L to R (starting at the little wall):

• Two "old" pieces, our bios, & price list. The top piece ("Beyond the rim") is a sculpture of Sue’s made from wood and human hair. The bottom piece is a photo of mine from the train tracks here in Morris.
• "Askance" – a large profile of Sue.
• "Thought full" – a very large shot of the back of Sue’s bald head leaning slightly forward.
• (Turning the corner) "Emergence" (top) – 2 horizontal shots of *very* short hair growing back in. "Home" (bottom) – Her very freshly shaved head.

L to R:

• A group of 3 all coming from Sue having me use henna to tattoo "No freedom without privacy" onto the back of her freshly shaved head. First is a close up of the dried henna, the strip in the middle shows her hair growing back through the tattoo and the tattoo fading over time, and the third is a B&W shot from when the henna was still wet.
• Lastly, a diptych of two very large "pages" of 420 different photos of Sue taken over a 3 month period as her hair grew back.

The Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance (PRCA) asked us about possibly doing a show together this time last year, assuming (I think) that we’d just collect some of her sculptures and some of my photographs, and call it a show.

We both felt, however, that if we were going to do a show together, we wanted to do a show together, so we asked if we could wait a year and assemble some new, joint material in the meantime. The result was this collection of photographs (by me) of her head; in essence she laid the tableau through various treatments of her head as a sculptural object, I shot a metric crapton of photos, and then we sifted through them together and assembled this collection.

While it’s only 8 pieces, it uses over 500 separate photographs out of the nearly 10,000 we shot over the course of 2013 for this project. (We shot over 7,000 images from late February to early May alone!) We also chose to make some very large prints, with the 8 pieces covering nearly 100 square feet of wall. I really love printing large, but rarely can justify it, so it was quite wonderful seeing some of these big prints. :-) The original plan for the big diptych was to have a single piece, 6 feet tall by 8 feet wide, but we couldn’t find anyone that could do art quality photo printing that big, which is why we ended up dividing it into two “pages”.

For folks in the area, the show opens Wednesday, 13 Feb, and there’s a reception Sunday, 16 Feb, from 7-8:30pm.

Looking back, it can be hard to imagine why people in the past just didn’t get it. Why they thought women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and why blacks and whites couldn’t use the same restroom, or the same school.

The people that voted to supported these old ideas were not all Bad People going out of their way to work against the rights of others. I know some where my relatives, and I’ll bet that some were yours. Certainly, there were plenty of small-minded, mean-spirited people leading the charge, but they depended crucially on the passive support of numerous well-meaning folk who mostly just didn’t want to rock the boat or weren’t very comfortable with change.

Tomorrow in Minnesota we get a chance to vote on whether our state constitution should be amended in an attempt to block all future efforts to allow gays the human & civil rights of marriage, & the legal protections it affords. As you consider this amendment, it might help to ask yourself: How do I wish to be remembered? As someone who quietly stood with those who would limit the freedoms of those different from themselves, or with those who believe in liberty and justice for all?

And let us be clear: This is a human rights issue.

Sue & I have been married for over 20 years and she has been a full, equal, & wonderful partner in building our shared life. Her creativity and passion flows through our child, our home, and the experiences we’ve shared. I would hope that our community would recognize this and support her associated rights, which include critical things such as health coverage, our pension, and her right to speak for me regarding medical treatment. If, however, someone didn’t recognize her rights, she would have the legal backing of the state of Minnesota, which ensures the human and civil rights of a spouse in numerous ways.

Why should any committed couple be denied these same rights, regardless of their genders?

Which brings us back to the question: How do we wish to be remembered? Do we want to be remembered as supporting a last, desparete gasp of a group attempting to deny yet another group a basic human and civil right? Or do we want to be on the right side of history tomorrow, knowing, win or lose, that we voted to treat our fellow travellers humanely, with courage & justice?

So I urge you to Vote No. It’s a vote your grandchildren can be proud of.

I would also strenuously encourage you, for many of the same underlying reasons, to vote no on the proposed Voter ID amendment. I recommend that you check out Guante’s excellent video on the Voter ID amendment if you wish to learn more:

You might also want to check out MPR’s nice video on the huge amount of vagueness and uncertainty there is in the proposed Voter ID amendment:

So go vote tomorrow. It matters. I know that the weird math of the electoral college can make it seem like voting for president doesn’t matter unless you live in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida. And it can seem like incumbents have a lock on everything. But on either of these amendments, it could literally come down to a few votes. So don’t say your voice doesn’t matter. Don’t say you don’t have time. Don’t say no one cares. Instead be a voice, however small, for a more humane world.

Vote No on both proposed amendments.

Via TechDirt I found this very cool video on how our “standard” notions of incentives don’t always work very well, especially when it comes to cognitive work. There’s a ton of cool ideas in the video (and more in the TechDirt piece, including some cool links).

The incentives in the talk are typically money, but I suspect that there are interesting things to be said about grades as an incentive in the academy. Does anyone know of work along those lines?

One really interesting story is about Atlassian, an Australian software company. (Their stuff is cool, and we’ve used some of it here at UMM in the past, but it’s gotten pricey and we’ve moved to other tools.) Apparently Atlassian gives their employees a 24 period every quarter to work on whatever they want, and then they have a party where people share what they’ve done. This apparently leads to a ton of cool ideas, bug fixes, and development. So, so cool.

How could we apply that here in the academy? What if we gave everyone in our Computer Science discipline a 24 hour period to work on whatever they wanted to and then had a big party where people shared what they did? Could we do it? Would it make sense if we did? What would it mean? We’d probably have to cancel at least our CSci classes that day, and probably make sure that no one was giving an exam the next day, etc., etc.

Because we would only control our discipline’s behavior, though, we wouldn’t give many of the students the freedom they’d need to really take advantage of the opportunity. It would presumably work a lot better if we did this across the entire campus – no classes, no exams, no papers due, and then some sort of event (or set of events distributed across campus) at the end for people to share their results.

Hmmm…

photo credit: PieterMusterd

If you’re looking for an opportunity to be even further depressed on this issue, I definitely recommend the ACLU’s short “national security quiz”. It’s really nice to know that “The U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone or PDA as you enter the U.S. and download all your private information—all without a warrant or probable cause” ’cause we are the Home of the Free and the Beacon for Democracy or some such. It’s also reassuring to learn that there are over 1 million people on the national Terrorist Watch List (which is then reduced to little more than a massive fishing expedition), and that includes a number of high profile dead people.

‘Cause dead people are so scary when they fly…

Man, oh, man, what a boondoggle. Absolutely enormous amounts of money and energy being expended, little of which actually does anything to make us more secure.

Another proud resume item for Our Fearless Leader. And another reason to be grateful that his fiasco of a presidency will end soon.