As has become a sort of yearly tradition, we hosted a three-hour training with the new batch of Field Trip Explainers, who will be starting to work on the museum floor in a couple of weeks. This is a particularly fun and creative group to work with: their ideas are always clever, the mood happy, and the insights that transpire in the “debriefing” session afterward always worth listening to and taking note of.
Click on the image below to be taken to a gallery of their work and creations:
And here’s a sweet video of their wonderful contraptions:
Inspired by the awesome Reflections show that is now on display at the Exploratorium, the Learning Studio offered a 3-hour workshop in which visitors built their own “Shiny, Sparkly, Something-or-Others”, as the title said.
This constituted an experiment for us in several ways, and a good first step into the kind of activities and interactions that we would like to start offering in the future.
First of all, it happened in parallel with a current show on the museum floor, and that alone allowed for adjacencies that were a source of inspiration for us, in developing the activity, and hopefully for the participants to the workshop, in coming up with their own creative ideas.
We also combined the workshop with an unusual two-week residency for artist Chris Bell, who had collaborated with us before. We thought he would be a great source of inspiration because of his previous work with lights and reflections off of common household objects, and proposed to him that he would be building and experimenting with an installation on the museum floor, right next to a gallery showcasing similar work by participants to our own workshop. Graciously, and it take a particularly selfless and generous artist to allow this, he accepted, and a great collaborations resulted once again.
So, this workshop started in the Learning Studio with a brief introduction to what we were going to do: essentially explore some of the aesthetic qualities of lights and reflections, and create our own expression of that.
Then we led the group onto the museum floor to have a chat with Chris, while he was starting to work on his installation. This was a great moment in which Chris introduced himself and his work as an artist, and had some very insightful words on his process of creation with such an ethereal medium, with a particular emphasis on knowing “when to stop”, which I think had a great and positive influence on the visitors’ work.
Then it was time to head back to the LS for an initial exploration, using just a light source and a simple sheet of Mylar, in order to start generating ideas, and to familiarize ourselves with what was possible and beautiful with this medium. After a while, we introduced, as usual, a host of different materials, all somehow reflective or translucent, as well as construction materials, wood, tape, motors, switches, etc.
The mood became very quiet and meditative, and the visitors got to work, and soon different avenues of thought took shape. I found it very interesting that often similar initial explorations led to very different end results. Likewise, as is often the case with our activities, the participants ranged both in age (from about 12 to older adults) and gender, and all seemed to be equally engaged in the activity.
Ideas were tried and discarded, problems were solved, and slowly each participant got to the point were they were satisfied with what they had built. At this point we took their creations, which were on independent “shelves”, and took them on the museum floor, where they became part of a collective Wall of Light, which stood on display for all museum visitors to see and appreciate for an amazing full two weeks.
And that concluded the first part of our exploration with light and with different kinds of interactions with the public. In the next days I will talk more about our next steps, which led to some interesting events!
In preparation for the upcoming Maker Faire booth, in which we will be hosting a community-built chain reaction event, we had the pleasure of trying out the activity with the Exploratorium explainers. Due to their busy schedule and the need to have the museum floor staffed, we had to split the workshop in two days, with half the explainers doing the activity on one day, and the other half on the next.
In this activity, we will ask participants to build a section of a collective chain reaction; each section will then join with and trigger the next one, so that at the end of a building session, we will be able to set the contraption off at one end, and it will work its way (flawlessly, I’m sure!) to the end.
As always, the depth of thought and care that this group of educators brings to any activity they participate in shined through, both in the actual construction of the chain reaction elements, and in the discussion we had afterwards.
Now we are definitely looking forward to Maker Faire in a month!
As the sun sets in Varanasi, we (Karen, Mike, and Luigi) collect out thoughts and gather our energy on the rooftop of the Dolphin Hotel, taking in the views of the Ganga river and rooftops of the city. It’s been an amazing and busy day. It began in the morning with chants from the monks in front of the Dhamekh Stupa in Sarnath. We sat with the monks as they chanted facing the Stupa, and later shared the famed Tibetan butter tea with them. Unfortunately, we were later informed, it was not yak butter in the tea, but just plain old buffalo butter. Still, it tasted quite strong, and salty, but not in an unpleasant way. We all agreed, however, that a glass was about all we could drink of it.
Then we decided to head to Varanasi, “just for a few hours”. That turned into a full day of walking around, taking another boat ride, which took us so close to the funerary pyres that we started to feel sweltering from the heat of the burning logs, a visit to a temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god, which is overrun by wild monkeys, and two passes through the main Ghats, the Dasasvamedha Ghats. So we found ourselves to be within a couple of hours of the night puja ceremony, and decided to stick it out, and witness it.
A few minutes before 6pm, the ghats are teeming with people, some already sitting on the raised platforms that serve as bleachers, and some scattered over the steps, on the roofs of nearby building, and, of course, on boats on the river. Loud music is playing over the loudspeakers, and at first I couldn’t identify the source. Eventually I found out that it was a harmonium player and a table player in the front, play and singing. By the river, there are seven smaller raised platforms, each with a small altar in front, with a few items on top of it, waiting for the holy men to take their place on them. Next to each platform, high up on the scaffolding, there are two bells, connected via long strings to someone in the public.
Eventually the time comes for the ceremony to begin. A candle is lit on each of the platforms, and the holy men take their place. The music becomes a devotional chant, slow and mesmerizing. for the entire ritual, each of the seven men will repeat exactly the same motions: the ritual begins with the playing of a conch shell, staccato at first, and ending with a long sustained note. Then the slow repetitive dance begins: first incense sticks are waved, toward the river at first, and then with identical motions in the other three directions.
Then big incense burners are lit, and waved in the same way, its sweet smell filling the entire audience.
One by one, different offerings are presented to the deities, some of them spectacular in their fiery glory, others as simple as marigold petals. The whole puja lasts for an indefinite amount of time, I really can’t tell if it’s been 10 minutes or 3 hours. Eventually the conch shell is sounded again, and most people start to leave.
However, the ceremony is not over yet. An even slower and more mellifluous dance with a feather brush begins, while the audience joins in the chanting and more upbeat singing. Finally, the holy men all gather at the front, facing the river, preparing for their last veneration. A yell goes out, from the singer and the crowd, hands in the air. A final farewell to the holy Ganga.
On the second day of working on their chain reaction machine (and the last day of building workshops!) we switched session, so that instead of the morning, we had the whole afternoon. We could hardly contain our excitement for what was to come, as the room lay all set up and in-progress from the day before, tables waiting to be completed.
It seemed to us (Karen, Mike, and Luigi) that most of the monks had already settled into their ideas, and had a pretty good sense of what they intended to accomplish, and the associated metaphors that we had asked them to think about. Based on the previous days’ tendencies, we had anticipated that most of the metaphors would revolve around three main themes: Buddhism, Tibet, and animals. Surprisingly, this activity brought out a little more variation and zaniness, with sometimes slightly disturbing undertones. For example, one of the elements in a machine consisted of a Tibetan monk slapping a Chinese person (cringe!). Another one involved an autorickshaw (repurposed from an earlier light-reflection prototype) running over a monk, which would then, by falling over, complete a circuit.
Always very inventive, some highlights included:
A soccer match between Tibet and the US, complete with first and second prize cups, and clapping audience.
A brilliant pulley system, with hand-braided rope, that we had never seen before.
A couple of hand-made gears, which after many iterations, prototypes, and a variety of materials, finally worked flawlessly. Perfect pitch!
Tashi’s creation, as always, was unconventional and a little bit crazy. He went through several different ideas, beginning to build, only to abandon them halfway through when he either lost interest in them, or ran into problems that were maybe too complex for him to solve. At one point he had started to build a model of the twin towers, including a way to make the tops collapse when hit by an airplane suspended on a string! Somewhat to our relief, he abandoned that line of thought, but that meant that he started the second day’s with a blank table. Then in a fit of inspiration, he started stringing foam tubes together, eventually fashioning some sort of crazy oversized monk that would shake uncontrollably and make all kinds of scary and “horrible” sounds, including thunder, clanging bells, dogs chasing after cats, and loud and campy music. Through its shaking motions, the monk figure would cause pieces of aluminum foil to hit each other, completing circuits, and setting the next machine in motion.
A rare treat: the translators, who were by the way such an essential part of our experience in Sarnath, in and out of the workshops, got to collaborate on their own table. They made a brilliant “Tibet express” train, complete with conductive rails!
Finally, the time came to set the whole contraption off. In typical fashion, all the monks crowded around the tables, we started a countdown from five (in Tibetan, of course!), and Geshe Thupten Khunkhen set the first block off. Of course, a chain reaction machine never works smoothly! The snags are part of the fun, and the monks enthusiasm was as high as we’ve ever seen: there were shouts of encouragement, teasing of each other, and joyful yelling when things worked. In fact, the whole experience was so delightful, that we had to set it all up and run it one more time!
And to end things on a great note, we set up an outdoor screening of one of our favorites chain reaction videos ever: Pythagora’s Switch!
We were overjoyed and delighted that, in addition to the monks, a number of local children took time off their bicycle-riding and kite-flying to attend the projection. We couldn’t wish for a better end to 10 magical workshop days.
