Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.
“I saw Tim’s work well before I met him,” Nisi told me later. “I moved to this neighborhood the same year I moved to Seattle, 1996 or so. The Central District is one of the city’s ‘historically black’ areas. People had warned me against moving here, and yes there were crack hovels and mattresses on the lawn but also BBQ restaurants and beauty parlors and other signs–for me–of home.”
Tim was home, we saw, and Nisi called out, “Hi, Tim! Is it all right if my friend takes some pictures?” Continue Reading »
Jayme Jacobson keeps finding these… things in her home. Here’s one now:
Eclectons, they’re called:
Eclectons spontaneously assemble out of everyday household products. If you pay close attention, you can catch them at the instance of assemblage (IA). After that, they fade from view, moving beyond the perceptual capacities of human beings.
But where, we wonder, do they do when they fade from view? We do, after all, live in a universe where energy is conserved. Jayme has some insight for us:
“Where do eclectons go?’ asked one of my young friends. It’s a good question because, as we know, they disappear from view shortly after IA (instance of assemblage). Evidence is a bit sketchy but one theory is that they are trying to get back to Eclectonia, a poorly understood galaxy about 450,000 light-years away that was recently picked up by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
My colleague Jolie Kaytes is a professor of landscape architecture at Washington State University and is interested in sense of place, how place makes us who we are, both as individuals and as communities, and how creative and analytical thinking can be used in solving problems. Recently, she created The GridShiter, a souvenir origami kit for a gallery show in San Francisco. (The show is, or was, at City | Space in Noe Valley.) I was intrigued by the analogy of folding paper and faulting crust and asked her if we could create a video that would showcase not only her art project, but some of her ideas about sense of place, as well. The result was this five-minute video. We shot all the photographs, interviews and sound-over narration in one 90-minute session; Jolie is an amazingly fun and efficient person to work with. This was my first time doing stop-motion photography, so the still camera work is pretty rough. But I like it; it gives the folding demonstrations a nice earthquakey feel.
Unpacking Place
About a year ago, I used a bunch of still photos taken by Jolie and did a video reinterpretation of “Unpacking Place,” an installation in the Cougarland Motel in downtown Pullman. Along with 10 other artworks, “Unpacking Place” was available to the public for one day, March 2, 2007. The collection of installations was curated by Samantha DiRosa, assistant professor of digital media, and titled “In(n) and Out of Nowhere.”
“Back to basics!” cry the Lumieres. Here’re some snips from the Lumiere Manifesto:
Lumiere video arises from the tradition of the French Lumiere brothers. Credited with some of the first footage captured, in 1895, the Lumieres are also recognized for holding the first public film screening, showing ten shorts that lasted only twenty minutes total. At the time, Louis Lumiere stated, “The cinema is an invention without a future,” believing that everyday photography and video [or film, as the case was] was ultimately nonsensical. Yet, we stand firm that Lumiere principles are essential to our existence as artists, media producers, visual creatures, and world citizens. Continue Reading »
Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called Some Girls. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought The Elements of Style and brought it out as a handsome paperback. As one reviewer put it:
A mature Salinger arrives on the scene and it’s a woman! Continue Reading »
I knew Kirk was a talented guy, so when Dr. Sullivan wrote to say, Check out this guy’s flickr stream, I was pretty sure I was in for a treat. But I didn’t think my mind would be blown by the man’s irrepressible use of color.
Of this old Plymouth, Kirk says:
I visited a junkyard near home yesterday and took these shots. It seems this yard was abandoned in the late 50’s since all the cars seem to be that old. Continue Reading »
Andrew Macrae, an Australian writer and artist, wrote to say that although he lives
a long way from the centres of cultural production in the northern hemisphere… maybe there’s something of interest in an antipodean perspective.
Oh my. The man knows how to write a pitch to snare an Irrepressible, no?
So check out his typewriter art (I suspect Photoshop or Illustrator, not an “actual” [or “Real,” as Andrew says below] typewriter, but I could easily be wrong; and don’t get me wrong: I respect and admire mimicry): Acid Head War. The thing that grabs me about Macrae’s pieces is the bridge between the dot matrix and the typewriter. All you can see here is the dot matrix; to get the typewriter detail, you need to visit Acid Head War.
What we’ve got here is the translation of photographs into typewriter art-via an algorithm which offers, I can only imagine, a good deal of user control. (Indeed, I suspect that each character is handpecked, but I’m a Romantic.) I have no idea of how many languages Andrew speaks (other than an obvious fluency with English, that is), but translation–or anyway, the engineer’s strategy of bridging–is clearly a forte. In that regard, check out Ordinary Magic, “the ecstasy of everyday things,” a minimalist WordPress blog in action. Continue Reading »
Novelist Michael Chabon, in a recent review of a new edition of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concluded by stating “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Those lines could have been an epigraph for Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression. McLeod is a sociology professor and an expert in the study of popular culture—just the sort of academic over which right-wingers love to excoriate “liberal” universities. But Freedom of Expression justifies society’s investment in scholars like McLeod: his book is learned, ranges widely over key areas of the copyright and intellectual property wars, and (here’s something you don’t hear everyday in regard to a scholarly work) is damn funny. Continue Reading »
A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.
Out walking with my friend Nisi Shawl recently in Seattle, she took me by the home of Tim Fowler somewhere on East Howell Street. I was immediately gob-smacked by what I saw: a building that was more work of art than conventional dwelling.
“Back to basics!” cry the Lumieres. Here’re some snips from the 
Sometime in the mid-90s, I received a manuscript from Sarah Hafner. The result was a chapbook of stories called 
. Sarah’s writing was hilarious and cutting at the same time, so when she asked me to consider her novel, The Elements of Style, I said, Sure, send it on over. I loved it and tired for a long time to raise the capital to publish this fine novel. It never came to be, and eventually I sold Permeable Press. Thankfully, Vivisphere bought 
So check out his typewriter art (I suspect Photoshop or Illustrator, not an “actual” [or “Real,” as Andrew says below] typewriter, but I could easily be wrong; and don’t get me wrong: I respect and admire mimicry): 
