Thursday, June 24, 2010

Scientists discover heavenly solar music



ScienceDaily (2010-06-22) -- Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun's atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by researchers, shedding light on the Sun's magnetic atmosphere.

Friday, March 12, 2010

2010 Metal Tiger Tibetan New Year



Monica Iancu, Tiger Banner, Calligraphy Painting for
The Shambhala Meditation Center Tibetan New Year Celebration


Cheerful Year of The Metal Tiger

I am the delightful Paradox.
All the world is my stage.
I set new trails ablaze,
I seek the unattainable,
and try the untried.
I dance to life's music
in gay abandon.
Come with me on my carousel rides.
See the myriad of colors,.
the flickering lights.
All hail me the unparalleled performer.
I AM THE TIGER

[From The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes
by Theodora Lau. Harper Collins Publishers. 2007]

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Exploring the Ineffable | FLYP

Artist Katie Patterson
Exploring the Ineffable | FLYP
Jul 24, 2009
By David A. Ross


The Moon has always seemed somewhat melancholic, a wistful object in the night sky that remains a favorite subject of poets, musicians and artists even after it has been de-mystified by 40 years of probes, manned landings and scientific exploration.

For the young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, it was the Moon's amgibuous distance—far, and yet so close in astronomical terms—that piqued her interest in pursuing her own kind of exploration. Paterson is interested in transmission and reception—the basis of human communication—and in a Zen-inspired quest to know and see what cannot be easily seen or known. An artist deeply engaged in science, she's also interested in exploring the ineffable. In her first well-known work, she placed a microphone into an Icelandic glacier, and callers to a mobile number in England could listen to the glacier as it slowly melted.

In her research, Paterson happened upon a global community of radio enthusiasts who took particular delight in bouncing radio signals off of the Moon's surface and recording the results. After making contact with a group of Japanese enthusiasts, she proposed trying the experiment with an encoded version of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, reconstituting it and playing the resulting transmission through a digital player piano, "performing" robotically in an empty gallery space. The results were, in Paterson's words, "strange and almost ghostly."

Because of the Moon's irregularly cratered surface, bits of the transmission are lost in the process, and there are gaps and missing notes in the playback which Paterson sees as a kind of technological intervention in the musical score. This seemingly simple transformation encourages us to listen carefully for what we can no longer hear.

She then convinced her Moon-bouncing colleagues to take this Zen notion to its extreme, and transmitted a performance of John Cage's 4' 33", his famous silent work, which encouraged audiences to simply listen to the sounds around them, and to pay the same careful attention to ambient sound as one would to composed music.

For a recent exhibition in London, Paterson produced a map of all the dead stars in the universe, and her next work is another search for the ineffable: working with several leading astrophysicists to find a way to transmit what she refers to as "ancient darkness," images of the black of deep space from the time of the Big Bang.

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www.flypmedia.com

Monday, March 16, 2009

Monday, March 09, 2009


Glacial Forms
Works In Progress

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

My Rooftop Piece
graphite & collage
5.5" x 15"
Archway
charcoal, graphite & collage
11" x 10"