WBEZ | tattoos

Mural restoration heartens Puerto Ricans

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:00:00 -0500

One of the country’s oldest outdoor murals covers a storefront on Chicago’s Northwest Side. People who care about the 40-year-old painting are finishing a facelift. The mural restoration is doing more than brightening up a gritty stretch of North Avenue. It’s got Puerto Ricans in the Humboldt Park neighborhood talking about their heritage.

MITCHELL: A celebration of the restoration included music with roots in Puerto Rican slave plantations. José López of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center recalled the artists who painted the mural in 1971.

LOPEZ: Young Puerto Ricans from the street — people who were marginalized — decided to give us a legacy for our historical memory.

MITCHELL: The mural covers the side of 2423 W. North Ave. and includes portraits of nine Puerto Ricans who struggled for abolition and the island’s independence from Spain and, later, the United States. Three of them are on crosses. Those three all served long U.S. prison terms in the mid-20th century. The artists, led by Mario Galán, named the mural “La Crucifixión de Don Pedro Albizu Campos” after a Puerto Rican Nationalist Party founder. They put him on the biggest cross. López said the mural has special meaning in a part of Chicago where many Puerto Ricans can no longer afford to live.

LOPEZ: Gentrification means, many times, the writing away of people’s history.

MITCHELL: Restoring the mural took a decade. Neighborhood leader Eduardo Arocho attributes that to a developer who owned a vacant lot in front of the work.

AROCHO: His plans were to develop a three-story condo unit. We tried negotiating with him for several months, even at one point offering him several lots in exchange. And he refused and he just started to build the wall, covering the mural intentionally. And so that’s when we grabbed our picket signs and started to protest.

MITCHELL: The city finally won control of the lot and helped turn it into a small park to keep the mural visible.

PITMAN WEBER: It’s remarkable that this mural has survived.

MITCHELL: John Pitman Weber is a professor at Elmhurst College in DuPage County. He has studied and created public art for more than four decades. And he provided consulting for this mural’s restoration, carried out by Humboldt Park artist John Vergara.

PITMAN WEBER: Its content is unique, not only in Chicago but nationally.

MITCHELL: And aesthetics? Pitman Weber calls the mural formal and stark.

PITMAN WEBER: Kind of Byzantine, in a way, quasi-naïve -- executed by some very, very young artists. The style possibly even adds clarity.

MITCHELL: Not all Puerto Ricans appreciate the artwork or the idea of the island breaking from the U.S. But when I ask the ones who walk by, most have strong attachments to the mural.

WOMAN 1: My mom used to go to St. Aloysius. My parents did and so...

MITCHELL: That’s a church right here.

WOMAN 1: It’s a church down the street. I used to go there when I was a little girl. And my mom would drive us to church and that’s how I knew we were getting close is when I’d see the mural almost every Sunday.

MAN 1: I see Don Pedro on the cross being crucified for what he believed in. Crucified the same way as Jesus!

WOMAN 2: I used to get up every morning and look at this mural.

MAN 2: I went to prison. I was 17 years old and I went to prison for 20 years. And, during those 20 years, when I used to think about home and I used to think about Humboldt Park, it was this mural that I used to think about.

MITCHELL: Why is that?

MAN 2: I remember when I was first looking at it, I think I was maybe 9 or 10 when I first noticed it, I didn’t know anything about Puerto Rican history. To me it was just a painting that was up there. I didn’t understand who was up there, what it was about. But when I went to prison I learned about my culture, I learned about who I was. I even got this guy on my arm. Two of these guys are on my arm.

MITCHELL: Tattoos.

MAN 2: Yeah, Pedro Albizu Campos on my right arm and I got Ramón Emeterio Betances on my left arm. And I think I can attribute that to this mural, man.

MITCHELL: The mural restoration will be complete with the addition of calligraphy this fall.

New electronic sensors stick to skin as temporary tattoos

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:56:00 -0500

Researchers have created a new thin flexible sensor that can be applied with water, like a temporary tattoo. Measuring activity in the brain, heart and muscles, the innovation could cut down on the number of wires and cables medical personnel use to monitor patients, among other applications.

The electronics can bend, stretch and squeeze along with human skin, and maintain contact by relying on "van der Waals interactions" — the natural stickiness credited for geckoes' ability to cling to surfaces.

In addition to being designed with a hardy serpentine pattern that resists tearing, the sensors are thinner than a human hair.

"These devices were made through 'transfer printing' fabrication processes that create flexible versions of high-performance semiconductors," according to Science.

The sensors could even be integrated into actual temporary tattoos, making patients feel a bit less Borg-like — and even offering a chance for style points.

In one test, a device that included a microphone was applied to a person's throat. The computer hooked up to the sensor could make out the words "up," "down," "left," and "right" — opening up the possibility that the sensors might help people with disabilities.

In an abstract of a Science article publishing their research, titled "Epidermal Electronics" (the full article is available only to subscribers), the study's authors say the "tattoos" could run on solar cells — and may eventually be used to create a new class of game controller:

Solar cells and wireless coils provide options for power supply. We used this type of technology to measure electrical activity produced by the heart, brain, and skeletal muscles and show that the resulting data contain sufficient information for an unusual type of computer game controller.

"The skin represents one of the most natural places to integrate electronics," materials scientist John A. Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, told Science. "As the largest organ in our body, and our primary sensory mode of interaction with the world, it plays a special role."

The new sensors were developed by Rogers and his colleagues in Singapore, China and the United States. According to Technology Review, the researchers see many uses for the technology:

Ultimately, Rogers says, "we want to have a much more intimate integration" with the body, beyond simply mounting something very closely to the skin. He hopes that his devices will eventually be able to use chemical information from the skin in addition to electrical information.

The new electronic tattoos should not be confused with the Digital Tattoo Interface, a 2x4-inch touch-screen implanted subcutaneously and powered by blood. And that, in turn, should not be confused with the more common "plasma display" used in many TVs.

Venture: The mistress of metal

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 05:01:00 -0500

Here on Venture, we'll trek out into the business world to hunt up people who can tell us more about the economy than the numbers alone.

Every week, the economic news cascades over us like a waterfall of numbers - housing starts, consumer confidence, jobless claims. It's easy to tune them out.

But all those numbers signify someone's livelihood, someone's home, someone's wallet. That someone is us. We want to get insight into the health of the economy by exploring how people all around us are experiencing it.

This week, we'll get data on the manufacturing sector. Someone in the Chicago area who knows a lot about manufacturing is Marsha Serlin.

Back in 1978, she was stuck in a situation a lot of people face these days - she was newly divorced with two kids, staring at foreclosure. She needed to make some money. So when she saw a neighbor with a truck picking up scrap metal in alleys, she had a flash of inspiration.

"I was strong, I was young and I said, you know, I can do this," Serlin said. "I said, if he can do it, I can do it."

She didn't let her lack of knowledge stand in the way. She just started asking other scrap collectors for tips.

"I said what about all that material, where do you get it?" Serlin said. "And they said, 'It comes from factories.' So I started knocking on doors. I was driving the truck in the beginning and then I had to hire people to do that and lo and behold, I had a fleet of trucks."

Now she wears a bubblegum pink hardhat and oversees a scrap empire in Cicero that stretches over 38 acres. United Scrap Metal’s annual revenue is about $200 million. It’s a noisy place. There are gigantic sorting machines that Serlin describes as straight out of Willy Wonka.

Outside she stops in front of a mountain of metal that includes remnants of old Coca Cola vending machines. From these scrap piles, she has a unique perspective on the economy. Serlin can tell if the country’s factories are humming or dead, based on how much metal they buy from her.

That’s the kind of savvy that can help us make sense of this week’s manufacturing numbers, which have been showing some improvement lately. She says the industry is clawing its way out of a deep hole:

Marsha Serlin's business is now one of the largest scrap recyclers in the country. I wanted to know what gave her the drive and business savvy to go from picking up scrap in alleys to running a multi-million dollar company.

From scrap yards to tattoos...

Tattoos are this week's Windy Indicator, where we search the Windy City's nooks and crannies for a read on the wider economy.

Even on a recent snowy day, customers stream into Tatu Tattoo in Wicker Park. Marci Mundo is the manager. She says business has slowed down since the recession hit, but they've adapted as their customers have scaled back:

Check back in with us next Monday for another installment of Venture. We'll meet an artist who's become an accidental real estate mogul and then head over for a good old-fashioned shoeshine.