PINC Program in Sarasota Serves Up Plenty of Brain Food
From an effort to part the veil of quantum physics via fluid dynamics to a guided group whistle-along led by a world-champion whistler, the eclectic obsessions, idiosyncrasies and genius of keynote speakers from around the world dropped nine hours of brain food on a sold-out Sarasota Opera House on Thursday.
Alternately exhilarating, challenging and provocative, the marathon People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity (PINC) program, sponsored by Ringling College of Art and Design, compressed the skills and perspectives of 16 presentations into 20-minute blocks of entertainment. In bringing PINC to Sarasota for the second straight year, Ringling President Larry Thompson urged advocates of another acronym, STEM, to add Art to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics equation.
Art — in all its forms of inspiration — is the foundational stuff of STEM education, he told an audience of 450. “Creativity,” Thompson added, “is the new oil of the future.”
Indeed, oceanographer Chris Linder, M.I.T. mathematics professor John Bush, M.I.T. architecture professor, John Ochsendorf and BMW sound designer Emar Vegt easily made Thompson’s case in sharing their passions on stage with myriad right-brain types.
No doubt the riskiest impression was left by author/publisher Joost Elffers, who went into an often hysterical exposition about how Dutch people like to cut their cheese — but not for the obvious punchline.
The PINC concept of bringing world-class speakers to a single-day stage was founded in The Netherlands 16 years ago. Elffers, a graduate of the Art School in The Hague, had listeners howling Thursday morning as he described how Dutch tourists would drive 15 hours to Spain without stopping so they wouldn’t have to eat French cheese.
But he returned to the stage Thursday afternoon in blackface to explain a Dutch Christmas phenomenon known as Black Pete, who accompanies Santa Claus in contemporary parades. In the guise of Black Pete, Elffers went on to explain the symbolic legacy of The Netherlands’ role in shipping more than a million slaves to North America without bringing human bondage to its own shores. He predicted it would take another 10 years for his sometimes clueless compatriots to retire Black Pete to the museum.
Other speakers, like filmmaker Vicky Mohieddeen, actually celebrated controversy.
Labeled “Leni Riefenstahl” by some detractors, Mohieddeen has traveled to North Korea 20 times. Her mesmerizing 2014 time-lapsed short film about urban routines in the Hermit Kingdom, “Enter Pyongyang,” was suggestive of a caffeinated ant farm, but her access to North Korea has evoked plenty of anonymous vitriol on social media — which she showcased on screen — from those who call her a tool of the Kim dynasty.
Mohieddeen tries to have measured exchanges with critics, and reported at least one instance of mild success. “We didn’t change his mind,” she said, “but he did change his tone.”
A big surprise
From wire to wire, PINC Sarasota was a day of input overload.
In a test of his acute ear for car recognition, BMW’s Vegt was blindfolded and told to guess the identity of a Fiat 500 — which had been driven on stage earlier — by the sound of its door closing. Although he declined to guess its make, Vegt eliminated sports car, SUV, carbon fiber, stretch limo, high-class luxury car and American from the suspect list.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the 10-year-old Cloud Appreciation Society, waxed lyrical on the pleasures of “cloud-spotting,” and added that his identification of a new cloud category, asperatus, is set to become the first new classification entry by the World Meteorological Organization since 1951. Classical pianist Daria van den Bercken employed calligraphy and water to interpret Handel: “I can only make it sing if I surrender to the flow.”
Dirt was a theme for at least two speakers. Oceanographer Linder visually introduced the crowd to the ominous world of thawing permafrost, and physician/author Daphne Miller presented the diversity of microbial dirt in organic farming as an “accessory digestive system” containing immune-system benefits.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was filmmaker Samuel Orr’s ability to turn the outwardly grotesque explosion of 17-year cicada flourishes into an emotional encounter. And in a refreshing twist on the world of corporate sponsorships, Wiebe Wieling offered the Eleven Cities Ice Skating Tour in the Dutch province of Friesland.
That century-old tradition has only been held 15 times due to lack of ice, and hasn’t seen a run since 1997, when the ice was thick enough for its 120-mile run. When conditions are right, the entire province has 48 hours to mobilize residents, all volunteers, out into the streets to shovel snow off the route for competitors.
The Tour rejects commercial sponsors and can attract hundreds of thousands of visitors. When snow falls but without enough ice for the entire run, “the whole country is in distress,” Wieling said.