MICHAEL LIGHT
[PHOTOGRAPHER]

IN CONVERSATION WITH LAWRENCE WESCHLER
 

“IT WAS A SOFT, WARM SUMMER JULY NIGHT, AND THE ABSURD PLEASURE OF FLOATING OVER THE LARGEST AGGLOMERATION OF TWINKLING HUMAN TRIUMPH AND CALAMITY EVER WITNESSED TOOK OVER.”
The primary components of Los Angeles:
Light
Space

Michael Light is a San Francisco–based artist and bookmaker whose work, by turns fiercely political and achingly rhapsodic, and not infrequently both at once, has come to focus, with gathering power and lucidity, on the rapture and the rupture that are man’s trace on the land.

Read the entire interview here: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=interview_light_weschler

LENA HERZOG
[PHOTOGRAPHER]

“ONE THING THAT I ALWAYS WAS AFRAID TO DO IS SORT OF NICE WORK. I DON’T WANT TO DO NICE WORK.”
Things coming to Europe from America, circa 1500:
Purple parrot feathers
Moose antlers
Sacrificial urns
Tropical butterflies
Dinosaur bones considered to be the bones of giants

Back in 1594, in the very heart of the period we will be considering in the pages that follow, Sir Francis Bacon, while prescribing the essential apparatus for “a compleat and consummate Gentleman” in his Gesta Grayorum, suggested that in attempting to achieve “within a small compass a model of the universal made private,” any such would-be magus would almost certainly want to compile “a goodly huge Cabinet, wherein whatsoever the Hand of Man by exquisite Art or Engine, hath made rare in Stuff, Form, or Motion, whatsoever Singularity, Chance and the shuffle of things hath produced, whatsoever Nature hath wrought in things that want Life, and may be kept, shall be sorted and included.”

Read the entire interview here: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201106/?read=interview_herzog

MARGARET AND CHRISTINE WERTHEIM
[THE INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING]

“IT REALLY DID SEEM LIKE A CRAZY CONSTRUCT.”
Helpful things to have in order to crochet a coral reef:
Knowledge of non-euclidean geometry
Interest in embodied forms of reasoning
A global sewing bee of serious science communication

The one came out of the sciences, the other out of the arts, although that’s probably the wrong way to put it, since they both came out of the same mother in the same place on the same day—identical twins, Australia in the late fifties: Margaret and Christine Wertheim—such that their subsequent divergence (physics and painting, respectively) may never have been as wide as it seemed, and their coming back together years later, in their adopted hometown of Los Angeles, to found the marvelously inspired Institute For Figuring (IFF), may never have been all that unlikely a prospect. The Institute, at any rate, is one of those heterodox polymath L.A. wonders—close sibling of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Farmlab and Beyond Baroque—a center, in its instance, for the identification, elaboration, and celebration of all manner of delicious affinities between the sciences, mathematics, and the arts, disciplines that, to hear these twins tell it (in their vividly infectious and enthusiastic manner), may themselves also be well-nigh identical under the skin.

Read the entire interview here: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201102/?read=interview_wertheim