Tuesday, November 18, 2003

A student at Central Saint martins, writing a blog about the up and coming multimedia piece. Well worth waiting for..
 
i forgot to mention that i had a lecture by a mathematician yesterday that was really great! i mean, i finished my tutorial and really wanted to go home because i was so drained by preparing for it, but i thought i'd stick around for this optional lecture and see what this mathematician could say to 'designers'. turns out this guy, marcus du sautoy, just wrote a book called the music of primes. he gave this really animated, passionate and very multimedia talk about prime numbers and what we know about them and what is still unexplained. basically, primes are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves. t he thing is there is no pattern, explanation or formula to figure out when they'll show up. it's an unsolved (math) mystery! i think my interest partially stems from the fact that this was a case of a scientist really understanding how to speak the langu a ge of a 'non-science' audience. granted, he used a lot of clips from movies like 'pi' and 'contact' to maintain our interest, but they all served to illustrate points about the fascinating mysteries around prime numbers. he also brought in the relations hip between music and prime numbers at which time he actually picked up a trumpet and played us a little jazz tune! [it was also really cute that he was wearing a tin tin t-shirt and plaid pants. repetti, if you're reading this, i thought of you! i though t, he's defeating all the stereotypes of scientists...so pop culture savvy but SO science-core! ;)] so in the end, what did this have to do with us as design students? well, he's interested in having artists and designers respond to the theories, history a nd na tural phenomenons around prime numbers. we've been given a brief (which is optional) to respond to any aspect of his talk with a visual interpretation. he's really open to any kind of media and any aspect that catches our interest is welcome. ult ima tely he'll choose a few to put on his website, http://www.musicoftheprimes.com, which i don't really care about, but i really would like to try and fit this in to my schedule because it's a kind of unique thing to visualize, especially 'cause i don't have to necessarily explain the concept of primes, but just respond to an aspect of their (unpredictable) nature that i felt particularly fascinated by. again, my dad will laugh when he see s that i'm actually considering taking on an extra project after all the stress i've been under at school...but this one just seems to cool to pass up! one last thing: in britain they call it 'maths' plural. it sounds REALLY bizarre and wrong, but it's 'cause they are shortening 'mathematics'. just amusing to me. :)
http://www.lungtissue.com/briarblog.html
posted by briar @ 9:49 PM

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