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.”

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I’m getting ready to do a bunch of news writing and recruiting video production for the students and faculty in WSU’s landscape architecture program. The faculty, especially, are all pretty a much a bunch of greenies. So I went stumbling to see what I could see and to what LEED-like activity might be going in other parts of the world. I found this hobbit-like habitation in Wales:

You are looking at pictures of our family home in Wales. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

What is going on in Wales that passersby stop to help you build your house? The last time a passerby stopped to help was when I was moving in a subletter for my old place in San Francisco. He helped mightily, hefted heavy boxes, the whole nine yards. And also gummied the back door so that the next day, when no one was around, he could slide on in and steal the subber’s laptop. Continue Reading »

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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 »

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