Topsy Turvey

This is such an interesting work of art.  It is simple and beautiful in it's design and in its experience.  It is in the middle of a long hallway, and it is not clear what it is or is supposed to do.  So you go to the wall and read the full page of text.  Then you go back to the device and discover that it moves and that you are supposed to move it while looking through it.  The glass sides of the long rectangular box function as mirrors and yet you can see through them.  When you try to move the device, you find it is really, really heavy, and yet it moves smoothly, though with a lot of force required.  But it moves in a strange way.  As you move it to the right it begins to point up toward the ceiling as it rotates further.  As you look, you see tilted views of the windows and scenes outside the windows.  It is such a surprise to find out what it does.  It alters our sensibilities.  And the unexpected weight is such a surprise.

So this is a view through the inside of the long rectangular box with glass sides.  It is disorienting, and it is supposed to be that, according to the text on the wall.  The text says this:  “Sarah Oppenheimer creates precise instruments for manipulating our built environment - altering our frame of spatial reference, displacing our experience of inside and out, and inverting our sense of what is near and far, here and there.” The piece is titled “S-334473.”

 

Back to Mass MoCA

I have a bunch more photographs from my recent visit to Mass MoCA and I will start posting them.  I have taken a number of exterior photographs of the museum buildings.  If you want to have some fun, go to the upper left hand corner of a daily post and there is a white box with a magnifying glass.  Enter "Mass MoCA" in there and you will be surprised how many architectural photographs there are.  I decided on this trip that I didn't remember having any photographs of the first buildings you see when you enter the parking lot.  I liked this one because when I first saw the blue and white stripes for the handicapped parking it made the picture much brighter and more colorful

This is the same building, seen from the other side.  I really love the modern parking lot lighting structure in this photograph.  It is not a very exciting photograph, however.  Better lighting at the right time on a sunny day would improve this no doubt. But I have a starter photo which I need to improve on. Stay tuned next year!

 

Oh No! I Dropped My iPad and it Broke!

Oh No!  I dropped my iPad and look what happened!  The screen was completely shattered!  Oh no!  It is ruined!  No I didn't!  This is a joke.  First of all it is not an iPad, but some kind of Verizon tablet.  It was given to me by someone in the astronomy club probably 10 years ago.  She got it free when she signed up for internet service from Verizon I think.  So I played with it for a while just to see what it was like and it was nowhere as easy to use as an iPad.  So I put it somewhere and recently uncovered it.  I plugged it in to charge it and the battery was shot.  So what I had wanted to do was to get it up and running so I could wipe the memory.  I had no idea what personal information was in it, but I wanted to delete it all. So I couldn't do that, so instead I decided to destroy it!  I got a small hammer and hit the screen and the hammer bounced off of it! I hit it a bit harder and it bounced off again.  I think it was two more hits, and the last one was really hard, and this is the result!  It makes a pretty pattern, right?  I am not finished demolishing it to make sure that no one could possible get the data off it.

So this is proof of what caused the nice round circle of cracked glass in the center.  I hope you enjoyed my joke!  Do you remember my other post a couple of years ago called "My laptop is shot?"  I actually shot a hole in the 20 year old laptop screen in the back yard, just for fun, before throwing the laptop away.

 

A Surprise at the Beach Tonight

We had such a surprise on our walk along the beach sidewalk just around sunset today!  This first photograph shows what we saw at first.  I have figured out, after shooting this shot, that we are looking at the backs of the newly engaged couple and they are looking at photographs taken by a young woman and young man on the backs of their cameras.  We were not sure if they were just starting, or whether they were finished.

Turns out they were finished and they walked away from this pretty setup at the water's edge.  A little bit later, two cars drove up here and two men disassembled the whole setup and packed everything into their cars.  I wished we had seen the shoot going on, just for fun.  But it was nice to see this.  A very fancy proposal and engagement, I think!

 

Another August Sunset at the Beach

We did our walk along the beach again tonight, and were rewarded, once again, with a stunning sunset!  I immediately started shooting, and most of the photographs look like the one below, a wide angle view of the beach and the water and the clouds.  And I think that is an interesting photo and beautiful as well, but I chose as my first photograph, this view of a single woman on the beach photographing the sunset with her cellphone, I think.  It just seems so much more dramatic with a single figure.

This is an earlier photograph and what makes it interesting I think are all the specks of people that can be seen against the water in the harbot which is orange because it is reflecting the sky.  Really wonderful that we got two spectacular sunsets in three days!  I would be interested in having you all vote for which photograph is the more interesting to you.  Thanks!

 

The Betty Crocker Cookbook

We were having Pizza with our friends at their house tonight so Kathy wanted to bring a blueberry pie for dessert.  She got out her absolute best reference cookbook to find the recipe she needed.  This old standby, the Betty Crocker Cookbook!  She has had it forever, I think it was a shower gift before we were married.  I glanced at the book on the kitchen shelf and realized I had never seen it closely!  Look at how you can see how much use this book has had since it was new back in the 1960's!

And this is the cover, showing its use as well.  The covers have come undone and are now held in place by some bright yellow tape. This cookbook is a treasure, because it has been used so much, an because it has been in our house since before we bought it in 1970. This cookbook is a wonderful record showing how much it has been used in our life.

 

An August Sunset at the Beach

We have been going to the Dunkin' beach each evening when the weather is good so that Kathy can walk on the level sidewalk as she recovers from her knee replacement.  So tonight after dinner we were stunned with the sunset as we walked along the beach.  It was a gorgeous, colorful sunset!  As many of you will recognize, I have photographed this tree against the sky so many times. But rarely with people in it.  It was a pleasant evening and the parking lot was nearly full, with people just sitting on the beach enjoying the weather.  After I got this photograph I walked right up to the tree and was surprised to see something.

A group of young boys with some adults present were busy doing something and when they all walked away from their project, I saw this!  And it is perfect with the clouds from the sunset.  They had built a cairn, which in the original Scottish Gaelic meaning is "A pile of rocks."  Cairns are originally designed to mark points along a trail, so that people can find their way.  Recently there have been complaints on mountail trails that some hikers have built their own cairns which is a problem because they can confuse other hikers and cause them to lose track of the trail, which is hazardous.  That is not a problem here, of course because there is no trail, just a pile of rocks on the land near a beach.  I do love this photograph the best, for today's shots!