Bruce Taylor's RASI Poem from 2011

[David Pantalony]

"Holdings"
a poem by the Bruce Taylor 
Poet Laureate for Reading Artifacts Summer Institute (RASI) 2011.
Delivered on August 19, the final morning of RASI 2011.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/100537355/Holdings-by-Bruce-Taylor

Bruce Taylor  is a two-time winner of the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. He has published four books of poetry: Getting On with the Era (1987), Cold Rubber Feet (1989), Facts (1998), and No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems (Cormorant Books, 2011). Bruce has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Toronto. He has been a teacher, a puppeteer, and a freelance journalist with an active interest in science, microscopy and classification. He lives in Wakefield, Quebec. 

[Richard L. Kremer]

What a splendid poem, David!  You should have Taylor publish it in the Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society … or as the frontispiece of the new e-Rittenhouse.

Best, R

[Dag Spicer]

Just heart about an amazing (underground!) museum in the foothills of Calgary: The Canadian Museum of Making.

Check it out: http://www3.museumofmaking.org/dbtw-wpd/machine_video.htm

Dag

--
Dag Spicer |  Senior Curator |  Computer History Museum
Editorial Board  |  Annals of the History of Computing
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. |  Mountain View CA  94043
Tel: +1 650 810 1035    |  Fax: +1 650 810 1055

Twitter: @ComputerHistory
FB: facebook.com/computerhistory

Technology married with the humanities makes our hearts sing.  -- Steve Jobs

 

[Graham Larkin]

Thanks Dag, those Museum of Making videos are a true inspiration.

I'm a Reading Artifacts alum from 2009, when I joined the workshop as a student and also gave a tour of the Narional Gallery in my capacity as Curator of International (formerly European & American) Art. Alas, that job was one of the 40 positions that have been abolished since 2008. The CSTM has lost 17 positions, and Library & Archives Canada is being even more extensively gutted, making the Musum of Making all the more crucial and inspiring.

As it happens I lived in Mountain View for a couple of years (2003-5) while teaching art history at Stanford. I never did make it to the computing Museum, though at the CSTM I did choose to work on a PDP-8. My hands appear in a few of these photos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdp-8/sets/72157622043171361

The PDP-8 was made in 1965, the year my father F. Michael Larkin began working in computer imaging at Culham Lab in Berkshire, England. You might be interested in this film he made two years later, when I was one year old

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaHqzQtaVmM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

explaining the laborious process of making computer animations in the days before video. 

As you can see I have added extensive explanation in the notes to that video. The sound seems not to work on the internal speakers for my iPhone, so if you watch it make sure you have a device it will play on!

Best wishes,

Graham Larkin

Ottawa

[Dag Spicer]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for the cool links... I really enjoyed the British film--very evocative of the era and how things were done.

Best wishes,

Dag