Yesterday was the first day of class for me and my fellow ITP 2018 classmates, and for some of us Applications was our first ITP class ever. It was very special, as Nancy outlined some of the history of ITP. Red Burns seemed like a very visionary and special woman. Many of us in ITP have discussed how it can be difficult to explain what ITP is to our family and friends, and I think that talking about what Red Burns did is a really good way to start. This isn’t from the lecture we had in class, but I think it is a good entry point to her history of founding ITP:
https://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/dec/15/technology-not-enough-story-nyus-interactive-telec/
Nancy read a short speech by Red while making some small asides about the references, and my page of notes started filling up. Things I wound up googling after class: Keat’s concept of “negative capability”, Thomas Aquinas’ concept of “scandalous curiosity” (re-purposed as positive instead of negative, though it seems that there is a kind of a dialog between Aquinas and Augustine in regards to this), Geoffrey Pyke, and Bruce Springsteen’s SXSW talk on artists that influenced his career. A link to the speech and transcription can be found here:
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/16/148778665/bruce-springsteens-sxsw-2012-keynote-speech
So great! Loving all of this already.
We were also given a small booklet of Red’s speech. I’m making sure to keep this in a safe place and cherish it. It was a very kind gift from the ITP staff. Thank you.
This was the introduction, which from now on will be the part of the class where selected classmates give presentations in response to the speaker from the previous week. This week’s speaker was Carter Emmart, Director of Astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History. He showed us a piece of software he developed over years to display at the Hayden Planetarium. There is a TED talk where he shows what it can do:
The software is called Uni View. This can take current data sets from NASA to perform its visualizations, so the earth we were seeing in class was photographed the previous day. He could access different data sets in order to view celestial bodies differently, for example we were able to look at the moon up close using photographs taken from the first moon landing and examine Mars using images from specific fly by missions.
He also talked about how an open source version was in development called Open Space, which was very encouraging to hear.
In the TED talk, and during the lecture, you can hear Carter engage in a sentiment that is commonly echoed in the space community. This sentiment is that looking at earth from afar makes humans feel a certain kind of bond to their fellow man, appreciate the fragility of our only home, and take a ‘larger’ view of the world and our existence in it. You will find all kinds of memorable quotes from astronauts who talk of this feeling. When I need to reference this concept in short hand, I call it “the pale blue dot” phenomenon. Carl Sagan gave a speech that sums up a lot of this emotion:
There are other presentations that can invoke similar feelings, like the innumerable “orders of magnitude” type videos that can make earth feel so small and give us perspective.
One of the things that I noticed about Carter’s presentation of Uni View in our class as opposed to the TED talk was the improvisational quality of examining the program. He would flick the constellation lines on and off. He would load the data of various space probe paths and on his way to look at them, get distracted and decide to go to the Moon. Then he would zoom in and talk about what the astronauts who flew over this mountain range said they felt when they approached. But almost as an after thought, he would say, “Oh yeah, let’s load those images from 1972 instead of the most recent!” He would get so close that he would glide past what he wanted to talk about and have to carefully re-orient the camera. What was the camera oriented towards before this? Easy to forget if you can choose from every known celestial body tracked by humans.
The aspect of him kind of playing around inside of this sandbox, sometimes “tripping” past things he was talking about, other times deciding to look at something else on a whim, struck me as a very unique sensation. You can have someone tell you about all of these things, and believe them. You can see an animated film that shows it, and be impressed. You can see a recording of the software doing a choreographed tour, like in the TED talk. But the casual use made me feel so much that, “Yes- this is real. REALLY real.” Effectively, there is no “looking behind the curtain”. It really is all there.
This kind of interactivity seems like it could offer another take on that “pale blue dot” feeling. Don’t feel awe inspired by a photo of the earth from space? Here, go take a spin around the universe. The fact that this will be open sourced is even better, as you could give this feeling to anyone for free.
You could say that this might just be fancy planetarium show software. But perhaps this kind of inspiration could make a real change in the future by making the right people feel the “pale blue dot” feeling, now when we need that feeling more than ever. I can feel the ITP ethos at work here.
It was a pleasure and honor to see this lecture. Thanks to Carter Emmart. And this certainly set a great tone for the rest of the Applications class.