Tag Archives: Astrophysics

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on science and ethics

Many of you who read my blog or know me personally know I am a bit of a lush for science. The astrophysics of monadologie came from my residency at Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, which in itself is part of a lifelong interest in astronomy in particular and other natural sciences.

My love of physics naturally leads into astrophysics at one end and particle physics, quantum physics and so on at the other, and to a slew of scientists and philosophers from Leibniz to Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers, others… Geology and geophysics take me into my love of climbing, mountains and so into Central Asia and China, geography, culture, history, maps and topography… anthropology… names keep recurring in different disciplines, braids between the disciplines inside and out of science–the arts, philosophy are twisted upon themselves over and over; ah and the joy is the same.

Some people might find through religion some sense of marvel in the universe. I do not. To me, looking at the stars or the earth and forcing interpretation through faith is perhaps at best an elegant metaphor or story to be studied through anthropology (I do find of course the pantheon of demons in all religions quite fascinating), but mostly craven superstition that is no different to a perverse choice in favour of the detritus littering the floor, when a banquet lies upon the table above.

Over the years of blogging and reading blogs, many of the ones in the sciences had coalesced around Discover Magazine Blogs and the Scienceblogs communities, which of course has led me to new blogs, furthering my wanderings through the sciences. Volcanology and deep sea oceanography with excellent blogs written by passionate working scientists are two of the fields I currently have a fascination for.

Yes, there is a but.

Mostly I don’t reblog. As much as I’d like to–and have tried in the past to make weekly reading lists of whatever has really grabbed my attention, the most obvious place where my love of science is displayed is in the sidebar (yes, needs updating…). But the last couple of days have brought some troubling developments.

Scienceblogs allows their writers complete freedom, in exchange for advertising in the right column and above the banner–most of which I don’t see because I use adblocking. This division allowed for an integrity in the science bloggers’ often coupled with disclosures either by naming themselves or when anonymous listing where their funding comes from.

As a non-scientist and being aware of the deluge of pseudo-science — homeopathy, new age therapies and so on under the misleading guise and banner of ‘alternative medicine’, the constant misrepresentation of climate science by the media, corporate manipulation of public perception and outright lies, or just simple things like why would a volcano cause air traffic across europe to shut down – all these things in small ways I find myself talking about.

But when a community such as Scienceblogs provides a platform to a corporate entity under the guise of a blog like others, when it is patently advertorial, massaging of public image, when it is Pepsi given space to write a blog (I use that in the very loosest of senses) on nutrition science and how they are making the world a better place through their foodstuffs research…

Yes, the science blog world is in an uproar. It is a crucial issue of ethics, impartiality and most importantly authenticity and integrity. When science is routinely denigrated, used against the wishes of scientists for political manipulation, misrepresented in the media, when vital issues for the our immediate future are at stake, it is imperative scientists are able to be seen as trustworthy and respected.

Many of the science blogs I read are in the process of leaving Scienceblogs. Funnily enough it has also introduced me to new blogs–which are also leaving. The story in itself is worth an afternoon’s reading, but summarised at The Loom, along with a list of blogs on the move, and by GrrlScientist in Sucking Corporate Dick (read the comments to enjoy scientists enraged).

Maybe this is also to say for those of you who get as much pleasure as I do in reading and in reading science, there is a wealth of extraordinarily talented writers in many fields who I’m sure you’ll greatly enjoy. And perhaps too, this diaspora is a good thing. Blogs and blog communities have progressed to the point – thanks to the code they run on – where ad hoc communities are simple to set up and there is no real need to belong to somewhere like Scienceblogs if they fail to meet the requirements of their bloggers.

I shall update my links in due course.

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monadologie – cosmos magazine

The bubble-quote of my traipsing through a park in Sydney, the endless, vertiginous blackness crisp with infinitesimal points, and there knowing the universe itself is enough, I didn’t elaborate on the minutes prior. Why was I walking through University of Sydney at night, alone? Why was I doing even in Sydney? And why is this memory so often recalled.

In this moment, looking up at the vast emptiness somewhere we are in, I knew absolutely there is no god.

I didn’t want to bring atheism so forthrightly into any discussion about my residency or monadologie, for many perhaps not so justifiable reasons including not-stepping-on-toes etc. I know from growing up very religious that people like to hold onto their faith with determination.

I was at a conference in Sydney, the Queen’s Trust Programme for Young Australians, and after a long day assumed the gathering I was sitting around in was for queers. Somehow I realised it was for Christians. I was already tired and emotional, the point of the structure of the week was to induce this, and sitting there was jolted into remembering just how messed up I’d been because of religion. And also, feeling peculiarly betrayed, suckered in, deceived. I was thinking we were going to talk about being queer and somehow that night I really wanted to… oh it’s elusive to remember…

I left. I said something like, “Oh, I’m in the wrong place”, and felt regarded as, well you know, a not quite as worthy person. I walked out, angry, certainly, upset also, this small gathering reminding me of the great villainy of religion that caused me to see every bad thing that happened as I grew up as god’s punishment for me being a sinner, for being queer.

I walked. It was inky in that way only standing in the midst of an unlit park can be, the horizon dotted by lights. I looked at the sky and god stopped. Gone.

I’d stopped believing years before, and praying, but in this moment if I can say I ever ‘became’ anything, I became an atheist.

I wrote this in the middle of the night, the witching hour, and all to say that for me in science i find an imagination far more worthy and joyous than religion can ever provide.

…

Tim Thwaites came along to one night of monadologie, stayed around for the discussion and later we spoke on the phone for an hour about the residency. I think it’s a really quite beautiful piece about the whole process that he wrote for Cosmos Magazine, and dance, art collaborating with science, especially for the last sentence:

monadologie is an answer to those who are unable to see how close is the link between the aesthetics of science and the intricate patterns found in art.”

I’m also quite honoured and proud, maybe a little bewildered to be in the middle of a magazine full of scientists talking passionately about their work. Photographed with my camera phone for your blurry enjoyment…

cosmos magazine - celestial bodies 1 cosmos magazine – celestial bodies 1

cosmos magazine - celestial bodies 1 cosmos magazine – celestial bodies 1

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MEL-ADL … finish

Days of nothing over the weekend, seeing Bonnie for the last time in a while, breakfast at Mario’s on Brunswick St, warm croissants and fresh jam, muesli and poached fruit, rhubarb and yoghourt, wandering the city and other streets on my own, bookshops visited, finishing…

Packing…

The careless, careful folding on my life into one sealed volume. One last, short sleep and then…

Adelaide tomorrow morning. All this time since early December is finished. A new project about to start, butterflies in my stomach.

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monadologie … last days and finish

The previous week has been on of quite small scale. I’ve been trying to learn everything I can on absorption spectrums and more importantly what electrons and photons do when and how as they get excited or … dwindle. This has led me in the last couple of days to things stars do, like eject vast gouts of corona or have all kinds of magnetic excitement around sunspots.

There is a point to this. I have no idea what it is.

Among the myriad things that never, for equally various reasons into the showing were the sublimely beautiful Hinode (Solar-B) videos of the sun in X-ray or Extreme Ultra-Violet, we’d talked about being projected on a suitably awe-inspiring scale at the end of the piece…

It’s been some weeks of just thinking about what we have done so far and where to go, and so for me the next stage, besides more funding applications is working on this new stuff for a solo. Also editing of the video into a 3D stereoscopic film.

My last days were spent on occasion doing tests for this, as single frames, and then as short bits of video, getting the separation right, working out how to assemble a stereo film in Final Cut, seeing what peculiarities and oddities emerged when the video was played back through the VR Theatre projectors, and repeat.

Aside from some weirdness, like frame rate irregularities, possibly due to how I exported it from Final Cut, and some unwanted up-scaling in the projection process, there’s nothing that doesn’t look atrocious and Chris is quite keen for us to continue. So while he works on the weirdness, I get to do the cutting. I haven’t done much in editing for a while with my old laptop so geriatrically incapable of rendering at a speed measured faster than frames-per-day, and the precarious assemblage to get it to boot in the first place, but with my new new!!! MacBook Pro rendering to m2v almost in real time, I’m all trembling with anticipation at getting fluent in all the fun graphics and processor intensive editing things… mmm excitement.

But… sadness.

Yesterday was my last at Swinburne. I’ve been there since early December when I had so little comprehension beyond nervousness at what I could possibly do, and in these tumultuous months, for so many reasons, personally, artistically, intellectually such a bone-crushing shove into a precipice, and somehow found it much more to my liking than the fear and nausea on its lip, and then yesterday to say goodbye to Chris and walk down beside the railway lines hummocked above, past Max and Alley Tunes and our small French café, the now autumn sun leaking long shadows through denuded trees, this last time.

And to pack, to entomb these months in boxes that, along with me though via different carriers will arrive in Adelaide next week, to finish. My room in Collingwood soon to be vacant, my life again designed around a suitcase. How unexpected and glorious this all has been.

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monadologie photos

I do have much more to write about these last days at the centre, and I’ll make excuses elsewhere. I got some photos yesterday from Chris of the performance, Saturday night, taken by Paul Philipson.

monadologie - 1 monadologie – 1

monadologie - 2 monadologie – 2

monadologie - 3 monadologie – 3

monadologie - 4 monadologie – 4

monadologie - 5 monadologie – 5

monadologie - 6 monadologie – 6

monadologie - 7 monadologie – 7

monadologie - 8 monadologie – 8

monadologie - 9 monadologie discussiion – lina, frances, bonnie, chris

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monadologie day 46

For those who count, days 43 through 45 were production days at Napier St and some 23 minutes of performing followed by a discussion with Chris Fluke, myself, the dancers and the audience. More on that non-sequentially, I imagine.

A week in Adelaide. mmm. Oh! I didn’t blog even. Seeing friends, many meetings, some shows and festivals and then a 6am flight back to Melbourne for the remaining three weeks of my residency.

What to say thus far? I have no idea quite what I have made. I can’t really assess it within the context of previous pieces I’ve made which exist in the world of dance theatre, performance, installation rather than pure dance. I do have some clear ideas where it can go in the coming weeks, which mainly will be research for me. I also plan to make this research into a solo while I’m back in Adelaide. I have an idea of what it could look like with a group of dancers, though not sure of the number. I had an idea that a chamber orchestra of brass instruments would be a fine accompaniment. I have lots of ideas I later regard with embarrassed disdain.

I’m quite sure having projection or dressing it up with the usual accouterments of dance is exactly what I don’t want to do. Nor either to engage with any of the devices of theatre. The problem with this is that in refusing to engage with common structural elements, it leaves a gaping void which needs to be addressed with some sort of rigor.

I was reading about a lecture Aubrey de Grey gave at the BIL Conference, where he said, (paraphrasing from …My Heart’s in Accra) “Be right (diligence before oratory). He quotes Sean Carroll: “Being a heretic is hard work”. It’s not enough to disagree with mainstream thinking – you actually have to be correct. “Galileo was a heretic, but understood the reigning orthodoxy at the time better than anyone else.” Very few people work that hard: “Many casual heretics can’t be bothered.”" At another talk, KV Fitz said, “intelligence is a function of passion.”

I think between these two thoughts much of what I am trying to do here is contained.

During my holiday in Adelaide, I showed the video of Friday night to Daniel, Bonnie, a couple of others. The more I watched it, the more I felt I couldn’t say anything about it. I’m not sure even if it’s any good. I can say though that making dance, seriously investing time, not in a personal style of moving or individual technique, but engaging wholeheartedly in the cultural history of western dance as performance and spectacle, all the way from Louis XIV and even before, and considering what choreography as movement is relative to the contemporary world as dance was 300 years ago to the courts, or as dance was to the Modern world of much of last century, to be very specific in analysing these systems of a body moving and to try and conceptualise where it could go, to not reiterate what has been done before, all this which is really choreographing and making dance and nothing else, is really fucking hard.

Also, I think it does not easily fit into being assessed within the sphere of what contemporary dance is at the moment in Australia. Certainly what I’ve seen in Melbourne is drifting far from dance these days, whereas Adelaide is quite fixated on, in various guises, the dancer as technician, and neither of these things are what I am interested in here. It is a problem with ideas, that if they don’t have some dialogue with the existing field from which they emerge and upon which they somehow reflect, it is tricky to be able to say much about what they are.

Not arrogantly pretending I just changed the world of dance, but the line of research I’m following doesn’t have much room for many of contemporary dance’s current tropes.

Then there was the discussion on language and structure with a couple of people, and whether pure dance can indeed say anything. My first thought on this was that if it really can’t say anything without being dressed up, perhaps it shouldn’t try to articulate anything in the first place. What does all this training and attention to corporeal aesthetics count towards? I suppose the answer therein in my continued preference for working only with dancers, and, well, very particular types of dancers at that.

All this to say, there is something in here that counts, but perhaps it is beyond my ability to make sense of.

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MEL-ADL … again … again … something like home …

A taxi driver from Punjab studying electronics with such a polite demeanor managed to persuade me that going all the way to the airport with him was not such a bad compromise than going to Southern Cross Station and getting the bus. Honestly, I was quite in the mood for swaying with whatever breeze happened by.

I have a sense of anxiety when I return to somewhere I used to live, that it will have changed, that I will have changed, and an accommodation between the two of us will be impossible. Still, to see North Terrace beneath from the usual exit row seat I occupy, I thought, “Home…”

And today, seeing my darling friends Gala, Lisa, Adam, and last night with Alison, and later today with Daniel… It’s like a short holiday, a reprieve from the madness of the past few weeks, the intense emotions, intellectualising, trying to make sense of what I wanted to do… and …

I’ll write about the showings later, when it’s settled somewhat, when I’ve looked at the footage, when it has calmed down.

So, Adelaide for a week. Festival time, shows to see, people here from Melbourne, Bonnie and Lina both, and something maybe growing in my life that has made these last couple of weeks like the sun breaking in mountains.

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monadologie day 40, 41 & 42

Oh, so close now and … mmm nervousness and so on.

A peculiar week. I haven’t been too intent on planning for the showing, the idea all along was to continue playing with stuff up till today and then whatever we have, tomorrow we for once stick with. So in a way it is finished but in more ways oh very much not.

Unexpected not-happening. All the Hydrogen shell stuff, based on the absorption lines, didn’t work. I mean didn’t work in one of it’s possible manifestations as a method to shuffle us closer or further from our centre based on the size and shape of various orbital shells. To wonder what I’m talking about and sometimes pictures are good, look at these Hydrogen atom orbitals. So we thought, oh well, save that for me alone for when I return to the centre.

That is to say, will work in a different way, but it was surprising to see the complexity of the piece disturbed and broken by adding just a bit more.

Altogether, it has reached a level of complexity that is pointless to add to as there isn’t time to fold new things into it, though I do have a couple of clear ideas where it will go in the coming weeks after the showing, and need to work this out myself through my favourite rehearsal method, lying down and dozing.

Gideon came in to watch us do a run today. He won’t be here for the showings, and we were, well, ready to be seen, and certainly by the end knew what it’s going to feel like to perform in two days. I need to learn to breathe differently, but it’s far too late for anything else. And remember everything else as well as how to improvise, and the other way too.

I don’t want to get into an analysis of what the work is viz. what I imagined it could be yet, though it now has the feeling I always get around here, a bit of emptiness at what could have been. It has to, at some time collapse from all the myriad possibilities down into the one thing it will be seen as, and watching it on video, I do enjoy, like endless rain in sheets beating the surface of puddles.

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monadologie day 37 & 38 & 39

This is the running order of the work. Or … it describes certain possibilities that if I’m clever enough could unfold in the weeks after the showings into something else. Yes, the phrase names are stupid. No, my notes do make sense to me, when I can read them. Yes, I have quite unnatural levels of nervousness and anxiety about this piece that I am so far unsuccessful in convincing myself is in fact excitement.

I spent Friday afternoon with Chris at the centre on what I was supposing, despite my utter fascination, was not going to make it into the piece. Well, how wrong was I? More on that later.

We were in Napier St again on Saturday, and ripped through most stuff and are vaguely coherent up to the end of phrase 37. Friday we went through the middle section that I decided for sundry reasons needed to be fast. Mostly this was because the movement is quite large and gross, and resists attempts to create fine detail like in the early stuff, and can just not be approached in the same way as those early phrases.

Rather than being a improvisation than once rendered lends itself to further unfolding, the middle section is more of a direct representation of the improvisation itself we did in the VR Theatre.

I have retired the word ‘thrash’ from contemporary dance lexicon. It’s boring after so many years that anything vigorous and slightly uncontrolled gets saddled with such a mediocre word. In response, I say, ‘thesaurus’.

I’m really too tired to type and every second word has mistakes in it so I think I’ll just go to bed and start again tomorrow.

monadologie - running order monadologie – running order

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monadologie

Frances would like to invite you to a showing of the development of monadologie.

“In so far as the concatenation of their perceptions is due to the principle of memory alone, men act like the lower animals, resembling the empirical physicians, whose methods are those of mere practice without theory… For instance, when we expect that there will be daylight to-morrow, we do so empirically, because it has always so happened until now. It is only the astronomer who thinks it on rational grounds.”

— G.W. Leibniz – La Monadologie 1714

monadologie has been:

choreographed and danced by Bonnie Paskas, Frances d’Ath, Lina Limosani
an ANAT/Arts Victoria Arts Innovation Residency (AIR)
at Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
and Maximised by Chunky Move

important things:

when: Friday 22nd February, Saturday 23rd February
what time: 7:30pm
where: Napier St Theatre, cnr Napier and Church Sts, South Melbourne

what else: blogging at www.supernaut.info and www.anat.org.au/blog/dAth and dance stuff at www.francesdath.info

contact me: frances at francesdath.info or 0419 586 227

Please RSVP by email or SMS

monadologie