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.”

PULLMAN, Wash. – The big news around here is that Bill and Melinda Gates gave WSU 25 million bucks to kick start a school of global animal health, “like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but for animals,” to paraphrase the region’s newspapers from this past weekend. Not a bad idea at all, but somehow I’m a little blue that $25 mill is the best WSU has ever done in the gift department. But then I was never properly afraid of clowns as a child (in fact, I thought they were kind of cool, and wondered what I might be able to get away with dressed up as one) and so have always naturally taken the devil’s side of things. In the pet store, you’ll find me in the underdogs department.

On the brighter side, of course, and in what I hope is international news (allez les Cougs!), WSU is in the NCAA Sweet 16. We beat the knee-highs off of Notre Dame. We now face #1 seeded North Carolina at freekin hometown Charlotte. Ouch. If you have prayerful inclinations, your contributions to the stream would be most gratefully accepted next Thursday (Wednesday, your time? I mean, if you live in New Zealand or somewhere?).