Sunday night – heading to NM

Our Uber arrived at about 5:30AM to get us to ORD for our flight toe Albuquerque. We’re on our way to see Max and Becky

Flight was smooth and made even smoother by watching the big leboskie again for the zillionth time. Ever time I watch it, I pick up more things !

Max and Becky picked us u at ABQ and we took the scenic route back to Santa Fe.. Much nicer than driving 25. We actually got to make a drop-by pilgrimage to “Bajo Bob’s” .. a company max knows well, biut has never seen/

We stopped at Madrid (rhymes with “bad kid”) for a great lunh and look around. We’ve been doing some reading on Madrid and its a very interesting place.. It used to be a booming coal town.. with more people than Albuquerque at one point in the 19th century. The place was aa company town until the 1950’s (i think).. at one point everyone who lived there had free electricity .. Employees were required to buy a christmas tree from the comany and light it u with electric lights. It was such a bog deal that folks came from far and wide to see the christmas lights.. THe airline TWA even altered their flight paths to allow passengers to see the lights of Madrid from the sky.
Today its pretty much a ghost town except the small strip along the highway that bisects the town. Thats filled with art galleries and funky gift shops .The mine tunnels and machinery are still visible all around. We had lunch and the old mine resturant that we’ve been to before.. it’s supposed to be the most haunted lace in Madrid !

The other thing in town is a dispencery wheir Max and Becky and our freind Chad works. It was a fun paying a surprise visit to chad. !

From there it was a retty short ride to Max and Beckys.. The lace is looking great.. they’re working on adding a new bathroom in a part of the house that used to be storage. These two cdo it all themseleves..
.. and they can do *anything* !

We said hi to our grandog Violet and our grandchickes (?)

Max showed us a new tintype a freind had made of him in exchange for soem technical work.. I love this picture !

Afyter getting settled, we walked over to the railyard to see an exhibit of interactive art called ‘currents’. it was the last day.. so I’m glad we caught it.. Super interesting stuff. Lots of AI art.. but several simple mechanical builds too.. they were my fav’s ..

like this very cool zooetrope of candy

A synthesizer that converts geiger counter clicks into music. >The clicks are made in response oto the radioactive decay of a piece of trinitite (fused glass from the first A bomb from the manhattan project)

I liked many of the projects.. this one is a woman whos constantly changin parts were displayed on small screens

Or this that visualized physically all the moves of the famous deep blue chess programs game that defeated chess champion GaryKkasparov

And a bunch of other stuff: electronic collidescope, AI interpretation of the perfect female face – (which appears to be angry most of the time in the full width of the web ). , a cool round screen cat , a high xncept projection peice and a display of plant s whose vascular structure had been replaced with glassy silica

One of my favorite peieces was totally low tech.. it was a collection of bent threaded rods with washers on them … you were invited to spin the device and watch and listten to the washers as they fell

I also likeed this high concept peice of a boat skeleton in the sky.. it reminded me of an art proposal that several of us made to Electric Forest that didnt get selected