things we thought we knew

Last night there was more sign making. A lot. It was great. We have made between 15 and 20 usable signs. Here are some pictures that Jeanette took.

translation -

Today is sign-making day. A German student and I will create cartoon dialogue boxes that will change the meaning of underwear modeling momentarily.

A very generous Hungarian math student translated some phrases that will go in cartoon dialogue boxes. I'm leaving the translator's comments in because I like them. Here are four phrases that were translated into Hungarian:

What is the sexiest prime number under 1000?
Mi a legszexibb 1000-nél kisebb prím(szám)?
(We often leave szám=number)


I think that 357 is hot.
Szerintem a 357 ...
I'm not sure in what meaning you use "hot", in hungarian I think the best word is "szenvedélyes", that means passionate, impassioned. If you want to emphasis another meaning, please tell it.
(Why do you think 357 is the best prime? I think the first thing that a half-naked woman would tell about primes is 007, James Bond... :-) )


A prime number is only divisible by 1 and itself.
A prímszámok csak 1-gyel és önmagukkal oszthatók.
(We almost always use the plural form to this definition)


Prime numbers are the key to any woman's heart.
A prímszám a kulcs a női szívekhez.
(what an idea!)

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uPCOMING things:
Monday - make photoshop document that shows each design in color. Save to USB stick. Print out.
Tuesday morning - return to the fabric shop to buy everything for the shirts. This will be exciting. The shirts will be assembled... I don't know how soon, though.
Wednesday - buy out the Gap
Thursday - world domination

Interventions in the Everyday

Here is a link to the blog about Interventions in the Everyday, a public art project happening in Budapest in March. Some of the sentences are not finished and that kind of stuff, but that'll be tidied up soon.

this blog

I want this blog to be more personal, written in my voice. The last post I was trying to be scientific or something, build an argument that could never be felled, but after re-reading the post I feel it's dry and weak.

But today is a new day. I will try to write more about my experience in Budapest and Hungary,. I'll also write about constraints and examples, and that kind of thing.

So here's a new start to this blog. I'm an American living in Budapest. I'm working on a Fulbright project. The project is to create videos related to the prolific Hungarian mathematician Erdos Pal (two dashes over the 'o' and one over the 'a'). In the U.S. of A. he's called Paul Erdos (Air - doosh). So far in Hungary I've worked on 5 videos, some relating to math. Earlier this month, I started two projects that I'm really excited about. The first is like a big jellyfish, huge and amorphous. It is perhaps the main piece of my Fulbright project, yet (under my professor's advice) I am letting it define itself based on the resource available, rather than me defining it ahead of time. That only makes sense, but it seems quite difficult for me to be patient in practice. The second project seems to be coming together really well, even though I've worked on it for only a week. I hope that the humor of the project doesn't detract from the meaning that is in there. It's an experiment... I guess I'll find out.

The first project is to create a documentary about the math research center in Budapest called the Renyi Institut. I will be talking with a professor from the institute on Friday. Apparently there are some recorded interviews of Erdos in Hungarian that perhaps I could use/translate/get someone to translate. I hope to talk to professors at the institute about their research. I want to learn about the current research, what interests people. The film that comes out of my work could go many different directions depending on who is interested in talking to me. I'm holding my nose to see where it goes.

The second project is a public art piece that I will do in collaboration with some German students from Stuttgart. They are continuing the series 'Interventions in the Everyday'. My part will be to make prime numbers fashionable - or rather, to exploit the fashionability of prime numbers. It will be awesome. The project has 3 parts.

First, there will be surveys and advertisements near Oktogon. I want to determine which is the sexiest/coolest prime number under 1000. Participants will be given a list of the prime numbers less than 1000 and will be asked to select just one number as the sexiest. Additionally, there will be so-hot-it's-not-funny-style pamphlets about famous theorems related to Hungarian mathematicians and prime numbers (probabilistic number theory, the prime number theorem, cryptography). They will be written in that all-you-can-eat voice, if you know what I mean. All of this will be in Hungarian. Perhaps some fliers will be in English and Hungarian. I'm not sure yet. Along with handing out these fliers, I will be selling prime numbered tee-shirts and prime-numbered necklaces (does anyone know where to get hemp string in Budapest?). I've found someone that will make the tee-shirts. I am working on logo design right now. It's all very exciting. Another aspect of the public art project will be little additions to the half naked pictures of women that are being thrown around town on billboards and such. I will add little cartoon dialogue boxes that say things like, 'I think 357 is sexiest.' (And perhaps another dialogue box coming from offscreen that says 'But 3 divides 357.') (Also, I want these interventions to happen on Mondays because in my experience it is a common belief that Monday is the most boring day. Survey?)

The second aspect of the project is that there will be a fashion show of prime-number-related clothing. If you've had the lifelong desire to be a model, well now is your chance to shine. This means you: Jeanette, Damian, Sofia, and Charity(?). The fashion show will occur in the middle of March. I envision the models walking down a homemade runway to blasting techno music strutting. The t-shirts will be ordered: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc. I hope to get some photographers to join me in snapping some photos. I hope that by some small miracle the number of photos snapped will be the exact same as the number on display. We'll see what happens. The shirts and jewelry will be on display and for sale after the fashion shoot. All of the shirts and everything will be hand made, hand printed (with a linoleum cut) or sewn. Even the beads on the necklace will be handmade in a ceramics studio in the U.S. by Emily Melander. Of course, I will not try to make any profit, I will just try to recoup the cost of making the shirts and putting together the fashion show. and it's expensivE!

The third aspect of the project is the exhibition. It will be a mini-store in the gallery, where shirts and jewelry are displayed on a table. I would really like to have a mannequin, but we'll see what happens. If you know where to get one in Budapest for a couple weeks, please call me or write. I would also like to display documentation of the coolest/sexiest number (ten bucks it's not 7). The documentation will probably be bar graphs. Very scientific. Very composed. Or perhaps I should copy some marketing posters. There might also be some video footage of people talking about the sexiest prime number.

So, as you can see, the prime number project has grown and grown. It will be big, but not too big. There may be aspects discussed here that are axed due to not having the time or resources. I think this post is long enough. I will keep updating this with a link to the 'Interventions in the Everyday' blog, and other things that I feel are pertinent to your daily life.

Are restrictions important to art-making?

Yes, I think so. A set of rules force the author or artist to find a creative solution.

I may be attracted to this position because it parallels the creativity required to make a mathematical proof. In math courses, I've been given some more or less obvious statements, from which I'm required to show the validity of a more powerful statement.

This relates to art-making. An installation artist is given mundane materials, like rocks, triangles, or the idea of pyramids, and from these creates something meaningful. A video artist has a computer and video camera, which are available to almost everyone. But she creates a piece that is moving or insightful. Traditional film plots set up a series of relationships from which an interesting, unobvious ending is believable. These are just a few examples in which the product is more than its pieces.

These examples are in the case when an artist overcomes ordinary constraints. But what if he is given restrictions beyond the norm?

Here is an excerpt from an interview that relates to this question. The quote is by Abbas Kiarostami, the highly regarded Iranian film director. He had finished Taste of Cherry (1997) and was showing it to people all over the world. On August 25, 1998, he was in Ohio, where he participated in an interview. An audience member asked the following question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: .... My second question is related to politics. Obviously a lot of films have been made about Iran that have become the great films of the nineties just like Chinese movies were the greats of the eighties. It seems to me like a lot of great art is coming out of oppressive cultures or regimes so that while the Westerners can praise their art they condemn their cultures. How much of this factor influences your work and would you be the same person, would your films be the same, if you were making films in the West?

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: .... I like to use the phrase restrictive to describe the conditions I work under rather than oppressive and I understand that oppressive means many different things under different contexts but for us as artists and filmmakers what we are dealing with are the realities of restrictions and I like to approach it from that angle. I look at these restrictions not in the context of the film alone but in the broader context of life. For me these restrictions exist everywhere and have always been there. Life in the East has never been without them. We have to always live within certain boundaries. Life is the combination and movement between restriction and freedom -- the field of action is limited, the field of power is limited, when we were kids we were always told what we could do and what we couldn't and how far we could go in doing things we could.

The best example I can give for this concept is when our teachers told us to do a composition for the class. When he gave us a topic, we would write about that topic and come up with something worthwhile. But when he did not specify the topic and left us free to choose our own, we usually couldn't come up with something worth writing about. We needed to be told what the boundaries and restrictions were. This has been the nature of our society and has been replicated in the realities of our film industry. For instance, during the first four years of the Iranian revolution, there was a great deal of chaos in the film industry because not many rules were set yet. Interestingly enough, most of the Iranian movie-makers didn't produce much during this time though a great deal could have been done. No one used the opportunity because everyone was waiting to find out what the restrictions were!

Most of the time we seek an excuse for running away from the responsibility. Restrictions give us this kind of excuse. Therefore, unfortunately, we seek energy from these boundaries set for us. I don't want to imply that these limitation are good and should be there, but we have been brought up with these and it is in our mentality. This is not limited to my profession -- it's in every profession, creativity is a necessity and limitation makes people more creative. I have a friend who is an architect. He tells me that he is at his best professionally when he designs structures for odd lots because these lands do not fit into the normal patten and he has to work within a great deal of limitations. So, he must be creative and he enjoys this. It is these restrictions that provide an opportunity for people to be creative.

Abbas Kiarostami suggests the idea of field of action. That restrictions help people to be creative. It should be noted that there are some obvious counterexamples. For instance, if the restrictions do not allow basic necessities, then these inhibit the creation of work. The field of action would be non-existent. The restrictions in this context presume that this field of action exists for its artists and authors. In the next post, I want to write further about the idea of restriction and constraint in relation to OULIPO.

The Binary Word Palindrome

Suppose you have a phrase such as

'Ami Silkey eats a pita.'

This is an example of a binary word palindrome. But where is the symmetry?

I'll rewrite the phrase again, and below it I will indicate a 0 for a vowel and a 1 for a consonant.

Ami Silkey eats a pita.
010 101100 0011 01010

The string of 1s and 0s is symmetric, and thus the phrase satisfies the following definition:

A binary word palindrome is a word or sequence of words that when transposed into binary using the above mapping (vowels become 0s and consonants become 1s), the resulting sequence is a palindrome.

Notes

1) The beauty of this constraint is that it could go unnoticed in a piece of writing. It lacks the extremely stringent and (in my opinion) overbearing nature of a palindrome, but still requires the writer to think carefully about how he uses words. I have yet to see a work that is constructed following this constraint. But it would be cool.

2) I realized the idea in Tihany, Hungary in September 2007 on a retreat for artists. A fellow participant was named Alana Lake. I thought immediately that the word 'vowelindrome' describes the idea. But then a few months later, I thought of a constraint that is described better by the word 'vowelindrome'. So I decided to call the first the 'binary word palindrome'. I have struggled to come up with a term that is both succinct and precise, and to be honest I'm not completely satisfied with 'binary word palindrome'. I've chosen the phrase 'binary word' to refer to the mapping from words to 1s and 0s, and 'palindrome' is self-explanatory. If you have a better idea, please let me know. Like the walindrome, the idea may have been noticed before by someone else.

3) OULIPO have done something similar to the vowelindrome. It is called the antonymic letter translation and may be attributed to the Moroccan-born Frenchman, Marcel Benabou.

The antonymic letter translation replaces vowels by consonants and consonants by vowels. The example given in the 2005 version of the OuLiPo Compendium (Ed. Harry Matthews, Alastair Brotchie) is

To be or not to be: that is the question
(To beorno ttobe that isthequ es tion)
An unreal oasis, easy quietus: no acme

The antonymic letter translation is similar to the vowelindrome because both constraints treat vowels and consonants as distinctly different sets.

The Walindrome

Palindromes are sequences of numbers or letters whose order is the same forward and backward.

Examples
1) 010
2) 012210
3) bob
4) race car
5) do geese see god?
6) a man a plan a canal panama
7) I'm an Ami

(Note: If you wrote '010' on a scrap of paper and then held it up to a mirror,
you would get something other than 010. The small little cap at the top of the 1 would be going the opposite direction. Palindromes are not sequences that look symmetric, but rather sequences in which the order of the elements is symmetric.)

What is a walindrome?

A walindrome is a word or phrase that in reverse order forms a different word or phrase. (Since the word/phrase is different in reverse order, it must NOT be a palindrome.)

Examples
1) stressed
2) diaper
3) devil
4) evil
5) emit
6) tennis (Matt Iverson found this one)

I have not included walindrome phrases in this list because I don't know any. If you can think of a non-trivial phrase, please, let me know.

Things to note

1) Matt Iverson and I coined 'walindrome' (a shortening of 'word palindrome') in 2006 in Salem, Oregon. Matt insisted that the set of walindromes should be distinct from palindromes. Walindromes are derived from a symmetry of existence of meaning in the case when the word/phrase is asymmetric. This is distinctly different from palindromes, which have the same meaning and order when reversed.

2) The walindrome idea may or may not be new. I have never seen the concept elsewhere, but wouldn't be surprise if it was discussed in an OULIPO session.

3) The longer the walindrome, the better.

4) I think the walindrome idea should be added to Wikipedia. But I don't know how to go about doing such a thing. Who officially says - 'yes, this idea/word exists'?