Today's Topics:
sand painting
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Date: Tue, 21 May 91 11:00:34 edt
From: Eric Haines <eye!erich@uu.psi.com>
Message-Id: <9105211500.AA22621@juniper>
To: subgenius@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Subject: sand painting
> So, I assume you've all heard about the tibetan sand paintings
> going on in some museum in SF?
We just had a sand painting made here in Ithaca by the monks, too ("Dalai '92
- The Sand Painting Tour"). I love the fact that [according to the sheet
provided at the site] the very act of seeing the sand painting being made
would imprint upon your DNA that you'd been there so that you'd reincarnate
closer to Nirvana next time. There's a guarantee you usually just don't get
in Judeo-Christian traditions (though a friend once did get a dispensation
from the Pope himself [no lie] that said he did not have to stay in some
waiting room in heaven for processing (or something like that, it was never
entirely clear what the bureaucratic levels are before being judged by the
Angel Gabriel)).
> ...Where the monks have been working for weeks on the paintings,
> and, when they are done, the Dali Lama will bless the work, then
> the paintings will be taken to the sea, and will be blown away by the
> wind...
Each grain of sand is full of sacred goodness, and the sand painting is swept
up from the table into a container and then scattered. We thought of a great
ad campaign for Hoover vacuum cleaners, which we'll leave to the reader's
imagination.
> The paintings were due to be finished saturaday, at which
> point the Dali Lama would do his thing.
I think that's the "Dalai Lama". The "Dali Lama" puts ants, melted watches,
and sliced cow eyeballs in the vicinity, while someone else fills a bathtub
with brightly colored machine tools.
> Well, Barb just told me that, this afternoon (ten minutes
> before she got there to see them), some crazy woman leapt
> onto the structure on which the paintings were being done,
> and started to scream and dance, utterly destroying the
> work that had been done.
Glad to read that followup post that the monks were slackful. It took about
two weeks for the monks to make their sand-painting here, though they said
they could knock off the painting in four days if they worked uninterrupted -
according to them, it was an easy one.
The Cornell computer graphics department also got a fair bit of air time here,
as one of the monks made a three-dimensional model of a mandala over the span
of a year or so - the sand paintings are two dimensional "floorplans of the
gods", to simplify it a tad. The model was used to make a rather nice film
about mandalas. Oddly, no one here thought of shredding and scattering the
computer backup tapes of the model when it was done.
Eric
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End of Subgenius Digest
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