The Art of Obsession

Saturday, May 17, 14
- The ﬁrst time I saw Harry Smith was in this photograph
- My friend Stinky had a copy of an Allen Ginsberg photography book, we were teenagers
- He was totally precocious and had tons of shit we didn't understand
- The caption is great - “Harry Smith, painter, architect, anthropologist, ﬁlmmaker & hermetic
alchemist, his last week at Breslin Hotel Manhattan January 12 1985, transforming milk into
milk"
- I had to know - who the hell was this guy?

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- Here’s a picture of Smith when he was younger
- It was pretty hard for me to ﬁnd stuff out about him at that point, but I did eventually
- He was all of the things Ginsberg wrote and more - a trained anthropologist, a linguist, a
translator, a painter, and perhaps most of all, a collector
- An obsessive collector

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“Harry Smith liked to look for keys
to the universal patterns that shape
our cultures and the hidden realms
of the human unconscious.”
- This quote and many of the images in this presentation come from the work of the Getty
Research Institute, a part of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

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“He compared patterns in native American
music with the eccentric rhythms of jazz;
the patterns in Seminole patchwork with
those on Ukrainian Easter eggs; the
intricate diagrams of master occultists
with the ambient rhythms of the sounds of
New York street life...”

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“...and somehow assembled from these
a harmonic web of cosmographic ideas,
employing all the investigative rigor of
his early anthropological training”

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A Collector
- As I said, Smith was a collector
- Here are some of the things that he collected

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Sounds
- He is perhaps most famous for his collection of sounds
- He was an seasoned Ethnomusicologist
- Also an avid recorder of every day life - the sounds from Ginsberg’s window

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- 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music
- Smith collected 84 songs from the mid 20s to the early 30s
- Inspired a lot of people, a generation of folk singers and beyond

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- Joan Baez

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- This guy, Bob Dylan

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- And a lesser known but equally brilliant artist named John Fahey
- He also released some other work with the Smithsonian

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“In 1964, Harry Smith was held for a
week in the Anadarko, Oklahoma, jail
on suspicion of stealing guns, and
there he met several Kiowa Indians
who introduced him to peyote rituals
and songs of the Native American
Church.”
- From the notes of another major release I’d like to point out
- Just to show what an amazing life Smith had

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“In 1973, Smith returned to Anadarko
to record. He decided to set up his
equipment in singers’ homes or his
hotel room, rather than at an actual
ceremony, because the Kiowa often
sang the songs in casual settings; he
also would be able to record
commentary.”

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- Kiowa Peyote Meeting
- A collection of recordings made in Oklahoma of the Peyote rituals of the Kiowa tribe
- Shows the range of his interests

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Egg Shells On
Toilet Paper Rols
- He also collected more...esoteric things
- Like egg shells on toilet paper rolls

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Gourds
- And Gourds

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Tarot Decks
- Tarot decks

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- All of these photos are from the Getty Institute’s collection of Smith’s belongings

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Paper Airplanes
- Paper airplanes were one of Smith’s many obsessions
- He had a huge collection of found Paper Airplanes
- Each was annotated with the location and time he found it
- The collection was donated to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum
- They hold fascinating cultural meaning

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Paper airplane made from “Many Smokes and Spring Seasonings” by artist Martin Carey,
published by the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, 1967.
Harry Smith papers. The Getty Research Institute, 2013.M.4, box 286

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Paper airplane made from from a ﬂyer for “The Event from the Cafe Au Go-Go” published by
Verve Folkways and the Inﬁnite Poster, Inc., 1967.

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Paper airplane made from “Demonstrate Against the War,” published by the Vietnam Peace
Parade Committee, 1967.

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Paper airplane made from an Empire State Building informational sheet, 1968.

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Paper airplane made from a menu inscribed “X-celsior” from Max’s Kansas City, about 1978.

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Paper airplane made from a connect-the-dots page titled “Oh! How I Wish I Could Fly,”
unknown publisher, about 1982.

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String Figures
- Smith was also deeply interested with string games and string ﬁgures

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- Here’s a photo of Harry with a String ﬁgure
- Photo Jon Palmer, Harry Smith Archives.

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- A page from Smith’s unpublished manuscript on string ﬁgures

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- More string ﬁgures from Smith’s book

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- Cabinet gallery exhibition in Brooklyn, 2012

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Images
- An extraordinary ﬁlmmaker
- “Collected” images, in a way, to produce his ﬁlms

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Still from Film #18, Mahagonny
Harry Smith (American, 1923–1991)
1970–80 (restored 2002)
35mm, color, sound, 141 min.
The Getty Research Institute

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& etc...
- He also collected many more things. Here are a few...

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Books

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Pop-up Books

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Beaded costumes

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Things shaped like other things

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(spoons shaped like ducks,
banks shaped like apples,
anything shaped
like a hamburger)
- For example
- So in other words

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Harry Everett Smith was a
master of obsession
- Which is why I jumped right in to telling you his story
- Maybe a little bit too much so

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This talk is called
“The Art of Obsession”

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The Art of Obsession
Michael R. Bernstein
!!Con, New York City
18 May, 2014
- Here’s the requisite proper title slide
- Thanks for having me, it’s an honor
- It’s my ﬁrst Keynote talk...
- Anyway, back to the subject

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Why?
- Why did I tell you about Smith?
- Because I’m interested in the following questions, and I wanted an excuse to ask them to
you

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What can we learn from
Harry Smith’s techniques?
- He found satisfaction in knowledge in the intersection between his interests
- Artifacts were a means to an end
- Paper airplanes were interesting because of the stories they told as a whole, their shapes
formed a language
- Paintings, songs, things that looked like other things - they all could communicate ideas

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How can we master
“The Art of Obsession?”
- And why do we want to?
- To me it’s summed up by this quote that we saw

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“Harry Smith liked to look for keys
to the universal patterns that shape
our cultures and the hidden realms
of the human unconscious.”

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Keys to Universal
Patterns
- The term that I liked the best from that description
- We can master the art of obsession by “looking for keys to the universal patterns”
- Universal patterns are composed of connections
- And I have a connection I’d like to share

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- String ﬁgures and knots were some of Smith’s favorite things
- He believed they held some secrets to universal human understanding
- Knot tying could be found in many cultures but not others
- Smith believed they worked similarly to how the human brain understood written letters and
numbers

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- Computer scientists and mathematicians are also interested in knots
- This is a ﬁgure from a book about term rewriting
- This complex un-knotting operation, composed of various prescribed “moves” has parallels
to program execution and term rewriting
- Imagine a complex term that can be normalized to a value
- This connection is deep and interesting
- They make me think that..

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Knots are Programs
- And they signal at what is interesting about computation
- Computation is more than “how computers work”
- Inﬂuences how we understand nature
- Inﬂuences how we live and communicate
- One of the deepest human achievements
- Which leads me to believe that

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Harry Smith
would have loved
Computer Science
- It has universal application
- Gets to the heart of many human problems
- Codes, languages, esoteric

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Get Obsessed
- And if he would give us advice, he would tell us to

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Obsession is crucial to
Interdisciplinary
thinking
- Because

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Interdisciplinary
thinking is crucial to
advancement

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So many possibilities
when it comes to
computers and
computer science
- So many starting points for exploration

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Compilers
- My favorite type of program recently
- So many different things going on

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Type Systems
- Getting to the heart of how we express programs

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Static Analysis
- Programs that analyze other programs!

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Logic Programming
- Solve problems you didn’t know you have!
- Shatter narrow paradigm worldviews!

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Distributed Systems
- We’re already distributed, it’s time to catch up

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PL Theory
- Languages are our interface to computation

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How?
- But how do we get and stay obsessed?
- How do we understand these subjects in a way that will lead us to ﬁnd these types of
connections?
- Here’s a little advice on my take

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mrb’s impractical
guide to “The Art of
Obsession”

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Follow the Links
- Look for inﬂuences and connections between resources and disciplines

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Open Your Eyes
- Be open to connections to your interests in unlikely places

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Pursue Discomfort
- Regularly consult texts and concepts that are challenging for you

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And Squash It
- And over time, watch them become understandable as you work hard to learn

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Trust Yourself
- Because you’re awesome!

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Contact Your Heroes
- Because they want to teach and learn (typically)

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Forget What Is
Practical
- It’s important to pursue concepts past the point of simple applicability

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And Then
Remember It
- But it’s also awesome to ship. So do it!

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Be (at least a little)
More Like Harry
- In other words

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Thank You
michaelrbernste.in
@mrb_bk
- Thanks to the Getty Institute for their amazing support of Harry Smith’s legacy

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Works Cited
• Bender, Jan “Treasures from the Vault” http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/treasures-from-the-vault-
harry-smith-and-patterns-in-the-wind/
• Getty Archives “Collections” http://archives2.getty.edu:8082/xtf/view?docId=ead/2013.M.
4/2013.M.4.xml;chunk.id=ref8;brand=default
• Andrew Perchuk, Rani Singh, editors “Harry Smith: The Avant-garde in the American
Vernacular”
• Perloﬀ, Nancy “Harry Smith’s Archives and Collections Now at the Getty Research Institute”
http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/harry-smiths-archives-and-collections-now-at-the-getty-research-
institute/
• Notes for the Kiowa Peyote Ritual Release, Smithsonian Folkways http://
www.folkways.si.edu/kiowa-peyote-meeting/american-indian/music/album/smithsonian
• Exhibition Press Release for “Harry Smith: String Figures” http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/
smith_string_ﬁgures.php
• Terese, "Terese Lite," Excerpts from the book TERM REWRITING SYSTEMS. From the
Course Term Rewriting Systems at the Vrije Universiteit, fall 2006.

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The Art of Obsession

The Art of Obsession

Michael Bernstein

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