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In 2013 we were in Tenerife, to search for Euphorbie. There we found the name of von Humboldt for the first time and we started to think about his cartography apparat, his researches and measurements, which stand close to his aesthetic ideas. At the end of 2015, we started to work actively on this project. It starts from our personal diary, with our pictures and Humboldt-related experiences and memorabilia, and it goes further to the idea of measurement, representation of nature through technology and digital-shaped reality. This Tumblr is an on-going collection of the ideas, diary of the project and part of the project itself. Authors: Marco Furlani / Jonathan Gobbi

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Hunting shack for Landescape 2017, Palermo Botanical garden

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“I like to blend in (especially in federally designated Wilderness) because pristine views are a limited resource and I don't want to be "visual pollution" to someone else.

I guess I’m selfish that way.”

Marco posing as explorer. Different location.

The quote is from a blog about hiking and trekking, the discussion was about the color of the equipment (bright vs. dark).

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“[...] there is a world of things out there - rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world.”

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk.

In the picture, Marco recognizes his own profile in a mountain on his way back to his hometown Trento.

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Plants

Anthurium humboldtianum, a species of arum

Utricularia humboldtii, a large perennial carnivorous plant

Mammillaria humboldtii, a cactus species

Lilium humboldtii, Humboldt's lily

Russula humboldtii, a mushroom species

Quercus humboldtii, a South American oak

Myrmecophila humboldtii, an orchid species

Animals

Vesper bat (Humboldt's big-eared brown bat) (Histiotus humboldti)

Woolly monkey (Humboldt's woolly monkey) (Lagothrix lagotricha)

Squirrel monkey (Humboldt's squirrel monkey) (Saimiri sciureus cassiquiarensis)

Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti)

Humboldt's hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus humboldtii)

Golden-backed uakari (Cacajao melanocephalus)

Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas)

Amazon river dolphin subspecies (Inia geoffrensis humboldtiana)

Mountains

In USA:

Humboldt Mountains (Antarctica), Queen Maud Land

Humboldt Mountains (New Zealand), Otago

Pico Humboldt in Venezuela

Humboldt Peak (Colorado), USA

Humboldts of Nevada:

Humboldt Range

East Humboldts:

West Humboldt Range

East Humboldt Range

Humboldt Peak (Nevada)

Parks, forests, nature preserves

USA:

Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt in Cuba

California:

Nevada:

Buffalo, New York:

Humboldt Park (Chicago park)

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park, in Eureka

Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge

Humboldt Redwoods State Park

Humboldt Wildlife Management Area

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest

Humboldt Park, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Park

Humboldt Parkway, repurposed

Water and ice features

Oceanic:

On land:

Humboldt Glacier in Greenland

Pacific Basin:

Bays:

Humboldt Current or Peru Current of the Pacific

Humboldt Bay, California

Humboldt Bay, AKA Yos Sudarso Bay, New Guinea

Humboldt Falls, Fiordland, New Zealand

Humboldt River basin, Nevada, USA:

Humboldt River

Little Humboldt River

Humboldt Salt Marsh

Humboldt Sink

Lake Humboldt

Canada

Humboldt, Saskatchewan

Rural Municipality of Humboldt No. 370, Saskatchewan

Humboldt (electoral district), a former federal electoral district

Humboldt (provincial electoral district), a former Saskatchewan provincial electoral district

United States

Settled places:

Superordinate governmental units:

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Nevada

Humboldt City, Nevada, ruins of mining settlement

Dewey-Humboldt, Arizona

Humboldt City, California

Humboldt, Illinois

Humboldt, Iowa

Humboldt, Kansas

Humboldt, Nevada

Humboldt, Minnesota

Humboldt, Nebraska

Humboldt, Ohio

Humboldt, Portland, Oregon

Humboldt, South Dakota

Humboldt, Tennessee

In Wisconsin:

Humboldt, Wisconsin, town

Humboldt (community), Wisconsin, unincorporated community

Counties:

Humboldt Township (disambiguation)

Humboldt County, California

Humboldt County, Iowa

Humboldt County, Nevada

Other

Guevea de Humboldt, Oaxaca, Mexico

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Plants

Anthurium humboldtianum, a species of arum

Utricularia humboldtii, a large perennial carnivorous plant

Mammillaria humboldtii, a cactus species

Lilium humboldtii, Humboldt's lily

Russula humboldtii, a mushroom species

Quercus humboldtii, a South American oak

Myrmecophila humboldtii, an orchid species

Animals

Vesper bat (Humboldt's big-eared brown bat) (Histiotus humboldti)

Woolly monkey (Humboldt's woolly monkey) (Lagothrix lagotricha)

Squirrel monkey (Humboldt's squirrel monkey) (Saimiri sciureus cassiquiarensis)

Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti)

Humboldt's hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus humboldtii)

Golden-backed uakari (Cacajao melanocephalus)

Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas)

Amazon river dolphin subspecies (Inia geoffrensis humboldtiana)

Mountains

In USA:

Humboldt Mountains (Antarctica), Queen Maud Land

Humboldt Mountains (New Zealand), Otago

Pico Humboldt in Venezuela

Humboldt Peak (Colorado), USA

Humboldts of Nevada:

Humboldt Range

East Humboldts:

West Humboldt Range

East Humboldt Range

Humboldt Peak (Nevada)

Parks, forests, nature preserves

USA:

Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt in Cuba

California:

Nevada:

Buffalo, New York:

Humboldt Park (Chicago park)

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park, in Eureka

Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge

Humboldt Redwoods State Park

Humboldt Wildlife Management Area

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest

Humboldt Park, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Park

Humboldt Parkway, repurposed

Water and ice features

Oceanic:

On land:

Humboldt Glacier in Greenland

Pacific Basin:

Bays:

Humboldt Current or Peru Current of the Pacific

Humboldt Bay, California

Humboldt Bay, AKA Yos Sudarso Bay, New Guinea

Humboldt Falls, Fiordland, New Zealand

Humboldt River basin, Nevada, USA:

Humboldt River

Little Humboldt River

Humboldt Salt Marsh

Humboldt Sink

Lake Humboldt

Canada

Humboldt, Saskatchewan

Rural Municipality of Humboldt No. 370, Saskatchewan

Humboldt (electoral district), a former federal electoral district

Humboldt (provincial electoral district), a former Saskatchewan provincial electoral district

United States

Settled places:

Superordinate governmental units:

Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Nevada

Humboldt City, Nevada, ruins of mining settlement

Dewey-Humboldt, Arizona

Humboldt City, California

Humboldt, Illinois

Humboldt, Iowa

Humboldt, Kansas

Humboldt, Nevada

Humboldt, Minnesota

Humboldt, Nebraska

Humboldt, Ohio

Humboldt, Portland, Oregon

Humboldt, South Dakota

Humboldt, Tennessee

In Wisconsin:

Humboldt, Wisconsin, town

Humboldt (community), Wisconsin, unincorporated community

Counties:

Humboldt Township (disambiguation)

Humboldt County, California

Humboldt County, Iowa

Humboldt County, Nevada

Other

Guevea de Humboldt, Oaxaca, Mexico

...and a Döner House.

On September 14, 1869, the centenary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was commemorated in New York—a city Humboldt had never visited—with a parade, a torchlight procession, a proclamation by the mayor, a formal banquet, and the unveiling of a bronze bust in Central Park. The following day, theTimes devoted its entire front page to chronicling the festivities.[...]

But Humboldt was, by the time of his death, at the age of eighty-nine, already an anachronism—a generalist in a period of increasing specialization and a Romantic in the Victorian era. Those he influenced quickly went on to overshadow him. Just a few months after Humboldt’s funeral, in May, 1859, “On the Origin of Species” came out. It upended the Weltanschauung that Humboldt had promoted, and his books began to fall out of print. (When I went to the nearest college library in search of some of his thirty-odd published works, all I found on the shelves was a desiccated edition from 1853.) By the time the bicentennial of his birth rolled around, in the English-speaking world, at least, Humboldt had been nearly forgotten.

(from: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/humboldts-gift)

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“A flare star is a variable star that can undergo unpredictable dramatic increases in brightness for a few minutes. [...] the best-known flare star is UV Ceti, discovered in 1948. Today similar flare stars are classified as UV Ceti type variable stars (using the abbreviation UV) in variable star catalogs such as the General Catalogue of Variable Stars.”

“Luyten 726-8, also known as Gliese 65, is a binary star system that is one of Earth's nearest neighbors, at about 8.7 light years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Luyten 726-8B is also known under the variable star designation UV Ceti, being the archetype for the class of flare stars.”

“Cetus (/ˈsiːtəs/) is a constellation. Its name refers to Cetus, a sea monster in Greek mythology, although it is often called 'the whale' today. [...] Mira ("the Wonderful"), designated Omicron Ceti, was the first variable star to be discovered and the prototype of its class. Over a period of 332 days it reaches a maximum apparent magnitude of 3 - visible to the naked eye - and dips to a minimum magnitude of 10, invisible to the unaided eye. Its seeming appearance and disappearance gave it its common name, which means "the amazing one". Mira pulsates with a minimum size of 400 solar diameters and a maximum size of 500 solar diameters. [...] AA Ceti is an eclipsing variable star; the tertiary star passes in front of the primary and causes the system's apparent magnitude to decrease by 0.5 magnitudes.[3]UV Ceti is an unusual binary variable star. 8.7 light-years from Earth, the system consists of two red dwarfs. both of magnitude 13. One of the stars is a flare star, which are prone to sudden, random outbursts that last several minutes; these increase the pair's apparent brightness significantly - as high as magnitude 7.[2]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_star

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luyten_726-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetus

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The idea of “Dode” came first from the inherent geometry in Tiziano’s paintings, and more generally from the Platonic idealism, Luca Pacioli and Piero della Francesca.

The dodecahedron is a geometrical solid that frames the reality around us and, through this framing, it allows us to measure, understand, reduce (somehow) the reality in itself.

As an idealistic, regular shape, the dodecahedron contrasted the idea of selva oscura, as seen by von Humboldt once he arrived in South America.

Whilst the savages and their untamed environment were to be feared, destroyed or converted (into a Good Christian or English Garden) in the opinion of most of his contemporaries, von Humboldt was one of those who didn’t fear this uncanny, impossible-to-reduce nature. He knew the relations that bound nature all over the world, but he never tried to apply the rules of his german “Heimat” to the Amazonia.

Back to us, what happened to our dodecahedron?

As we started to work at this project, and the ideas began accumulating, we started also to fear the amount of different paths in front of us. We needed a frame, a regular shape inside of which we could work.

But we don’t like the idealization of nature (or reality, in general), we didn’t need a perfect form. We made an intervention on the regular dodecahedron, a sort of wormhole that deformed the structure. We called it “accelerated dodecahedron”. Dode.

In June 2016, we went to Brazil and we built our “Dode” there using woods, electric cables, plastic and other materials we found by chance on the street.

We tried to get as close as possible to the original structure designed for us by a Brazilian architect, with the aim to define the distance between the geometrical drawing and the real structure.

A series of pictures documents the intervention.

One of them was uploaded on Google Maps in the closest point possible to the real site of the intervention (the real site is not reachable in Google Maps).

https://goo.gl/maps/HabsJYF6c2A2

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„Wir konnten auf dem Gipfel des Pic die Farbe des azurnen Himmelsgewölbes nicht genug bewundern. Ihre Intensität im Zenit schien uns 410 des Cyanometers zu entsprechen“.

Alfred Gebauer, „Alexander von Humboldt – Seine Woche auf Teneriffa 1799“

A cyanometer (from cyan and -meter) is an instrument for measuring 'blueness', specifically the colour intensity of blue sky. It is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt.

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered the procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints.

The desire to present data in a way that emphasizes both its beauty and its interconnectedness goes far, far back—all the way to the beginning of the 19th century, when pioneering naturalist Alexander von Humboldt invented the "thematic map."

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“A flare star is a variable star that can undergo unpredictable dramatic increases in brightness for a few minutes. [...] the best-known flare star is UV Ceti, discovered in 1948. Today similar flare stars are classified as UV Ceti type variable stars (using the abbreviation UV) in variable star catalogs such as the General Catalogue of Variable Stars.”

“Luyten 726-8, also known as Gliese 65, is a binary star system that is one of Earth's nearest neighbors, at about 8.7 light years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Luyten 726-8B is also known under the variable star designation UV Ceti, being the archetype for the class of flare stars.”

“Cetus (/ˈsiːtəs/) is a constellation. Its name refers to Cetus, a sea monster in Greek mythology, although it is often called 'the whale' today. [...] Mira ("the Wonderful"), designated Omicron Ceti, was the first variable star to be discovered and the prototype of its class. Over a period of 332 days it reaches a maximum apparent magnitude of 3 - visible to the naked eye - and dips to a minimum magnitude of 10, invisible to the unaided eye. Its seeming appearance and disappearance gave it its common name, which means "the amazing one". Mira pulsates with a minimum size of 400 solar diameters and a maximum size of 500 solar diameters. [...] AA Ceti is an eclipsing variable star; the tertiary star passes in front of the primary and causes the system's apparent magnitude to decrease by 0.5 magnitudes.[3]UV Ceti is an unusual binary variable star. 8.7 light-years from Earth, the system consists of two red dwarfs. both of magnitude 13. One of the stars is a flare star, which are prone to sudden, random outbursts that last several minutes; these increase the pair's apparent brightness significantly - as high as magnitude 7.[2]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_star

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luyten_726-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetus

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http://mentalfloss.com/article/66479/parrot-kept-language-alive

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“[...]The large canvas, more than ten by five feet, and set in a massive frame, stood alone in a darkened room, with carefully controlled lighting and the walls draped in black.”

“Church did not doubt that his concern with scientific accuracy proceeded hand in hand with his drive to depict beauty and meaning in nature. his fait in this fruitful union stemmed from the views of his intellectual mentor Alexander von Humboldt, a great scientist who had ranked landscape painting among the three highest expressions of our love of nature.”

“In an age when most painters aspired to a European grand tour to set the course of their work and inspiration, Church followed a reverse route, taking is cue from Humboldt.”

“Church achieved primary recognition and respect as the most scientific of painters [...] But Humboldt realized that any fine canvas must be conceived and executed as an imaginative reconstruction , accurate in all details of geology and vegetation, but not a re-creation of a particular spot [...] None of Church’s great paintings represent particular places.”

“[...] I would go further and argue that this vision may now be even more important and relevant today than in the era of Humboldt and Church. For never before have we been surrounded with such a confusion, such a drive to narrow specialization, and such indifference to the striving for connection and integration that defines the best of in the humanist tradition. Artists dare not hold science in contempt, and scientists will work in a moral and aesthetic desert - a most dangerous place in our age of potentially instant destruction - without art. Yet integration becomes more more difficult to achieve than ever before, as jargons divide us and anti-intellectual movements sap our strength. Can we not still find inspiration in the integrative vision of Humboldt and Church?”

from Stephen Jay Gould, “Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes: Church Paints, Humboldt Dies, Darwin Writes, and nature Blinks in the Fateful Year of 1859″ in “I have Landed”, Vintage, Random House, 2003.

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http://www.agreementstozinedine.com/#/