Month: February 2018

The Canal

Photographer Unknown, Venice Canal

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you’ve got to swallow this morning, you feel it’s not over for you yet.

No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you’ve been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it’s time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air.”

-Joseph Brodsky

 

Carlo Maria Maiani

Carlo Maria Maiani, “Allegoria Profetica”, 1982, Acrylic on Canvas

Carlo Maria Mariani is a conceptual artist who uses painting as his medium. In the 1970s, Mariani gained international reknown by starting a movement known as conceptual painting—paintings painted with technical brillance and inspired by art history.

The modern context of Mariani’s work represents a dialogue between the history of art (from classical to 21st-century sources: Medusa’s head, Calder’s mobiles, Duchampian imagery), allegories, dreams, and everyday life, to become the artist’s personal iconography.

In 1998, Mariani was the recipient of the prestigious Italian Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for lifetime achievement in painting. He has represented Italy three times in the Venice Biennale, with figurative works of timeless beauty and witty sophistication. Mariani continues to receive widespread attention both nationally and abroad.

Calendar: February 18

Year: Day to Day Men: February 18

The Pose

The eighteenth of February in 1838 marks the birth date of Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach. Due to his contributions to the physics of shock waves, the ratio of the speed of flow or object to the speed of sound is named the Mach number in his honor.

Born at the village of Brno-Chrlice in South Moravia, a part of the Austrian Empire, Ernst Mach was educated at home by his parents until the age of fourteen. He studied for three years at a secondary school in the city of Kroměříž. In 1855, Mach enrolled at the University of Vienna where he studied physics and medical physiology. In 1860, he received his doctorate in physics under Austrian physicist and mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen, the first to design an electromagnetic machine which used its electrical induction for power generation. 

In 1864, Mach turned down the chairman of surgery position at the University of Salzburg to accept a professorship of mathematics at the University of Graz, the second largest and oldest university in Austria. Two years later, Mach was appointed Professor of Physics at the university. In that position, he continued his work in psychophysics, a field that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. In 1867, Mach became the chair of experimental physics at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University, a position he held for twenty-eight years before returning to Vienna.

Ernst Mach’s primary contribution to the science of physics were his photographs and descriptions of spark shock waves as well as the later studies of ballistic shock waves. Using the technique of schlieren photography, Mach and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. Invented in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler, schlieren photography is, essentially, a process of photographing fluid flows by measuring the spatial variations in the intensity of a light source shining on or from behind the target object.

Mach’s initial studies in experimental physics was primarily on the refraction, polarization, diffraction and interference of light in different media and under external influences. Further explorations dealt with supersonic fluid mechanics. In a collaboration with photographer Peter Salcher, Mach presented a 1887 paper on his research that correctly described the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a projectile. They confirmed the existence of a shock wave of conical shape with the projectile at the apex. The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound (Vp/Vs) is called the Mach number in honor of his work in the field. This ratio is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in the fields of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics.

Ernst Mach also made many contributions to the fields of psychology and physiology. Among these are his discovery of the oblique effect, the relative deficiency in the perception of oblique contours as compared to vertical or horizontal contours. Mach formed an experiment in which he placed a line to make it appear parallel to an adjoining one. Errors in the observer’s perception occurred least for horizontal or vertical orientations and largest when the lines were set at an incline of forty-five degrees. Mach’s experiment showed a perceptible change in the appearance of an object occurs with a forty-five degree rotation.

Another contribution by Mach to the field of sensory perception was the study of effects caused by the optical illusion known as Mach bands. Through this illusion, he explored the edge detection ability of the human visual system. The Mach bands exaggerate the contrast between edges of slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they touch. From this study, Mach made a distinction between what he called the physiological space, specifically visual, and geometrical space. 

Ernst Mach survived a paralytic stroke in 1898. He retired form the University of Vienna three years later and received an appointment to the upper chamber of the Austrian Parliament. In 1913, Mach left Vienna and moved to his son Ludwig’s home in Vaterstetten in Upper Bavaria near Münich. Ernst Mach continued his writing and correspondence until his death in February of 1916 at the age of seventy-eight.

Raffi Kalenderian

Raffi Kalenderian, “Erics”, 2011, Oil on Canvas, Dimensions Unknown

Raffi Kalenderian is a painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. He graduated with a BFA in Painting at the University of California and did his residency at Saint Bartélemy, French West Indies.

He has a preference for portraying people in his immediate environment. In his portraits the boundaries between figure and background are blurred in such a way that the figure blends into the structures of its environment. Kalenderian’s painting style is reminiscent of painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, the Futurists or the early Mondrian, though his oeuvre is surprisingly contemporary at the same time.

In the case of his solo portrait “Erics”, there is not as may be expected one pair of eyes looking at us, but there are two. In this drawing Kalenderian captures the image of a friend, who appears twice at the same time, as if his alter ego had crept into the picture: at once awake and stretching himself, at once nearly asleep and withdrawn. Through this double appearance the drawing not only gains a psychological component but also emits an animating dynamic.

Calendar: February 17

Year: Day to Day Men: February 17

Attention Caught

The seventeenth of February in 1674 marks the date of the Ambon earthquake in the Maluku Islands, the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia and the largest ever recorded in that country.

The geological area of the Indonesian North Maluku Islands is located in the zone of convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. This area is dominated by a complex mixture of tectonic elements, including collision, subduction and vertical fractures which shift horizontally. In the search for the cause of the Ambon earthquake, immediate to deep-focus earthquakes with a depth of sixty kilometers or more were ruled out as the source. 

Known historical events of that type did not generate the scale of tsunami that struck the islands. The 1938 Banda Sea earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.5 and Rossi-Forel intensity of VII (very strong tremors), generated a minor tsunami of only 1.5 meters (5 feet). Researchers ruled out faulting as a source because the Ambon earthquake had an extreme run-up height of at least 100 meters on the northern shore of Ambon,

The likely source of the tsunami appears to have been an earthquake generated undersea-landslide. Although never confirmed, two faults are seen as likely sources of that landslide; the South Seram Thrust and an unnamed fault found on the island of Ambon. Published research journals have not assigned a magnitude to the event; however, from collected databases, it has been estimated as an earthquake with the magnitude of 6.8 at a depth of 40 kilometers (25 miles).

A German botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, Georg Eberhard Rumphius was assigned in 1654 to the Ambon archipelago. Accompanied by his wife and two daughters, he assumed the position of merchant in 1662 and, on his own time, undertook a study of the Spice Islands’ flora and fauna. Rumphius and his family were present on the island at the time of the 1674 earthquake; his account of the earthquake is the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia. 

The Ambon earthquake occurred on Saturday evening, between 19:30 and 20:00 Eastern Indonesian Time, when the island inhabitants were celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year. The shaking earth rang the large bells on the local Victoria Castle and knocked people off their feet. 

The collapse of seventy-five stone buildings killed eighty-four people and injured another thirty-five. Water spurted into the air from wells and the ground, some upwards to 6 meters (20 feet). Clay and sand also erupted from the ground. Among the dead from the earthquake were Rumphius’s wife and two daughters, killed by a collapsing stone wall. 

Immediately after the earthquake, a mega-tsunami swept through the coastal areas of Ambon Island. The earthquake produced a tsunami which reached heights as much as 100 meters (330 feet) and nearly crested the coastal hill areas. This tsunami resulted in the additional deaths of over two thousand individuals.

Notes: The translated summary notes of Georg Everhard Rumphius on the 1674 Ambon and Seram earthquake are recorded in the files of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. These notes are located at: https://iotic.ioc-unesco.org/1950-ambon-tsunami/1674-tsunami-in-ambon-and-seram/