DWG's Juggling Revolution Begins

Our project has officially taken its first steps. Our goal is to create a high quality juggling video, and teach as many people as possible to juggling along the way.

Our thirty new juggling balls came in from jugglingstore.com about a month ago, just in time for our SPLASH classes where we taught fifty middle school and high school students from the area how to juggle, most of whom had never tried before. We also used the juggling balls to hold the first ever joint Stanford Running Club and Down With Gravity event: Joggling! We juggled and ran around campus for about a mile. It is impressive, although perhaps not too surprising, that there is a large overlap in the two clubs; the mentality for both is actually quite similar as they involved a kind of meditation achieved through repetition that is best developed through challenge and practice.

We also got eighteen of the highest quality juggling clubs from the World Juggling Federation's site. The PX3 Deco's are perfectly weighted, and as seen in the teaser video below, they look great as well. The video below is just a small section of the footage we shot a couple of weekends ago. We learned that there are some fantastic places to shoot at around campus, but also that one hour of filming will probably correspond to about one minute of final product. We have a ton of ideas, and are excited to head out for another day of filming and to try out some more ambitious tricks. Enjoy the video below, and there will hopefully be much more material on the way.

Fragments-- Completed!

Hi everyone, I finished my paintings and they're currently hanging in Gallery 160. The project description and images are below:

Project Description

Throughout the Bay Area, mountain lions are predators to deer, pigs, and other smaller mammals; they in turn fall prey to humans who have urbanized the region. Fragments is an exploration of the tension nested within human-mountain lion interaction; it identifies the role of mountain lions both as apex predators and as victims of accidental or unjust interactions with humans.

This series contains six works, from left to right:

Puma concolor, oil on canvas

Mountain lions, also known as cougars and pumas, are territorial animals that prefer low population densities. The average male mountain lion stands 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall, and is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long from nose to tail, about 80 centimeters (32 in) of which is the tail. They are the fourth largest cats.

Hesitation, mixed media on canvas

The Bay Area has seen a recent influx in mountain lion sightings, and indeed, it seems reasonable that twenty-first century industrialized Americans are scared of these felines roaming near the homes in which young children are being raised.

Fragmentation, oil on canvas

Urbanization in the Bay Area has led to humans building homes and roads through the areas mountain lions once lived. As a result, mountain lion territory has been broken into pockets in a phenomenon called habitat fragmentation. This reduction of habitat size leads to crowding and increased competition, factors which play into species becoming threatened or endangered.

CARNIVORE, oil on canvas

In the Bay Area Puma Project, scientists led by Chris Wilmers are tracking the movement of mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They are currently following 15 pumas by way of a GPS collar tracking system named CARNIVORE.

Oops, oil on canvas

Because mountain lions require a large territory, human-induced habitat fragmentation has led these lions to cross roads such as Highway 17 near Santa Cruz in search of more land, prey, and vegetation. Unfortunately, not all mountain lions make it safely across this freeway.

Resolution, mixed media on canvas

One method to counter the harmful effects of habitat fragmentation is to build wildlife overpasses across freeways to connect one side to the other. These overpasses are landscaped bridges for animals to walk across.

Special thanks to Xiaoze Xie and Chris Wilmers. Sponsored by SiCa Spark! Grant.

Re-... Mission Successful!

Our completed work was performed as the opening piece at the Dance Division’s “MOVES: Spring Student Works Showcase” which took place at 8:30pm and 10:00pm on Friday, May 13, 2011 at Roble Gym Studio 38. The finished product integrated the dance, interactive projection, and sound elements to present a unique collaborative work on the theme of memory.

We thank the Spark! Grant program for funding this project. The financial support supplied us with the equipment necessary to make this project a reality. It provided us with the means to thoroughly explore this partnership of artistic mediums, which has been inspiring and deeply gratifying. We also extend a special thanks to Diane Frank, Tony Kramer, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics for their help with this project.

Choreography/Dancers: Ali McKeon and Katherine Disenhof
Live Video Processing: Hunter McCurry
Sound: Chris Carlson (cloudveins.bandcamp.com)

Inside and Out

hi there,

i realize i've been a delinquent when it comes to posting, but i have finished the horse! if you visit the website below, you can see photographs of the exhibit it is currently in... or you can head over to Gallery 160 in Wallenberg Hall and take a look at it in person :) if you decide not to, at least read the project description below (it was displayed with the horse) before you take a look at the website...

thanks,

fallon

website: http://www.stanford.edu/~suemcc/TSR/2011_Exhibition.html

Project Description:

me:

quiet, composed, and content above the water.

legs paddling frantically below the surface to stay afloat.

you:

quiet, composed, and content above the water.

that’s all i know.

When you look at another being, what do you think about? Chances are the surface dominates your thoughts. When we see the facade of something familiar, we often forget the complexities that exist within. We forget that hopes, dreams, anxieties flood other living beings. We forget about the bones, the tissues, the living breathing cells. We forget the effort that ducks put into floating serenely across the lake.

How does this general unawareness affect our perception of the world and ourselves? Where does the life go when we talk about another’s appearance? If we are not aware of it, does it even exist?

I’d like to ask you a favor: please have an experience with this piece. You may look briefly and walk away, or stand and stare at a single element. You may even feel the need to spend minutes inspecting the placement of every diagnostic scan. Feel free to get up close, to move away. Talk to someone near you, or to no one. Share your thoughts in the notebook below, or choose to keep them private. See if you can discern the place of separation between the surface appearance and the internal occurrence. Maybe you can find it. Maybe then you can explain it to me…

About the Artist:

My name is Fallon Segarra. I am a Biology major, an Art Practice minor, a long-time horse fanatic, and an aspiring equine orthopedic surgeon. I enjoy thinking up conceptual art projects that do not always work out aesthetically, but do always teach me something.

My work tends to be photographic and hand-held. This is my first attempt at anything you cannot put in a carry-on suitcase.

_______: A Debut in Performance Art

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_UK9oma5Vg

_______: A Debut in Performance Art - highlights of our final performance!

Tensegrity: A New Scale

Over the past two quarters I have learned an incredible amount about tensegrity, perhaps most importantly that it is very difficult to achieve. I have always been interested in structural systems, and this is one of the most intriguing because of how interconnected every single piece is, even though the compression rods actually never touch each other. My bamboo materials proved to be much too difficult to use, and over the past few weeks I have struggled to make the tensegrity happen. In the past few days I have decided instead to try the tensegrity first at a smaller scale, and in fact the material choice, pencils, allowed for an interesting meaning to be attached to the form.

The above image shows how the tensegrity sculpture looks flattened out in the construction process. As you can see, each pencil has three strings attached to each end. On each layer there are four pencils each angled 45 degrees, and when going up one layer the pencils are shifted half a string and angled the other way. After tying all the strings onto the pencils I then wrapped each layer unto itself and connected the final strings. A little tweak here and there, and suddenly the form sprung to life.

This is one of those examples of why I consider structural engineering to be an art. When something stands with an elegance of mechanics like a tensegrity sculpture, it is essentially comparable to magic. I feel that when art demands your attention and never leaves your memory, it has done its job.

I thought about what the pencil structure meant to me, and the first thing I thought about was writer's block. The chaos of the form made me feel as if creativity were being locked in an invisible prison. I put a piece of paper under the form and the metaphor became clear.

Then I put it on my head and I thought, maybe this is exactly the opposite of writer's block. Maybe it's a symbol of imagination, the sprouting of ideas. I feel content with both of these images and invite you to consider other meanings for tensegrity, at different scales and with different materials. I plan to buy stronger rope and create a bamboo version that stands at least ten feet high. I was considering lining all the rope with artificial vines to create a form that suggests an intelligence in nature's design. This just goes to show how artistically flexible engineering and structure can be.

"Re-"

With the performances only two weeks away, our new work is finally coming together. We have most of our materials and have been able to work with the projection images in the studio space. Moreover, the music and choreography are almost complete. Hopefully we will be able to finish the piece by the end of next week.

This new work will be performed as a part of the Dance Division's Student Choreography Showcase in Roble Gym on Friday, May 13th, at 8:30pm and 10:00pm.