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Symbolic: Weasels in art

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If you enjoy TripOut, the blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is also worth your while. In this important post they explore the use of weasels, ferrets and minks in 16th century portraits:

In the 16th century, weasels were a catch-all category for many of the furry, long-bodied carnivorous creatures in the mustelid family, such as ermine, sables, martens, ferrets, stoats and mink. These creatures often appear in Renaissance portraits of high-ranking noblewomen, and represent a fascinating language of sexual symbolism. Explore some of the hidden meanings of weasels below!

By Chelsea Nichols, ridiculouslyinteresting.com
Portrait of a lady (1520-25) by Bernardino Luini. Oil on panel, 770 x 575 mm. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
‘The Ermine Portrait of Elizabeth I of England (circa 1585), attributed to William Segar. Oil on canvas. Collection of Hatfield House, Hertfordshire.
‘Lady with an Ermine’ (circa 1490) by Leonardo da Vinci. Also known as ‘Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani’. Oil and tempera on wood panel, 548 x 403 mm. Collection of Czartoryski Museum, Krakow.

Legalize: All drugs?

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A couple thoughts: (1) video games from Pac Man and Mario on have had druglike bonus items, and you can’t really win the game without them; (2) privileged people can do all the drugs they want and it rarely comes back to bite them legally.

Playboy magazine explores some arguments for total legalization, spending drug war monies on on treatment (when necessary), as opposed to war.

Activists often turn to Portugal as a model for a more pragmatic and humane approach. Facing a breaking point with their heroin crisis, Portuguese lawmakers started looking into new strategies in 1999. They implemented a policy in 2001 that decriminalized drug use and funded a system of social workers, clinics, and treatment centers. Following decriminalization, Portugal saw a decrease in HIV infections, addiction, overdoses, and drug-related prison sentences. From 1999 to 2015, the amount spent per capita on “drug misuse” went down by 18 percent. Meanwhile, there was a 60 percent increase in addicts seeking treatment. In an article for The Guardian, Susana Ferreira attributes Portugal’s drug laws to a “major cultural shift” and argues that these policies were “merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country.” 

Daniel Spielberger

Do: Priceless Festival

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I wanted to begin collecting some of the more psychedelicly-focused festivals and events around the world. I met someone in my travels last weekend who recommended the Priceless Festival in Belden Town, northern California, an annual three day event in early July.

They have annual themes like Binary Ball, 70s Prom, Space Odyssey and Mad Hatter’s Teaparty. It is a small festival on a river, maxing at 1150 folks. It is family friendly, volunteer run and a registered non-profit, so money-making is not a primary focus. There are workshops in microscopic landscapes, parkour, bad temporary tattoos, neurohacking, local bird songs and more. They have art and music with four stages plus “wandering minstrels”.

Tickets are sliding scale, beginning around $270 plus an optional meal plan. They do sell out quickly, but volunteering could get you in!

The name of the event was meant to remind campers that you can’t put a price on the value of a weekend in the woods relaxing and dancing with your friends.

Priceless festival website

Immersive: Participate in the world

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I don’t have much time to post today due to camping trip prep, but I wanted to suggest No Proscenium which bills itself as “the guide to everything immersive”, from dinner theater to escape rooms to site-specific dance.

I’ll write more about this later, but I suggest you sign up for their monthly email list of events across the North America. And immerse.

Together: Collaborative music playroom

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Plink is a collaborative online music space where you can get your groove on. Initially you might play alone — its simple point and click for different sounds and keys (I’ve only tried it on a computer; I will try it on a phone and update this soon with details). The magic truly happens when random folks join. You begin a musical dance, playing off and against one another. And you can’t mess up, it all sounds pleasant.

Beyond: Community-supported sight

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The arc of technology has positive and problematic impacts on society at large. But specifically in regards to accessibility it can be revolutionary. I love a good story about people getting to experience the world in fresh, improved ways and here are two innovations, both supporting folks that experience vision impairment.

(1)Be My Eyes is an app that connects a blind/low vision person’s rear-facing phone and voice with a sighted volunteer . From the Be My Eyes website: “As a sighted volunteer you can help just by installing the Be My Eyes app. A blind or a low-vision user may need help with anything from checking expiry dates, distinguishing colors, reading instructions or navigating new surroundings.” I haven’t volunteered yet, so I can’t vouch for the service, and one review claims there might be issues with privacy and the vouching of volunteers (can nothing in the world be purely good?). But I’m interested in volunteering and I’ll let you know how it goes.

(2) For blind/low vision people, visiting fine art galleries and museums with no-touch policies can be oppressive and dull. The Unseen Art Project intends to challenge this premise by allowing users to upload various angles of two-dimensional fine art which can then be 3D printed for display in both public and private settings. Vision impaired people and the rest of us will be able to feel the slight smile of Mona Lisa or Picasso’s cubism style. We’ll get to experience art in a new, sensual way. They are in Indigogo funding mode, if you are interested in supporting or learning more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86zg9zE2EI

Internal: Brain dance

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Oh my, graphic visualizations are among my favorite ways to lose myself in a screen, like watching the ballet of synapses in my brain. And this one is exceptional: Trust – Max Cooper feat. Kathrin deBoer & Tom Hodge

I recommend watching that first and then exploring this browser-interactive environment-version that utilizes motion, sound and form from your mic, camera and keyboard: https://epok.tech/work/tendrils/

You can thank me later.

What’s: Above

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See that plane above? Want to know where it is going? Tap your FlightRadar24 app for iOS or Android, or browse over to flightradar24.com. This free service tracks most active flights in the world utilizing an army of volunteers with electronic receivers that pick up positional information from a plane’s transponders (you can participate for free! ). It’s a big small world.

Episodic: Whale tales

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Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that. It is a representation of evil incarnate in an animal – and the utter perfidy of that notion. Of a nature transgressed and transgressive – and of one man’s demonic pursuit, a metaphorical crusade that even now is a shorthand for overweening ambition and delusion.

The Arts Institute, University of Plymouth, UK

Two Moby Dick things here: First, the University of Plymouth released all 135 chapters available online for free, each read by a different narrator. They are super well done (with delicious British accents!) and I’ve begun eating my way through this tome, one chapter a night before bed. They are available through a podcast feed, Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music, and streaming it through this website.

Thing two: I love when humans are creatively obsessive about anything, when they jump all the way into their passions, often for absurd reasons. In 2009, artist Matt Kish illustrated his experience of the first page of Moby Dick. He kept going for 552 straits days. In 2011 he compiled it into a book fantastic accompaniment to the audio book mentioned above: Moby Dick in Pictures.

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