Ask A Genius 931: Italian Micromosaics in “Bloaty” Los Angeles
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did these mosaics start in Italy?
Rick Rosner: Yes, it started in the 1500s because the Pope noticed that tourists in the Vatican. All of their breath was fucking up the frescas. It was making the walls moist. The frescas were falling apart. He commissioned artisans to replace many frescas with very precise mosaics. Everyone has seen shitty mosaics, especially in America, that have a bunch of grout between the pieces of glass. An exemplary mosaic has no grout between the pieces of glass. It is glass to glass because the fitting of the pieces is super precise. Look at Jesus here; the gap between the pieces is no more than a millimetre in most places. In many places, it is close to zero. It is a good mosaic. It started in Italy. They developed an adhesive allowing olive oil and flour to dry for days or weeks. It works fine but dries up over a century. So, if it gets jarred, a micromosaic will often lose pieces, which is terrible for the mosaic but good for me because I can buy them cheaply and put them back together. So, I can buy stuff for much less than it is worth after you put it back in.
Jacobsen: This one is plastic.
Rosner: That one is plastic with pegs in it.
Jacobsen: The Samuel Jackson is also plastic.
Rosner: They are both made out of mini-stek tiles.
Jacobsen: A machine could do this, design it, in…
Rosner: …These sets, they also have them for legos. They come with software that lets you… That over a dog with legos. I bought it for $7. They uploaded a picture into the software. It gave them a Lego map of what colours to use and where. You could tell from that. It needed a little bit of goosing. In some artistic works, there is an ample black space right in the middle of it, which is both the dog’s nose and mouth. You get a general idea of what is happening, but you could improve it. With the Frida thing, mine was based on somebody else’s work, probably taking the most famous photo of Frida Kahlo and digitizing it into a mosaic. So, that guy probably used software. Then I took him and worked from it, generally, but also made artistic choices to make it more coherent visually. Like the roses, they read much more as roses than they did in the original because I understood. If there was a curve of a petal, even if the software doesn’t know, because the software doesn’t know shit, it is pre-AI. It doesn’t understand petals. It just understands the colour and tone of whatever square it looks at. I was able to complete the petals, but the software couldn’t. So, you can see the roses look a little bit more rosey. Ditto with, probably, some of the facial features. You could smooth out some of the shading.
Jacobsen: The horse example, it is more American, coarse.
Rosner: That was from a craft’s kit sold in the early 60s, when they were popular. It came from a kit that gave you a pattern. It is like a paint by numbers. It gave you glass of half-a-dozen different colours. It said, “Lay them out here.” I have seen another copy of that pattern on sale on eBay or somewhere, where this person was conscientious and artistic. They did a good job. I saw another one that was crappier. This one has nice aesthetics. It is primitive. But it has elegant curves to it. It feels visually satisfying. Burt Reynolds is a product of a hackneyed mosaic project, which lets homeless people and recovering drug addicts do art therapy by providing with the material to make mosaics and sell their works. This person is a fan of pop culture. I’ve seen other works by, maybe, the same person: Freddie Mercury, the evil stay puft marshmallow guy from Ghostbusters. The other difference between micro-mosaics and full-blown big mosaics is I get this one for $50, which is less a buck a square inch. A micromosaic runs 10, 12 bucks, just a regular one – not a fancy, nice one – per square inch. I have a pair of shoes, rolled paper, notebooks. One of the notebooks where I record how many times I have worked out in a day and how many sets I did.
Jacobsen: Do you calculate how much time you have spent at the gym?
Rosner: I know roughly. I can do 4 gyms in less than 75 minutes if things go well for them.
Jacobsen: Every day?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Since 1990…
Rosner: …I haven’t missed a day since 1991.
Jacobsen: How many days is that?
Rosner: 12,160-something.
Jacobsen: Times 75?
Rosner: Times 75 minutes?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: It would be 1.2 million times three-quarters, is 900,000 minutes.
Jacobsen: How many hours is that?
Rosner: Divide by 60, it is 15,000 hours.
Jacobsen: Which is how many days?
Rosner: A work year is 2,000 hours, so 15,000 hours is 7.5 work years.
Jacobsen: No sleep, constant?
Rosner: 15,000 hours divided 24 hours in a day is like 600-something solid days without sleep, just going 24-hours a day.
Jacobsen: Is this overall, this obsession, was worth it, in hindsight?
Rosner: It is ridiculous. It is wasteful. I am going from gym to gym. But, maybe, it has left me healthier than some parallel world version of me might be who doesn’t work out 5 times a day and does 100 sets a day.
Jacobsen: How many calories a day do you think you are burning a day, at your size?
Rosner: Under 140lbs at 5’10”.
Jacobsen: 1,500 a day baseline?
Rosner: Nah, probably, closer to 2,000.
Jacobsen: Basal metabolic, not with exercise.
Rosner: With the exercise, 2,000, 2,200, that a normal, beefy man who is 5’10”, 5’11”, 185lbs, not much exercise. That guy ats 3,200, 3,500 calories a day. I have got a nervous stomach. I’m sure I have a biome that makes me bloaty. So, if I eat too many carbs, my gut bacteria eat my carbs for me and make a bunch of gas. I get a stomach ache, or diarrhea.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 