A la Bienale di Venezia

Taking advantage of staying in Venezia over the weekend, we went to the huge international contemporary art exhibit located all over the city but mostly in the Arsenale and in the gardens. This was quite impressive in terms of diversity and style, of course, although the general feeling was rather bleak, centering on pollution and apocalyptic themes. The particularly ugly French exhibit was for instance a highly polluted sea surface, made of glass and only accessible by going around piles of gravel in the basement of the pavilion. Most exhibits also involved videos, often not making much sense, and comparatively few paintings or photographs. Within this depressing catalogue, a few beautiful highlights from my own perspective. One was a construct of several thousands shell-like objects, sculpted from sheep leather by Zahrah Al Ghamdi, a female Saudi Arabia artist Another one, representing Ghana, by the artists El Anatsui and Ibrahim Mahama, recycled aluminum stickers into huge maps, reminding me of the recycled maps in Munbai airport.Yet another one, difficult to catch, was a huge construct from the Philippines by Mark Justiniani, made of glass that gave an impression of infinite depth and again recycled different objects into wells, reminding me of the automated art pieces appearing in Gibson’s Count Zero. Called “Island Weather” to reflect upon the elusive nature of truth and the notion that everyone is an island, with bottomless layers of accumulated memories.

A series [called Angst] of remarkable night photographs by Soham Gupta of some inhabitants of the slums in Kolkata where the persons chose to act in relation with the hardship or trauma that led them to survive in the street. And still exhibiting joy and engaging into farciful behaviours. A video was however striking [from my perspective], describing the fight of a Nunavuk father to prevent his children being sent far away for schooling by the Canadian government, as it reminded me of a so different time when, as a child then, a catholic missionary from the Far North had come to our primary school and told us fascinating stories of the cruelly beautiful (or beautifully cruel?) like in the Arctic, in what did not appear yet as a strongly biased manner… The title of the Bienale this year was May you live in interesting times, which prompted many attendees to scrawl Theresa May you leave in interesting times over the exhibit panels! Interesting if bleak times indeed.

gerrymandering detection by MCMC

In the latest issue of Nature I read (June 8), there is a rather long feature article on mathematical (and statistical) ways of measuring gerrymandering, that is the manipulation of the delimitations of a voting district toward improving the chances of a certain party. (The name comes from Elbridge Gerry (1812) and the salamander shape of the district he created.) The difficulty covered by the article is about detecting gerrymandering, which leads to the challenging and almost philosophical question of defining a “fair” partition of a region into voting districts, when those are not geographically induced. Since each partition does not break the principles of “one person, one vote” and of majority rule. Having a candidate or party win at the global level and loose at every local level seems to go against this majority rule, but with electoral systems like in the US, this frequently happens (with dire consequences in the latest elections). Just another illustration of Simpson’s paradox, essentially. And a damning drawback of multi-tiered electoral systems.

“In order to change the district boundaries, we use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to produce about 24,000 random but reasonable redistrictings.”

In the arXiv paper that led to this Nature article (along with other studies), Bagiat et al. essentially construct a tail probability to assess how extreme the current district partition is against a theoretical distribution of such partitions. Finding that the actual redistrictings of 2012 and 2016 in North Carolina are “extremely atypical”.  (The generation of random partitions obeyed four rules, namely equal population, geographic compacity and connexity, proximity to county boundaries, and a majority of Afro-American voters in at least two districts, the latest being a requirement in North Carolina. A score function was built by linear combination of four corresponding scores, mostly χ² like, and turned into a density, simulated annealing style. The determination of the final temperature β=1 (p.18) [or equivalently of the weights (p.20)] remains unclear to me. As does the use of more than 10⁵ simulated annealing iterations to produce a single partition (p.18)…

From a broader perspective, agreeing on a method to produce random district allocations could be the way to go towards solving the judicial dilemma in setting new voting maps as what is currently under discussion in the US.

Munbai map [recycled art]

While my transfer in Munbai from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 was a bit hectic, with a security luggage scan before boarding a shuttle that would drive us to outside the terminal [next to slums that seemed to have direct access to the runways of the airport!), the brand new Terminal 2 was impressive as well as efficient as I went through security and passport controls quite quickly. I eventually reached the museum part, as this terminal holds an unbelievable collection of artefacts, sculptures and paintings. From the lounge, I could admire the above map of the region of Mumbai, made of recycled computer boards, by Akshay Rajpurkar, which I found deeply moving. If I ever travel past Mumbai T2 terminal, I will make sure to tour the rest of the collection!