In this joyful, heartfelt talk featuring demos of her wonderfully wacky creations, Simone Giertz shares her craft: making useless robots. Her inventions — designed to chop vegetables, cut hair, apply lipstick and more — rarely (if ever) succeed, and that’s the point. “The true beauty of making useless things [is] this acknowledgment that you don’t always know what the best answer is,” Giertz says. “It turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. Maybe a toothbrush helmet isn’t the answer, but at least you’re asking the question.”
In 1997 two spaceships were launched from Cape Kennedy containing material to represent life on earth. The ambition of the project was to make hypothetical contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. The choice of material was subjective to an American, scientifically educated, 1970s community, with paternalistic attitude towards the rest of the world. But who consulted us? We were not asked to make a contribution and we must do something about this falsification, especially now as we approach the end of the second millennium, when everyone is making lists and taking stock of what has been achieved.
With a mixture of irony and seriousness, the filmmaker, artist and director has chosen to put together his own shopping list called 100 objects to represent the world. After presenting this 100 objects in an exhibition at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace in 1992, Greenaway now brings the objects to an audience instead of bringing the audience to the objects: in a completely new and theatrical setting, light, sound, voice and music will be part of a modern opera – a prop opera. The importance of the prop should not be underestimated in our own materialistic and icon-producing world. Can you imagine a Chicago Gangster Film without a gun? But the objects to represent the world are not inanimate but are presented in a mixture of Machiavellian, galactic toy store and Faustian dream space.
The opera set is an installation that can be contemplated on stage also before and after the performance.
The 100 objects are presented in a sequential narrative by Thrope the Misanthrope, who guides us and Adam and Eve (two silent, naked actors) to show what mankind has really learned during the past millennium: from the comforts of domesticity and sentiment, through the delights and torments of sex, power and money, to the tragedies of war, disease, loss and death. This journey is to be traveled in 70 minutes, structured by Thrope’s spoken discourse. His dramatic performance is accompanied by the soundtrack of Jean-Baptiste Barrière (engineered at IRCAM Paris), making him a teacher, a pedant and persuader, a charlatan and preacher.
Although he rarely ventured far from New York, Joseph Cornell was able to create intricate worlds of his own from the solitude of his basement. In this episode of Anatomy of an Artwork, discover Cornell’s enchanting Soap Bubble Set, a perfect example of the artist’s miniaturized realms constructed from everyday ephemera. With symmetrically laid out clay pipes, glasses, maps and organic detritus, Cornell built a vast referential network of found items that encapsulated his many interests from across the arts & sciences.
NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is a critical step toward enabling spacecraft to safely, independently navigate in deep space rather than rely on the time-consuming process of receiving directions from Earth. Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the clock is the first timekeeper stable enough to map a spacecraft’s trajectory in deep space and small enough to be housed onboard. The technology demonstration is validating a miniaturized, ultra-precise mercury-ion atomic clock orders of magnitude more stable than what’s used on spacecraft today.
Concept of the systemTom Cwik, the head of JPL’s Space Technology Program (left) and Allen Farrington, JPL Deep Space Atomic Clock Project Manager, view the integrated Atomic Clock Payload on General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems US’s Orbital Test Bed Spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechOne of three free posters celebrating NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock. The mission will demonstrate technology that would allow a spacecraft to calculate its own trajectory rather than waiting for that information to come from Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The philosophers and astronomers who came before us probed the stars and studied their light to understand the universe and observe the passage of time. They learned to measure time in intervals of years, months, days, hours, often as a period or cycle. Nowadays, we are also using light in the same quest for precision and knowledge, but can we proclaim having found universal time?
Bill Hammack shows the world’s smallest atomic clock and then describes how the first one made in the 1950s worked. He describes in detail the use of cesium vapor to create a feedback or control loop to control a quartz oscillator. He highlights the importance of atomic team by describing briefly how a GPS receiver uses four satellites to find its position.
We take lots of things for granted in this world; GPS, the internet and of course particle accelerators. However, none of these things would be possible without atomic clocks.
How Long Is One Second, Really? Do we really know how long a second is? The science behind how time is actually measured may prove you wrong.
Inside The Most Precise Atomic Clock in the World From his basement lab in Boulder, Colorado, physicist Jun Ye and his team have built the world’s most precise atomic clock. The clock is so powerful it can measure otherwise imperceptible changes in the physical world. “Have you ever seen the movie called Interstellar? You’ll see some of that in our lab, it’s not science fiction. You can actually see clocks slow down,” explains Ye. In episode seven of The Most Unknown, geobiologist Victoria Orphan travels to JILA—a physics institute jointly operated by the University of Colorado Boulder and NIST—to untangle questions of space and time with Ye and his otherworldly atomic clock.
It is estimated that 869 species have become extinct in the last 500 years. Nearly 20,000 are now considered threatened with extinction. Why are so many species disappearing so quickly? Which are the most vulnerable? What mechanisms are causing these disappearances? What are we doing to avoid them?
The museum has a small but beautiful collection of extinct animals that was removed from the exhibition some 20 years ago for conservation reasons. We have decided to exhibit this collection, not only in ideal conditions for these valuable objects, but in a current scientific context, aiming to explain by example certain mechanisms at the origin of the disappearance of species.
This new exhibition space addresses topics such as the conservation efforts undertaken at the local, national or global level, or the 6th extinction.
YouTube Strategy for Museums is a bite-sized course designed to be completed in an afternoon. You’ll be led through a series of nine exercises to get you thinking about how to use YouTube for your museum.
The course features examples from some of the most successful channels on YouTube, including the work that our course leader Wouter van der Horst from We Share Culture has done for the Rijksmuseum.
