Did you know that Bowhead whales can live for up to 200 years? The scholarship suggests that these sweet little (massive) creatures, covered in over a foot thick of blubber who swim around in the iciest water of the Arctic can be over sixteen feet long, and spend their time snacking on crustaceans (hundreds of thousands of pounds of crustaceans).
I didn’t know about Bowhead whales in any detail before now, and it feels like I’ve stumbled upon a new prism ray of divine creation.
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I’ve been working on a write-up on Art Directors, and one of my featured art directors wanted to have her photo taken at the MIT art museum. She had texted me the link to In Concert: Ganson & Cavatorta, and I confessed to her I’ve never been to an art museum hosted by a technology and engineering institute1.
Before I bore you to death, take a look at this engineering masterpiece by Andy Cavatorta of his Bowhead whale:
When you walk into the space, you are surrounded by the sound of this machine-whale.
He describes his masterpiece like this: “It's hard to talk about whales without talking about their extinction. So I'm making some references to Hildegard Von Bingen’s visions of the end times, and also the Biblical story of the Leviathan, the unimaginably huge chaos monster that lives in the deep sea, who God slays and feeds to the righteous at the end of days. Also, the song comes from a sort of AI and HvB wrote a lot about the inner light and life within seemingly inanimate things.”
The whale art did make a song, it’s mechanisms churning out the sound like a sad cry. AI and Hildegard Von Bingen, together.
There was something about seeing the wood and metal hum in oiled harmony, along with the dim light casting shadows on the spindles, textured like vertebrae, that brought the experience of a Bowhead whale a little closer to a lived experience.
A sad song of a fleshy whale made real in the MIT museum.
I really appreciated it.
The end.
So here it is: a recantation of my former dislike for stuffy engineers with no scope for the imagination. The good ones do exist!