The Loaded Tangent

A miscellany from the crossroads of the arts, science, culture and technology
January 9, 2012

Tin Can Rocket Man

A passing nod to the movie Solaris (1972), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (pictured top left), in The Loaded Tangent’s final post of 2011 supplies the root of this digression: a side-winding homage to the talents of David Bowie (top right).

The experience of watching psychologist Kris Kelvin (played in Tarkovsky’s movie with hangdog restraint by Donatas Banionis), isolated on a space station with his ghosts and memories, triggers an echo of Bowie’s 1969 single, “Space Oddity” – a tune dusted with existential melancholy.

“And I’m floating in a most peculiar way / And the stars look very different today / For here am I sitting in a tin can / far above the world / Planet Earth is blue / and there’s nothing I can do”

The title of the song is a play on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie was released in 1968, and forms something of a counterpart to Solaris. Phillip Lopate’s essay on the Criterion website explores connections between the two movies, noting that Tarkovsky thought Kubrick’s film was “cold and sterile”.

Bowie’s fascination with all things cosmic surfaces throughout his early work: three of his first eight hits have space-related themes – “Space Oddity”, “Starman” (1972) and “Life on Mars?” (1973) – although the last of that bunch is a surreal meditation on earth-bound escapism.

(There’s a thematic kinship between the un-named girl in “Life on Mars?” – who is “hooked to the silver screen” – and Mia Farrow’s (bottom left) Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), who finds release from life’s drudgery in the cinema.)

Surveying the full extent of Bowie’s career-to-date, it’s clear that he regards space, science and technology as fertile sources of metaphor but, every now and then, the scientific community returns the favour and looks to the artist for inspiration.

Science writer Philip Ball borrows Bowie’s word “peoploids” (from the spoken word track “Future Legend” on Diamond Dogs) to help explain Dirk Helbing and Peter Molnar’s work on crowd motion (Critical Mass, Ch. 6: The March of Reason).

Christopher Nolan fought hard to secure Bowie for the part of Nikola Tesla (bottom right) in The Prestige (2006), and it’s tempting to wonder if engineer/entrepreneur Elon Musk, who named his electric car company Tesla, will add “Life on Mars?” to the in-flight playlist when he sends the first of his proposed Space X vehicles (top middle) to the Red Planet.

So why has Bowie so consistently and comfortably danced between the worlds of science and the arts? His creative openness to all manner of influences and stimuli may have been encouraged by involvement with the experimental late-’60s Arts Lab movement (he co-founded the Beckenham branch), of which writer Alan Moore (a former member of the Northampton branch) still speaks highly and fondly.

Moore is a master of connections, whose encyclopedic frame of reference allows him to trip lightly through dense thematic minefields, not least in Watchmen (bottom middle), an associative masterwork and one of the all-time great graphic novels.

Fitting, then, but not in the least bit surprising, that Moore should loop this tangent back towards Tarkovsky – one of the later panels in Watchmen (drawn by Dave Gibbons, coloured by John Higgins), features a poster for a Tarkovsky movie season, highlighting Nostalghia and The Sacrifice.

Here’s Bowie, acting out “Space Oddity” in his 1969 promo film, Love You till Tuesday, making the most of his meagre budget with lens filters, bewigged sirens, and a reflective silver tube.

Leave a comment
December 16, 2011

Log House Rocket Man

In The Loaded Tangent’s last post, a musical line of digression connected philosopher Thomas “Leviathan” Hobbes to the Russian Futurists (both the early 20th Century literary/arts movement and the same-named band from Toronto), and it’s to Russia we return here, via American engineer K. Eric Drexler.

Drexler is a fascinating character – the world’s foremost expert on, and champion-in-chief of, molecular nanotechnology. While he appears to have borrowed his name from Ian Fleming’s unused stockpile of preposterous villains, his clipped intonation belongs to the school of Niles Crane, fictional brother of Frasier. He has the air of a weary genius, a man who has grown tired of defending his theories, and he sports a silvering beard.

As a summary of Drexler’s standing within his chosen field, this 2010 WSJ article holds up well. It reviews his laudable efforts to popularize and develop concepts first alluded to by Richard Feynman (pictured bottom left) in the landmark 1959 Caltech lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and highlights the too-often blurred differences between common-or-garden commercial nanotech (which focuses on the chemistry/materials science of smart paints, fabrics, medicines and the like) and pure Drexlerian atomic-scale nanotech (a revolutionary branch of engineering which could transform what it means to be human).

On 10 November 2011, Drexler gave the Inaugural Lecture at the Oxford Martin Programme: Exploring a Timeless Landscape: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology. To support a key thread within his argument – that well-established physical principles have historically defined the boundaries of “possibility space” into which great innovators have boldly stepped – he highlights the amazing career of rocketry pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935, top left).

Like Drexler, Tsiolkovsky received a fair degree of flack for his early theoretical and conceptual work, but was ultimately vindicated. He was honored as a Soviet hero and buried in state. Remarkably, Tsiolkovsky deduced the fundamentals of rocketry and space travel without ever leaving smalltown Russia. As Drexler puts it:

“He worked out the principles of rocket propulsion in space, space suits, closed ecological life support systems, and a range of other technologies that are central to the enterprise of taking human life and moving it into space . . . [and] he did this while living in a log house in rural Russia, south of Moscow, teaching [mathematics in] high school.”

Drexler clearly feels a bond of kinship with Tsiolkovsky, who was known in the vicinity of Kaluga as something of an eccentric. The Russian believed humanity would one day colonize the Milky Way (bottom right), and was inspired by the science fiction of Jules Verne. In turn, he influenced a host of sci-fi writers, among them Stanislaw Lem (bottom middle), who name-checked Tsiolkovsky in Tales of Pirx the Pilot. The log house above (top middle) was photographed on Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky, who directed the brilliant 1972 movie version of Lem’s Solaris.

A generation down the line, at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, American rocketry pioneer Jack Parsons (top right) – who “no doubt contacted Tsiolkovsky” according to Parsons’ biography Sex and Rockets – contributed his own fair share of eccentricity to the science of space flight. He pursued a keen interest in the occult, was hand-picked by Aleister Crowley to lead a Californian branch of the magical organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis, and  knocked around with L. Ron Hubbard, pre-Scientology.

Parsons was killed, 17 June 1952, in an explosion at his home garage (possibly an accident, possibly at the hand of bent cop Earle Kynette, himself no stranger to explosive materials), not far from Caltech, where Feynman would give his groundbreaking lecture, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom . . .

Since this tangent is now wobbling around like a knuckleball, maybe it’s time to step back from the plate. This excellent video by Spanish band Dúo Cobra materializes for no apparent reason, along with 372 others, when “log house” is typed into Vimeo. It’s really rather good.

Leave a comment
December 13, 2011

Music of the Futurists

Several illuminating thoughts on Thomas Hobbes – a cornerstone of The Loaded Tangent’s debut post – arise from Scott Horton’s August 2009 piece on the 17th Century philosopher for Harper’s. Hobbes was a futurist, of sorts, in the sense that he developed a theory of the future in relation to the past. As expressed in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640):

“… we make remembrance to be prevision, or conjecture of things to come, or expectation, or presumption of the future.”

Horton, an attorney who specializes in human rights law, points out that former United States V.P. Dick Cheney was especially fond of Hobbes, and suggests that “the [Iraq-bound] Hobbesians of the Bush era” – in their push to shape a post-9/11 future – may have misread their pet philosopher by elevating fear and “unreasoned reflex” above caution and prudence.

Politics aside, Horton also notes that Hobbes was an “intensely musical man” who, according to biographer John Aubrey (1626-1697), was “much addicted to music, and practised on the bass viol (pictured top right)”. Hobbes, we’re told, applied a mathematical perspective to his melody-making and, with this in mind, a swift associative leap takes us to Baroque genius Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, top left), master of formal mathematical patterns and occasional employer of the Fibonacci sequence.

Fast forward to the early 20th Century, where maths, architecture, chaos theory and futurism (and capital ‘F’ Futurism) coalesce in the work of composer Iannis Xenakis (bottom left), who collaborated with Edgard “The Father of Electronic Music” Varèse (top middle) and architect/designer Le Corbusier on the legendary Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, described in this piece by the Guardian’s Tom Service as an “interdisciplinary poly-art orgy” – 350 speakers; 20 amplifiers; one monumental audio-visual head trip.

Here’s what visitors would have heard as they entered the pavilion – Xenakis’s “Concret PH”:

Moving on to modern electronica, San Francisco’s Brendan Angelides (bottom right), aka Eskmo, merits a place in the audio-maths-futurism mix: his video for the digi-organic “Cloudlight” (below, directed by Dugan O’Neal) subtly blurs the line between the biological and the binary (note the tree trunk at 00:30), and sets the natural world against a flickering geometrical tapestry.

Manitoba native, Dan Snaith – better known as Caribou – left Imperial College London in 2005 with a PhD in mathematics. In 2010, he toured with the Russian Futurists, an indie-pop band from Toronto. (For more about the original Russian Futurists, and their 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, click here). The video (below, directed by Video Marsh) for Caribou’s “Jamelia” – from 2010’s Swim (bottom middle) – shares with “Cloudlight” a delicate tension between nature and artifice, complexity and order, fluidity and precision.

Leave a comment
December 12, 2011

Cross-Over Leviathans

Thanks for tracking down the debut post from The Loaded Tangent – part-blog, part-immersion in a roiling ferment of ideas fueled as much by culture and the arts as by science and technology. Connections will be forged, disciplines crossed, fields switched, minds expanded, and fresh discoveries made.

Here, the geek and the fop, the techie and the poet, the code-writer and the novelist, the rocket-scientist and the artist are on an equal footing. Men and women of letters will trade inspiration with number-crunchers, as each freely explores the others’ territory and, hopefully, somewhere down the line, thoughts new and brilliant will materialize like so many cosmic flashes. Then we can all celebrate with wine, song and fierce conversation, and the great timeless feedback loop of inspiration will keep on doing its thing.

First up, a motley crew of exceptional talents, united not only by a greater-than-average degree of genius, but also by an irresistible impulse to switch fields: to swerve off from their main area of specialism at an unexpected, hugely rewarding tangent. Post-Elizabethan philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – pictured top left – made his big switch relatively late in life, inspired by Euclid’s Elements of Geometry to apply the methods of science to politics and society. As Philip Ball notes in his excellent book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another:

“It was not until 1629 that the forty-year-old Hobbes, a committed classicist, had his eyes opened to the power of scientific and mathematical reasoning.”

The result was Leviathan, published in 1651, for which Hobbes handsomely deserves his status as cross-disciplinary hero and pioneer.

Hedy Lamarr (top middle) supplemented her Hollywood day-job with a sideline in wireless electronics, as co-inventor (with like-minded polymath George Antheil) of a frequency-hopping technology for torpedoes; Babe Ruth (top right) started out as a pitcher before immortalizing himself as The Sultan of Swat (there’s a great piece on the science of the Babe here); actress Ida Lupino (bottom left) broke more than one mould when she made her move behind the camera, and became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker (1953); and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey (bottom right) followed the field-switching example set by the likes of physicist-turned-molecular biologist Francis Crick (bottom middle) when he moved his focus from artificial intelligence to aging.

Every one of these game-changers nutmegged predictability, and sold expectation a glorious dummy, by daring to strike out in a new direction. (In the case of Babe Ruth, maybe “head off” works better than “strike out”). Their willingness to traverse boundaries, coupled with a talent for redirecting and re-sharpening their focus, makes them honorary cross-over leviathans. Expect more of their ilk from The Loaded Tangent, as the voyage into cross-disciplinary idea-space continues . . .

Leave a comment