Bio

Born in New Jersey in 1961, The Starn Twins Doug and Mike moved to Brooklyn in the 1980s were they worked in the industrial neighborhood Red Hook. They worked with silver gelatin papers and toning and bleaching methods. They then started work on the series Attracted to Light which moved them into the new century and new technology.

They are most well known for their conceptual work with photography. The themes they explore are chaos, interconnection and interdependence, time, and physics. Not only do they work with photography but also sculpture, architecture and site-specific projects.

http://www.starnstudio.com/media/pdf/DM%20Starn%20career%20narrative%202012.pdf

History of Cameras and Photography

Although the foundations of photography date back as far as the ancient Romans, the history of cameras starts in the seventeenth century. The history of photography revolves around innovative attempt to reproduce images, whether the attempts were successful or photographic dead ends.

Camera Obscura
The ancient history of photography can be traced back to a device known as the camera obscura. A camera obscura consists of either a dark room or box with a tiny hole at one end. With a small enough hole, an inverted image of what the hole faces appears enlarged on the opposite wall of the camera obscura.

The camera obscura’s ability to reproduce images would become the basis for camera lenses as photography technology advanced. With the advent of the camera obscura, the combination of light and chemical processing also entered the realm of photography. At this point, the history of modern photography and cameras began.

A Brief History of Cameras
French inventor Nicephore Niepce produced the first permanent image in the history of photography. Niepce used a camera obscura and paper coated with photosensitive chemicals. The exposure time necessary to capture this historic first image was a staggering eight hours.

Daguerreotype and Calotype Cameras
In 1829, Niepce partnered up with Louis Daguerre. After Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre continued the research he and Niepce had begun. Through his continued efforts, Daguerre succeeded in reducing exposure time to a mere half hour. He also discovered that immersing images in salt would render the image permanent. Daguerre named his re-invention of the camera obscura the Daguerreotype and sold the rights to the French government in 1839.

“Daguerreomania” exploded in Europe and the U.S, where permanent images on glass and metal became popular. However, while reproducing images with the daguerreotype was popular, this new model could make only one image and not multiple copies.

Even as daguerreotypes became popular, the next step in the history of cameras was already underway. In 1835, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot created the first paper negative. Nine years later in 1844, Talbot patented the Calotype. Although the Daguerreotype produced better quality images than the Calotype, Talbot’s invention could produce multiple copies from a single negative.

Talbot is also credited with publishing the first photo collection in the history of photography. In 1844, he published a collection of photographs entitled The Pencil of Nature.

The Next Step in the History of Cameras
Because the exposure times for both the Daguerreotype and Calotype were long, faster exposure times were the next step in the history of cameras. This became a reality with Frederick Scott Archer’s Collodion photographs in 1851. The Collodion process reduced exposure time to a mere three seconds.

To reduce exposure times, Collodion pictures were processed while the photographic plate was still wet. As a result, large amounts of developing equipment had to be available on location. Dry plate processing wasn’t available until 1871.

Between 1851 and 1871 a number of events occurred in the history of photography:

• 1861: James Clerk-Maxwell creates the first color photography system, using black and white photographs with red, green and blue filters.
• 1861 to 1865: Mathew Brady and his photography staff cover the American Civil war.
• 1877: Edward Muybridge’s pictures of a galloping horse prove that during gallop a horse’s four hooves leave the ground at once. Much money changes hands among San Francisco’s wealthy, who had bet on the outcome.

Dry Plates and Box Cameras
In 1871, Richard Maddox discovered gelatin could be used instead of glass for photographic plates. This step not only allowed for faster development but also paved the way for mass-produced film.

George Eastman took the process further and introduced flexible film in 1884. In 1888, Eastman introduced the box camera, the first product in the history of cameras available to the general public.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, photography technology has evolved at a rapid pace. The following are some landmark developments in photography during the 20th century:

• 1907: The first commercial color film is developed.
• 1936: Kodachrome, multi-layered color film, is developed.
• 1937: Photojournalism becomes an important part of reporting WWII news.

The Future of Cameras
The history of cameras and photography is ongoing with new innovations appearing regularly. With the digital camera, amateur and photographer can now take multiple pictures and view them almost instantly. Even underwater cameras are now affordable options for the general public.

Innovation and necessity have driven the history of photography and cameras. With the vast knowledge of photographic techniques available today, further innovations can be expected in the future.

http://www.photography.com/articles/history/history-of-photography/

Bamboo

General Uses For Bamboo

Bamboo has been used for eons for many applications, from a food source to a building material. But with the age of modern materials, many people don’t understand the scope of uses for bamboo. The shoots can be picked early for eating, and the wood of older canes can be treated and used as anything from decoration to instruments. Thankfully, many manufacturers have seen all the products that can be made from this highly renewable resource and have begun to utilize bamboo in some fascinating ways.

Decorations

From picture frames to room dividing screens, bamboo can make some elegant and exotic decorations for the home. Depending on the manufacturer, bamboo decorations can be the rough finish of natural bamboo that reminds people of tropical getaways, or the sleek, lacquered finish that creates a modern elegance that many people remember. Bamboo can also be colored so that it can fit into any décor.

Building materials

More and more furniture, flooring, and even homes are being built with bamboo. Whether people like the look of the bamboo, or the way it holds up, it is becoming a more popular building material that many people are recognizing. The smooth floors hold up well in kitchens and other rooms, and the furniture, bound attractively with rattan or leather, gives any room a modern look.

Fabrics and clothing

A fabulous trend right now is bamboo fibers being used in fabrics and clothing. Bedding made of bamboo fibers is as soft as or softer than most cotton beddings, and drapes with the look of silk without the expense. It is becoming a mainstream trend to have bamboo fabric products or clothing, populating many major chain retail stores.

Cooking

Cooking with bamboo is nothing new in Asian culture. Bamboo shoots are a common food in that part of the world, and have also migrated into cooking utensils. Bamboo cutting boards are notoriously good for not dulling blades on knives as quickly, while bamboo utensils like wooden spoons are excellent for not scratching the bottoms of expensive non-stick cookware.

Agriculture

Bamboo started out as a natural plant in most places, but has become a large part of agriculture. From being the main crop of a farm to be harvested for other uses, or as the channel linings for irrigation systems, bamboo fits naturally into agriculture. Of course, bamboo is also grown as a food source, and as a garden plant as well, the woody grass being an excellent addition to any garden.

Weapons

While this is rarely seen any more, bamboo was once used to make many different types of weapons. From blow guns to archery bows and arrows, bamboo made light but strong weapons for many centuries. Though they aren’t used as frequently any more, even gunpowder guns have been made with the hollow tubes.

Instruments

Hollow tubes make excellent instruments, whether it is a flute or a drum, and bamboo is one of the best bases for instruments. The light, durable quality of the bamboo is coupled with its musical potential, and creates some of the most beautiful sounds that music has ever heard.

Of course, these aren’t all the uses for bamboo. There are many other types of products that can be made of bamboo, and all are coming back into their own as bamboo continues to grow more popular in the main stream economy.”

From Bamboogrove.com

http://www.bamboogrove.com/general-uses-for-bamboo.html

The Whitney

As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection—arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.

Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik in 1982). Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing (with the San Jose Museum of Art) in order to increase access to its renowned collection.

Their Home Town, Abescon, NJ

Absecon City Government is comprised of a number of departments organized to most efficiently provide city services.

Because of its hometown flavor and the varied activities and lifestyles offered, our community remains unique in many ways. Absecon’s strength and vitality revolves around its citizens, who provide the foundation needed to make us a stronger and more binding community. In the same way, the rich tradition of our past will serve as a prelude to the shared excitement and pride that the future holds for all of us.

Abescon, NJ

Special Project

At the occasion of the 2008 Aspen Institute conference on
Tibetan Arts and Culture, Doug and Mike Starn were invited
by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Aspen, CO), to curate and
guide the stage design for His Holiness the Dalai Lama
teachings on Sunday July 26th.

The stage design refers to the Tibetan prayer flag tradition in which countless flags are hung out of doors, open to the winds, for the prayers to spread throughout the world. As the flags fade and degrade in the sun and elements, hope and good wishes are spread and renewed as new flags are hung alongside old ones, reminders of virtue, goodness, protection, and happiness, these flags express genuine heartfelt loving kindness.

Floating above His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) was a colorful cloud comprised of 2000 prayer flags handmade by local kids in a common prayer/wish for peace, love and understanding. This mass of flags is unlike a normal display of children’s art, in that the artworks are not meant to be seen individually. It is the interconnected whole, it’s the presence of all of the wonderful and beautiful thoughts and intentions joined together that makes the difference to the artwork/cloud; just as it is all the individual efforts together towards peace that surely make the difference to the world. It is the artists’ intention to not only build the kids up as individuals but to build their awareness that together, as members of society, they can make a difference.

Below the cloud is a snowfall of unique and individual snowflakes created by the kids. Cliché as it is, every real snowflake is a unique, beautiful, ephemeral, a minute and unlikely architecture, so delicate they are barely more than an idea. But in accumulation of staggering and immeasurable amounts create glaciers, leading to the realization that the improbable is possible when all come together.

The kid’s visions are underscored and intermixed with photomicrographs of the unique crystal formations of actual snowflakes photographed by the Starns. Each flake starts as a frozen molecule of H2O with six sides, they each grow differently simply because as they move around in the clouds collecting more frozen water vapor each one is occupying a different microscopic environment than every other burgeoning flake. The final shape of each snowflake is a record of its individual journey from the clouds, before it is eventually reabsorbed into the atmosphere—returning, once again, to the ideas of transmutation and regeneration and impermanence. In the Buddhist tradition and in the Starns’ world, art and science are not in argument; both seek to understand life and the nature of perception. Ultimately, what their work seeks to both personify and provoke is a state of mindfulness in which opposites such as light and dark, or same and different, are not held in a tense equilibrium but rather in dynamic counterpoise.

The Starns’ engagement with Buddhist principles takes many forms, both concrete and abstract. It is present in their photographs of the eighth-century Buddhist monk Ganjin, the archetypal blind seer; it flows through their images of trees and their discarded leaves, symbols of birth and rebirth; and it extends to their unique photographic treatments, in which the passage of time is built in and wholes are made up only by parts. A statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Chinese Buddhist deity of compassion and mercy, for instance, which employs an antique carbon color-printing technique to build an image from successive delicate and ripped layers of prints in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The frail colors shift and swim before the eyes and it is clear the full color is constructed from parts.

Twin brothers Doug and Mike Starn have always insisted on the collaborative nature of their art, a binocular vision that draws on the works of philosophy, art, history, and science. They are enthralled with “the coincidence of opposites,” a yin requiring a yang, and have used it as a springboard for their ontological investigations for more than 20 years. Chief among these is light, both metaphor and manifestation of knowledge. They choose the medium of photography to call attention to the instability of vision and the ephemerality of the moment. But in their search for light to record their images, the camera also becomes an instrument of awakening, a tool to show us the invisible light that describes the world to our eyes and constitutes our unique subjectivity.

 

Behind Your Eye

“…Vision doesn’t work like a camera, the mind is an interpreter of constantly fed information. Not just from your eyes, but also from all of your sensory inputs simultaneously, these are your interfaces to the world. Your mind decodes and understands the information based on a lifetime of constructions, memories, desires and learning…it is through all that that we ‘see’…” D+M S Behind Your Eye: An Installation by Doug and Mike Starn is the artists’ first large-scale project in New York in recent years. It will be shown in the Neuberger Museum of Art’s two largest galleries, a space of more than 10,000 square feet. Behind Your Eye coincides with the release of the publicationAttracted to Light, an exquisitely produced book of the Starns’ extensive conceptual portrait series of the moths’ nocturnal journey and the seeming gravitational force that light has over them. Forming the core of the exhibit are more than 60 images from these photographs: sulfur-toned silver prints on hand coated Thai mulberry paper (that mimic the “dusty” wings of the moths) and film-still lambda digital C-prints derived from footage shot for a project commissioned by the Bohen Foundation and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. The Neuberger Museum’s complete installation incorporates nearly 80 photographs, drawn from three of the Starns’ most recent series, 2 of their transparent illuminated manuscripts and a large-scale 2-channel video projection. Behind Your Eye is curated by Dede Young, Neuberger Museum of Art Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Mike and Doug Starn. “This exhibition presents an intimate look into the artists’ handmade books and their ongoing philosophical and metaphorical dialogues with life, bridging art to physics, biology and cognitive science. The work is based upon the artists’ research and intuitive reflections and interpretations of the transfer of knowledge through an elaborate personal lexicon of metaphors,” says Ms. Young. It will be on view from March 7 through August 8, 2004.

Structure of Thought #7 (walktrough) Behind Your Eye refers not only to the mind but also to visual perception, light and the metaphor of photosensitivity. In their work, the Starns incorporate images of neuronal synaptic arbors overlapped and intertwined with dentritic tree branches, underscoring the connection of the internal and external worlds. The entrance of the Theater Gallery is a site-specific walkthrough Shoji screen (10 x 50-foot photo-collage), Structure of Thought 7. Sliding panels provide access to the exhibition arranged and lit as a study library displaying neuronal scroll tables, the preliminary hand-made books of a 2-volumedos à dos livre d’artiste, and 60 images of nocturnal moths from Attracted to Light, individually encased in lepidoptera-like specimen boxes dispersed on 33 desks. Floating on the far wall of the gallery, a multi-paneled digital video still (ATL Film Still 14, 10 x 30 feet: a constellation of moths, evanescent thresholds into the Starns’ “Gravity of Light” concept), the side gallery walls are flanked with digitally printed segmented leaves (Black Pulse—the discarded photosensitive heart and lungs of trees). In the adjacent gallery, on an ethereal transparent scrim is a large-scale dual-channel video projection, “Structure of Thought” (8 minutes), an approximation of the non-linear process and architecture of thought; a living dendritic accumulation of intersections and layers. “The structure of thought is not sequential. It is layers upon layers of ideas, all connected or able to connect. None of the ideas necessarily comes first; the connections are part of the whole. There is order to this confusion by the simple fact that they are connected. (…) We can’t see where all the limbs go but we know they are separate and connected, like capillaries in your body or in a leaf.” (Lange, 1975) The film renders the processing of information, overlapping layered images of branches and dendrites portraying layered conduits carrying the foundations of thought.

Nowhere to Fall (download video) The Starns have written, “The classical metaphor of light is knowledge and information. Trees are literally a recording of light, growing, through photosynthesis, towards the source. Trees are mostly carbon (and the allotrope of carbon most familiar is black). Black is, in the color spectrum, literally the absorption of all visible light. We use this symbolically in our silhouetted images of trees; in this understanding, we relate the black of body of the trees to the black of written information, the black ink on the pages of books through thousands of years of transcribed thought and creation. The Sun writes of its complex knowledge and describes itself, the trees as containers of comprehensive information and layered knowledge. The interconnectedness of trees-branches over branches into branches. Web, network, synapses, like dendritic neurons in the brain. The network of information and links. The pictogram nature of Chinese calligraphy is in relation to the silhouetted form of trees; the layered dendritic branches are in relation to the complexities of knowledge, understanding, memory and imagination. These trees are light written in the calligraphy of the sun.” Aside to this video are literally illuminated manuscripts; Gravity of Light and Behind My Eye, lit by fiber optic threads and electroluminescent technology bring within a faint light some of the Starns’ rough notes of their interrogations and observations on light, excerpts from Dante’s Paradiso, and reports from astronauts of their sensations in weightlessness, etc… Light is the basis of photography and of vision, it is for the Starns the most powerful force. The gravitational power and force of the sun, the source of light, and the physics of color juxtaposed with the control light has over their chosen subjects, has many coincidences and convergences of physical fact and metaphor. The Starns photograph these subjects and conceive printing techniques to elucidate their metaphors, mixing non-traditional silver printing techniques and hi-technology with digital manipulation. From their satellite-photographed images in the early ’90s, to the macroscopic and microscopic observations of the nature of moths, leaves and neurons, they offer a journey into relativity. Mike and Doug Starn, through their personal semiology, portray new models of the mind and its conception of itself in experiencing the world. “Light is more than enlightenment; it is the gravity of all our past experiences and our future, the conscious and unconscious, the external and internal factors that drive our lives. The pull of gravity that light has over the corporeal body of the moths is like breathing, like thinking, impossible to deny; involuntarily, moth’s wings bring them to the light.” (Demetrio Paparoni, “Tree of Life,” from Attracted to Light; powerHouse, 2003).

Absorption and Transmission

artists’ notes

Absorption + Transmission refers to leaves, trees and photographs absorbing light (and the absorbing of light being its opposite). In almost any culture in the history of the world, light is used as a metaphor for thought, knowledge, intelligence… With this metaphor as our foundation, we recognize that a tree grows toward light, and of course, it uses light in the process of photosynthesis, partly to remove carbon from the air, and important to our metaphor, carbon is the primary matter of the body of the tree. The carbon atom, in most states, is black. Besides black being the absence of light it, is also the complete absorption of light. In fact, in physics terminology, carbon is a “black body radiator”—perfectly absorbing and capable of perfectly emitting all wavelengths of light. Carbon for us is the representation of the absorption of light (figuratively thought and information). The black silhouette of the tree represents the absorbed light. The structure of thought is a living dendritic accumulation of intersections and layers.

We had been working on the series Structure of Thought for a couple of years, and the silhouetted trees already symbolized the layers and layers of sensory input, memories, emotion, imagination and ideas. For us, the dendritic and rhizomatic form presented broad dynamic fluid movement between points all connected or able to connect, so when we stumbled upon the same form in the image of a brain neuron we felt validated. The dendritic form gives the pathway for the complicated and the continually capable of changing connections in the transmission of impulses. And in a delightful coincidence, the way the living neurons are imaged is bioluminenesence (harvested from a jellyfish or firefly) is expressed into a single neuron and the neuron becomes illuminated (and a photomicrograph is taken of it)—the neuron absorbs the light.

–D+M Starn