Cooper Union Alum Climbs Famed Statue in Tuition Protest April 25, 2012 8:03pm
A man climbed the Peter Union statue, triggering a standoff with cops on April 25, 2012. (DNAinfo/Alan Neuhauser)
By Alan Neuhauser and Wil Cruz
EAST VILLAGE — A one-man protest against Cooper Union's decision to start charging graduate students tuition turned into a hour-long standoff with cops Wednesday when the dissenter scaled the Peter Cooper statue.
The protester — whom friends identified as Jesse Kreuzer, a recent graduate of Cooper Union — climbed the famed statue on East 7th Street and Cooper Square in defiance of the school's decision to charge students for its graduate programs next year.
"I'm doing this because I appreciate the education I got and what I got it for," said the protester, who moonwalked and made phone calls atop the statue.
Some 200 gawkers cheered on the man, who was carrying a sign that read: "No tuition, it's our mission!" Kreuzer began climbing the statue around 5:30 p.m. but "his sign kept falling," said Santiago Gomez, a junior at Baruch College who was walking by at the time.
"It takes a lot of b---s to get up there," Gomez added. "But they're going to raise tuition anyway."
"Students can't afford loans. We can protest, but the big guys already decided."
Cops initially tried to extend a ladder up to the protester, but it didn't reach. So they called for a bucket truck and eventually talked the man down from the statue at 6:45 p.m.
He was taken into custody, though it was not immediately clear if he had been charged.
The elite school announced Tuesday that it will begin charging graduate students tuition. It will not, however, charge undergraduate students to go to school. "Weighing all the alternatives, I am convinced that some fee-based programs are necessary for Cooper Union's solvency, and that this framework gives us the most optimistic way forward," said Jamshed Bharucha, the university's president on the school's web site.
"Because we have a short runway to get these programs going, failing to act now will put the institution in peril."
Still, the so-called hybrid model still hurts students, protesters said.
"Cooper Union is free, but they're threatening to change that...It makes a huge difference in terms of debt," said Kanchan Richardson, a Cooper Union art major. "It affects people's lives. Education is invaluable and beyond a business model."
Cops tried to convince the protester to get down from the statue on April 25, 2012.
Students watched a man climb the statue at Cooper Union in protest of the student's decision to charge tuition for graduate students.
Students looked on as cops took the protester into custody on April 25, 2012.
Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20120425/lower-east-side-east-village/cooper-union-alum-climbs- famed-statue-tuition-protest#ixzz1t9u0pBrk HUFFINGTON POST Posted: 04/13/12 07:35 AM ET | Updated: 04/13/12 07:38 AM ET
Commencement 2012: More Of The Coolest Names Giving Speeches This Year
We gave you round one, now here's round two of some of the 2012 commencement speakers we're excited about.
Being journalists and admitted nerds, HuffPost College cannot wait to hear what Ira Glass has to say in his speech to Goucher College graduates. But there's also the possibility of Steve Carell actually saying a favorite quote from The Office to a graduating class at Princeton; "May your hats fly as high as your dreams." Take a look at our new list. Which speeches would you most want to hear?
Walter Isaacson 1 of 16
March 29, 2012
A Virtual Community Helping to Power the Effort in Syria By CHRIS PALMER and DANIEL A. MEDINA
*Karam Nachar wants to topple President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Every day, he wakes before dawn and begins working with other activists – planning opposition strategies, honing their message to the world media, and coordinating the smuggling of goods into the country to aid the revolution. They chat online or in the back rooms of cafes. “I want to build a new country,” Mr. Nachar, 29, said. “There’s no going back – we need to get rid of this regime.”
But Mr. Nachar is not acting from Homs or Damascus or any other Syrian city that has been besieged by Mr. Assad’s forces over the past year. He conducts his operations out of an apartment on the Upper West Side and Karam Nachar, who teaches at Cooper Union, has been any place with Wi-Fi. helping the uprising in Syria as part of a Facebook group that has arranged for goods to be smuggled into Syria to those opposing the government.
The power of the Internet has allowed Mr. Nachar to connect with Syrian activists from around the world as he finishes his Ph.D in history at Princeton University and teaches at Cooper Union. And he’s become embedded in digital communities trying to make an impact on the ground in Syria despite living thousands of miles away. “I remember I wrote my very first Facebook status on the 17th of March, which was two days after the very first demonstration took place,” he said, referring to last year. “And I realized that there were these people who were as vocal as I am, so why don’t we come together and form our own groups, where people can come together to help the revolution tangibly?”
The center of this virtual community is a private Facebook group started last year by a graduate student at Columbia University who allowed herself to be identified only as Fatima because she feared reprisals against relatives in Syria. Prospective members were vetted by administrators who examined their Facebook profiles and past social media use. A year later, the result is a sprawling network with nodes in Syria, Beirut, London, New York and elsewhere. “I never imagined how many projects people would take on,” said Fatima, who grew up in Damascus. Their group works hand in hand with Local Coordination Committees, collections of activists sprinkled throughout towns across Syria.
A committee member will ask the group for certain materials, Mr. Nachar said, and volunteers will raise money by holding events – a concert in New York, a lecture in California – or by simply asking friends or family members to contribute.
The money is funneled into a bank account that the expatriate activists have created. Other volunteers withdraw money and buy the materials, usually in Gulf countries like Dubai or Saudi Arabia, to avoid long-distance shipping. Finally, the goods are transported into Syria by hired smugglers and delivered to activists on the ground. Materials delivered have included satellite phones, which can cost up to $2,000, and boxes of Quick Clot, a gauze product that helps to stop bleeding. A pack of 10 two-inch squares costs $105. Mr. Nachar said it was difficult to say how much his group had raised because funds were managed on a project-by-project basis.
In recent weeks, though, the group’s efforts have often been stymied as the government has cracked down. Fixers on the ground who receive supplies at the Turkish border and transport them to opposition strongholds have been arrested or killed en route. *Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty “We depend on these fixers, and now many of them fear for their lives every time they go out on a mission,” Fatima said.
The group has also paid nominal “salaries” to activists on the ground who have lost their regular jobs, and given money to families who have lost their homes or had a family member killed.
At a meeting last month in the back of a Midtown cafe, Fatima, Mr. Nachar and others sat with delegates of the Syrian National Council, a main exile opposition group, hashing out the pros and cons of training citizen militias.
“Groups like these here and around the world are really what is helping continue our the revolution,” said Mohammad Alabdallah, a council delegate.
As the situation in Syria continues to deteriorate and Mr. Nachar, Fatima and the others fear for the safety of their relatives and friends at home, the tensions and contradictions in the life of a Facebook revolutionary can be overwhelming.
“We feel guilty that we are here,” Mr. Nachar said of expatriate activists. “Even though we’re pouring everything we have into this revolution, we’re still kind of safe. And so yeah, we think maybe we should all go back. Maybe we should be smuggled into the country and be doing all of this there.”
April 4, 2012
Lebbeus Woods, "Early Drawings" Friedman Benda 515 W 26th St, New York Art, Exhibitions (Art & Museums)
The remarkable drawings of visionary architect *Lebbeus Woods delineate an array of retrofuturistic urban structures so complex, they make the High Line and the Second Avenue subway look like kid stuff. Some of his projects, such as the “Centricity” and “A-City” schemes, are wholly speculative; others, like “Aerial Paris” and “Underground Berlin,” propose the transformative remodeling of real city centers. But in all cases, Woods, cofounder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, brings immediately apparent technical understanding to bear on his wild flights of fancy. Inspired by the Romantic and Surrealist traditions, he conjures an aesthetic tightly interwoven with architectural theory and practice, and with echoes across many other mediums and disciplines in addition to art, from illustration to film, literature to radical politics. *Arch Faculty
April 25, 2012
Pull Up a Broken Chair By TIM McKEOUGH
The objects and installations created by *Alex Mustonen and **Daniel Arsham of Snarkitecture, a Brooklyn art and design studio, are almost always perplexing, purposely challenging people’s expectations. Their Cast Light, for instance, is a light bulb encased in a solid block of gypsum concrete that allows illumination to escape only through rough cuts in the material. And for “Dig,” an installation in New York last year at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, they conceived a cavelike interior, which Mr. Arsham chiseled out of solid blocks of expanded polystyrene in a series of performances. The furniture they have designed for their latest exhibition, “Funiture,” running at Volume Gallery in Chicago through June 13, is no exception: all of the pieces look to be broken, or in the process of falling apart. But things are not quite as they appear. Despite the imperfections, the pieces are structurally sound and functional. Mr. Mustonen, 30, and Mr. Arsham, 31, recently answered questions about their creations. How would you describe Snarkitecture? Mr. Arsham: We don’t really know quite what to call it. It’s definitely not a firm. It’s an open-ended question, revolving around collaboration. This is evident in the types of projects we engage in, everything from these more functional objects to installations to stage design. Mr. Mustonen: Our practice is naturally positioned between art and architecture, because of our respective backgrounds. In the end, we look at it as neither. We’re not making art, and we’re not making architecture. But we’re moving in the territory between those. What are your backgrounds? Mr. Arsham: We both studied at Cooper Union. I studied in the art school, Alex in the architecture school. There’s a lot of crossover in terms of the use of the wood shop at Cooper. I ended up being friends with more of the architecture students. We collaborated on a few different projects post-school. They were within my own art practice, but required more of an architectural hand and a different knowledge set than what I had acquired. I didn’t have any skill at drafting, and Alex helped me. But why “Funiture”? Mr. Mustonen: We didn’t set out to design furniture. They’re not really intended to furnish anyone’s home. They’re more design objects. It’s funny, in some of the advance coverage we’ve already seen people self-correct the title, to avoid making the typo. In some ways, it was conceived as a kind of mistake in the same way that a lot of the work in the show sets up a condition of a confusion of function or stability. Mr. Arsham: This is something we employ a lot, this questioning of things, and setting up these parameters where you’re not quite sure what’s what. On the subject of names, what about Snarkitecture? Mr. Mustonen: The name comes from a Lewis Carroll poem, “The Hunting of the Snark.” It tells the story of these misfits who are on a misguided search for this mythical creature, the Snark. They set out into the ocean with a blank map, and they’re searching for this ineffable, unknown thing. Is there a common thread running through the pieces in the exhibition? Mr. Arsham: All these works started from different places, but you can recognize patterns, the question of erosion and the idea of something breaking and then being corrected. A lot of the works imply a functionless object. But it’s an illusion. These works are completely functional and stable. The materiality is resolved in a way that they’re in a frozen state of erosion. Mr. Mustonen: Float is an interesting example. It’s a low coffee table or benchlike form, that’s kind of excavated on one side. From one angle, it appears to be a solid rectilinear volume, a block that’s boring and static. On the other side, it appears to be cantilevering beyond where it should be. It looks like it should fall over, but you can actually sit on that cantilever, and it’s completely stable. But why make things that look as if they’re falling apart? Mr. Arsham: There’s this notion that objects are performing in a way they shouldn’t. We’re able to, in many cases, correct that sensation through the addition of other materials or balance. We’re breaking objects and then giving them their function back. *AR’05 **A’03 The New York Times/ WNYC Schoolbook April 6, 2012, 9:01 a.m.
The Art of Slipping in Some Learning By Eddie Small
Off to the side of *Eric Azcuy’s cluttered desk were two products from Nissin Foods: one Cup Noodles and one box of Chow Mein. It looked like lunch, but it was actually the day’s art lesson. The inspiration came from an NPR story Mr. Azcuy had read earlier describing how the design of instant soup cups makes them tip over easily, spilling their hot contents on, and often burning, young eaters. So, Mr. Azcuy figured, why not see if his students could come up with a better, safer model for the cups?
“It’s something relevant,” he said calmly, his black curly hair, dark- rimmed glasses and plaid collared shirt making him appear just a bit hip. “It goes to show you how important design is.” The lesson plan was typical for Mr. Azcuy, 35, who is in his sixth year of teaching art at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science, a grades 6-12 school of almost 600 students in the South Bronx, where 91.2 percent of the children come from families with income low enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. It gives the students a chance to be creative while also letting them know that art can have some practical applications, even for people who don’t Eddie Small Photographs for SchoolBook intend on becoming the next da Vinci. A student in Eric Azcuy's art class, using math in his creation.
The attitude has led to projects that include painting a giant periodic table of the elements, creating a mural based on “The Great Gatsby” and the day’s effort at redesigning the Cup Noodles container. Still, Mr. Azcuy doesn’t rely exclusively on these types of assignments. He recognizes that sometimes it’s best to just let his students use art class as a time to draw.
“It can also function as an escape to a place that has nothing to do with the tests and the SAT and the college pressure and this kind of thing that’s happening in a lot of their classes,” he said. “It’s like a way for them to just zone into their art and creative world.” Mr. Azcuy grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and attended LaGuardia High School, Cooper Union and Columbia University, where he achieved a Master of Fine Arts. He was initially brought on at A.M.S. as a substitute, but he was hired full time after the school’s previous art teacher went on pregnancy leave and didn’t return. Almost immediately he began linking his students’ art projects with what they were learning in their academic classes.
Eric Azcuy, preparing for class.
One of the first things he had his sixth graders do, for example, was use four drawings to transform an object they had in front of them into an object from their imagination. The first drawing would be 100 percent object, the last would be 100 percent imagination, and the second and third would be 75 percent object, 25 percent imagination, and vice versa. In other words, this wasn’t just a chance for students to transform a stapler into a five-headed dragon. It was also a chance for them to understand how percentages could be visually conveyed. *A’98 “The math, it was kind of just snuck in there,” Mr. Azcuy said. “They don’t really notice it. It’s snuck in under the fun of art.
Mr. Azcuy has found several benefits to teaching art class this way. It allows students to see that art is “in everything,” not just in one large, paint-splotched room at A.M.S. It gives students who aren’t as naturally gifted at drawing a chance to do well on the academic parts of the projects. And it’s a lot of fun, too. “The more linked different subjects are, the less they are different subjects,” said Mr. Azcuy. “The more it’s just about the learning experience, and I think it’s just more comfortable for them.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Azcuy began his sketchbook class by placing the Cup o’ Noodles on a board, holding it up in front of his students, and tilting it to illustrate how quickly the cup could fall over. He then did the same with the more rectangular Chow Mein to give his students an idea of what type of redesign they might attempt.
After the demonstration, the students dove into their sketchbooks, and what Mr. Azcuy referred to as a “cool, relaxed, art-making vibe” took over the class.
“This room … it’s like a creative kind of space for them,” Mr. Azcuy said of his students. “A safe, creative space where they can feel free and comfortable to explore things.”
Most of the students in Mr. Azcuy’s sketchbook class agreed with this description. They applied it not just to the room but also to Mr. Azcuy himself.
“He lets you express your feelings,” said Joel Tolentino, an 11th grade student. “It’s a good stress reliever.” Mr. Azcuy has no plans to stop teaching or leave A.M.S. anytime soon; he’s far too excited about the opportunity to grow the school’s art program. The one word that keeps coming up when he discusses the future is “more.”
More classes, more field trips, and more collaboration — all while the married father of one (soon to be two) tries to maintain a balance between his work life and his home life. “I feel like it’s also important to let go in order for me to rejuvenate my creative self,” he said. “To then bring that back to the students so I’m not this kind of rundown person in the front of the room. “It’s a balancing act,” he continued. “That’s what life is for everyone, I guess.”
Bloomberg Businessweek April 05, 2012
Artisans The Letterpress Thrives in an iPad Age By Peter S. Green
On a March evening in Brooklyn, Donatella Madrigal is standing at a Vandercook Universal press, wiping her ink- stained hands on a denim apron. She has just run off several hundred greeting cards, which she’ll sell online and in neighborhood gift shops for up to $5 apiece. By day, the Madrid-born 27-year-old is a graphic artist who designs ads for clients such as Bobbi Brown Professional Cosmetics, working mostly on a computer. In the evenings, she goes analog, printing cards at The Arm Letterpress, a former garage filled with vintage printing presses rented out by the hour to artisans. Using hand-set type or plates of her own design, Madrigal places paper stock on the printer bed. She lifts a heavy crank that rolls her card stock across the inked plate with a satisfying thunk. “It’s an excuse to get down and dirty and to get away from the computer, and I’m always learning from the paper,” Madrigal says as she runs her hand across the deep grooves that the image carves into sheets of all-cotton card stock.
In the past decade, letterpress printers have grown into a thriving community. Many of the most devoted members are graphic designers who, like Madrigal, are seeking an alternative to their digital day jobs. An online group called Ladies of Letterpress, “dedicated to the proposition that a woman’s place is in the print shop,” has nearly 1,500 members (including 50 men) and an annual meeting that draws more than 100 people for a weekend of workshops and schmoozing. “It’s almost like artisanal breadmaking,” says
Photograph by Jessica HischeLetterpress at The Arm in Brooklyn Sarah Schwartz, editor of Stationery Trends magazine, a trade publication. “People are returning to things done by hand, and it’s a very tactile art form.”
The market for letterpress items has resisted the downturn in luxury goods that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Kate’s Paperie, an upscale Manhattan stationer, says letterpress products jumped to 44 percent of sales last year from 33 percent in 2010. Etsy, the website that hosts online stores for handmade goods, listed over 22,000 letterpress items in early April, more than triple the number a year earlier. “To spend $4 on a card to send to my best friend who’s just had a baby is not a big splurge,” Schwartz says. Traditional letterpress printers eschewed the deep impressions in the paper that Madrigal enjoys, known in printing lingo as “punch.” They preferred a smooth finish called the “kiss” that resembles the product of a laser printer. “In the old days, type would wear and you had to work carefully to make sure it all hit the paper at the same level,” says Mike O’Connor, founder of the Amalgamated Printers’ Association, a hobbyists’ guild. “You were considered a craftsman if there was no punch at all. … Now it’s the effect you want.” Kimberly Austin was a photographer in San Francisco when she caught the letterpress bug. Eight years ago, she spent $750 on her first press, a hand-powered Chandler & Price. Austin Press, her one-woman business in a converted warehouse on the San Francisco docks, has become a full-time job, with three letterpresses churning out greeting cards, thank-you notes, and wedding invitations with illustrations and phrases culled from 19th century engravings. “It’s hard to resist the punch,” says Austin, who sells her cards in her online shop and at the women’s clothing chain Anthropologie. She says she did about $250,000 in sales last year, double the level three years earlier. Zoe Feldman rents time at The Arm every few weeks to print cards with ironic phrases from 1990s TV shows, and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards for same-sex parents, and sells them on Etsy. “It’s not exactly the Hallmark demographic,” says Feldman. The former Pepsi executive and MBA candidate at New York University’s Stern School of Business says she may forsake corporate life if the nascent business takes off.
The Arm is the creation of *Dan Morris, whose great-grandfather was a printer in Ohio. Morris studied art and
* School of Art Tech, Type Shop architecture in Australia before apprenticing to a letterpress printer in Baltimore. Fourteen years ago, he paid $285 for his first Vandercook, a mid-20th century model considered the Cadillac of hand-cranked letterpresses. The same machines sell for $10,000 today.
The decline of the letterpress began at the end of the 19th century, when linotype machines allowed printers to set type as fast as they could tap at a keyboard. By the early 1890s, the country’s remaining type manufacturers had consolidated into a single company, American Type Founders, says Morris, whose bookshelves are lined with type catalogs from the early 20th century. Letterpress managed to hold on through the advent of offset printing, the Xerox (XRX) machine, and the likes of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Canon (CAJ). “These presses can last 100 years, and some of my best presses were only built in the 1960s,” Morris says. “As long as there are people who know how to use it, there will be letterpress.”
The bottom line: Hand-cranked letterpresses are making a comeback as entrepreneurs cater to Gen iPad's craving for goods with a human touch.
Walks and Talks A Conversation with Mitch Epstein by Urban Omnibus April 4th, 2012
Currently on view at Chelsea’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is a series of New York images that subvert cityscape clichés by foregrounding what is often merely the background of urban imagery: the city’s trees. In each of these large, black and white photographs, the artist *Mitch Epstein portrays a singular tree somewhere in the five boroughs. As Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, suggests, each of Epstein’s trees is an eccentric character as a well as a monument possessed of its own history. Yet all of them, taken together, challenge us to resist any neat categorizations between our natural, cultural and physical environments. Through exhibitions, publications, installations, films and video, Epstein investigates the complex overlays and interdependencies between these three ways of reading the landscape. Epstein recently sat down with Urban Omnibus to discuss several of his diverse projects and the threads — political, economic, architectural, urban — that connect 40 years of his artwork. -C.S.
American Elm, Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn 2012, 2012 | click on any image to launch a slideshow of Epstein's work | Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Mitch Epstein and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. All rights reserved. Looking back and reflecting on your diverse body of work, do you think the built environment is a theme that specifically interests you? Or is more incidental to other themes that motivate your process and inquiry? I would say the culture of the built environment is always something that has engaged my attention. My pictures are largely drawn from my experience in the real world, and wherever I go, I’m navigating the built environment. I became committed to photography after I moved to New York in the summer of 1972 to study art at Cooper Union. New York City enabled me to learn my craft in a very particular way: I spent a lot of time walking the city’s streets, making pictures. The physical layout of New York and finding a way to integrate myself fully into it, had a lot to do with my beginnings as an artist. At this time, my interest in “the built environment” was intuitive. Later, with The City, Family Business and American Power, my interest in the consequences of a community’s infrastructure would become more conscious. In particular, my recent project American Power – for which I spent five years traveling through the country looking at how energy production and consumption manifest themselves on the American landscape – pointedly reflects on the built industrial environment and how we, as a society, have both prospered and suffered from it.
Tell me more about American Power. How did the project come about and what were its various components? The project was instigated by a commissioned piece that I did in 2003 for The New York Times Magazine. I was A’74 asked to photograph the death – in fact, the erasure – of a town. Cheshire, Ohio was built around a coal-fired power plant owned by one of our larger utility companies, American Electric Power (AEP). But due to the environmental contamination of the plant’s immediate environs, AEP offered to buy the residents out and razed the town. I was unnerved by the stories of the handful of renegade residents who refused to sell, and I was struck by the complex relationship between corporation and community, and the questionable choices corporations have made to sustain the growth of energy production. These themes stayed with me after I left Cheshire, the gestalt got under my skin. And so I designed a project that over the next five years took me to regions that were rich in various kinds of energy production. I wasn’t interested in making a strict, documentary account of power plants. Rather, I was interested in looking more deeply at the inter-relationships between various kinds of power and our cultural and political attitudes towards the theme of energy. I quickly ran into a lot of trouble, in this post-9/11 era, with corporate security from power plants and local law enforcement. I was told that photographing “infrastructure” was not allowed. I stood my ground, but I certainly wasn’t interested in getting arrested. The limits I ran into prompted me to find other ways to broach the subject of energy. I looked more deeply at consumption and the politics behind the business of energy. For example, by the end of the project, I had traveled to both the Democratic and Republican 2008 national conventions. In Denver, the clean coal campaign was propagating its message on big trailer trucks moving through the city. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the convention was held in the Xcel Energy Center, an arena whose corporate sponsor is a large public utility company. The relations between these various institutions, between business, government, people and nature, revealed a complex web that intrigued and troubled me. American Power is a series of pictures presented in an exhibition context as well as a publication with an accompanying essay. After the work was finished, there was a lot that remained unsettled for me and also for my wife, Susan Bell, who collaborated with me editorially on the project. We felt compelled to experiment with a public art component to the project, to use the work outside the white box Chelsea gallery context. So we raised a modest amount of money and took over a number of billboards in Columbus, Ohio, where AEP has its headquarters, and in Cincinnati. We also made a series of posters with relevant and pithy quotes by American writers. We put the pictures online at whatisamericanpower.com, which shares some of the backstories to the pictures and also offers a curricular guide for high school students.
What is American Power? by Mitch Epstein and Susan Bell | 5456 West Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio | Photograph: Lee Satkowski
I was struck by one phrase in the curricular guide, that it would equip students “to look harder.” What does that phrase mean to you? It means to read pictures. We’re taught to read literature, but we’re not generally taught to read images. Photographs are used for so many different purposes, from journalism to advertising to family mementos. And I think remarkable photography insists upon a critical reading of a well-made picture’s layers, its conceptual tension, its historical depth. Much of the backstories of these pictures are embedded in the pictures themselves. My goal with the American Power series was to make pictures that weren’t simply illustrative, but would resonant metaphorically, that could speak to the paradox, complexity and confusion of our cultural relationship to energy; that could convey what’s at stake. Each picture stands alone, but they come together as a series to form a narrative that suggests the bigger picture.
Speaking of narrative and of complex social and economic issues, tell me about Family Business. Family Business, like American Power, began with a single subject. In this case it was my father. I had never made my family a part of my work in a direct way. But in the fall of 1999, I got a telephone call from my mom: two teenage boys had started a terrible fire in a building that my father owned. The fire took an entire city block down in the town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, where I grew up, and this led to a $15 million lawsuit against my father. That event initially compelled me to go back home and see if there was anything I could do to help. It also pulled me into the world that my father helped create and of which he was also a victim. He had been a successful, dedicated businessman through most of his life, a model figure for me, even though his wasn’t the path I wanted to pursue. The portrait I made of him was also a portrait of men who came from his generation, many of whom were veterans of the Second World War, who prospered during the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s, who were products of a generation that believed hard work would lead to success, that believed in a strong ethic of small business practice. My father stayed very close to his original ideas about business, and over the course of the 50 or 60 years, things changed around him and he didn’t change with them. Business became big and corporate. Holyoke, an industrial town that had grown in the early 20th century to support the production of paper and silk, declined as industries moved from the North to the South and, eventually, abroad. The town opened itself up to a new wave of largely Hispanic immigrants. There was a very complicated social mix. And my father was very intertwined with, and devoted to, the town.
So I saw this project, Family Business, as a way to bring fresh eyes to the stuff that I was made of. This was, after all, my place. It was a place that I had to shut out when I moved to New York in the way many New Yorkers repudiate our origins to carve out the opportunity to begin anew. But after many projects that took me abroad, I was ready to look again at this complex web of family, business, community and the notion of town.
Warehouse, 2000 How do you think your work abroad, your investigation of material or social cultures in Vietnam or India, inform the way you look at place and space and culture in America? I’d say the single most important thing that came from my time abroad was a deeper sense of humility and awareness of the fact that we have a very short-lived history. When you are in a country like India that has such an extraordinary history, you begin to question your perspective on things. I am part of an American generation with a profound sense of entitlement, a generation that’s taken a lot for granted. By embedding myself and actively participating in unfamiliar worlds, by relinquishing what I thought I knew, I could approach the United States with a new openness. The cluttered, chaotic intimacy I observed in Asia contrasts sharply with what I see as a self-insulating impulse in the American environment. In Vietnamese or Indian villages and cities, people live openly and closely, whereas the largely suburban landscape of the States seems to me to prioritize protection and comfort. Asia is about the extended family; America is about the independent family. And New York is a separate thing — where you can find Asian social vibrancy alongside European order. I’ve felt most comfortable here for all of my adult life. One of your first big projects rooted here in the United States was The City. Is that something you approached as a specific project? Yes, in the mid 1990s, after the Vietnam project, I wanted to work in America again. And the city seemed the logical place to start: this was my adopted city; this was where I learned the craft of photography; I had invested a lot here. So I wanted to go back to the city as subject. In the beginning, I spent time simply walking the streets, which is how I had started making pictures in the ’70s. But I quickly realized that this was a different era, and the city’s changes began to shape my process. The presence of surveillance cameras and a certain self-consciousness on the part of the public made me aware of how notions of private and public had become very present on the surface of things. And so, one year into the project I committed to the overlap between private and public as the project’s principal theme.
Untitled, New York #4, 1998 What do the words “public” and “private” mean to you in that context? For me, the terms evoke boundaries: what are the social boundaries in public space? Often we behave in very private ways when we’re in public. Or inversely, we put on public poses in private. I began to think about my own life as an example of what each of us has to do to survive in a city like New York: we all construct friendships and associations in a constantly shifting universe of so much diversity and complexity. I used my circle of connections to people, friends, family, and associates to say something about how people function within the larger sphere of their city. And I went back to some of the areas where I had first gained a footing as a photographer: 5th Avenue, Central Park, and Times Square, which was undergoing a tremendous metamorphosis from this tawdry, sinister funhouse to a Disneyfied, corporatized urban mall. Neighborhoods were positioning themselves as entrance points for big business to come in and redefine the city for the new millennium. And, looking back, I think there was a lot in the air that perhaps suggested what was to come on 9/11. There’s one picture I made, with the twin towers in full view and the tiniest punctuation of a surveillance camera. Obviously, we are in a very different city now than we were in the mid-’90s. And I’m excited by how contending with notions of public and private continues to be a vivid topic for urbanism.
American Elm, Central Park, New York, 2011 And now you’re making a different kind of portrait of the city with the trees. How did your most recent project come about? With The City, it took me a year of making pictures before the central theme of public and private emerged as something I wanted to investigate. And in 2008, I was making work in Berlin as a fellow at the American Academy about the evidence of 20th century history in the present Berlin landscape. That project made me realize that the more specific my starting point, the more possible it would be to draw something vast. Family Business began with a single man, my father, and its subject grew into something much larger. American Power began with a single town and a single theme, energy, and also grew. Trees have long been a leitmotif in my work, especially in American Power, where the trees in the photographs provided a counterpoint to the overriding evidence of industry within the landscape. Initially, I thought, let me look at trees and see if this is something I can explore in depth. With this project, my approach shifted: I wanted, at least for a time, to stop making pictures that responded to the world I’d inherited – my downtrodden hometown, my disappointed, burdened father, the ravaged landscape of my country – and make, instead, pictures of the world I’d prefer to see. And so I chose to bring individual trees forward as the protagonists in this project. I shot in black and white to keep the viewer’s focus on the trees more than the surrounding human world (color can distract). But I still wanted to photograph these trees in the context of the contemporary landscape. I wanted to draw a broad portrait of the city through some of its extraordinary and idiosyncratic trees.
How did you choose them? I did a lot of research, with books and a lot of looking, walking the city’s streets and parks. In part, I followed a list that the Parks Department had come up with in the ’80s that designated about 100 “great trees.” The project took me into neighborhoods and worlds that were utterly unfamiliar, and it enabled me to look at the city from a vantage that was fresh. These trees came long before me and will live long beyond me; they have been a kind of witness to the longer history of the city. There’s a picture when you walk in to the show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co of an American Elm up by Central Park in the mid-’90s. The tree sits in the foreground and off to the side are two men in repose. And one of them has his arms folded in a pretzel-like gesture that echoes the gesture of the tree. To be open to, to use this kind of serendipity is important to me. You asked earlier about how my experiences in places like India informed my practice. Well, in India, as a photographer, you’re dealing with a sense of chaos that’s much more extreme than the kind of chaos we might know in America, even in New York. I think that prepared me for part of what photography can capitalize on: how to bring together what might initially seem like unrelated events or elements and link them in a way that can find new meaning through their juxtaposition. That’s part of what photography has the ability to do well. With the tree pictures, there is a clear inversion of roles. In American Power, trees support — as a foil or counterpoint – the built environment, which is center stage, whereas in this current work, the architecture, environs and people recede into the background; the trees take center stage.
Mitch Epstein’s most recent exhibition is on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. March 16th to April 14th 530 West 22nd Street New York, NY Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Mitch Epstein and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. All rights reserved.
Mitch Epstein’s photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern in London. His eight books include Berlin (Steidl & The American Academy in Berlin, 2011); American Power (Steidl, 2009); Mitch Epstein: Work (Steidl, 2006); Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (Steidl 2005); and Family Business (Steidl 2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Epstein has worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Salaam Bombay!, and Mississippi Masala. Epstein is a vice president of the Architectural League’s board of directors. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Guest Blog
Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
How did Titanic really break up? By *Richard Woytowich | April 9, 2012
Hello, everyone! I’m a member of the Marine Forensics Committee, and author or co-author of three peer-reviewed papers on the “Titanic”. My most recent paper, “The Breakup Of Titanic – A Re-Examination of Survivor Accounts”, was presented at the First International Marine Forensics Symposium on April 4.
Working with Roy Mengot (with whom I co-authored one paper), I’ve been gathering evidence to support a reconstruction of the breakup of the “Titanic” that differs somewhat from the one you may have seen in movies or in other publications. The most important stages in our reconstruction are illustrated here: In our reconstruction, the failure began in the ship’s bottom structure, when the ship was at an angle of about 17 degrees. The failure spread across the breadth of the ship, then upward; it also spread forward and aft, probably along lightly riveted longitudinal seams, forming two separate pieces of the double bottom.
When the ship’s stern section came back down into the water, buoyancy forces took over the job of holding up that part of the ship, so the breakup stopped for a little while. At that point, the two halves of the ship were held together by the uppermost strength decks, and by the double – thickness side shell plating. The outlines of the two double bottom pieces that broke away from the ship are indicated. The deckhouse is shown opening up at the aft expansion joint – but the split in the deckhouse was an effect, not a cause, of the hull break.
As the bow continued to flood, and as water poured into the engine room (which would have been opened to the sea when the bottom gave way), the bow section pulled down on the forward end of the stern section. The angle between the two pieces of the hull decreased – as if the ship were a giant paper clip that was first bent, then straightened out. At some point in this process, the two sections broke apart completely.
The breakup was not symmetrical. The “Big Piece” (a large piece of the ship’s side, recovered in 1998) came from the starboard side – it had no counterpart on the port side. The after part of the ship is known to have listed to port fairly suddenly – so the starboard side may have failed first, leaving the flooded bow section to pull down on the port side of the stern section until the two parts separated completely. This left the stern section to float on its own, eventually standing nearly vertical in the water, then finally disappearing below the waves.
That’s our reconstruction. Now, let’s look at how it was developed, and why we believe that it’s closer to what actually happened than any other model proposed to date.
These ideas began to take shape when I first saw the photos of what were then called the “Missing Pieces”. Looking at the way the keel bent at the ends of those pieces, I was sure that it was shaped by compression. Also, the remaining edges looked too clean to have been formed by multiple twists and bends – those pieces looked like they failed first, not last.
The “Big Piece” seemed to be the other important piece of the puzzle. It seems to have failed along three distinct edges. After years of puzzlement, I realized that the “Big Piece” must have formed part of the temporary hinge about which the stern section bent, first downward, then upward. Such a sequence of loads and ship motions could have created the piece as we see it today (Any attempt to say how each edge broke would be pure speculation – but if the ship broke from the top down, we would be able to explain how only one of the edges formed. Once the ship split in two, there would be no forces remaining that could produce the other edges.). *ME’72
Any understanding of the sinking has to take into account the “Titanic”’s riveted construction. My first paper on the “Titanic”, published in 2003, gave me some insights into the behavior of the riveted joints. I realized that because of the way the hull was riveted together, the bottom was not as strong as most investigators believed. And because of the way the uppermost strakes (strips) of plating were constructed, they had much more strength than most investigators have given them credit for.
The high stresses around the deckhouse expansion joints – previously believed, even by the Marine Forensics Committee, to have been the starting point for the breakup – turned out to be a “red herring”. The deckhouse was made of lightweight plating, and carefully constructed so as NOT to share in the structural loads on the ship. (I recently rediscovered an old printout of a photo from the Discovery Channel website – no longer available online – which clearly showed that neither edge of the “Big Piece” was aligned with the deckhouse expansion joint.). Roy and I did our groundwork. We made calculations. We created a computer model of a portion of the bottom structure, and identified potential weak spots. We compared our reconstruction with survivor testimony and the condition of the wreck.
We had help from other members of the Marine Forensics Committee (formerly the Marine Forensics Panel) – especially from its chairman, Bill Garzke. As I mentioned earlier, this is the same body that was once a leading advocate of the theory that the break started in the upper portion of the hull – but they gave us their full support. We first presented our work informally at a session of the 2007 SNAME Annual Meeting. We developed it into a formal paper, which was presented at a local section meeting in New York in 2009. It was published in 2010 as “The Breakup Of Titanic – A Progress Report From The Marine Forensics Panel (SD – 7)” in SNAME’s journal, “Marine Technology”. (The reconstruction given here includes a slight change in the later stages of the breakup, to be presented in more detail in my new paper at the Symposium, but the main features have not changed.)
In professional circles, our work has not been challenged. I was expecting all kinds of objections to be raised during our presentations – we did not get even one. But in some circles, the “top down” breakup model remains in vogue. According to an article on the History Channel website, our work will be challenged in a documentary to be aired on the anniversary of the sinking.
To get some insight into the views of those who continue to believe that the breakup started at the upper edges, I would recommend a visit to the website of Parks Stephenson, perhaps the most influential advocate of a top – down break. The URL is: http://marconigraph.com/titanic/breakup/mgy_breakup.html.
Does it matter which version goes into the next generation’s history books? Well, it matters to me as a professional. It may be a bit of a stretch to call this a paradigm shift, but it does have many of the characteristics of one – and engineers, like scientists, must always be prepared to deal with new evidence that may force us to discard our previous concepts and embrace new ones.
But we also hope that in the absence of such evidence, our work will be respected. If there is to be a debate over the validity of our work, we hope that it will take place in open scientific and professional forums, and that the outcome of the debate will be determined in the best tradition of scientific inquiry.
There is even more at stake in this particular case. The legacy of the survivors is, in a sense, on the line. If our reconstruction is substantially correct, then the survivors’ testimony (with a few exceptions) turns out to have been quite accurate. There will, of course, still be some conflicts to resolve, but those conflicts will be easier to understand.
On the other hand, if a “top down” breakup goes into the history books, the survivors will be forever remembered as people who let the stress of the situation blind them to what was happening before their eyes. Some of my colleagues have suggested that there may be some sort of middle ground – some way to combine elements of both breakup models. If there is such a middle ground, I would gladly stand on it – but at the moment, I don’t see any more middle ground here than there was between, say, Kepler and Copernicus. I’ve had my say. Now it’s your turn. You are the jury. What part of the evidence would you like to see in more detail? What will your verdict be?
About the Author: Richard Woytowich is a Professor in the Computer Engineering Technology department at New York City College of Technology. Previously, he was a Senior Engineer with the American Bureau of Shipping. Other previous employers include Gibbs & Cox, Inc., a naval architecture and marine engineering firm. He holds a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from The Cooper Union, a Master's in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, and a Master's in science education from New York University. He is a licensed professional engineer in New York State, and has been a member of the Marine Forensics Committee (formerly the Marine Forensics Panel) for over 10 years.
April 2012
iSCISM: Interference Sensing and Coexistence in the ISM Band By Joe Baylon, Ethan Elenberg, Samantha Massengill Department of Electrical Engineering The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art ISM Interference
1. Introduction A multitude of commercial devices transmit in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, and these devices are likely to interfere with each other. These effects are compounded in highly populated metropolitan areas with large numbers of microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, wireless game controllers, and other devices which occupy the ISM band. This contributes to an ever increasing need for effective interference mitigation schemes in Wi-Fi networks.
Wideband Interference: Microwave Oven. The most common source of interference in the ISM band is the microwave oven (MWO). Nearly every home, apartment, office, and restaurant in a large metropolitan area contains an MWO, and its operation can severely degrade WiFi transmission. Both residential and commercial MWOs are characterized by a wide-band frequency profile. However, the interference varies in time with a nearly even on-off cycle corresponding to its 60 Hz AC power supply. This corresponds to a period T of approximately 16.7 ms, a key characteristic used in both modeling and identifying MWO signals.
Narrowband Interference: Bluetooth. Other than MWOs, most interferers in the ISM band occupy a bandwidth smaller than the approximately 20 MHz WiFi channel. The majority of these devices employ a frequencyhopping spread spectrum (FHSS) method to randomly change between several carrier frequencies throughout the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Although FHSS devices should theoretically cause minimal interference with Wi-Fi communication, their increased prevalence has been shown to be detrimental to throughput in both simulation and field testing. Efforts to eliminate the effects of these interferers on WiFi networks have been focused on providing robust, interferer-agnostic mitigation techniques. Previous work has focused on detecting and classifying signals, but alleviating their negative effects based on this classification has not yet been explored. For example, Airshark [1] and RFDump [2] act as low-cost spectrum analyzers that are helpful as network diagnostic tools. The authors of these papers mention the potential of interference mitigation but neglect to implement it. Other work has been done in avoiding interference at the MAC layer by switching to a different channel or changing the rate of transmission, but this approach does not adjust mitigation to best remedy the effects of a specific interferer.
Full article appears: http://highfrequencyelectronics.com/Apr2012/HFE0412_OE.pdf NEWSDAY April 21, 2012 Scientist recalls making of atomic bomb
Updated: April 21, 2012 9:06 PM By JAMIE TALAN. Special to Newsday
Photo credit: Chris Ware | Among his memorabilia, Meyer Steinberg has a plaque signed by at least half a dozen Nobel laureates who witnessed the first test of Fat Man in Alamogordo, N.M. (March 27, 2012)
*Meyer Steinberg was just 20 and fresh out of college when he got the mysterious assignment. His bosses at Kellex, a division of the construction and engineering giant M.W. Kellogg Co., said he was being transferred. The destination: Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The job: classified.
The Astoria kid who had just graduated from Cooper Union eventually found himself at a laboratory bench with gloves, masks and a new set of clothes, turning plutonium oxide into carbon tetrafluoride.
He was working on the Manhattan Project and helping to build Fat Man, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.
"The thinking was that Hitler was having a bomb built and we needed to get there first," Steinberg said.
Steinberg, now 87 and one of the last surviving members of the project, moved on to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and was assigned to flow calculations, equipment inspection and eventually making plutonium.
For the scientists who worked on the development of the atomic bomb, the Melville resident said, the ending of World War II was proof of the power of chemistry. "If we didn't use the atomic bomb, we would never have known how dangerous it was," Steinberg said.
Eventually, he said, he left Los Alamos for graduate school, and soon after found himself working in a garage in Mineola with two other scientists commissioned with funding from Harry Guggenheim to develop hydrazine for rocket fuel.
Guggenheim, the businessman, diplomat and president of Newsday, was fascinated by space and sent the scientists a check for $100,000 every year, Steinberg said. Guggenheim visited the lab each year, and on one occasion brought Charles Lindbergh to show off his project.
But the garage experiments eventually ended, Steinberg said, and he needed to find a new job. The former military base at Camp Upton was being converted to laboratory space and the job at hand was to expand basic research in the atomic sciences. So Steinberg began working at Brookhaven National Laboratory and went on to become an expert on greenhouse gases. He retired with 38 patents, 500 scientific publications and a book on the effects of carbon dioxide and global warming on the environment. *CHE’44
In the 1990s, one of his Brookhaven colleagues, Edward Kaplan, was interested in the fallout from radiation exposure from atmospheric bomb tests, so Steinberg turned over a urine sample. It showed that his radiation levels were 10,000 times above normal.
"You're a heavy hitter," Steinberg recounted Kaplan as saying.
Plutonium finds its way into bone, much like calcium, and stays put for 23,000 years, the half-life of the metal, Steinberg said. And to this day, his high levels have not caused any adverse medical conditions. "Maybe a little radiation exposure is good for you," Steinberg said.
Three years ago, he buried his wife of 58 years and now with his kids long grown, he's getting married again. As he packed up his house recently, Steinberg rummaged through chemistry books, old newspapers from his days at Los Alamos and other memorabilia.
He dusted off a plaque signed by at least half a dozen Nobel laureates who witnessed the first test of Fat Man in Alamogordo, N.M., thanking those who worked on "the World's Greatest Secret."
April 26, 2012
Cooper Union End of Year Show Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, 212-353-4120 East Village / Lower East Side May 21 - June 9, 2012 Opening: Monday, May 21, 5 - 9 PM Artwork: Issac Nichols
For more than a century-and-a-half, the Cooper Union End of Year Show has marked its students’ transition from studios, laboratories and classrooms to the gallery. A time honored tradition, the first recorded exhibition took place in 1860 at the historic Foundation Building, now joined by 41 Cooper Square, the institution’s LEED Platinum academic building. Works on view represent the culmination of each student’s unique experience in Cooper Union’s top ranked programs. Prominent Cooper Union alumni of the past century include Alex Katz (visual art), Daniel Libeskind (architecture) and Russell Hulse (physics). Admission is free and open to the public. Opening night: Monday, May 21, 2012, 5–9 p.m.
Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Through June 9, 2012 Foundation Building, 7 East 7th St., b/w 3rd and 4th Aves. An exhibition of student works that explores the role of architecture in contemporary culture and society through conceptual and scaled drawings, detailed three dimensional models and digital renderings. Projects range from the development of **new methods of drawing and investigating space to proposals for New York City and sites in Darwin, Australia; a military area on the border between North and South Korea; Lima, Peru; a rural area of Kansas, and other locations. The Cooper Union End of Year Show has become a significant New York City tradition that has consistently showcased innovative and visionary projects by emerging architects, helping to launch the careers of such notable alumni as John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Shigeru Ban, Laurie Hawkinson, Diane Lewis, Stanley Allen, Daniel Libeskind, Toshiko Mori and Rolf Ohlhausen.
The School of Art Through June 9, 2012 Foundation Building, 7 East 7th St., b/w 3rd and 4th Aves. With a commitment to radical and experimental exploration, the School of Art’s experience based curriculum has produced some of the most compelling individual and collaborative projects, year after year. Illustrating the school’s continuing role as an incubator of significant artists from historically influential artists: from Alex Katz, Eva Hesse and Lee Krasner to recent alumni including the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Sara VanDerBeek. A diversity of sculpture, painting, graphic design and video installations will be on view in gallery spaces in the Foundation Building and 41 Cooper Square.
Albert Nerken School of Engineering Through June 3, 2012 41 Cooper Square, 3rd Ave., b/w 6th and 7th Sts. Representing the different engineering disciplines, a dynamic array of projects will be on view for live demonstrations including battling robots, an interactive display for deaf children, a student designed friction welder, a pumpkin chucking catapult, augmented reality interactive posters, and the design and construction of a Formula 1 race car. The installation at 41 Cooper Square, Cooper Union’s LEED Platinum building, showcases the inventive and invaluable outcomes generated by the fields of mechanical, electrical, civil, and chemical engineering.
TEDXCOOPERUNION: FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Show Website
Description: TEDxCooperUnion: Found In Translation on April 24, 5-9PM at The Cooper Union, will feature live speakers, TEDTalks video and discussions exploring the intersections between engineering, art, architecture and the humanities. Presenters include: • Ron Gonen, Co-founder of RecycleBank,, will talk about his new venture to convert dog waste into clean energy. • Flora Lichtman, the multimedia editor at NPR’s "Science Friday," will give her top five list of How To Talk To Scientists. • Sangu Iyer (CE ‘1999), writer and PE, will talk about "Soiled Hands," her essay published in the anthology Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy and Sanctuary. • Benji Strauss (BME ‘12) will talk about his work as a volunteer EMT and the dangers of missing silent heart attacks. TEDxCooperUnion is licensed by TED and independently organized by Albert Nerken School of Engineering at The Cooper Union Professor, alumna, and TED Fellow Nina Tandon. http://tedxcooperunion.eventbrite.com/
Cost: $20
Dates:
• 4/24/2012 from 05:00 PM to 09:00 PM http://www.ny1.com/content/ny1_community_calendar/events/#28273
Tedx Cooper Union: Found In Translation was listed by the following outlets:
CBS local CityGuide CityLimits CultureMob Daily News Eventful FlavorPill Gotham Gazette HopStop NY-1 NYAS – Science in the City NYC.com The Lo-Down Village Alliance Westport News Yahoo-Upcoming Yelp Zvents
Can we have free will, if the brain’s actions are automatic? A scholar makes the case
By Ted Altschuler
12:12 pm Apr. 13, 2012
With the recent charging of George Zimmerman for the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin plastered across national headlines, personal responsibility and justice are top-of-mind.
It may be just these issues that drew several hundred New Yorkers through the Italianate brownstone arches of The Cooper Union Wednesday evening for a lecture by Dr. Michael Gazzaniga: Who’s In Charge? Free Will and Dr. Michael Gazzaniga. the Science of the Brain.
The industrialist Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Union in the 1858 to provide free science and cultural education. Its semicircular Great Hall has served ever since as a forum for controversial social, political and scientific discourse. Influential cultural figures from Salman Rushdie to Susan B. Anthony have spoken from its wide wainscoted stage. In his talk, Who’s in Charge, Michael Gazzaniga, a venerated researcher often credited with founding the field of neuroscience, helped his audience consider what knowledge about the brain’s structure and social behavior contributes to our public discourse on justice.
An online search on Gazzaniga brought up nine books and 195 research papers. He is Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. This could seem like an intimidating speaker for listeners better acquainted with the humanities, but a plain-guy speaking style put his audience right at ease. This was important for following Gazzaniga’s journey from researching the roles played by the right and left hemispheres of the brain to thinking about justice and the law in an hour-long lecture—a progression which took even his brain 45 years to make.
“Probably 99.999 percent of what goes on in the brain is automatic and unconscious. I have no idea what my next sentence will be, and sometimes I sound like it,” Gazzaniga began in his unassuming way. “We think the other stuff, the ‘me,’ the ‘self,’—we think that’s really important. We think there is somebody in charge—somebody pulling the levers.”
In promoting the book Who’s In Charge, Gazzaniga has learned that this is a subject on which everyone has an opinion.
“The next time you have a dinner party and you feel the conversation getting dull, bring it up and watch what happens!” he said.
But Gazzaniga would not cast his vote for or against, preferring to make his audience wait until after he had built his case. Why is it that people object to a brain determined by its physical properties, but not to the same property in the cells that make up the brain, asked Gazzaniga. He sees himself as one in a long line of thinkers about the physical world, the brain, and its actions. In this he included Lucretius, the first-century-B.C. philosopher. Lucretius was troubled by the laws governing how atoms moved because they implied that behavior was automatic.
“He wanted some wiggle room [to account for our free will], so he said that atoms must swerve,” said Gazzaniga, laughing. 20th-century experimental psychology saw things differently. The brain was a blank slate and our behavior was determined by our experiences. Albert Einstein said he took comfort in his lack of free will because it protected him from taking himself too seriously.
Gazzaniga’s mentor, neurobiologist Roger Sperry, was one researcher who changed the outlook of psychology with a simple experiment. He surgically turned a frog’s eyes upside down in their sockets. If experience determined brain structure then a frog would learn to adapt to the upside-down messages that his eyes sent to his brain. The frog never learned. This suggested that after initial development, brain structure was fixed. But if structure is fixed, does the brain come with content built in as well?
The experiments of Dr. Rennee Baillargeon at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who studies human development, suggests that even infants under a year old expect some behaviors more than others. When puppet A steals a cookie from puppet B, and puppet B steals it back, infants showed no surprise. However, infants appear shocked when observing one puppet helping another, suggesting to Gazzaniga that certain expectations of behavior are hard-wired into the brain early on and one of them might be a sense of retribution.
Gazzaniga’s own work with patients whose right and left brain hemispheres were surgically separated, showed specific roles for each half. When separated, one half of the brain was not aware of what the other half was doing. Yet, if Gazzaniga asked his patient why his hand behaved in a certain way, even though that side of the brain had no access to the reason, the patient always made up a story that made sense.
“Something comes with our equipment that builds a sense of self, a sense we are in charge,” he said. This causes a huge problem with our thinking that our brain could be automatic.
The brain’s structure may be determined and some of our social rules established early in life, but thought processes do not proceed in an orderly way from A to B to C. Connectivity in the brain is characterized by much more complex structures. This is where the going got tough, because our teacher seemed torn between keeping the conversation at a level his audience could understand and delivering his punchline, which relied on complexity theory and a principle called emergence.
Although Gazzaniga did some hand-waving and cut to the chase, in a nutshell emergence says that complex patterns (like behaviors) can arrive out of multiple simple interactions. So what emerges from the interaction is different from the parts that made it up. This is why, said Gazzaniga finally casting his vote in the free will debate, “the brain is automatic but people are free. You are responsible. Get over it.”
Free will is not a useful concept at the level of brain biology, to summarize Gazzaniga, because the biology is fixed. We cannot control our brains. It is at the level of interactions between people where concepts like responsibility and justice can be addressed. Gazzaniga compared the problem to an analysis of traffic, which cannot be achieved by studying individual cars. “Traffic only exists in the interaction,” he said.
What to do regarding justice, accountability, treatment and punishment are all cultural questions, but biology can contribute to a culture’s decisions, Gazzaniga suggested. Recent research suggests to him that such thought is becoming urgent. He cites recent studies which show differences between the brain images of typical people and of psychopaths. What happens when we can predict criminal behavior, asks Gazzaniga? What happens the day someone comes up with a treatment for psychopathy? While the evening took the audience on a journey that included the specialized area of brain science, Gazzaniga was more focused on its cultural implications. At times he oversimplified the science. For example, he ignored a body of research supporting the ability of adult brains to reassign new functions to areas once used for other purposes, work that would have argued against his deterministic view of the brain. This kept things simpler for his audience of nonexperts, but it did not eclipse his bigger idea, which supports free will despite the fixed properties Gazzaniga claims for the brain.
It is fitting to a lecture given in the same hall where Frederick Douglas defended President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, to consider the responsibility that comes with the freedom to pursue knowledge. The progression of knowledge is inevitable but is not unequivocally positive from a moral perspective. Sometimes potential threats are clear even to the non-specialist, as for example, with knowledge about splitting the atom. In considering how to use the knowledge gained by neuroscience, sitting at the nexus of biology, psychology, philosophy and information theory, it helps to have a broad view.
Warned at the outset that the topic ignited controversy, the evening’s Q&A featured an outraged tirade by a speaker so apoplectic over Gazzaniga’s claims of the deterministic brain, that he could barely make himself understood. This was balanced by the question of a more modest audience member worried only about his ‘senior moments.’ He had attended a talk given by Eric Kandel, Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist, and had also asked Kandel’s counsel, hoping there would be a simple solution such as eating “brain food.” “What do you advise?” he asked Gazzaniga. “Blueberries and martinis,” Gazzaniga answered. “What did Kandel say?” asked Gazzaniga. The man replied, “wine every night and forget about it!” http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2012/04/5689615/can-we-have-free-will-if-brains-actions-are-automatic-scholar-makes-
The following outlets listed Who’s In Charge?: Free Will and The Science of The Brain
BookForum Greenwich Time New York NonProfit Press Upcoming- Yahoo CBS local HopStop NY MetroParents WBAI (on air promo) City Limits Love My Zip NY Nerdlist Westport News Daily News Manhattan Users Guide NYC.com Zvents Doing NYC MediaBistro Stanford Advocate Eventful New York Academy of The Villager Events.org Science Town and Country Fyifly New Yorkled Travel Mixed
In addition, NYU Medical School’s Neuroscience Institute and NeuWrite (a collaborative working group for scientists, researchers and writers), supported by the Office of Graduate Affairs, Columbia University Medical Center, planned to send the event notice out to their respective members/mailing lists.
April 26, 2012
Larkin Out Loud Posted by Giles Harvey
As with so much else—England, foreign countries, children, grownup people, a great deal of literature, and a great deal of life—Philip Larkin didn’t care for poetry readings. Listening to poetry read aloud, complained Larkin, one never knows how far away the ending is; all sense of stanzaic form disappears; and this is to say nothing of all the tiny misunderstandings that chip away at our ability to concentrate, the “theirs” being taken for “there’s.” I don’t much like poetry readings either, and I would add to Larkin’s list of grievances the fact that most people aren’t very good at reading poetry aloud. The greatest offense is usually simply that of reading a poem as though it were a poem, in a boomingly uniform incantation that obscures nuance and texture. Fortunately, there were few such performances on display on Tuesday night at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, where the Poetry Society of America had organized a tribute to Philip Larkin, England’s greatest post-Second World War poet, to coincide with the publication of “Complete Poems,” a clear improvement on the earlier editions, which includes each of Larkin’s collections in their original order, along with a section of uncollected and previously unpublished work, and a staggeringly thorough commentary. Like the clientele of a hyper-exclusive café, the evening’s readers—James Fenton, Saskia Hamilton, Mary Karr, Nick Laird, Katha Pollitt, Paul Simon, and Zadie Smith among them—sat in threes around small tables up on stage and took turns approaching the lectern to read a Larkin poem of choice. Deborah Garrison got some laughs for her brilliantly plain and unobtrusive reading of “Poetry of Departures” (“So to hear it said / He walked out on the whole crowd / Leaves me flushed and stirred, / Like Then she undid her dress / Or Take that you bastard”), while Andrew Sullivan’s rendition of “The Whitsun Weddings” was bracingly alive to the poem’s atmosphere of gathering mystery and power. To mix things up—and Larkin was all for variety (he said he always put a lot of thought into the order of poems in a collection: “I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls”)—the floor was intermittently ceded to the Queens College Louis Armstrong Ensemble, who played several of Larkin’s favorite Sidney Bechet numbers. (The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik did a fine job with Larkin’s poem to Bechet, where he exclaims, “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous Yes.”) Many of Larkin’s best poems follow the same structure. First, the poet is arrested by something seemingly mundane—an invitation to a party, the sight of a young couple passing in the street—and begins to turn it over in his mind. As the poem gathers steam, these meditations take on a metaphysical cast and are expressed in an increasingly lavish diction. Then, almost bashfully, Larkin seems to overhear himself and to reject conventional poetic speech and sentiment in favor of a more grounded, clear-eyed vision of the world, one that his experience has verified. *excerpt from original article
Events on Monday, April 16
Books: Discussion Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India Monday 4/16 @ The Great Hall at Cooper Union Gandhi’s struggles on two continents, his fierce but, ultimately unfulfilled hopes, and his ever-evolving legacy detailed in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi...
“Great Soul” was featured in the following outlets: Book Forum Cityguide NY City Limits Eventful Events.org Fairfield Citizen Flavorpill Gotham Gazette Greenwich Citizen HopStop The Lo-Down NY1 NYC.com NY Daily News NY Luxury Platform for Pedagogy Thought Gallery Travel Mixed US Department of State Upcoming Zvents BUSTLER
Urban Planet: Emerging Ecologies Where: New York, NY - 41 Cooper Square, Cooper Union, Rose Auditorium (map it) When: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 Share/Save: & Email this
Credit: Werner Kunz and Denise Hoffman Brandt Urban Planet: Emerging Ecologies will reflect on the urgency to affect change in urbanization practices when confronted with the context of unviable “territorial ecologies,” defined as spheres of sustainable interaction between humans and their environment. The guest speakers will shape an explicit understanding of different urban contexts examined via the lens of ecological viability and speculate open-ended alternative urban futures. Tuesday, April 10 at 6pm, Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square Prior to the event, there will be a reception on the Alumni Roof Terrace at 5pm This event is free and open to the public
Schedule: 5:00 - 6:00 pm: Reception Alumni Roof Terrace at 41 Cooper Square 6:00 -6:15 pm: WELCOME Anthony Vidler Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union Ambassador François Barras Consul General of Switzerland in New York Introduction | Lydia Kallipoliti (Conference Chair) Assistant Professor Adj. of Architecture | The Cooper Union Senior Associate | Cooper Union Institute of Sustainable Design 6:15-7:15 pm: LECTURES “The Architecture of Social Investment” | Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner - Urban-Think Tank Founders and directors of Urban-Think Tank and S.L.U.M. Lab (Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory) Chair for Architecture and Urbanism at the Swiss Institute of Technology [ETH Zurich], Zürich. “Technology and Urban Issues for Cities of the South” | Jean-Claude Bolay Director of the UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development. Professor at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology – EPFL, Lausanne. “Post Sustainable: The Future of Socio-Ecological Cities” | Mitchell Joachim Co-President of Terreform ONE and Partner at Planetary ONE Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture, Urban and Sustainable Design Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University 7:15-8:30PM : ROUND TABLE Moderator: Lydia Kallipoliti Carolina Barco Project Manager Sustainable Cities, IADB (Inter American Development Bank) Denise Hoffman Brandt Associate Professor, Director of Landscape Architecture Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York Grahame Shane Professor Adjunct, the Cooper Union & Columbia University Discussion with all participants Conclusions and Salutations | Kevin Bone Director | Cooper Union Institute of Sustainable Design Professor of Architecture |The Cooper Union This event is organized by the Cooper Union Institute of Sustainable Design in collaboration with International Institutional Affairs at ETH, Zurich and the UNESCO Chair for Technologies in Development at EPF Lausanne. It is made possible with the generous sponsorship of the Swiss Consulate in New York and the Swiss organizing institutions. http://cooper.edu/events-and-exhibitions/events/urban-planet-emerging-ecologies
Additional listings appeared: Archinnode Architects Newspaper Buckminster Fuller Institute Bustler European American Chamber of Commerce Gotham Gazette New York Academy of Sciences Platform for Pedagogy SuckerPunch Daily Terreform 1 Urban Lab Global Cities
April 18, 2012 Vanity Fair to Host Christopher Hitchens Memorial this Friday
By Vanity Fair 8:00 PM, April 17 2012
By Gasper Tringale.
Vanity Fair will host a memorial for the late Christopher Hitchens this Friday at noon in the Great Hall of Cooper Union. Scheduled to pay tribute in New York are Stephen Fry, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Christopher Buckley, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and physicist Lawrence Krauss. “In assembling a roster of speakers with deep belief in the power of the written word and the wisdom of nature and the universe, we hope to do an atom of justice to Christopher’s memory,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said. A limited number of seats are available to the public on a first- come, first-served basis. Those interested in attending should send a request to [email protected].
Just a few months after his death on December 15, 2011, in Houston, Texas, the American Society of Magazine Editors nominated Hitchens as a finalist in the best-columns-and-commentary category for its 2012 National Magazine Awards. Hitchens’s three essays—“When the King Saved God,” “Unspoken Truths,” and “From Abbattabad to Worse”—touched on the topics of politics, religion, and dealing with the diminishing effects of chemotherapy.