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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: August 1, 2003
Latest Update: August 1, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

The Aesthetics of Play

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, July 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Thursday, July 31, 2003: Last week we looked at the aesthetics of answerability, with which we have by no means finished. Answerability is for us a key concept upon which depends interpersonal respect, making it fundamental to ideas of community. But this week I was more absorbed by building detailed resources for your Fall classes at UWP and at CSUDH.

As part of that activity I found myself entering the Berkeley server numerous times. I had put up some "blogs" that I discovered by following pages of Open Computing Facility's computing staff, and had just gone looking for the OCF home page to explain to you and to me what it was. Turns out it's the location of a government-sponsored computing lab at Berkeley. And turns out that it seems to hold most of Berkeley's computing equipment. But where was that playful staff whose "blogs" I had followed? So, naturally, I kept going until, lo, I stopped cold before this weeks's photo, for which you'll have to scroll about halfway down the original file at Berkeley.

Read the article. You won't understand every word, but the idea is summed up quite effectively: "This is what structural biology is for -- it shows us how extremely simple nature's solutions can be."

So that's how water gets into our cells. Look! You can see it! Now I wouldn't want to spend all day in a lab, working at getting tools that would enable us to see it. But I'm delighted that someone else wants to do that. Last week when we spoke of answerability, we didn't say much about "play." But play is at the heart of answerability. It's often what makes us want to answer, to question, to join in the decision-making, and to celebrate the results.

Play includes story telling. And as I put up my lecture on story telling through photo essays, I began to realize that this cell membrane, AQP1, had a local story to tell. The scientists at Berkeley were just helping it tell its story by putting all their expertise to work. All the stories matter. AQP1's story in this case is just this beautiful picture and an understanding of its structure. Thanks to Biophysicist Bing Jap and his team of scientists, we now know that story. I hope that for the scientists, their work had the satisfaction of play, as mine does. Something so beautiful should come from the aesthetics of play and answerability.

AQP1 attracted me because it was beautiful, and I wanted you to see the beauty of some of the science that most of my behavioral science people shy away from. But when I came back to my computer this morning, there was gibberish on this file, no AQP1. Vowing not to work so late next time, I went rather desperately searching for AQP1. And in that process I found Mirsky, just sitting there quietly in my art program, abandoned, alone. What was he doing there? Why, of course, he was another sample of aesthetic play. Here was the world from a completely different prespective. No angstroms here. And he was almost pure play:

Mirsky is one of the computer kids that puts up blogs, if that's the right name for diaries. I had chosen this one to share with you because I liked it so. I like the use of words as art, I like that it's much clearer that it's Mirsky's work than any title for it. I like the colors and the layout. I like the drawing; reckon it's a tape machine of some sort, but it likes like boobs to me, all of which adds to the craziness of this piece. I'll bet at a sub-conscious level it's his mother, urging him towards seriousness. Can't you just see her arms folded? Of course, he left her head off, but that won't silence her. She's a MOM.

There are two versions of the story: one at Mirsky's Diary, I think, that is, I think it's a diary. I found it as a link, favored, I presume, on the homepage of one of the OCF staff, Bem Ajani Jones-Bey. I'm not sure what prompted me to link to "robotfindskitten.org," other than the spirit of play, and somehow from there I got to Mirsky, who was somewhere linked on the site robotfindskitten.org. Through further playing I found , but no photo of Jake. Jake Mirsky?

Mirsky's story of his delight at discovering he'd been "published" (I think that's what he means) in version 1 is hilarious. He seems to have gone hopping about in delirious joy, to the annoyance of some fellow worker. I wish we had photos of that. And his story of how his site became so popular merits attention, too. This is play, kids. Don't do it. You could get in trouble. They're real touchy about porn on the Internet. By the way, I never found "robotfindskitten.org" that had intrigued me in the first place. It helps in playing on the Internet to let the links take you where they will. You'll find the most amazing things sometimes as favored links on computer techs' sites.

. . .
Bem Ajani Jones-Bey
Link on photos for their sources at OCF.

Now, in conclusion, think how you've learned to "know" to some very small extent, the scientists who hunted down the structure of AQP1 and the techs of OCF. Maybe this will explain how when our students from Wisconsin meet our students from CSUDH, they meet like old friends, in spite of the fact that they've never seen each other before. The sharing of just a few tiny details makes us "really real" to one another. From there, respect is easy.