I couldn’t bring myself to put an actual picture of a bug on my blog. These are mechanical bugs made by Mike Libby. I guess these mechanical critters don’t really fit into the theme of the reading, although they are very impressive. The article “Doin Dirt Time” in the book Conversations Before the End of Time, Suzi Gablik, the author of the book, is discussing an interview with Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds. The insertion is basically about this couple who lived in Los Angeles and decide to rid all of their art work and live in the desert, for lack of a better term, to become “hippies”. The people seem a little over the top to me, but I really respect what they are doing. They live off of their land, do no use electricity, and simply try “to live closer to nature“ (62). It is inspiring to me that they have become so dedicated and willing to live in such a manor, but I feel their reasoning is somewhat ridiculous. They feel they “need” to live this way incase the world suffers some form of apocalypse. I guess I somewhat understand the fear of apocalypse but if anything is going to happen the world will probably flood and then we’ll all be screwed!
The second reading was called “Making Art About Centipedes”. This reading was not my favorite. It was an interview with a guy named Christopher Manes. I see his point of view but I do not like it. Also Gablik did not do the best job counter acting with an argument. Maybe I missed some hidden messages or just really didn’t know what was going on but it really just seemed like Manes believed that humans are completely dispensable compared to fungi and insects. All he talked about was how they are better than humans, but I kind of like humans. I think we are a very diverse set of beings. It is impressive to me how Manes perspective really makes you realize how similar humans are to insects but I would not say that either is better. I feel like they are not super comparable. We do similar things but in very different ways. Some better some worst. Gablik’s argument about “a centipede doesn’t play basketball” (98) wasn’t exactly the most intriguing. Especially for trying to say that humans are not hopeless. There are many people in the world that do many great things despite how Manes may feel.
One of the people was our guest lecturer on Tuesday. His name is Colin Ives and he mostly does work with animals and exploring their tendencies and behaviors. Ives does a much better job of explaining how animals and insects play bigger roles in the world and our environment than we let ourselves believe. With his work he is simply just trying to open the eyes of others saying that there are things in the world that need some improving. During his guest lecture he showed us several things but one really stuck out in my head. It was on his website colinives.com and his project was called “The Clearing”. In this art museum he set up a projector with a 360 of a beautiful forest and only played segments at a time, but if a person walked in front of the image the projector would turn off, leaving the image ruined. Just like in real life, we have all these amazing habitats around us but we can ruin them just as easily.
All of these people have very similar ideas about maintaining nature and they all have displayed them in very unique and powerful ways. I believe just as much as they do that we need to do our best to maintain what is left.
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