electric mist

time traveling again...

Carl's been invited to exhibit his Time Machine with a traveling Smithsonian exhibit. It's for kids (who tend to love the crazy thing he made) and the "installation" is in January. I'm not sure how long the exhibit runs, but woo! Smithsonian. He's over the moon.

Carl's Time Travel Machine was featured again a few weeks ago at a local Gallery, which ended up having several hundred people moving through the art exhibition that night. The first night he'd been invited last may, we took these photos. I've got a bunch more from that night and from this new night that I need to get up on that site in thumbnails, but if you haven't seen them, they're funny.

gorgeous

I absolutely love Leya's paintings, shown here in a recent gallery showing. It's unusual for me to feel so strongly about abstract art because I work more in grounding the imagery in reality whenever I've painted. But each of her works feel like a story, or maybe an entire symphonic movement, they have such a presence, a power of motion and emotion caught in time. Beautifully done, Leya, truly.

the art question

One of the things that people kept asking at the Art Hop the other night when they looked at the Time Machine was, "Is this art?" I can't say that I blame them, because you know, really, it started off as a hair dryer until Carl saw something crazy in it and began modifying it. It's funny how we often get hung up on "What is art?" as if there were some sort of empirical test we could apply to any object or work and know that yes, this one is art while no, that one is not. And I think the main reason people want that sort of test is so that they don't look foolish appreciating something that someone else thinks is silly or junk. Most of us just don't want to look foolish in front of anyone.

But the bottom line is, it's art if it's art to you. Period. It really doesn't have to be art to anyone else to qualify, because your appreciation of it, your interaction with it (whether it's intellectual because it provokes thoughts, visceral because it provokes feelings, tactile because you're actually physcially interacting with it or all of the above) makes it art. (I could now digress into a very lengthy philosophical discussion here where I pull out a bunch of dead philosophers and why "art... arts (verb)" and so forth. And we could argue to the death as to whether something functional can also be "art" and whether "art" should be divided from "craft" and why and how and good god, wouldn't that be dull? And rather pointless. With a Masters in Philosophy, I would bet I could bore the pants off you right about now, but even I know it's boring to listen to a lot of dead philosophers because the whole exercise would contradict the point... that you don't have to listen to what other people think, it only matters what you think. So there ya go, philosophy in a nut shell.) (Um, not literally, I hope.)

When one of the men attending the Art Hop walked forward toward the Time Machine (laughing, seeming eager to ride it), he asked me, "Is this art?" And not wanting to sound pretentious, I said, "I don't know if it's art or not. I just know it's making a lot of people laugh, and that was the point." He nodded, smiling even bigger, and he enjoyed his "flight." (I think he went to the Fiji Islands. I also think he had decided he was 18 again.)

How can that not be art? The art of making people laugh, of transporting them, however via imagination, to another place... whether they were pretending to be elsewhere or they were simply allowing themselves to let go for a moment of their rigid "public" face and be a kid again and have fun and pretend.

I hope that today, even if it's for a few minutes, you'll go out and "art"... try your hand at something. You can be very very bad at it, that's okay. It's not the quality that makes it art, it's the effort, the interaction. You don't have to show anyone, either -- it's not a contest. But start. Give yourself a chance to do something creative. There is no "bad" here, there is only play. So go. Art a little. It'll change your world, even if for only a little while.

time travel photos

I've tried to size all of the following photos for the web so the download wouldn't be horrific... but if something's slow, y'all let me know and I'll put up thumbnails instead, or link to another page with the photos.

I think this is my favorite photo of the night:

The whole thing sits on skis, just in case you land somewhere snowy:

But before you time travel, you must first check the oil:

That's a dip stick that you can pull out (which I didn't photograph). And here's how you know when to change the oil:

Because, of course, you're reading the heads up display:

And you know you need to check your fuel before you go:

If you run low on the fuel (twinkies), the light on the fuel indicator would light up:

because the fuel pump:

would send a message to that indicator above. Once you are seated (here's Eliza):

you have to turn on the various things in sequence.... from the lights and thrusters:

and to the time travel button show above (the one with the twinkie indicator light)...

And when you switch on those thrusters, the thruster lights come on:

Some people were really surprised when they hit that thruster button:

because the whole thing suddenly vibrated. That was due to the unseen (a curtain hung over this) massager Carl had strapped to the back of the hair dryer seat:

which, when the thrusters were on, vibrated fairly heavily and the echo against the seat back made a real "engine" sound.

When the thruster lights come on, so do all of the lights around the wings and the rudder:

Which you steer while holding onto the handles on the side of the machine:

If you run into to anyone else time traveling, you can let them know you're there, too, by dinging this bell (which was surprisingly loud):

And just in case you travel really really far and have an, um, emergency, we have that covered:

Carl got everyone to turn everything on in the right sequence and then back off again in reverse sequence. Occasionally, a couple of people would start to stand up before turning everything off and he'd say, "Wait! You don't want to vaporize yourself!" and man, they'd plop back down in that seat and draw their hands into their chest like they really might have vaporized. Cracked me up.

It was fun to see how different personalities interacted with it. Some laughed and were itching to have their turn. Some stood shyly a few feet away, leaning in toward it but not-quite-brave-enough to be silly in front of a crowd until Carl would call them over. Others practically ran out the previous time traveler so they could have a turn.

The comments they would make as they time traveled were funny and interesting. I got a kick out of the ones who really turned that globe around to their very specific destination (and I don't think there was a single repeated destination for the night)... with places like Fiji (current day) and the Renaissance period (in order to get some of those antiques before they became so valuable) and the North Pole (to visit Santa) being some of the choices. Other people actually got into the time aspect, with a large number of women asking the question about if they went back, would they come back looking younger. (I told them I had started off that morning as an 84-year-old. They practically jumped in the seat.) A few people went even further to interact with the crowd, pretending to be going forward in time and telling the crowd they were getting older and older (with a couple of people in the crowd contorting their bodies as if they were now hobbled over canes). Some of them really got into the act, pretending that there were G-forces pushing them backward into the seat and leaning from side to side as they swooped through time.

Mostly, everyone chuckled and many laughed (some just couldn't stop laughing and smiling), and pretty much everyone was sure Carl was nuts, but a genius nut. Lots and lots of people asked me if he had always been like that and I could easily assure them that yes, indeed, he had. (One of our first dates was right after the semester had let out and a few of our wealthier friends were going to Colorado for a ski trip. The rest of us broke students were stuck at home, so Carl decided to have a Colorado ski party. Now, understand, this was like our third or fourth date. He went around to stores and got the equivalent of several refrigerator-sized boxes of those white packing peanuts and poured them out on the floor of his apartment, filling it up to calf level. He then rented a helium tank and we blew up about 400 balloons to cover the ceiling. We made snow angels and partied with about 30 people in that apartment until the next morning. I still find peanuts in some of our stored things.) I can't say I didn't know what I was getting into, can I? (But it's been fun.)

He's already planning on additions to the time machine. He wants to put it on a platform, and eventually, make it to where there are foot pedals on the skis and hydraulics underneath so that when you push a foot pedal, the whole thing leans to a side or forward or back. There will be a seat belt, of course. And god only knows what else. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if, not too long from now, he turns the damn thing on and it really does disappear and travel in time.