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Infrastructure Day
30 September 2014
Sooner or later it just happens. For no reason whatsoever. Your pipes break. Your roof leaks. Your router balks. Your clutch slips. Your hard disk fails. Your lens won't focus. And you realize how reliable your infrastructure has been. Until now, of course.
Untitled. Nobody can resist touching Deborah Butterfield's bronze horse sculpture.
So you spend some time taking things apart and putting them back together again so you won't have to think about them for another decade or two. Maybe you even improve things. If you know what you're doing, anyway.
We're having that kind of day today. This week, in fact. But we're getting back on track today. Enjoying our latest site revisions as we fortify our local network.
As we polished up our infrastructure, we remembered Deborah Butterfield's Untitled of 1999, a sculpture of a horse, which has been grazing in the Cantor Center's lobby at Stanford University thanks to a loan by Burt and Deedee McMurtry.
It looks like driftwood. You are convinced, as you admire it, that you could lift the whole thing up with nothing more than a single finger.
There is a sign asking visitors not to touch the artwork but, mesmerized by the horse's wooden infrastructure, nobody sees the sign. And the poor sculpture is tucked in a corner behind the guard desk so the guard can't see what anyone is doing. The horse, of course, can't complain.
Sooner or later it just happens. Someone touches the marvelous assembly of "driftwood" the draws a horse in thin air and feels, instead, the cold bronze of intention behind each piece.
Now that's infrastructure. May you build yours of such sturdy stuff that when the fates try to touch it, they realize how foolish they have been!
Now back to work.