walkabout day 28

More Overloaded Media Overload Day

Back in San Fran, as they tell knowledgeable visitors never to call it, I hit the Exploratorium at its spiffy new Pier 15 digs with two other ex-Exes, one of whom is not so ex as to not still be working there even though he was fired a few weeks ago and was able to slip the other two of us ex-Exes in for free. Peter, the Not-Working Dos Equis was suitably jaded and Wayne the latter-day Equis his usual cynical self, so the net result was a dystopian tour of failures and slippages vis the tractionful triumphs of our hazily remembered past... In other words, things are pretty much the same. But somewhat more polished and dust free.

Indicatively, the word Science is no longer in the title. Now it is "A Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness". Kinda strange. Anyway there is some attempt to include Social Science in the mix and (my) entire Sound and Hearing section is pretty much missing in action. At least some of the Color and Light stuff made the transition to the new space in sorta-reduced capacity.

On the other hand two of the Artist In Residence 'zibbits  for which I provided technical assistance -- kinetic neon sculptures by Christian Schiess -- are still there, one is in much improved condition but the other is outwardly identical to the way I left it 35 years ago. I have no idea if the guts are the same though:

I designed this control panel and the electronics therein

Plus the Delayed Speech piece which I re-built after a few years of re-enforcing its headphone supports and splicing its tape loop with thousands of screaming children running hither and yon around me. Now in yet another incarnation:

Delayed Screech, c. 2014

And my large, cluttered, superfund cleanup site of an electronics shop has been reduced to a computer workstation and a single cabinet of miscellaneous parts that no one remembers how to use:

the machine shop has more tools now though

Then I went to Pier 24, a huge well installed photography gallery, by appt only, at, well, pier 24, right under the Bay Bridge. It's a stunning display of mostly contemporary photography that turns out to be mostly nothing like one would nominally believe photography to be. Images that look to be spontaneous but are painstakingly posed. Images that look to be --dramatic-- documentation that are pieced together frames from multiple locations around the world. Images that look to be photographs but are really shadow-grams. And even some --i.e., a lot of-- traditional, meaning alternative, process wet-salt-plate-print-obscura-god-camera-silver-paladium-knows-what work of interest.

A couple of blocks after stumbling into the fading evening light I found this stencil on the sidewalk, with the toes pointing towards the Oldenburg/van Bruggen Cupid's Span sculpture:

Then oysters and a martini at WaterBar on the Embarcadero and dinner with Jenny at Uzen on College. And "home" to make this full report.

All in all a day for introspection:

the gdm tablet thinks about taking a picture until I look to see if it has taken the gdm picture yet