ERIC WENNINGER

Tag: art

Recycled Hope

February 24, 2025

Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the Monkey Bar

At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.

Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.

We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.

In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).

Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?

Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.

Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:

All these strangers
Passing by me
But we choose not to see,
Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be)
Oh, we choose not to see

There is always hope,
There is always hope.
There is always hope (I wanna be)
A swinger in the trees

There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Branching Realities

December 13, 2024

A Purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum – Image via The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Last week’s newsletter was about branching realities.

It started out like this:

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.

In addition to his work on circle visualizations, Manuel Lima has also worked with branching. In The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, Lima documents the use of tree diagrams from throughout history to categorize a wide variety of information:

I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.

I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:

Angie’s notes

As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.

Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.

The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.

Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:

Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).

You can read the whole newsletter here.