The Tea Pot PhD in Arts vs Engineering

On one of my many trips to MONA, I was introduced to the term "Tea Pot PhD" by several pedagogy researchers travelling to the museum. They hold PhD's in humanities and the tea pot PhD is defined as one in which someone makes something apparently trivial (from a modern day mass-manufacturing perspective), say a tea pot and expounds in detail regarding the artistic and technical processes involved in making it in the body of their thesis. The term is used in a derogatory sense implying lack of originality and critical thinking. Such an approach is considered a short-cut to being awarded a doctorate.

As an engineering PhD student, the tea-pot PhD sounded like one of the most difficult sort of PhD's to undertake. As I have seen numerous PhD candiadates take the long arduous road towards a practical application oriented PhD as opposed to a complex numerical/analytical modelling based solution where they churn out bits of Matlab or Python code - which ever is the flavour du jour. The arrival of rare components such as materials for a Terahertz oscillator, dielectric for a special patch antenna or a bunch of antennas and digitiser cards for a Noise MIMO radar can hold up progress for years. In my particular case I had significantly alter my research path since the Single pass Quad-pol airborne L-band interferometric radar I proposed to work with did not materialise, and eventually the small company I was working for had a sad demise.

Performing field work, coordinating satellite data takes and finally closing the loop using theory and experimental validation takes a quite a bit of effort. This can be compared to preparing and pouring tea. As opposed to designing the teapot/radar instrument itself. I am surprised that fine arts which are supposed to encourage creativity and aesthetics is biased against the creative process itself and focuses on the critical aspects instead. Engineering is all about creating working systems and transitioning pure science to more applied aspects, creating products which are of real use to the society. Admitted a lot of the engineering I indulge in is like playing with early days of X-ray, we get a different view of the planet, but we haven't quite worked out how to diagonise the fractures using the imagery. This does not automatically imply that the building such systems is pointless.

After all I am only doing a PhD in - "watching grass grow from space using flash photography with microwave ovens".


“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”
― Brendan Behan

Five favourite things - Mate selection criteria

Being a citizen of the world is nothing new in my generation. I was born in Kolkata, India, grew up and went to high school in Juja, Kenya and I have spent a great deal of my later life in Adelaide, Australia. It however does make it difficult to have a cultural identity and the answer to "Where are you from ?" takes about 5minutes. Lately my parent has been on my case to get a traditional girl from my community. Being rather untraditional and free-wheeling, while appreciating the depth of knowledge  in the rather ancient culture(this culture is rife with philosphers and mathematicians - students of the zero) I was born into is hard work. It is so much like another old culture, the Egyptians, where the Pharaohs only marry within the family. So I have resorted to setting little tests for prospective partners. Here is one a girl had set in the Hobart Art school (it could have just been a griefer).

A while ago a friend showed it to me. So I have listed 5 of my favourite things (Modern States of Matter - Classical Elements):

1. Plasma - Fire
2. Gas - Air
3. Liquid - Water
4. Solid - Earth
5. Bose-Einstein Condensate - Quintessence

If your 5 favourite things match with my 5 favourite let me know. I so do not want to get into the Pharaonic tradition of having to marry only within your family.

M.C. Escher and E.A. Abbott - Projection, Vision and Flatland

No one has played with our mind and sense of sight and explored how we see lines, curves, light and shadows like M.C. Escher. Even today Escher's infinite staircases seep into everything in modern culture, like maze designs in Inception. The drawings only make sense if you regard them just as projections rather than reality in 3 dimensions. This is a patent failing our senses have, we often mistake the perceived reality in 3 dimensions to be the actual reality which requires at least 4 dimensions according to Einstein, and even more according to the cabal of theoretical physicists seeking a unified theory of everything.

"The elimination of the logical inconsistencies [requires] rejection of our ordinary concepts of space and time, modifying them by some much deeper and nonevident concepts." - Matvei Petrovich Bronstein. Even a grand mind like Bronstein's cannot escape the vagaries of his time and escape from a firing squad. The ideas of conditional backgrounds and background independence are quite old. Including the mathematical and social treatment of dimensions by E.A. Abbott in "Flatland".

Let's hope "A Square" physicist in our 4-dimensional space-time land gets a revelation from a hyper-sphere and lays to rest the ghosts Einstein has conjured up from the manifolds of the universe.

Last days in Hobart - Keeping little momentos

I had an exciting last week in Hobart. I made a necklace from things found in the IXL courtyard just to take things from Hobart with me, it forms a grungy addition to the Ethiopian coptic cross.

Checked out of the nicest house I have ever lived in , Derek and Cate have been the nicest landlords imaginable. They helped me shift the high amounts of entropy that had accumulated in my apartment to the Hobart tip. Whatever I have left behind is not sufficient compensation for the amount of consideration they have shown me.

My precious bike and surfboards went to interesting new owners. Somebody planning to ride the bike around Tasmania is a worthy new owner at any time.

The last week was spent at the backpackers and strangely enough people from the recent past reappeared. I also met some nice new people , particularly Roscoe. I spent time dividing attention between the grunting coming from the screen (just tennis) and people drawing, cooking, reading and planning their trips. My old acquaintances let me capitalise on the trike ride David, a local tourist operator, had promised. It was quite a bit of fun.

On the 27th plenty of my friends turned up for my farewell, from various circles I have drifted around in the city - Salsa, CSIRO, arts and people I had met by chance at the bar like Mr. Leigh. Just a note to self - he has my "Small Antennas" book which I need to return to the library. Thanks a lot for signing my Frida Kahlo book guys and all the great times.

Last day of taking the MONA pill - learning to be Limitless

The greatest deception that men suffer from is from their own opinions. - Leonardo da Vinci.

Last saturday was my last day at MONA. I have been taking the MONA pill for a year now and the course has made me realise a lot about myself that was latent. Drugs are inherently replicants or cocktails of natural neurotransmitters. External non-chemical stimuli like music or visual arts can have a drug like effect by triggering secretion of certain neurotransmitters. You do not have to take a pill to go to sleep, put on the sound of a water fall or your mother's heart beat and your body will learn that it is now safe to stop defending its existence and renew - sleep. Like the drug in the movie Limitless, the MONA drug works best on people who are already quite smart.

Without going into details of how things work I will recount my only verbal encounter with David Walsh, apparently formerly called Glenn. I was hanging out with a couple I had met at the museum, Perth town planner and his Fiancée - an artist and an air hostess with Qantas. We managed to miss the last boat while chatting at the wine bar and called a cab. Eventually a cab arrived, it was the wrong company in retrospect. We hopped in the back seat, it was apparently a cab David had called. He walked in, graciously let us ride in the back seat and cab share. He said - "You were visiting my place" , and realisation dawned. A lot of babbling ensued, I don't recall the exact details, but I do remember David saying - "I am a Mathematician". That explains everything.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work. - Leonardo da Vinci.

Holiday in Adelaide - Ghosts of Christmas past

Last year was rather topsy-turvy for me, so this year I decided to jet back to Adelaide and spend Christmas with long time friends. The pre-christmas birthday party turned out to be a real blast. All the people I hadn't seen for years managed to turn up.

The hostel on Carrington is pretty fun as well, they laid out a Christmas spread, but I had an invitation to Hanukkah. Some drifting around the University, The SA Art Gallery and Glenelg ensued. I am still drawing away little things, learning scheme and swimming in the ocean.

The hostel has a huge collection of DVD's and books. I am burning through the massive Peter. F. Hamilton Tome - Pandora's Star, dragging it down to the beach when I can. Maybe I will finish it before I leave.

The Hobart Giraffe hunt

The other day while walking to salsa I met someone who likes giraffes. So I went on a week-long artistic giraffe hunt to please her. I acquired and made giraffes using various materials and metaphors, and I still have enough inertia to keep collecting, even though my muse has moved on.

1. First one acquired was a Kenyan wooden sculpture. This has been passed on to a very good friend in Adelaide.
2. I drew it up as a sketch, first in my new Moleskine - iCamera. This has been donated to the Ivory, great place to relax, have a drink and draw in peace.
3. I used the wooden giraffe sculpture and drawing as models and built a paperclip and random stuff sculpture. This one has gone to a sculpture student at UTAS.
4. Learnt that we have been invited to submit an experiment for the ISS and made an origami coin box giraffe (which was declared a Brontosaurus).
5. Walking back spotted the initial giraffe available at Despards Gallery and bought it up.
6. A soft and cuddly one from Teddy Bear store, this one got ogled on the way back to base and possibly jinxed the whole process. So I have donated it back to the jinxer. There is still a limited edition collectable hanging out in the store which I might get at some point in the future.
7. The papier mache giraffe made in Philippines that I picked up while drifting around in Spotlight. During this drift I also met someone who has been awarded a scholarship to create piece based on the Monomyth at MONA. This giraffe ended up acquiring a knuckle mark on one of my adventures around the xenophobic parts of Hobart town. I passed it on to my French housemate.

Are you artier than a fifth grader ?

Once upon I time while I still used to watch TV (instead of the world go by, which is much more interesting), Rove used to host a show called "are you smarter than a fifth grader". It seems that it is still on. The show mostly tested textual and numerical skills or pure recall (very left brained). I have recently started experimenting with drawing techniques and I hear "My 5th Grader could have done that" quite often. It is so nice to see young talent, and I do indeed have some pieces from the open-sketchbook project proving the beauty of children's artwork.

So I am putting forward here a right-brained show in the same vein. Put an established artist and a 5th grader in the same stimuli field and let them each produce a piece. Then do a double-blind test with a jury of their peers (both age groups need to be represented since art is highly subjective), on which one is better. It may get hard to keep the stimuli field interesting for the adult and the child at the same time. I did one of my coolest subliminals while watching Final Destination 5.

I believe the education system currently established is very asymmetric and a right brained show may help highlight this or prove me wrong ( none are so blind as those who will not see).  Just to keep it clear on my belief in children's abilities, the bits of TV (Time Tunnel) I do watch is recommended by kids I meet while walking to Salsa.

Mapping the Arts and the art of mapping

One of my friends recently launched a digital arts initiative and I decided to check out the mapping arts program she had talked about previously. It makes heavy use of the Google maps/globe API and the google earth browser plugin to produce a content control interface via flash that the standard Google Earth would be lacking. Quite ingenious.



The bit of the program I especially like is the geek in residence concept. Now this is a rather personal interest thought - but making maps and making maps pretty is a fusion of art and digital technology. We even had a presentation in FOSS4G about making maps pretty. I would love to see a geek-art collaboration in this domain.