

If you come out to the opening at Boyden Gallery of St. Mary’s College of MD on October 21st, you can gauge whether we managed something a little more polished and sophisticated…and better yet, see how the early test informed the final vision.

Importantly, the final work calls attention to the way in which the entire Chesapeake Bay Watershed, comprised of 150 major rivers and streams, is interconnected. And as an interactive installation, it offers you a way to personally participate and demonstrate that anything that happens to part of the watershed has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem.

We’re hoping it’s a lot of fun to play with the water. But we’re also hoping the installation will convey that the Watershed, which supports innumerable life forms, including 17 million humans, is severely threatened and now relies on us for essential interventions that will restore and preserve its vibrancy for the future.

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Life Support, an interactive installation by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac, includes an IV bag, drip pan, beakers, droppers, projectors, water from the Chesapeake Watershed, and sound. It is on view at Boyden Gallery from October 18 to November 22.

Thumb notes and photographing the invisible

Bill Crandall

My good friend and collaborator Craig Czury is doing a poetry event at Upshur Street Books on Feb 16th, if you're in Washington DC mark your calendars. Craig is an old school poet-warrior with the soul of a documentarian, with an enigmatic way of looking at things. We've been working together on an ongoing fracking-related project combining his words and my pictures from around where he lives in rural northeastern PA - fracking ground zero, the Marcellus Shale region. This event is for the release of his latest book, Thumb Notes Almanac, docu-poems he made by hitchhiking up and down the rural highways and back roads and chatting up locals and fracking workers alike. He creates a humanistic, nonpartisan mosaic of voices from a region under duress.

We’re planning a book of our joint work too. I think our visions meshed well, since we both like getting at a story indirectly, through the side door. I remember an intro to a Josef Koudelka book that calls Koudelka a ‘secretary to the invisible’, which always struck me as a noble guiding principle. How to illustrate an issue that is mostly invisible (fracking happens two miles underground)? For me, it wasn’t about shots of fracking towers as much as a feeling for the land. I consider it a landscape series.

I’ll probably make one or two more visits up there to keep the project going. Fracking activity, and the ripple effect on the community, is constantly in flux. Below is a photo I took of a well pad that seemed fairly innocuous. I couldn’t tell if it was under construction, or deconstruction, or was simply a dormant former drilling spot. (On a tragic side note, the family across the road who owns the property got a big windfall for signing off on the land rights. They spent part of the money on a four-wheeler for their teenage son, who promptly crashed it and died.)

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This is right up the road from where Craig lives in an old rural schoolhouse converted to artist studios. Here’s a night shot he sent more recently of the same spot:

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If you want to see how our project is shaping up so far, take a look on my website.

It's a Robot, Baby

Joe Lucchesi

Like a lot of folks, I’ve been thinking about love in the time of robots lately. A recent viral video of a smiling electronic baby happily squirming in its UCSD Machine Perception crib really sent me over the edge, plunging into the uncanny valley. Looking at something close - its nubby teeth and charmingly squinty expressions, but not close enough - its rubbery skin jaggedly meeting its acrylic blue skull, produced a visceral sense of existential angst that took me by surprise.

Could this almost-baby potentially be my technological successor, my reaction already intuiting my own technological insufficiency? Maybe. Could it also be that the video is yet another irresistible metaphor of machinery mediating any and all intimate relationships? But this is a social media fact that projected our love lives into the digital realm back in the internet equivalent of the stone age.

Or perhaps my response was a jarring realization that our robot overlords have arrived, and unlike what pop culture has led us to believe, it wasn’t in the form of an inexorable army of powerful replicants, or deceptively charming and attractive lackeys lulling us into a false sense of pampered security, or even the friendly neighborhood drone delivering my mail. It arrived in the form of a gurgling, happy baby making cute for my benefit. Some aspect of all these notions fed my momentary vertigo on the edge of the technological ravine, but mostly I think I reacted from a sense of self-betrayal - the robot baby caught me off guard because this already exists. It might be too late, and I hadn’t even noticed.

Programmed using newly-available big data drawn from studies of infant responses by developmental psychologists, one of my more sobering thoughts in staring down that video was that our physiological human reactions had been recorded, translated, crunched, freely exchanged and turned into a simulated replica of ourselves, programmed into a silicone equivalent whose goal is then to teach us about developing human interactivity and emotion. The breathtakingly efficient inversion of that exchange is what worries me now, as though we’ve already ceded the territory of invisible human connection to its quantified doppelganger. This feels like one more step to making technological conquest both plausible and palatable.

Human relationships mediated by technology are nothing new, only taking new forms appropriate to the age. The camera, the telegraph, and the telephone all opened up new possibilities for connectivity across time and space even as they subtly initiated an easily-ignored gap in which we’re dealing with disembodied versions of each other, negotiated across this divide. And that’s only in recent history. As that video suggests, some folks think of the uncanny valley as only a warning of an unsolved problem. But others see this sense of uneasiness when confronted with our almost-selves differently, as a prompt to think about the human within that gap. 

So maybe I should thank the robot baby for its charming and off-putting chubby grins, its inability to perfectly simulate human behavior and - in turn apparently - teach us about our own development.

Our human relationship to the natural world can’t be far behind in all this unsettled estrangement, and of course is already here. Server farms succeed the agri-business conglomerate that itself replaced the family farm in the vast plains of American productivity, producing a new crop we increasingly rely on for sustenance.

The question then becomes: can we live on data alone across the rolling hills of the fertile uncanny valley? We can’t, but robot babies do.