Radiant

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

I liked the circles of light reflecting off the waste can at the elevator late this afternoon 😄

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What’s in a tagline? My blog’s identity: Version 4.0

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

I’m developing a new course at MSOE called “SS 3700 Digital Society.” To say I’m excited is to understate my enthusiasm for this topic. As a political science major who took computer programming classes in the late 1970s using a keypunch and a card reader and who then later got a PhD in English,  I have a long history of interdisciplinary curiosity and a strong drive to seek out connections among really disparate subjects.

The “Digital Society” course brings together my interests in humanities, social science, communication, media studies, and technology in a way that nothing else ever has. I’ve begun all the usual tasks of scholarly inquiry: assembling a bibliography (the academic equivalent of baby steps), attending meetups and conferences, joining professional societies, subscribing to journals, finding Twitter hashtags that can introduce me to new topics and fellow explorers, etc.

Since I’m essentially feeling my way here, any opinions and advice you’d be willing/able to share on this (very broad!) topic would be greatly appreciated! In return, I’ll share my readings and ideas with you. My blog isn’t really changing at all, but since I’m doing this work anyway, I’ve decided to post once in a while about what I find. Maybe it’ll be interesting for others to think about, too 🙂

 

Posted in Higher education, Learning, Life, Popular culture, Science, Teaching, Technology, Writing, blogging | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

(Not Quite) Night at the Museum

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

Grohmann Museum, that is. Taken sometime around 6:00 p.m. yesterday. The building is closed by 5:00, but a few of my colleagues and I are often still here after hours wrapping up our current work day and prepping for the next.

Posted in Art, Life, Milwaukee | Tagged | 2 Comments

April “Fake News” Fools

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

These videos have been around for over a year but didn’t receive as much attention as I’d have expected. Given the strong resemblance to “pranks” in their inherent trickery and potential for malicious intent, it seems appropriate to highlight them in an April 1 post.

First, from July 2017, is a video created by a research team from the University of Washington using software and previous footage of President Obama to create a speech that is completely fabricated.

Second, from April 2018, is a similar speech created by Jordan Peele to put the same point across to a wider audience in the form of a humorous “public service announcement.”

And finally—also from April of last year—is this TED talk from Supasorn Suwajanakorn, a member of the research team that created the original fake. In his 7-minute presentation Suwajanakorn explains how fakes like this one are created, how to tell a fake video from a real one, and what the implications of this technology may be.

I guess the punchline to this “prank” would be: If we believe that “seeing is believing” with  any sort of digitally-vulnerable source, then the joke’s on us.

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Fave Movie Moments – “Do you know why this is my favorite tree?”

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

I showed Sean Baker’s The Florida Project last week in my honors film studies class, where the honors program’s theme, “The Power of Place,” is the central unifying subject of our course.

I really love this film and could not believe it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Then again, one thing I’ve learned and wished I’d known much sooner in my life is the extent to which awards are arbitrary, political, and subject to both conscious and unconscious bias/prejudice/ignorance. In the case of this film, the subject matter (white welfare mothers and their children living a precarious existence in low-budget motels-cum-housing-projects at the margins of Disney World’s tourist complex) was not “deserving” enough to warrant attention, much less recognition or validation, from cinema’s oligarchs. That’s my personal take on their slight (which clearly somehow affronts me on moral grounds😂).

Anyway, one little moment from this movie that I find incredibly meaningful comes when six-year-old Moonee and her friend Jancey score a loaf of white bread from the church group that distributes food from the back of a van each week at the Magic Castle motel, where Moonee lives with her mother. The girls carry the bread to a nearby field and share a messy, sticky meal of jelly smeared over slices of bread with a spoon as they sit facing each other on what appears to be a tree branch, the jar resting between them on the bark.

“Kind of like that, don’t ya?” says Moonee. An old hand at getting free bakery items (and soft-serve ice cream cones via coins scrounged from strangers outside the Twistee Treat stand) Moonee is Jancey’s guide to the art of enjoying “found” treats.

“This is the best jelly I ever eated,” Jancey replies.

“Do you know . . . Do you know why this is my favorite tree?” asks Moonee, a closeup on her profile as she bites into a slice of bread.

“Why?” says Jancey.

“‘Cause it tipped over,” explains Moonee, licking jelly from the bread’s surface. “And it’s still growing.”

Then we cut to an extreme long shot of the tree, the two girls barely noticeable at first in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Only as we process their presence do we realize how huge that tree is. And that, yes, it is indeed “still growing” despite its dire circumstances.

An image like a little gem of poetry.

The film is full of metaphors similar to this one. In fact, maybe the best way to deal with the movie’s unexpected final moments (uplifting? heartbreaking?) is to remember the lesson of Moonee’s tree.

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Posted in Life, Movies and film | Tagged , | 9 Comments

If you love ruins and abandoned places

Posted on March 28, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

Then you might want to read this review of a new book that sounds so “me” it jumped straight to the top of my to-read list.

I love Phaidon, publisher of fabulous picture books for grownups. Like DK,  my other fave picture-book publisher, Phaidon is headquartered in London. Their new book, Ruin and Redemption in Architecture (by Dan Barash), has a ship date of March 29 (tomorrow) if you order it directly from Phaidon. Very pricey to do that, though ($59.95).

Otherwise, you can order from Amazon, but the book won’t be released/shipped until April 17. At a cost of $37.39, though, a savings of almost 40%, I guess that’s worth the wait.

 

Posted in architecture, Books and reading | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Red Arrow Starbucks, last week of March in the late afternoon

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

Doesn’t our Milwaukee seem slightly Santa Fe-ish here with the shadows? Last coffee run of the day, just before my 4:00 class. Doing film history this week, which given our quarter system, is more of a “greatest hits” of milestones, technical progress, and cultural reflection/influence than a true history. As always, I’m struck by the outsized influence just a few key people can have in the birth and development of an art form.

Posted in Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Diercks Hall, late March 2019

Posted on March 26, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

I walk the Grohmann Museum’s galleries and climb the atrium’s spiral staircase for exercise when my schedule is tight, starting from the lower level and working my way up to the rooftop garden before taking the elevator back down to the basement and doing it all over again.

Set to house Milwaukee School of Engineering’s AI program, Diercks Hall will open this coming fall. As I reached the top of the staircase during my rounds yesterday, the bright colors of construction workers’ vests and the yellow/green material covering the walls (insulation? vapor barrier? something else???) caught my eye across the finally snow-free sculpture garden. A cheerful sign that progress was achieved during the cold, gray days of our Wisconsin winter—and a reminder that “slow and steady” wins the race, even when conditions are far from ideal.

Proof of which also includes my “Grohman workout,” now that I think about it 🙂

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All that is gold does not glitter

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, a fact I discovered randomly while going through Twitter for a work project. For those of you/us who haven’t read The Lord of the Rings recently (or paid exceptionally close attention to the calendar of Middle Earth), March 25 marks both the day the One Ring was destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, causing the fall of Sauron, and also the beginning of the Fourth Age, ushered in as that ancient evil was extinguished.

Knowing just enough about the Middle Earth calendar to cause trouble for myself, I wondered if that was by the Shire Reckoning or the Stewards’ Reckoning and did a quick search. Not that it matters! Just because once I’d asked the question, I kind of wanted to know the answer. Although I didn’t totally track that down, I did find a website that takes its history of the Middle Earth calendar quite seriously, the Tolkien Gateway project/wiki, “the J.R.R. Tolkien encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” A pretty amazing website covering just about any topic you can think of drawn from the fictional world of Tolkien’s imagination.

I also found a website (Tea with Tolkien) devoted to “the works, life, and Catholic faith of J.R.R. Tolkien,” where a post titled “Why March 25th Might Be The Most Important Date of all History” explains the significance of that date in terms of its religious roots, with their juxtapositions of life and death that most likely inspired Tolkien’s decision to use it in The Lord of the Rings:

In The Spirit of Liturgy, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explained, “Jewish tradition gave the date of March 25 to Abraham’s sacrifice… This day was also regarded as the day of creation, the day when God’s word decreed: ‘Let there be light.’ It was also considered, very early on, as the day of Christ’s death and eventually as the day of his conception..”

Are you a Tolkienite? For many years I reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy every year. As my children grew and my job expanded, that tradition fell by the wayside. It has now been about 15 years since my last reading.

So many books, so little time. Should I push aside some of the new titles on my “to read” list to make room for another reading of Tolkien? I think maybe yes, I will. After all, just like Heraclitus’s river, this reading would not be a mere repeat of what I’ve already done. I’m a different person now than I was 15 years ago, and the world is a different place. Reading the trilogy today would be an entirely new experience, with new understandings to gain, connections to make, and insights to form.

Here is my favorite poem from The Lord of the Rings. I  can still vividly recall the delight my 13-year-old self found in its wordplay and mind-bending reversals. It is found in the trilogy’s first book, when the hobbits are fleeing the Shire with the ring but don’t know where they’re going or even have a full understanding of the evil they’re up against. This poem turns up in a note left by the wizard Gandalf telling the hobbits to trust Strider, the rough-looking and seemingly untrustworthy “Ranger of the North” who is actually Aragorn, descendant of ancient kings and legitimate ruler of the throne of Gondor and the race of Men.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

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Spring Thaw – Now that’s what I call melting (and about time, too!)

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Katherine Wikoff

When I got home last night, I was amused to note that the remnants of our ice storm weeks ago had been uncovered by melting during the day. The photo is dark, but you can see the layer of ice that’s no longer covered by snow.

It reminds me of how some rocks are harder than others, which is how you wind up with formations like buttes.

Photo by Wolfgang Staudt, via Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

Temperatures rose even more overnight, and this morning when I left for work there was a swift-moving river of water rushing down the street toward the sewer grates.

Finally!

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