- internetplus

Join the Drop Box Brigade today!

Code for America sends Fellows to cities to help local governments do more with technology.Now, we've launched Brigade to help everyone make their cities better with technology. We're coming to PDX!

-------------

• Who: Rebooting Democracy Folk, Civic Hackers, , City Reps, Developers, Designers, etc — anyone with the passion to make Portland better!
• Where: Geoloqi HQ (920 SW 3rd Ave #400). Our civic-minded friends at GeoLoqi have graciously agreed to host our civic rabble. 
• When: April 22nd, 10am-3pm. *Lunch will be provided.*
• What do you do at civic hackathon, anyway? At a civic hackathon, people who know and love technology (software developers, designers, entrepreneurs, etc.) come together with people who know and love urban issues (city staff, local organizations, community members and leaders) to use technology and their collective skills to build solutions that matters to our city, and other cities too. 

There's food, smart people, and networking opportunities. It’s an opportunity to make a difference with skills you know, hone some you’ve forgotten, and maybe even acquire some new ones. Still not sure what to expect? Check out a Fellow's experience. 

 

The Bus Project is throwing an awesome festival this month called Rebooting Democracy, and you can get in free(ish) if you volunteer.

I paraphrased Antonoi Gramsci badly over beer with Nim. Here is a proper rendering, from Gramsci's Letters from Prison:

In acquiring one's conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man.

Such conformity (community?) underlies underlies language. Amartya Sen argues that Gramsci's idea indirectly influenced Wittgenstein, leading him from his view of language as an abstract symbol system to something not reducible to math and logic. (RC's own Vernon Carter believes Wittgenstein thought this way all along and was being ironic in the Tractatus.)

Gramsci isn't quite paraphrasing Aristotle, who said something related, namely:

 He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Solitary confinement makes you insane.

More here via mefi

Compelling video is not real. It's art. 

See: ‘Bird Man’ Hoaxster Comes Clean on Dutch Television

I wrote a moderately disparaging article about the Boeing 787 a while back, likening it to a carbon fiber cathedral since it basically applied new(-ish) materials to the old tube-and-wing design.

But apparently because of the Dreamliner, you'll soon be able to fly nonstop from both San Diego and San Jose to Tokyo. San Diego's runway was evidently too short to put enough gas on to the 777 so it could go the distance across the Pacific against headwinds. San Jose had enough runway but not enough people to fill the plane. (See the piece by Guy Norris in Aviation Week.)

The 787 is smaller than the 777, so you can fill the tanks and still get off the ground in San Diego. And fewer seats to fill and a 10% improvement in operating efficiency means "long, thin" routes like San Jose/Tokyo or Boston/Helsinki, for example, can proliferate.

However, in keeping with my baroque thesis, Norris writes: "the 787 may not open the floodgates on long, thin routes in the same way as did the 767 on shorter transatlantic routes."

Initially I thought perhaps we would see a PDX-Narita route. Delta already offers one--via 767.

White Bird dance has brought Kidd Pivot back to Portland for an incredible performance of the 2009 piece “Dark Matters”. Their last showing is tonight, and it should not be missed. “Dark Matters” is a remarkably ambitious piece which rewards a close reading while also offering a rich aesthetic experience for viewers who just want to watch world-class dancers in an inventive performance. But this is Research Club, so let’s get down to that close reading, shall we?

Most responses to “Dark Matters” begin with the structure of the performance, as the show is very much a choreographer’s show, directed with great ingenuity by Crystal Pite. The dancers are working with a world that she built more than they are building their own.

Broadly, “Dark Matters” is shaped like this — the first, theatrical act features dance wrapped up in a silent play  about a puppeteer whose bare-wood creation comes to life and turns on him (and the set). The puppet is animated with astute grace in the Bunraku style — multiple hooded performers dressed all in black  (kagezukai or “shaded manipulators”) appear on stage behind the puppet, using wooden rods to articulate it. For the entire first act, dancer Peter Chu is the only performer on stage in regular costume, dancing with either the puppet or the black-robed kagezukai. As the narrative and the narrative structure fall apart, the kagezukai are freed from their roles and become stage hands, fighters, and then dancers themselves. The narrative is driven by a cinematic and noisy score by Owen Belton which shares the audio space with a looped quote from Voltaire’s 1755 “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”:

 

This frail construction of quick nerves and bones
Cannot sustain the shock of elements;
This temporary blend of blood and dust
Was put together only to dissolve;

The quote’s obvious connection to the puppetry hides a subtler theory of the whole work encouraged by these words. (More on that later). 

The way in which the first act tears itself apart is full of deft shocks and some genuine humor which shows both in the interpretation and the plotting. Any further details would ruin some really tangy surprises.

The second act starts without warning, while the audience are still returning from the bar and bathroom — warning that the boundaries of the stage have not been repaired during the break. A lone kagezukai dances mainly with the astonishingly beautiful lighting design by Robert Sondergaard until the rest of the troupe joins. There is a temptation to refer to this portion of the show as the “pure dance” portion, as it does not include puppets or an obvious plot like the first act did. However, it is this reviewer’s opinion that the second act is entirely driven by the wake of the violent reframing that occurred in the first act and dissects the same ideas more tenderly and subtly. 

The theatricality of the first act, which does get a little whimsical at points, has been criticizedas being too obvious and self conscious. I think this is quite missing the point. The broad strokes of the first act represent the long run back that Ms. Pite took to launch her program out of the theatre and into a new space. The intricacy of the show lies in the way in which the broad, loud themes of the first act are still enfolded into the aesthetic and structure of the second act. She shows us theatre and the hubris of thinking that one can control what one makes, she literally waves a sign that says “this is fake”, and then she breaks the illusion more than you thought possible, even after telegraphing her punches.

What we’re seeing is an intricate, dance-based work of postmodern art which, like any sufficiently self-aware and ambitious contemporary piece, addresses its own unjustified, transitory, and fleeting existence. Vik Muniz’s concept of the worst possible illusion is at play on many levels. We know we are being fooled, but we are fooled more profoundly through that knowledge. Penn and Teller’s cup and ball trick is a brilliant shortcut to this feeling.

This brings me back to the Bunraku puppet. This particular style is a historically-rich example of the power of the idea of the worst possible illusion. The kagezukai are right there on stage in pure view, but not because of a failure of stage lighting. They are blocked out just enough so that we look elsewhere, but not so much that we are not aware that our gaze is being directed. The artistry with which the kagezukai direct the puppet is the treat, as is the artistry with which the author of the play directs our attention. In Bunraku, the musicians, the silent puppeteers, and a player known as a “chanter” create a synchronized performance that aims to thrill the audience not though its power of illusion but through an open demonstration of the artifice of theatre. 

Whether there is a conscious application of the historical context of Bunraku to “Dark Matters” is not very important to me. The fight scenes contain recognizable martial arts stances, including poses from both tai chi and manga. I had the opportunity to talk to Peter Chu to confirm that those choices were studied and on purpose. So I do not think that there is a hidden message to be decoded from the references to Bunraku, but given the rigor of the rest of the show, it is much more likely that Ms. Pite has studied what she is working with than not.

Bunraku was contemporary with the rise of Kabuki, which later became more popular. They differ in many ways, but their structures are fundamentally divided by the fact that Bunraku has the chanter — a performer who reads the story out loud, the same each time, doing the voices for every character. in contrast, Kabuki allows space for the actors and actresses to improvise and pun. Bunraku is called an “author’s theatre” — at least by Wikipedia and by people who use Wikipedia. The performance is driven by the writing and the planning.

“Dark Matters” applies itself to the hazards of authorship and will — first in a fun, accessible spirit through the play, and then in increasingly poignant and abstract ways through the real-but-fake destruction of the play and its spirit and the dance that occurs in its rubble. The real plot of the piece is the journey of the lone kagezukai who escapes the first act, a journey which needs both the first act’s flawed theatre and the second act’s “pure” dance.

“Sufficiently self-conscious and ambitious contemporary art” tends to come out rather dry most of the time, both from being baked in academia and from the maker’s worry at being distracted by the juicier ingredients. What we often get is a lot of meditation on the futility of practice or the restricting pressure of historical context. They don’t sound like it, but these are compelling plots. It’s just that it’s much less common that pieces can engage these ideas and turn them back on the audience as something human and relevant to getting out of bed in the morning. “Dark Matters” is an inventive, entertaining, and surprising performance by incredibly talented dancers, but it isexciting because it is a big, complicated contemporary work that manages to make these issues and ideas stab you in the gut.

Later in the work, the Voltaire quote continues:

 

Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,

The piece is framed by quotes from a poem written after an earthquake made city-building and everyday life seem pointless to one of the greatest writers of his time. These are read over the silent performance like a Bunraku chanter. The main structure borrowed from Bunraku — the puppeteers and puppet — falls apart and produces a refugee. This refugee, the kagezukai, perseveres after the destruction of its entire world. It enters the part of the show we were expecting — the dance. Without its presence and without its journey, this dance would merit a much less complex, direct reading of its formal qualities. The dancers are unquestionably at the top of their class, but I don’t think “Dark Matters” is about the dancing. It is about how it becomes about the dancing.

Whether Voltaire is writing after an earthquake or Crystal Pite’s troupe is performing in a blindly-optimistic city overdue to be leveled by a massive one, the decision to stand up and make art has always been one of the few things that art can contribute to the world that makes it worth special attention. This decision requires comparing ones own creative forces to the forces of the outside world, and, like Voltaire reminds us, our guiding thoughts can seem to occasionally mingle with those larger forces that appear to be at work, despite how small and frail we are comparatively.

So it is one thing to get up and perform as a talented dancer. It is another thing to build, destroy, and reconstitute the frames which these dancers occupy  so that the dance has nothing left to justify it. The plot is distilled into the choreography of the second act, where the kagezukai mingles, interferes, and plays with the forces that drive the dancers. Their effort to dance, the struggle to find and negotiate the forces which drive that effort, and the facts of will that make it possible to do so are the stories we follow. As the piece resolves, these stories focus in on the physical acts on stage — at points, the dancers’ gasping breath is the only sound effect.

In the final passage, the lone kagezukai disrobes and reveals herself to be the remarkable Sandra Marín. The last, intimate partner dance concentrates the themes of will, drive, frailty, and doubt. Accompanied by Eric Whitacre’s beautiful choral work “Sleep,” it is balletic, earnest and solemn. What makes it work is how the audience was exposed to the delicate mechanics of building something fleeting and beautiful.