a nerd, relaxing

nerd

an enthusiast whose interest is regarded as too technical or scientific and who seems obsessively wrapped up in it.

 

 I’m immersed in re-launching my bookbinding business, nutting out the schematics for prototypes for new models made from bamboo, taking my plans for electronic books back to analogue and figuring out how they’ll be manufactured. So it’s to be expected that I fall asleep with visions of formulae dancing in my head. But I’ve had a lot of time recently to catch up on reading and listen to music and go to see works at art galleries. It’s been a long time since I’ve just followed my interests and goofed off without responding to reading and cultural pursuits with sketches and specifications for some kind of book or electronic device. Then I looked at the list of what I’ve been reading, seeing at galleries and listening to, and every single one of the artists is an engineer or have collaborated with engineers to create their works! 

Alexander Calder’s Circus is one of the wonders in my world: animals with bendy wire bodies and abstract fringes and button eyes that have more personality than National Geographic videos of actual animals. I found a wonderful Uncle Fester-ish photograph of him growling with one of the Circus Lions in a new monograph of his work. In an interview in the monograph he talks about studying engineering before becoming a sculptor. Marcel Duchamp said of him:

“Among all artistic “innovations,” that came about after the Great War, Calder’s line was so distant from any established formula that there was a need to invent a new name for his forms in motion: “mobiles”. Through their way of counteracting gravity by gentle movements, they seem to “carry their own particular pleasures, which are quite unlike the pleasure of scratching oneself,” to quote from Plato’s Philebus. A light breeze, an electric motor, or both combined in the action of an electric fan, can set in motion a series of weights, counterweights, and levers that draw unpredictable arabesques in the air, producing a lasting feeling of surprise. Once colour and sound join the party, the symphony is complete and all our senses are called to follow the invisible score. Pure joie de vivre. Calder’s art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.”