Lightning Strikes Space Shuttle!

(Photographs by Gene Blevins.)

Zap! Can’t control Mother Nature. That caused yesterday’s delay. Everything checked out for launch tonight, keep your fingers crossed, say a prayer, light a candle. My son-in-law is out on the ship waiting to retrieve the booster rockets and my daughter wants him back!

Mythbusters… BUSTED!!!

My best friend from college is a scientist.  The Mythbusters swore on TV that you could not walk on water with a pair of shoes.  We proved them wrong, big time…

Attention Excess Disorder.

That was my one-man show at the New Gallery of the University of Miami, in 2001, when I was 40.  It was the only time I really focused on a body of work and refined my wobble up to that level.  The internet attention performance art that I have been doing in the meantime is much more immediate.  Paintings take time and a seriously concerted effort, while blogging and message boards are much more click-and-get.

Either way, there is now a certain amount of human awareness energy connected to my stuff.  When I was fooling around with quantum mechanics with my buddy Nick Herbert, we talked about a fascinating idea for an experiment: Take two identical artworks.  Infuse one of them with an excess of attention; get a lot of people to look at it a long time.  Then display both the “pre-seen” piece and the “unseen” piece, while measuring the “popularity” of the two by recording the amount of time the visitors spend looking at each one.  The hypothesis predicts a longer attention total for the piece that was “pre-seen”.

We never devised the specifics thoroughly enough to test it.  Any suggestions?