reading list

(from email correspondence 10/12/08)

Hello Bonnie & Nova,

In all the enthusiasm to finally have a chance to begin sharing with you what's been ticking in my head, I forgot the most important part - the observation journal I have started for this project. I have also started building a sculpture, based on the data I have already collected here. I'll bring all that on Tuesday. IF Bonnie's studio situation works out (did you get my last email?), I might make that my Berwick studio for the residency.

My reading list of late has included:

Emergence - Stephen Johnson (about complexity theory)
Simplexity - Jeffrey Kluger (about complexity theory)
Sync - The emerging science of spontaneous order - Steven Strogatz

Also love the following books:

Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman (non-fiction / fiction)
The German Lesson - Sigfried Lentz (fiction)
Anything by Samuel Becket or Jean Ionesco or Bertholt Brecht (drama)
The Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell
The World Without Us - Alan Weisman (what if we all disappeared from earth, what would happen to this planet...fantastic book!)
Field Notes from a Catastrophe - Elizabeth Kolbert (non-fiction, great book on climate change)
The Weather Makers - Tim Flannery (non-fiction, climate-change)

I also have a weakness for detective novels, which replace TV for me.

I have this list of people I carry in my mind with whom, if I could, would like to have a beer with. Obviously this isn't realistic, since some of them are already dead. But, nonetheless, they intrigue me for one reason or another and would love to hear them speak. Many of them are not artists and even those who are, don't necessarily make art I like. It's more their thinking that I find interesting:

Agnes Denes - her drawings on thoughts and equating the evolution of thoughts to the ways crystals grow.
Matthew Ritchie - the way he uses his paintings and writings to construct a cosmology that infuses religion, science and fiction
Bill Viola - the guy is just so damn articulate about life and it's a pleasure to hear him talk
Johannes Kepler - famous mathematician and devout believer in God. His spherical model of the universe is unbelievably beautiful!
Leonardo Da Vinci - I want to sit next to a river with him and have him explain to me the turbulence of water.

On Tuesday, I will bring you both copies of Steve Reich music as well as the article I mentioned by Peter Galison called "Data Scatter into Images, Images Scatter into Data". I'll also set up some stuff in my studio area for folks to look at - notebooks, sculptures, things in progress.

See you Tuesday,

Nathalie