Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Doing Art 

(plus a Technical Digression)

"We went to school in the sea"

NOTE: Don't forget that you can click on the images to see them larger, or open in another tab to get full size. And the Links appear in pale green. They're what makes it a Web.

Oh dear. Alice objects to my title, Doing Art. She thinks people will assume we've taken up modernistic collages, water colours, or even Fainting in Coils. She would prefer something like Visiting Art Galleries and Exhibitions. She can be so pedantic sometimes. We finally compromised by agreeing to add to the title, as appropriate in each case. So, start again.

Doing Art 1: Munch Prints

Here I am, at the gates of the pretentiously named SCO NATIO GALLERY O MO. Alice has just become a Friend of the Galleries. She says its a good deal: for a one-off annual subscription, she gets free entry to all the paying exhibitions at the four different National Galleries in the city. So we'll be Doing Art a lot for the next twelve months.

Watch this space, folks.

Next we're in front of the imposing pillars of the august building. And I do mean august with small 'a' and accent on second syllable, as opposed to capital A, accented first syllable: apparently totally unrelated. It was September anyway. English is such a confusing language. Reflects the idiosyncractic structure of human thought.

Alice has now looked it up, and the first use comes from the Latin augere - to increase or honour, and the latter is summer's (if you're lucky enough to get one of those) final month, named after the Emperor Augustus. Since he was so called as an  honour, it seems there is a connection after all. Did you ever!

Technical Digression - by Alice

Amazing how that apparently simple word "august" just popped out of Monkey's head and into my fingers on the keyboard. As you can see from his Profile, he is digitally disadvantaged, so relies on my secretarial skills to promulgate his wit and wisdom to the world. 

One of Google's Data Centers

But do you realise exactly what is required after the relatively simple act of typing to achieve this transmission? My computer's processor turns these keystrokes into a series of noughts and ones in its memory circuits, and transfers them to the hard disk when I click on Save. Later, when I copy or upload the blog, these bits of "machine code" pass down my phone line, then via the solid or ethereal staging posts and gates to my ISP's UK server. It is NOT really a Series of tubes! Then they are shunted in packets (that is what they're called) to another server, on a rack, in a container, in a storage unit, at one of Google's vast data centres (centers in techno-type) possibly the one in Finland, since Blogger is powered by them - a huge multinational corporation giant - and I'm in Europe.

Data Racks in one of Google's centers

Then, in order to get to your computer monitor (or tablet or smart-phone screen) when you click on a BookMark or Favourite (you have made one for this blog, I hope) or just type in the http address (that means hypertext transfer protocol, by the way) these bits and bytes are translated and transferred along a similar reverse trajectory. Just think! There are billions of little electrons, or else pulses of light, running a relay race along thousands of miles of wires, cables, optical fibres, routers, amplifiers and connections (masses and masses of them in undersea pipelines, but only a few via satellite) to reach you - who actually may be only a relatively few miles away from the physical me!

Cooling pipes - carefully colour coded

And did you see these amazing pictures Google recently released? They are absolutely stunning! There's a neat YouTube video too (less recent) where you must listen hard to spot the quaintly named "Google-provided Personal Transportation Device." Techies have their own brand of humour.

If this enthralls you as much as it does me (Monkey is getting very impatient and bored up in his dictation post) there are some interesting books on the whole thing. I can recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet looks promising too, not just the great cover design, so I've requested it from the library. (Aren't Libraries simply wonderful!) If you follow the last link, do scroll down and watch the fascinating lecture by Andrew Blum, or see it on its own at TED. There's an excerpt from Tubes on Gizmodo; also a review and interview with the author at npr books.

OK. Digression over. 

Back to Monkey - and Munch

Yes, Alice that's all very interesting, I'm sure. You're quite the Granny Geek. I agree human ingenuity, creativity and technology are indeed awe-inspiring and their potential for changing the world maybe for a little bit better, or, scarily for a great deal worse - is mind-boggling. But all I really care about is that it works when I need it to. Sorry.

Not smiling, but screaming

Where were we?  Munch.

Munch is famous for that horrifying painting, aptly entitled The Scream. A print version of it was on the poster. Nothing beautiful or uplifting about that. Alice would say Art can be meaningful and significant without necessarily appealing to our aesthetic sensibilities. Maybe it's a matter of opinion. Still, I know what I like and what I don't. And it's not this. So there.

The only way I could respond to this harrowing piece was to turn my "smile" upside-down.

 The exhibition didn't have any of his paintings, but a number of prints - made from woodcuts, or etchings. That's a fascinating process, as we learnt later (wait til we get to Piranesi.) You can't photograph inside any of the exhibitions, though some images can be found on the bountiful world-wide web if you use your ingenuity.

Munch certainly created some lovely flowing lines, and made interesting variations in different colours, but even this sexy Madonna (No, not that one!) has a sinister little figure in the corner, a bit like a dead foetus, I thought.

In fact, I found most of this show was very depressing indeed, though Alice said she could appreciate the artistry.

But how about this self-portrait with a skeleton arm laid in front? Gloomy, don't you think? Munch himself was clearly suffering from depression, which is a terribly debilitating illness, very underestimated by people who've no direct experience of its horrors.

My favourite part of the visit was the ladies' loo!

A great piece of art in itself.

Here's what I was gazing at...

Does this mean I took the Blue pill, after all?