I'm still unpacking my things. I have so much stuff, granted most of it is artwork (sculptures and their respective bubble sheet packaging take up a lot of room). Anyway, the packing has gotten me particularly nostalgic and I've decided to post photos that I know I was having fun in. I'll tackle more moments in the upcoming days...
Today classes were canceled and oodles of students presented original research projects and theses at Elon's Student Undergraduate Research Forum (or SURF). As someone said tonight "I went SURF-ing all day and was no where near the beach!" Actually, that's not true. I wanted to see all of my friend's presentations (which was about 40, give or take), but my presentation took too long both to install and de-install. Here is a video of the way I set the installation up today (I might change it a bit for my gallery opening on Sunday):
Along with allowing viewers to, um, view the artwork, I gave a brief speech and participated in a Q & A session for about 15 minutes. I think I did well and people seemed to really enjoy the session.
After a hard day's work of presenting, the students and their mentors were invited to attend a dinner celebrating and congratulating everyone on their achievments. We got little awards! :
Today was the opening reception for the first half of the senior art major class. My exhibition (the second half) will hold its opening reception on May 2nd from 1-3 pm. Anyway, everyone did a wonderful job and I'm glad I finally got to see the finished products (I didn't necessarily know what their theses were going to look like). Above is a picture from today that I snapped just before my camera's battery died. I had intended to document each member's work, but instead just got a picture of a few of the guys small-talkin' 'round Travis' sweet installation. Later (after I charge my camera) I'll be sure to post pictures of the rest.
The world's oldest known rocks are found near the Great Slave and Great Bear lakes in Canada. The rocks, which include granite, are around 4.03 billion years old.
Probably the earliest seismoscope was invented by the Chinese philosopher Chang Heng in A.D. 132. This was a large urn on the outside of which were eight dragon heads facing the eight principal directions of the compass. Below each dragon head was a toad with its mouth opened toward the dragon. When an earthquake occurred, one or more of the eight dragon-mouths would release a ball into the open mouth of the toad sitting below. The direction of the shaking determined which of the dragons released its ball. The instrument is reported to have detected an earthquake 400 miles away that was not felt at the location of the seismoscope. The inside of the seismoscope is unknown: most speculations assume that the motion of some kind of pendulum would activate the dragons.
