A few years before Disney's chastely fleshless skullbot, the LA-based Iranian artist Behnaz Farahi designed a less humanoid but also far sexier eye-contact-responsive item called "The Caress of the Gaze". It was admittedly designed to be worn by probably quite a sexy human. Most fashion is. According to this article, a camera beneath the top's mesh of quills registers not only whether or not the model is being looked at, but also the gender of the onlooker, and potentially even their age, possibly to stop the piece responding too sexily. Seduction doesn't seem to be the point of the piece however, so much as the creation of an article of clothing that can respond involuntarily to its wearer's environment, both physical and social, like hairs rising on a second skin. This is almost the exact opposite of the intention behind Farahi's most recent piece, and the piece that introduced me to her:
Taking its title from an article by Giyatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" is a work about not being looked at. The Barandi masks that inspired it were said to have been worn as a protest against Portuguese colonists. Its eyelashes flutter not in response to the male gaze, but to communicate in a secret language, like the American soldier who blinked TORTURE in morse code while filmed hostage in Viet Nam. As Farahi herself explains however, it is not in fact the wearers of these masks who will be communicating with each other in this language, but the masks...
These are just random phrases, right?
I finally got round to downloading the Duolingo app in case I suddenly decide to emigrate. I'm learning French, Spanish, Japanese and Welsh. And I was in fact planning on getting an earlier night tonight, but then I put this on...
... and it made me realise my own balcony could do with a bit of a clean, but when I went to the cupboard under the stairs to look for a tea light to put in the little tea light geenhouse I found the flat had a slinky, which was exciting so -
It has been harder to find good videos on slinky physics than I'd imagined. A few experiments with one in zero gravity proved so disappointingly unsurprising that the only person who thought it worth putting online was some grumpy flat-Earther calling for an end to science funding. But the video below from Veritasium is a cracker. Not only did I not manage to predict what happens when a slinky is dropped at full stretch (in a situation with very few variables) but, having seen it, my explanation for why it happened turned out to be completely wrong. All in all then, a very satisfactory watch (and also, like all videos of plummeting objects, clearly a metaphor for something or other). Details after the vid.
So: I didn't predict the bottom would remain hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote. And when it did, I decided what I was seeing was the bottom springing back up, but that it only looked stationary because the whole slinky was also falling at exactly the same rate in the opposite direction, although this seemed a remarkable coincidence. And that's because, of course, this is not what was happening at all. Nobody's done anything to the bottom of the slinky, so it's not "springing back up", it's simply staying put, held as before by the elasticity of the slinky above, although the tension is shrinking. Presumably therefore, if you simply lowered the slinky rather than let go, the bottom would still remain in place. But no, hang on, that can't be right... I guess it must be... Until the slackness passes through the slinky to the other end? I suppose... I need to get a slinky.... Oh, do you know what else there are surprisingly few videos of online? Mummenschanz.
I'm sure I wasn't alone as a child in trying to work out if a clock
actually went "tik tok", or just "tik", by seeing if I could alternate in
my head on what beat the "tik" fell, but for me the results never proved
conclusive, perhaps because this test specifically depends on skewing
the results. Anyway, I knew the mind can play tricks, but I don't think
I'd ever encountered a purposefully engineered auditory illusion until today, so huge thanks to Gavin Brockis for the following. It got me very excited.
According to the youtube blurb the
Shepard Tone "seems to continuously get higher but
never really does", like the aural equivalent of an Escher staircase, but the mechanics of hearing are far more of a mystery to me, so I'm far less clear what's going on – Oh wait, it's here – Of course Vsauce made a video about it. Further thanks, though, to Gavin for this neat introduction to the reading of sound waves,
and to James Bachman for trying to explain it all to me in terms
of a slinky, almost as if the slinky was specifically designed to explain waves. Oo. Slinky physics. That's got to be a thing, no?
