Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Today I went with a handful of friends to the Somerville Open Studios; we went to the Fort Point ones last fall. In both cases, we got to meet and talk to artists while looking at their work and workspace (which is also usually their home), but in Fort Point, most of the studios were subsidized spaces in dedicated artists’ collective buildings, while in Somerville, a lot of the artspaces were run out of people’s apartments or garages, and there seemed to be a lot more side project work from people who aren’t necessarily professionals. This was pretty neat! I felt like in addition to seeing art, we were seeing a lot of the Somerville community (and Somerville geography — I’m still tired from walking all afternoon around parts of the city I didn’t know existed) of ordinary artistic people. Jesse said at one point that he thought the anthropological aspects of going into these people’s homes and workspaces was almost more interesting than the art.

Of course, the art was interesting too. There were a lot of cool things, but a few favorites: a Moomers-esque apartment where we chatted with the guy who makes crazy robot sculptures from repurposed metal, and a couple of guys in a garage, one of whom paints realistic images of suburban scenes, and the other of whom paints surrealistic images of an astronaut moving in a world that’s a cross between the familiar and the futuristic, exploring our relationships to prior generations’ notion of the future (more at his website, astronautdinosaur.com(!!)).

I’d never heard of open studios before last fall, but it seems like a pretty sweet idea. People from the community can see what is going on in the local art scene and learn more about the art process through talking to artists and seeing their workspaces; artists can get exposure, show off their stuff, connect with each other, and sell pieces.

I understand (sort of — it’s still frustrating) when motorists think they have the exclusive right to the road (hint: legally, NO) and honk/yell at bicyclists going slower-than-car-speed in front of them. But when a public bus honks at me to get out of the way when I’m riding down Mass Ave, exercising my rights as vehicular traffic — well, I’d have hoped the MBTA would train their drivers more thoroughly in the rules of the road.

I never got very far with Gravity’s Rainbow last fall, but I think that was in large part because it’s too bulky to toss in my purse when I go to work — this year, I started reading while riding/waiting for the T, and apparently I spend a fair amount of time doing that, as I’ve finished two books recently with very little time spent reading in non T-related settings:

The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell

This was a Christmas present from my parents; the author is an animal behaviorist who addresses human misconceptions about canines from a perspective that is part hard science, part personal experience. She contrasts canine and primate behavior: e.g., primates love hugging, while canines find it kind of weird; loud primates get high social status, while canines don’t really respect loudness; etc. I was pleased to take some of this information to my dog job, where I practiced not looking dogs in the eye in order to appear non-threatening. (Successful.)

The Mind’s I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

This was a Christmas present from my favorite philosopher of science; it’s a collection of stories, essays, etc. that are primarily thought experiments on the nature of “selfdom” or “mind” (including, e.g., the paper in which Turing proposes the Turing test, some science fiction about robots and putting minds in new bodies, Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” counter to Turing’s arguments), each followed by “reflections” by the editors. I read my first Richard Dawking in this book, and found his analysis of living organisms as “survival machines” for genes compellingly reductionist (I always have a weakness for reductionist arguments). The editors advocate a more-or-less materialist view of the mind, including some fairly convincing arguments against mind-brain dualism; essentially, their position (counter to the position of some of the essayists) is that consciousness comes from a system behaving in the way that a brain behaves. And also, I suppose, minds are tricky, tricky things that no one really understands, but they’re probably just made of neurons and not some amaterial “soul”.