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The art of Burning Man will take over an entire gallery at the Smithsonian Institution for 6 months in 2018! This is the first major national exhibition to focus on the event.

Original site

Grand Salon, Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W.)

March 30, 2018 — September 16, 2018

Michael Garlington, Totem of Confessions, 2015, photo courtesy of the artist

Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, multi-story art installations and buildings are erected and many are burned to the ground. Dedicated to principles of radical self-expression, decommodification, communal participation and a reverence for the handmade, the thriving temporary metropolis known as Burning Man is a uniquely American hotbed of artistic ingenuity and one of the most influential events in contemporary art and culture.

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man is the first major national exhibition to focus on the large-scale, participatory work from this annual event. The exhibition will take over the entire Renwick Gallery building, bringing alive the maker culture of Burning Man through artworks, immersive room-sized installations, jewelry, costumes and ephemera that will transport visitors to the gathering’s famed desert city and highlight the ingenuity and creative spirit of this cultural movement. Photographs and archival documents drawn from the Burning Man Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art will trace Burning Man’s growth and its bohemian, counterculture roots.

The exhibition will include works by David Best, Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Five Ton Crane, FoldHaus Collective, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Hybycozo, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Christopher Schardt, Leo Villareal, Richard Wilks and others. Several installations were featured at previous Burning Man events, while installations by David Best, Natalia Bertotti and Michael Garlington, and Five Ton Crane will be commissioned specifically for the Renwick’s presentation and will debut in the exhibition.

Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, is organizing the exhibition in cooperation with Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization responsible for facilitating and extending the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into the wider world.

We visited our Christmas Tree, Fiona over Memorial Day weekend. Fiona will return to us in December courtesy of Patrick and Laura of Forever Green Christmas Tree. They worked hard to help make this, our very first camping trip, a lot of fun!

Megan, Abigail and I at King Park on a beautiful day!

The patent just expired on the MP3 file format (did you know that MP3 wasn’t an open format??). The people that built it, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits is letting it go.

This article says “the German research body that owns the rights to MP3, has decided to no longer renew its patents on the technology–effectively killing the format for good.” I don’t think the format is “dead” but the long tail has certainly already begun. How often do you listen to MP3’s vs streamed audio content these days?

My very long time friend Travis has written his science fiction book series. Dive back into hard SF!

Tagline: Science fiction about antigravity, lunar colonization, open source software, genetically modified dogs, AI…and really really big guns.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tjic/powers-of-the-earth-sf-with-spaceships-dogs-and-bi

Some friends of mine at San Jose State University are running a research project related to sensory processing and sleep quality. If you or someone you know are at least 60 years old and living in the United States, please consider participating by completing the survey below:

Sensory Processing and Sleep Quality Among Older Adults
The survey is anonymous and takes about 25-30 minutes to complete.

Seen in a school I am serving at:

It’s not about bathrooms… as it was never about the water fountains.

My friend Vickie just died. She’d often say with feeling in her voice, “It’s all about the journey!” Sometimes that was an excuse for why bad things happened, sometimes it was a joyous call to celebrate the universe we live in. She was right on both accounts.

Pancreatic cancer took her at age 51. Death is coming with increasing frequency. The first contemporary of mine to die was JTF when we were both in our 30’s. My dad has been telling me about my parents’ friends dying more often: the parents of my childhood friends, their bridge partners, neighbors. I am trying to describe the feeling I have regarding this and it is difficult. Right now it feels like a sad, dark void.

Considering presidential politics? Listen to NPR’s Marketplace!

Hint: destabilizing factors are looked upon with suspicion on the world stage.

Megan and I had a really fun Valentines Day. Emmy came over to watch Abigail for our outing. Abigail shrieked with delight when she was at the door and demanded, DEMANDED that Emily come into her bed room. It was awesome. Went  out to Kiru Sushi near home for a spectacular dinner and then off to see Hand to God at the Berkeley Rep Theatre.

Best moments in the show:

Bad puppet Tyrone and Carolina’s bad puppet doing nasty sex positions while their “owners” sit a hand’s distance away, quietly and entirely embarrassed for what they have to endure.

Jason/Tyrone goes full crazy on Tim and the way we are sitting in the theatre, we have Tim’s view and Tyrone is completely intimidating!