Swinging into spring
like a goth Andre Agassiz
Here in the Netherlands, I may not have Tinker Creek1, but at least I have 200m of the Natuurpark Bloyendael canal. On my bike ride to and from work, I turn off the main bike route onto a cobblestone path, taking whatever the opposite of a shortcut is for the sixty seconds of relief offered by this tiny oasis. I have been keeping an eye on the birds. In the winter this is a limited watch: fat wood pigeons coo and flap, Eurasian coots push water around with their enormous dinosaur feet, the white bums of Moorhens wag rhythmically as they peck at nothing on the banks of the canal, and the blackbirds flock at dusk in huge swooping choreographies.2
With the onset of spring, the canal livens. The mallards have returned, docile and gleaming, pairing off early and proudly. They sleep sweetly among the crocuses and daffodils in the overgrown grass of early spring like enormous Easter eggs; I can pile on as many adoring adverbs as you’d like me too.
Soon after, the Graylag geese arrive, swarming the waters in great honking crowds. At first, they are just territorial with each other, fighting in trees and on the water. Then we enter Geese Hissing Week, where at least once a day a goose will unhinge its jaw, wide like a young girl in a horror movie, tongue waggling from inside its cavernous orange beak and scream death upon ye. Those weeks, I do very little bird watching and a great amount of peddling very fast.
Now, battles wages and worn, the waters have calmed. For each resting gaggle, a single goose now stands a stout, mistrustful watch, throwing one of nature’s narrowest side-eyes.
Last to the water before the equinox is the tufted ducks, some dozen of them, hair done up like a goth Andre Agassiz. Spring, I suppose, has officially swung3.
I have been keeping more regular desk diaries4, e.g.,
The room we had booked had been reserved by someone else, and R was online, so J and I sat in adjacent single person soundproof booths. The lights kept turning off because I am too still and small to be noticed. I have to explain things over and over again. At the beginning of the meeting, every time I start explaining the file structure, R has to get up to let his dog out. Then in. Then out. Then in. I begin again. I explain again about the model settings file and about how anything we create must be able to be used easily by people who do not code. It needs to be scientist-proofed. The lights go out again and again and again and again, and the fan shuts off too, and I wonder: exactly how sealed is this room?
They are not all so depressing! Eventually I will have a collection of these and when I am done with this job perhaps I will alphabetize them.
I taught another workshop a few weeks ago, to undergraduates in the honors college. There were just a handful of them. I wanted them to get a sense of how technology mediates how they see and interact with the world, what is represented, what can be represented, what is “captured”. What is seen, and by whom? What does this offer us and what does this limit? The motivating technology for this workshop is the creation of 3D models from photogrammetry and lidar, which are used in science, construction, archaeology, etc.
We start by taking our phones and opening a mapping application, zooming all the way - what do you see? - and zoom out to the area of a watershed - how do you know the area on your screen is the size of a watershed? And we look and observe at what is represented and what is missed and think about the resolution of the satellite images or what gets labeled or what simplified color schema do and how it changes what we focus on. I then guide them in a visualization practice of a landscape, our eyes and imaginations being powerful imaging tools as well. We move on to hand tools, drawing and sculpting my rock collection with air dry clay. Finally, we head outside to make a map of the courtyard, using our phones to try to create 3D models of plants with photogrammetry and lidar (your iPhone can do this too). No two maps were the same! There was a cat out there, a very patient one, but as it is an alive being with things to look at, it moved its head during the image capture and as a result, this is the 3D model of a cat as produced by Scaniverse.
Well, this post was meant to be a celebration of spring and a rather banal update on work and teaching but instead has somehow turned into a horror show.
Literally the only thing I have read this month is Herman Hesse’s the Glass Bead Game for my book club and I’m only halfway finished. HELP.
I’m back in the pottery swing of things and so have been looking at a lot a lot a lot of clay on Instagram. Two of my favorite projects being Phoebe Zoeho’s sadcats, sculptures of deranged maneki nekos, and Chunmei Jia’s playful use of glaze texture in her ceramic illustrations.
Until next time,
Elizabeth
There are no unmanaged waterways in the entirety of the country
Ok there is also the common magpie but my preschool teacher said if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.
Like.. spring has sprung but tennis.. get it.
Need a better name involving notions of fieldwork, digital documentation, journals, etc etc. Please send ideas.
Agassi*****. 🥲