This series of three "Fairs for Knowledge" aims to take learning out of the classroom and into unexpected venues, including a flea market, a restaurant, and a laundromat. Focusing on apparently minor topics that if treated correctly can in fact open up to a wide number of cultural and scientific disciplines, each fair will feature "stalls" where visitors can have short, spontaneous one-on-one conversations with leading experts in a given field. Aiming to create bridges between specialists and the general public, these fairs are designed to encourage an informal, social, and open mode of learning.

 

The themes for the fairs will be "Hair", "Clouds", and "Chicken", three overfamiliar and undertheorized objects of study that are perfectly situated to create a conversation that draws on social, literary, artistic, political, and economic sources.

The first event, on the topic of "Hair", took place on 30 January 2011at the Brooklyn Flea, with booths installed between vendors at the popular weekend market. This season’s Fair for Knowledge on “Clouds” will take place at Jo's restaurant, where diners can also order some food for thought—in the form of a conversation with scholar Lytle Shaw, historian Deborah Coen, essayist Pierre Pachet, computer scientist Luc Steels, essayist Ginger Strand or philosopher Carole Talon-Hugon—to be served at their table along with their meal.

 

• Deborah Coen will speak about the standardization of cloud classification in the early twentieth century. "How did such a varied and transient entity as the cloud become an object of scientific investigation? The standardization of cloud classification circa 1900 represents a remarkable negotiation between international scientific expertise and local common sense."

 

• Pierre Pachet will engage visitors in a discussion about the link between writing and clouds: "If I had created this world, there are two precious things I would have been totally unable to imagine: birds, and clouds. What I like about clouds is their shapelessness in motion. Those moving forms, made of thousands of airborne droplets of water, are now grey masses which surround you, now fleeting drawings. When I write, I would like my sentences and my ideas never to be totally fixed, but on the contrary still shifting so that the reader can feel the words’ desire to evolve, to correct themselves. Aiming for accuracy through such matter - not nebulous, but cloud-like."

 

• Lytle Shaw will analyze the influence of the development of cloud typologies on literature in the early nineteenth century.

 

• Computer scientist Luc Steels will focus on synthetic clouds: "I am involved in creating artificial structures with life-like properties, whether in computers or in collectives of robots. The topic of clouds conjures up many different images in my mind. One is how we can synthesize clouds of autonomous entities, such as clouds of flying birds in computer games or swarms of robots coordinating their activity without a central coordinator. This brings in the fascinating topic of self-organization and how spontaneous order may arise in systems whose elements have only local interactions but show nevertheless robust, flexible global behavior.  Another is cloud computing that is currently revolutionizing information technology infrastructure. Computation and information moves out of individual machines to an invisible for ever changing dynamic network of machines. What is going on here? Is this a good thing or are we putting the computational foundations of our society on shaky grounds?"

 

• Ginger Strand will give her thoughts on cloudseeding.

 

• Philosopher Carole Talon-Hugon will comment on the heavily clouded sky in Tintoretto’s "Saint’s Body Brought to Venice",  to underline the intrinsic power of forms and colors.