musings | Tien Chiu's Blog

December 3, 2018 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Remove before launch

I’ve been pretty silent here for the last few weeks because I’ve been working like crazy on prepping my online course Color Courage for Weavers for its launch. (Coming up fast. Really fast.)

And I’m not going to say much right now because I’m still working like crazy trying to get the launch ready. You have no idea how many moving parts are involved!

But I did want to share one thing with you.

You may recall that, long ago and far away, I worked for a company called Skybox Imaging….which made, launched, and operated state-of-the-art, seriously bleeding-edge imaging satellites.

Well, when satellites are constructed, there are typically protective parts that are kept in the satellite while it’s being stored on Earth, but are removed just before it leaves the planet and goes into orbit.

So people don’t forget to remove those parts, they are typically tagged with big red labels that look like this:

So shortly after I joined Skybox, I got a “Remove before launch” keychain fob to commemorate the launch of our second satellite. The one that convinced Google to buy us.

After I left Google, I thought, “Remove before launch. Hey, that’s cool. I’ll just leave it on until I’m ready to launch my new business. That’ll be another six months or so.”

Then Life Happened. It’s now been on my keychain for over three years post-Google.

But…it’s coming off.

Within the next week.

Stay tuned….

November 16, 2018 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Book review: Figuring Fibers

I have long wondered whether it was possible to create Art that expressed the beauty of science at a deep level. Most of the Art I’ve seen celebrating science has lain strictly at the surface – mostly, images of scientific concepts that happen to have aesthetically attractive representations. Fractals, various spirals based on the Golden Mean, microscopic images of cells, and so on. These are OK, I guess; they help make science more approachable, and they definitely demonstrate that science-y things can also be pretty things. But they don’t get at the true beauty of science, which for me is conceptual beauty, the sheer elegance of the rules underpinning the way the world is put together. I have never, for example, seen a work of Art that really expressed how elegant Maxwell’s equations, or the Pythagorean theorem, really are. Not their truth, or their usefulness, but their elegance: The simplicity and power with which they express their underlying truth.

It may sound odd to non-mathematicians or non-scientists to talk about beauty in a profession that is supposedly dedicated to truth, but the beauty of the truth, of the rules underpinning how the world works, is what gets most of us into the game. Particularly, it’s what gets mathematicians into the game. Because mathematicians work with abstractions rather than messy data, and because much of mathematics has no obvious application to the real world, mathematicians are in some sense the poets of the scientific world, seeking truth and elegance for their own sake rather than for any specific application. (This is, like most sweeping statements, an overgeneralization, but one with a reasonable degree of truth to it.)

The great mathematician G.H. Hardy, in his book A Mathematician’s Apology (one of my favorite books about the philosophy of mathematics), said this about mathematics, Art, and beauty:

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words…The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics….

It would be quite difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics. It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind—we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

I’m not going to try to give a rigorous definition of mathematical beauty – it would be an interesting exercise, and Wikipedia takes a stab at it, but it would be kind of like trying to explain being in love to someone who’s never experienced it. Louis Armstrong once said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Mathematical beauty is somewhat similar.

Nonetheless, it exists, but it’s a conceptual beauty, and trying to render it in physical form is hard. Really hard. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was possible. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how because I’d never seen it done.

Until someone told me about Figuring Fibers. Figuring Fibers is a compilation of articles that demonstrate mathematical principles using fiber arts in a deep, thoughtful manner. It’s unique in that it’s written with mathematical rigor, yet is readable by the sufficiently bold layperson, and each article covers a deep, interesting mathematical idea and then demonstrates it/extends the idea using a fiber art technique. Crochet, knitting, quilting, sewing, and beading/embroidery are all used in the book. (No weaving, alas, but perhaps a future volume?). This is no mere crocheting of a Moebius strip or knitting a 3D rendition of a Klein bottle; this is creating fractals, extending the Chinese Remainder Theorem to knitting contexts, and proving hyperbolic geometrical theorems through quilting. I mean, this stuff is cool. Way cool. As in, I had continuous nerdgasms for three days cool. (Okay, okay, TMI, but you know what I mean. 🙂 )

Figuring Fibers is definitely not your “Quilt in a Weekend” type fiber book, and it is not for those easily intimidated by mathematical notation. In fact, I opened it, looked inside, saw subscripts and superscripts and phrases like “Triply periodic polyhedra in Euclidean Three-Dimensional Space” and nearly shut it again. But I didn’t, and I’m very glad I didn’t. If you are mathematically educated enough to read Scientific American, and if you are willing to put some time and effort into understanding the concepts, you can skip over the more technical bits and still get 90% of what the authors are saying. There are definitely places where you’re going to get lost – at least, for awhile. And there are places where you’re going to have to go back and forth until you get it. But it is possible to skim over those parts and still appreciate how devastatingly cool (did I mention devastatingly cool?) the concepts and the art are. Yes, I was a math major, but I haven’t cracked a math text in 25 years, and I still think this was an amazingly enlightening read, both for the mathematical beauty and the knowledge that it is possible to combine Art and mathematics in a deep, beautiful way. (Plus, I now have a new favorite phrase: “The Borromean Rings are Hyperbolic: Proof by Quilt”! OMG, I’m in love.)

Figuring Fibers is edited by Carolyn Yackel and Sarah-Marie Belcastro and published by the American Mathematical Society; it is available through Amazon but is (at least for now) available much more cheaply on the American Mathematical Society website. It is the third book in a series; I haven’t yet read Making Mathematics with Needlework or Crafting by Concepts, but you can bet they’re on my reading list now!

October 27, 2018 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

The “art” thing

Some of the responses to my last blog post made me realize I was careless about what I said. There’s a perpetual confusion about what the word “artist” means, because (in my opinion, anyway) there are two meanings to the words “art” and “artist”. The first, which is what I usually mean, is an inclusive one: it refers to someone who is doing something creative, regardless of skill level or degree of external recognition. If you’re making something creative, you’re making art, and you’re an artist.

And then there’s Art with a capital “A,” which is the stuff you see in museums and galleries, possibly accompanied by the Artist, typically someone with a list of exhibits, museum collections, etc. next to their name. What I would describe as “a career artist”.

I would certainly describe myself as an artist, and I have very little doubt that, given time and effort, I could succeed as an Artist. But that’s not where my interests lie. I don’t feel disillusioned about Art, exactly, but after two years as Board President of an Art museum, I feel I have a better idea of what it is and isn’t. Let me explain.

As someone newly interested in things artistic, I wasn’t entirely sure what Art was, or how it differed from the art I saw in day to day life. As a result, I shared the fairly common belief that Art was the best quality art, selected by curators for preservation in museums. And thus, that being an Artist represented achieving the pinnacle of artistic quality, and was something that, as an artist interested in producing good quality work, becoming an Artist was something I should aspire to.

This isn’t an uncommon belief, and there’s a nugget of truth in it: one rarely sees crappy art in museums, because museums exhibit things that people want to see, and people rarely want to see crappy art. But museums don’t necessarily display the best art, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s impossible to determine what art is “best,” because everyone uses different criteria. Second, museums aren’t out to display the best art. They want to display the art that most advances their mission, and which brings in enough visitors to keep them in business. The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, for example, focuses on art in textile media, because that’s our mission. We aren’t going to exhibit paintings, even a Renoir or a Picasso, because that’s not what we’re about. You could create the world’s greatest bronze sculpture, and we would still reject it, because it’s not what we collect or exhibit.

Similarly, art galleries are interested in exhibiting things that will eventually sell enough to keep them in business. Again, they won’t sell crappy art, but they aren’t out to sell the best art, either. So yes, being exhibited in a museum or a gallery is a sign that your work isn’t terrible, but it isn’t a sign that your work is the best, either.

Another trend in modern Art over the last century or so has been the “de-skilling” of Art. Ever since Marcel Duchamp produced his piece “Fountain” in 1917 – a commercially made urinal signed with a fake signature – the trend has been to emphasize concept over technical skill. As a result, a lot of modern Art is about message, not technical skill, and there’s even a certain undercurrent that suggests that a piece that pays too much attention to technical skill isn’t “really” Art. I’ve seen many exhibits by highly skilled Artists, but I’ve also seen a lot of exhibits that, while powerful Art, are technically primitive – as in, I could probably have executed some of the pieces, even though they aren’t in my medium.

Given that I care very much about technical skill in my work, enjoy pushing the edge of what can be done with a technique, and don’t particularly care to put an explicit message into my work, it seems that my work is unlikely to make it significantly into the Art arena any time soon. I might be pleasantly surprised, but I’m also not planning to pound on the door of the Art world demanding recognition. They’re going in one direction and celebrating a particular thing, which is not my thing. Three or four years ago, that would probably have bothered me. Today, it doesn’t. I think two years as Board President at an Art museum has really helped me gain perspective on this. I’m pleased about that, though I’m not sure it’s an insight I’d have sacrificed two years of my creative life for.

(Not that I regret becoming Board President for one moment – but I’m also very happy to have stepped down to Board Vice-President as of a few months ago. Now maybe I can do some weaving again!)

The last week and a half has been spent finishing up the filming for my upcoming class, Color Courage for Weavers. I’m a little nervous that I may be including too much material for one class, but since I plan to offer a online workshop version as well as a content-only version, hopefully those who would like more guidance will be able to get it in the workshop version. It’s now looking like the release date may be early December.

October 21, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Forging a new identity: Art science

It’s been almost exactly three years since I quit my job at Google, stepping out of high-tech and leaving my old identity behind. Since then, I feel much of my personal work has been around freeing myself from who I was, leaving me to explore who I am and will be.

So what next?

In my book Master Your Craft: Strategies for Designing, Making, and Selling Artisan Work, one of the best pieces of advice for finding your own voice came from metalworker Debora Mauser:

If you look at some of the pieces [an artist] has made, say ten pieces, what do they look like? Are they all shiny metal? Has he or she used blue lapis in all the pieces? What about those ten pieces does he or she love? And that is usually the maker’s artistic voice, even if he or she didn’t realize it. Most people will like a shape, a color, or a texture, and that will show up in much of their work.

Once you discover your style and your voice, you can increase your creativity. You don’t have to be limited. You can develop that voice, and take it off in different directions.

One of the big projects I completed during the last three years was my Procion MX dye sample project, where I dyed 1500 samples using Procion MX dyes on cotton, then took photos, wrote up the results, and posted them on my blog. I got two comments that made me think, “Hmm.” The first was from professional dyer/weaver Dawn Jacobson:

If the Nobel Committee gave a prize for dyeing, I’d submit your name for consideration. This is the most comprehensive set of dye data I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing–you’ve made it reproducible, organized, and understandable, and it definitely fills a void in the area of controlled fiber-reactive dyeing.

The other was from a fellow Caltech alum:

Lol! 😉 Your article reads like a scientific paper: abstract, results, methods. All you need is a conclusion suggesting future work and a nod to your grant agencies.

Fantastic work!

These two comments startled me. I had been thinking of myself as an artist making samples for future artwork. But these two comments made me realize that, even as an artist, I was still a scientist. Faced with a lack of knowledge, my gut instinct is to design a rigorous experiment to gather data systematically, run the experiment with careful attention to reproducible methodology, write up the results, and publish them. I can only attribute this to genetics: I was born to and raised by two scientific researchers. So, when confronted with the unknown, I have a deeply rooted, irresistible, positively atavistic urge to conduct academic research studies. (You know how some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth? I came into the world with a lab notebook between my teeth.)

So that was one key piece of my identity.

The second key discovery was that, while I am definitely interested in doing artistic/creative things, I’m not really interested in being an artist. This astonished me since I had quit my job to become a full-time artist, but after three years of producing almost no art, it was pretty undeniable. Okay, being Board President at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles ate almost two years of my life, and I was setting up a business for most of the rest of the time, but still, if being an artist was a huge fire in my belly, I’d have come up with some way to do it. From this I conclude that creating things is important to me, but doing art – work that has a message and that communicates something to people – isn’t. I think that’s because what is considered art these days is often overtly political, with an obvious message. I’m not interested in creating that kind of art, probably because I’m a writer. I can create far more powerful political statements through my prose than I can through my weaving, and if I’m going to make that kind of statement, I’d rather write it. I want to reserve my textile work for the things I want to do with it, which center around creating aesthetically powerful, technically intricate work. If that’s not art, that’s fine: It’s what I want to make, and that’s good enough for me.

The third discovery – well, not discovery, exactly, because I’ve known it all along – is that at the very bottom of everything, I’m a writer. More specifically, I’m a nonfiction writer. I like to use writing to explain things, either through stories about my own experience or through writing up the results of my research studies. I’ve been writing since I was twelve. I’m probably even more compulsive about it than I am about the academic studies. (Though I can’t blame my parents for the writing part. I just fell in love with it.)

Put these three together and you get exactly what I’m doing now: Developing and teaching a scientific, systematic approach to art. I’m calling it “art science,” after “food science”. It’s the same idea: taking a field that has always been considered intuitive and analyzing it/explaining it using an analytical, scientific approach. (Curiously, I am following in a fellow Caltech alum’s footsteps here: popular food science writing was sparked by Tech alum Harold McGee’s book On Food and Cooking, which took a topic that had been the province of food chemists and made it accessible and interesting to home chefs. I don’t think this is coincidence – to do this kind of writing, you need both scientific background and literary bent. And it’s easier to get the writing skills post facto than the science,)

Art science isn’t a new concept any more than food science was when Harold McGee started writing about it. But there are a lot of similarities between the way that art is regarded now and the way cooking was regarded then. Much of the way we “read” an image is hardwired into us by biology. Our visual system is physically designed to do things like find edges and areas of high contrast. Doing so allows us to pick out a lion (or gazelle) in the underbrush faster because we don’t have to scan every bit of green, we just have to find the one bit of contrasting yellow-brown in a sea of green. But because our system is hardwired to do this, placing a small area of high contrast in an otherwise unchanging background will draw the eye there instantly. You can’t avoid it. It’s hardwired into you.

So if you look at this swatch,

….the first thing you saw was the yellow dot. I can tell you that not because I have a natural color sense, but because I know how your visual system works.

So that’s how I’m viewing myself now: A teacher of art science, researching how artistic design works, then writing/teaching about it to educate others. Because I feel that there are a lot of myths around art that can be terribly destructive to anyone who wants to create original work. In particular, the idea that artistic “talent” is an innate gift. It isn’t, and it’s not talent, either. Being good at artistic design, like being good at anything else, is largely a matter of skill and knowledge. And those can be learned by anyone who is willing to put in study and practice.

Here’s a teaser shot from the filming of my class “Color Courage for Weavers”. I’m releasing it next month.

video production studio for Color Courage for Weavers

September 22, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Cat-iversary #5!

Five years ago, one of the last bastions of human freedom fell to invading aliens…

…and there was much rejoicing.

Of course they were the kings and queens of all they surveyed:

They were yin to each other’s yang:

They watched TV together:

Fritz and Tigress watching TV — Fritz and Tigress learning to sew

Napped together:

New Olympic sport: synchronized napping!

And hunted self-driving android mice together:

They became expert photobombers:

And, of course, they ruled the household with an iron paw:

Tigress and the iron paw — A displeased Tigress

Needless to say, we are thoroughly besotted with our ~~despotic alien tyrants~~ adorable cats, and look forward to many more years with both Fritz and Tigress!

Happy cat-iversary to us!!

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