http://jmrozman.tumblr.com/

research: making panoramas

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:15:00 -0500

some things i found:

http://lifehacker.com/378490/stitch-photos-into-panoramas-with-free-software recommends these two:
hugin: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/
autopano: http://autopano.kolor.com

there’s also photomerge: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-75e8a.html

some good tech guidelines on doing the shooting: http://digital-photography-school.com/8-guidelines-to-taking-panoramic-photos-with-any-camera of course i was working with a point-and-shoot, so i couldn’t do much re the exposure.

tutorial: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/new-gui/en.shtml

inasmuch as my studio is an ongoing (and, for better or worse, time based) installation, i wanted to take a data point, so to speak, at the end of last semester. so i shot enough photos to make a nice panoramic… now only to assemble it.

where sometimes i’m interested in the technology getting in the way and showing its pixelated face, here i think the documentation will need to be as seamless as i can get it to be.

Research: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:12:56 -0500

(Oh yeah, I was looking at FG-T in the fall. belatedly:)

I am reading these. Just reading, for now, not writing responses.

Interview with Ross Bleckner: http://bombsite.com/issues/51/articles/1847

Interview with Maurizio Cattelan: http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=59

Interview with Joseph Kosuth: http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/2005_1_felix-gonzalez-torres-and-joseph-kosuth/ Originally published in Art and Design Magazine Profile No. 34, Private Pursuits and Public Problems

infiltration.

[[[[[images of that which we oppose are said to destroy the system which we hold dear… but it only destroys the illusion that the system is anything but a construction.]]]]]

www.temporaryservices.org/Perfect_Lovers.pdf a guide to re-creatingPerfect Lovers

http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/gonzaleztorres1.doc Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Etre un espion - Interview by Robert Storr

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.trax.it/tim_rollins.htm Interview with Tim Rollins… not a great translation! excerpts here: http://orienteering.tumblr.com/post/14659295748/excerpts-from-an-interview-with-felix-gonzalez-torres

presence carries with it implicit absence, implicit loss

Some Things, Vol. 16

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:22:33 -0500

briandcollier.net he does cool work. i don’t want to lose his name. Brian Collier. http://societyrne.net/ that is one of his projects. he’s a one-man i-believe-in-this-stuff-so-i’m-doing-it kind of guy. and he makes enough web presence that it gets official… even though officialdom is totally arbitrarily bestowed and we know it… the signifiers of officialness still function just fine.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/18313/create-panoramic-photos-with-windows-live-photo-gallery/ panoramics from windows live photo gallery. yay. gonna do my studio soon.

http://devidsketchbook.com/post/38143601170/hangarbicocca-by-thomas-saraceno-argentinian oh my, this is amazing. photos are great but surely don’t do justice to the experience.

http://www.raptitude.com/2012/12/on-being-under-the-influence-at-ikea/ on the IKEA experience. oh, the world of promise…

http://www.pandora.com/escala?bio The mention of controversy and the end of Escala’s bio presents the possibility that one can remake what’s been remade, in a “this is my version of it” way. And, hey, the choice of material to remake matters, too.

http://www.fac-ture.co.uk/ one lovely though enigmatic way to set up a website. i could roll with that. faugh, words. faugh. and if the work, too, is enigmatic… take it the whole way right??

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/10/11/162677201/on-human-compassion-encountering-the-dalai-lamas-scientific-mind …I confess, when I’ve got the couple hours, I’m willing to listen to the guy talk for longer than a sound bite.

http://chicagoartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/pentagon.jorge_.jpg I liked this image. Here’s where it was posted: http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/04/cam-weekend-listings-6/ Ah, Chicago… so much art to see!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoEbFGDaWUI nice video.

http://dream.dickmacinnis.com/forum/ for the artist on a budget, here’s software that provides much of the functionality of the adobe suite.

Some Things, Vol. 15

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:27:52 -0500

http://www.vice.com/read/photos-miranda-july-136-v16n9 I heart Miranda July. Have I mentioned that before? I do.

http://mirandajuly.com/wordpress//wp-content/media/interviewmagaug2009.pdf Here’s this, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tmFozbdjWc A work for two flutes; Linda Dusman’s An Unsubstantial Territory

http://butdoesitfloat.com/ nice art blog, tumblr style, photos w/ just a few words, often a quote… mostly eye candy.

Some Things, Vol. 14

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:08:56 -0500

As usual I have gone on for too long. This is all old news. The new news goes in the next one. But check out Ben Grosser’s facebook demetricator. That stuff is cool.

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/behold/2012/10/15/jay_mark_johnson_s_very_unusual_camera_emphasizes_time_over_space.html weird camera. and interesting.

http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/ take the numbers off your facebook.

tools for moving ink around… yes another use for dental tools. http://www.amerdental.com/carver-2mm-cleoid-discoid.html
http://www.cetllc.com/operative.html#dc
http://www.sweethaven.com/sweethaven/MedTech/Dental/DentSetups/lessonMain.asp?iNum=fra0213

inexpensive polycarbonate for monoprint plates: http://www.andymark.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=am%2D0983&CartID=1

costs far more but arrives faster: http://www.amazon.com/Polycarbonate-Sheet-Thick-Clear-Thickness/dp/B00520AR9C/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1350778610&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=polycarbonate+sheet+.030

http://butdoesitfloat.com/It-is-easy-to-imagine-fantasy-as-physical-and-myth-as-real-We-do-it some of these would be amazing as colored pencil drawings

the difficulty of judging distances on the moon: http://sundaramfield.com/problem-of-judging-distances-and-sizes-on-the-moon/

WIND VISUALIZER: http://hint.fm/wind/ this is cool.

pondering the impossibility of a unitary language (except as a theoretical construct), differènce as...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:25:55 -0400

pondering the impossibility of a unitary language (except as a theoretical construct), differènce as the new ether (the fabric of space-time that is the perceptual ground of difference), and how every use of language simultaneously reinforces and erodes meaning as we know it (disregarding the multitude of problems with those last four or five words).

Some Things, Vol. 13

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:13:18 -0400

Terrorism, dance, and ideology. Sort of. This has been sitting in “drafts” for long enough.

Awhile I was thinking about repetition as a way of neutralizing the meaning of words, so that’s why I mention him. Charles Veitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJAQ_XRYWE and search youtube user cveitch …this guy did some work that I saw about a year ago (and I’m glad to track him down again)… (Veitch repeats the word terrorism - terrorism terrorism terrorism - )

I’m not sure how, at the moment, I am considering the relationship between repetition and meaningfulness or meaninglessness. Naturalization is another idea in play.

Miguel Gutierrez is a good influence for me. I can’t situate him among peers or anything; I just don’t know. He’s articulate, intelligent, honest, and raw. Anyway, I was thinking about him again and came across this. http://vimeo.com/49181782

From his site:

I MAKE PERFORMANCES THAT ARE ABOUT THINGS AND ARE THINGS THEMSELVES. THE THINGS THEY ARE ABOUT ARE BIG: HOW TO LIVE IN THE WORLD, HOW TO LOVE, HOW TO FEEL ABOUT BEING YOURSELF. PROBABLY THE BIGGEST QUESTION I MAKE ART ABOUT IS: WHY ARE WE ALIVE. I AM A DANCER. I WRITE POEMS. I MAKE SONGS AND MUSIC WITH MY VOICE AND RUDIMENTARY KNOWLEDGE OF INSTRUMENTS. I THINK THAT WE ARE ALL POWERFUL PEOPLE.\

Actually, after going through Barthes’ Elements of Semiologythere is something I’m thinking about and wanting to think about. What is the ideology expressed in being an observer? It’s something I’ve wondered, on and off, for years. But I think I have a foundation for considering it. Barthes, Hegel, and Kant would probably play into how I read the question. But then even the position of myself, examining the question through those lenses, merits examination. And I tend to examine questions rather than answer them. At the same time, I know myself to, personally, have a particular and strong ideology - it came out - and/or was developed, challenged, and grown - in the spring, with the utopia seminar.

Some Things, Vol. 12

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:59:55 -0400

It’s that time again. I haven’t been on the internet much lately and maybe won’t be on the internet much going forward, what with school and all. Today: binaural beats, milk paint, the ground of change, rigorous undergraduate institutions, photography as criminal action (what?), how to tie a Swiss seat (I gave a wonderful demo of this last week), online image convertor, and thinking about where sentences come from.

Today, yestoday, I am thinking about binaural beats. (Learn a little and make some here.) Or if you’ve ever played a musical instrument, tried to match a pitch, and heard that wah-wah-wah-wah as your tuning gets closer. So why am I thinking about this? Because my service hours to the department have me in the company of a transformer. The sound it puts out seems to be around 119.7Hz (matching by ear to the tone generator at onlinegenerator.com) and the volume is too high to make music-listening easy, though maybe some ambient music would work. Running the tone generator at 121Hz seems particularly nice (not 120.8 and not 121.2). So there’s an interesting experience-experiment for ya.

On to the older stuff.

Milk paint! http://www.earthpigments.com/casein/milk-lime-paint.cfm Thanks to Xinran Yuan for sending me this. (She makes some lovely, lovely work. Check out her website.)

The ground of change is the ground of interaction, one human being to another. It’s totally counter to today’s language of big problems, big solutions, big politics, big everything. But this ground of interaction is also the space of direct and nuanced individual agency. (This is one of many conclusions I reached during the utopia seminar this part spring.) Wendell Merry makes an argument along the same lines: take local responsibility for small problems. Quote via this YouTube video: (Originally posted by Paul at TAE - link to post.)

I don’t think that I know anything that’s reducible to a last word. Our people like to trade in that kind of stuff, but it’s stuff. It really doesn’t amount too much.

What’s really interesting is the possibility that we humans can make sense. This is an issue, this is a formal issue [of] the greatest urgency and gravity. What are the conditions within which we human beings can make sense? Within what limits can our minds be effective?

I’ve been griping about this to some of my friends lately. We’ve had two generations of college-bred people now who have really be indoctrinated now that every big problem has a big solution, and I just don’t believe it. The big problems we have now are going to be solved, if they ever are solved, by hundreds of people accepting local responsibility for small problems. They ain’t never gonna get famous, they ain’t never gonna get tenured for this. But this is the way it has to work.

We’re not really very smart we humans. And the idea that someone could come up with a big solution to a big problem is always dangerous. It always come down to the simple, the simple solution. People who make simple solutions always make trouble. And they’re always surprised by the trouble they make.

So, to hell with the last words. Let’s try and make one sentence that’s rightly positioned within a manageable context so that we can utter it to somebody else and they’ll understand it. And that we would be then on the way to define a job of work that we can actually do.

College rigor: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2012/08/05/college-rankings-2012-most-rigorous-schools-photos.html#slide3 My alma mater (Illinois Institute of Technology) is ranked as the 24th most rigorous school in the States.

Taking photos as treated as criminal action. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/criminalizing-photography/

How to tie a Swiss seat: because you never know when you’ll need to rappel off a building, right? http://www.itstactical.com/skillcom/knots/knot-of-the-week-swiss-seat/

How to convert image file types: a nice site that does it for you: www.online-utility.org/image_converter.jsp

Where do sentences come from? Some thoughts and encouragement on writing. I’d like to think it crosses over to other art forms, too. opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/

Some Things, Vol. 11

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:40:14 -0400

Long overdue, this one is all over the place. Photography, ceramics, art, life, perception, a recipe, and longing for a hero. Ready set go!

A one-GIGAPIXEL camera!
A fascinating solution points dozens of cameras at a spherical lens, and uses HDR technology to join the images. Very cool. http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/06/22/Gigapixel-camera-suggests-ways-to-offer-high-pixel-counts

A really beautiful digicam that’s not DSLR: http://www.finepix-x100.com/ Put on the “cool toys that I really don’t need yet” list. (This is where I remind myself that I shot nearly my entire portfolio for MFA apps with my $200 Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. It’s the vision, not the equipment.) Besides, I’m working on making a pinhole camera that shoots film, and that will be a fun toy. If anybody wants to offer advice on when or under what conditions I should make a more substantial camera investment… please do.

Photographic aesthetic decisions as content and other tales: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/assignment-chicago/2012/07/hipstamatic-photojournalism.html

On pulling together a portfolio. I’ve been through it and the process was not. fun. at. all. It’s worth applying to lengthy-paper-writing, too. So when you (or I) need a little prodding and handholding, this might help: http://zackarias.com/editorial-photography/editing-your-portfolio/

The death of the resume, and new recruiting tactics: This article troubles me. Deeply. What matters isn’t actual value but the ability to create perceived value - buzz. Someday, “perception is reality” might have reality catch up with it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2012/07/23/the-death-of-the-resume-five-ways-to-re-imagine-recruiting/

Spomenik - Soviet monuments.
I came across them a couple of years ago and was reminded of Chillida’s work in some ways. The scale is massive, and I’d love to see some in person… the idea of exploring the Eastern European countryside for abandoned monuments makes me think of the movie Everything Is Illuminated (beautiful movie, but I haven’t seen it in a few years). http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html

Total change of pace here: ceramics. http://www.audreyrosulek.com/rosulek/Portfolio/Portfolio.html Came across Audrey Rosulek’s work. I like her forms, her material palette, and particularly the drawn-on quality of her work… it reads as a body of work in a different way than pottery does sometimes when it’s same-same-same. This also reminds me that I have quite enjoyed making forms and then drawing on them. Something to consider doing again? Also, I’d like to drink from one of her mugs. That’s a nice lip.

Looks and perception: An artist did portraits of himself with a dozen different looks - including hairstyles and facial hair. It’s amazing how various cues work together to construct a visual identity. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2173486/How-different-man-look-Hilarious-portraits-photographer-Gordon-Stettinius-lesson-bad-taste.html

Some thoughts on why people do counter-productive things, or fail to do productive things. Short answer: being creative, being critical, and marketing yourself are three very different activities. The article’s worth a read: http://the99percent.com/tips/7200/Is-An-Inner-Argument-Holding-Back-Your-Productivity

A nice lemon-parsley-butter sauce: http://www.crablab.com/crabbiest.shtml The sauce is good on everything so that’s a keeper and an easy go-to. Nice if you brown the butter upon melting it. Crab cakes were fine. Alterations: I used more green onion than called for, added a finely chopped stalk of celery, and dashed some more Tobasco sauce atop the crab cakes.

We long for heroes: A thoughtful article on a writer named Jonah Lehrer. http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/jonah_lehrer_throws_it_all_away/

WPA Mural Restoration

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:47:00 -0400

Attention artists, art historians, preservationists, and art lovers of all sorts:

The front page of today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer features a story about two women who are on a mission to get a WPA-funded mural restored. The image above is from the PD article.)The Spirit of Educationis a full-color oil-on-canvas mural painted in 1939 by Cleveland artist William A Krusoe under FDR’s Works Project Administration. Photographer Walker Evans is probably the best-known photographer of the FSA, a program that (if I recall correctly) was later rolled together with the WPA.

The mural is currently in the possession of Cleveland’s Intermuseum Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization. The first step is to raise $3k for its condition to be assessed. Restoration is estimated at between $75k and $150k.

Please, go read the article for more information, including information about how to donate for the assessment. The women, both 1966 alumni of Lincoln High School, the mural’s original home, have raised about $500 so far. I am hopeful that, with an assessment and a new Cleveland-area site offered, that they’ll be able to find local and federal funding to complete the project.

Please go read the article for more information. For more information about donating, per the article, contact the Intermuseum Conservation Association (which also has a FB page here) at 216-658-8700.

How to help:
Please think about donating even $20 toward the appraisal. Once I get more information, I’ll do a follow up post. Do you have any contacts that might be able to help? The Ohio Historical Society owns the image above, the PD used it for their article. I wonder if posters could be printed from this image and sold to raise funds. (Even better if the Cleveland Museum of Art would help host the sales.) I also want to help the efforts out by doing a Wordpress site to make the information more widely available. But I’m also about to move - in less than a week! - and start grad school two states away. Lots of ideas and no time.

Some Things, Vol. 10

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:17:18 -0400

In this edition… street art, some existential-y things, busy-ness, psychopathy, and a little somethin’ crafty to lighten things up (and because I thought it was cool).

Sarcastic Street Art:
It’s fun, take a look. http://www.walltowatch.com/view/8077/Sarcastic+Street+Art

An existential-y quote:
I get a daily quote in the mail, and this was a nice one. Plus, one of my favorite poems is by WCW (who, incidentally, was a physician):

We crave certainty; we love to put a period at the end of a sentence, and that is that. But take a look at people, a real close look, and you’ll find inconsistencies and contradictions— and that’s where a closer look is needed, not a category or a definition that tells you, that reassures you: all right you’ve got it!
- William Carlos Williams

Some existential-y reading I want to do:
Baudrillard: Simulations. http://www.amazon.com/Simulations-Foreign-Agents-Series-Baudrillard/dp/0936756020 I want to read this. From Amazon’s summary: Baudrillard’s bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure’s general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don’t refer anymore to anything except themselves. See, how could you not want to read that??

Our litigation-happy society implicitly suppresses scholarly opinion:
In Art, Freedom of Expression Doesn’t Extend to ‘Is It Real?’ Story at NYTimes.com. Pull quote: “Art scholarship is fighting a losing battle against commerce.” There’s no place for best judgment rendered in good faith. And it’s not just an art problem, of course: far from it.

Some existential-y not-really-street-art:

image source

Remember, being busy is usually a false trap: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?src=me&ref=general It’s amazing how much you can get done if you just sit down and work for four or five hours, without distraction. It’s amazing how much free time appears, too. Oh wait, I’m about to start grad school. Well, maybe in two more years… wait, nope. Starting now. Anyway, just read it, it’s short and well-written.

Pyschopathy is all around:
The word “psychopath” makes me think of people who do premeditated and repeated violence - criminals, right? Well, this was a long article and an education. The profile of the psychopath is broader than my associations with the word. The bad news for optimists? Not everyone is redeemable; some people genetically lack the stuff that gives most of us conscience and empathy. The good/bad news? Other people are socialized psychopaths - they learn those behaviors. The book is essentially a compilation of research. The article describes psychopathy, with generalized examples as well as particulars, from WWII to recent politics. (Though there were moments where the political parts seemed a stretch.) http://www.sott.net/articles/show/148141-The-Trick-of-the-Psychopath-s-Trade-Make-Us-Believe-that-Evil-Comes-from-Others

Quotes:

We talked about this earlier when we described society as a trial, with everyone looking for the truth somewhere in the middle. As long as there is some idea of compromise, the people of conscience will always lose.

The liar is at an advantage because the judge or jury will still expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. … Telling the truth cannot get that person 100% of the justice he or she deserves, while lying will always get the perpetrator something… The liar and manipulator will… use the good will of the person of conscience against him. Lying is therefore always a winning strategy.

On the lighter and craftier side.
How to make your own super-cute zippered pouch. http://www.noodle-head.com/2012/06/open-wide-zippered-pouch-diy-tutorial.html I like containers, and these are really, really sweet. Variety of fabrics can be a way to code the contents. Actually, it’s not just containers, it’s organization, itself: I am pleased when everything has its place. (I also am an aspiring minimalist… This presents practical problems; I don’t put away what I want not to keep, because I don’t want to bestow importance by giving it a place. Result: the clutter of indecision.) Size chart here: http://www.noodle-head.com/2012/06/open-wide-zippered-pouch-tutorial-size.html Also, this has the potential to be the kind of thing I would totally wear: http://www.noodle-head.com/2012/06/pink-friendship-bracelets-tutorial.html (Repetition is essential.) Badass.

Some Things, Vol. 9

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 15:58:00 -0400

In this edition: lightning strikes, bread from starter, and the coming .art TLD. I haven’t been browsing the Web too much lately but am planning to resume my visual research, though I won’t be adding to what I’ve put on Pinterest. So there’s also a bit on that.

The house was struck by lightning. I’m staying with my folks in Ohio for a bit and there was a storm the other day. There’s a bit of burned fascia and a gutter-to-house arc, but there wasn’t a fire. People were outside at the house next door, maybe fifty feet away, and thankfully nobody was hurt. Some low-voltage stuff (phone/fiber equipment) at our house was affected, which was inconvenient. It killed a robin. That was sad. I took a picture and later buried him. It apparently killed half a holly bush, which was odd and somewhat sad, and made me think of the Old Testament story about the burning bush. It may have moved a 30# rock a foot, which is also odd. We’ll see how things play out with the bush. You can learn some things about lightning here: http://www.supertopo.com/images/lightning.pdf

I’ve been baking bread. In terms of art/ritual, it’s one thing that makes sense to be doing (being at parents’ house). A friend gave me starter and I started out with the recipe here: http://sharemykitchen.com/recipes/my-recipes/breads-buns-and-pastry/natural-starter-whole-wheat-bread/

Art news (or not-news): E-flux applies to manage .art TLD: ttp://www.e-flux.com/art-domain/ A top-level domain is the suffix on a website, such as .com, .org, .net, .edu, and so on. I guess a bunch of new ones are going to be used.

I think it’s kind of awful, actually, that anybody wants to be a clearing-house for what would be declared “art”. Under e-flux, .art would would represent ” quality, content, and educational and ethical values” as understood by “an advisory board of artists, art historians, critics and curators”. It could certainly be worse. As as artist, I don’t want to see that sort of oversight.

From the e-flux “about” page:

With its expertise in the historical and contemporary development of art gained through years of collaboration with thousands of practitioners, institutions, and publications in virtually all parts of the world, e-flux plans to bring this knowledge to the .art top-level domain. e-flux envisions this new space as a reliable, ethical, selective, and educational resource for art professionals, educators, institutions, and especially the public at large.

The .art TLD will cater to the needs of a substantial international community that is directly or indirectly involved in the creation, promotion, marketing, education, exhibition, and development of art and artistic works, and this under the supervision of a committee of experts comprising of art historians, artists and curators who are active in this community.

A substantial part of the revenues generated by this service will be returned to the art community in a form of grants and funding for underfunded art institutions, organizations and projects.

Pinterest: I really, really like Pinterest for visual research. It’s as simple as can be - click, select, type my thoughts, click, done. It works with minimal disruption to my train of thought. And here I am refusing to use it. Here’s why: I don’t want to contribute to copyright violations. My own research falls under fair use - it’s for research, I describe what interests me about the image, and I credit the source/artist. But here’s the thing: people can repin. The source information is frequently discarded. I would be furious to find my work floating, uncredited, around the Web, and I don’t want to help that happen to other artists.

Pinterest part 2: http://ddkportraits.com/2012/02/why-i-tearfully-deleted-my-pinterest-inspiration-boards/ This is a well-written blog post about the legal ramifications of using Pinterest.

Two Films

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:54:01 -0400

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Dancing Dreams. Totally different things I wanted to hang on to from each one.

Film #1: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Rough at points, really rough, but a beautiful movie. I watched the Danish version (IMDB link) with English subtitles. Okay, it’s nice to see the good guys win and the bad guys brought down, but I mention the film because it had a couple of really, really beautiful moments in it. Visual beauty, I mean.

(Yes, the same thing again, basically. Saw it, wanted to keep it, had forgotten about the first. Go figure.)

Film #2: Dancing Dreams (IMDB link) I also want to watch Pina (IMDB link) sometime. So I’ll just mention a quote from an interview that I connected with. I’m still getting a sense of what choreography and dance are and can be. They’re time-based forms by nature, movement-based rather than language-based, and for the audience, visual and aural. Those are values that arise in my observation-based work, so I’m comfortable thinking of it as related.

Anyway, here’s that quote:

Interviewer: You said that you didn’t know if you could pull off a whole evening. But over time, you knew you could do it…
Pina: Yes, but I doubt myself time and again. It’s like I learn nothing along the way. That is, I must search myself every time for little back doors, It’s still the same now!

Some Things, Vol. 8

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:16:10 -0400

On being an artist and changing place, among other things:
http://www.kerismith.com/blog/10-ways-to-infuse-your-work-with-your-personality/ nothing earth-shattering in the realm of advice, but good things to remind oneself about.

Rethinking privacy on the internet:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/rethinking-privacy-in-an-era-of-big-data/ By the way, did you know that your date of birth, plus gender, plus zip code, uniquely identifies you? Nearly 100% of the time.
Ben Grosser did a piece to hide from Google: http://bengrosser.com/projects/personal-depersonalization-system/ Clip from the page:

For background information on this topic, I recommend you read Eli Pariser’s new book titled The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. You can also check out his TED talk on the subject.

Music to the people! Flash music mobs:
How might one talk about this as art and experience? Spectacle, yes. But more, perhaps, when the music is skillful enough, and the experience comes together.
Copenhagen Philharmonic, Copenhagen Metro (train), Grieg’s Peer Gynt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gww9_S4PNV0
Copenhagen Philharmonic, Copenhagen Metro (station), Ravel’s Bolero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrEk06XXaAw
Or not as much. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR5UwyK3a7Y

Oh, and I’m baking bread. A friend gave me some starter; I’ve fed it a couple of times and this morning used this recipe: http://sharemykitchen.com/recipes/my-recipes/breads-buns-and-pastry/natural-starter-whole-wheat-bread/ I figure that’ll be my summer experimentation. But it could become a longer-term project, too: every place has sorta-different microbes in the air, and sorta-different water: bread then becomes a way of marking/recording place.

Some Things, Vol. 7

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:13:15 -0400

In today’s issue of Some Things…
A graduation speech, a couple of arts in video form, a google shenanigan, and a couple other don’t-forget-you-have-agency things. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen any of my art-school buds, I’m days from leaving the area where I’ve lived for the last two years, and headed for the next step on heaven-knows-where-this-path-leads with whole new people, whole new place. No summer job lined up and no clue exactly where I’ll be living in the fall… so I’ll take all the encouragement I can get. Buffalo ho! (Wow, does that sound awkward.)

A graduation speech by Neil Gaiman at University of the Arts, Philadelphia: http://vimeo.com/42372767 Time well spent. Here’s a quote I particularly enjoyed:

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakeable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. (7:10)

http://wearechopchop.com/%E2%80%9Cunnamed-soundsculpture%E2%80%9D/ Go, look at this. I watched the video. The idea is more interesting to think and talk about than to actually look at, for me - mediating the poetry of a moving body, this way, kills it. The stills are cold, clean sand - technologically marvelous. The body is flesh and blood.

http://wearechopchop.com/watusii/ This is beautiful, in unexpected ways.

https://www.google.com/search?q=askew Just click it. And then look. Ok?

http://everymondaymatters.com Building awareness of the agency of the individual. Or, more simply: you matter, and you can do small things to make a difference in the world. The things you do make a difference in you, too.

http://passivepanda.com/introducing-remora-method Bottom line: take the thing that you do well, and go team up with folks who could use that one thing. Everybody wins.

More Books! or, the library returns to the library

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:30:00 -0400

Art books. Some returned with regrets, some not. A few weeks ago, I had forty five of the library’s books in my possession. Today, they (almost) all go back. The two that I’m holding on to for a few more days: On Ritual and A Day Like Any Other.

With regrets:

Uta Barth / The Long Now Reminds me of questions I have about looking, about looking at the photograph v. observing the slowness of the real thing; the opposite of the decisive moment, I guess. Wondering about putting on a good show; feeling like living with one of these works is something else entirely. These are works about observation; there’s a sense of slowness in many of them, but the passage of time is lost, or rather, the passage of time is in freezing a moment, and watching that moment indefinitely. Works closely tied to the experience of looking. All concepts I work through and with. I would like a copy of this book.

Rivane Neuenschwander / A Day Like Any Other This I have written about. I would like a copy of this book.

Pierre Loti / Jerusalem Trans. by WP Baines, Pub by Frederick A Stokes Company, New York. Red cloth hard bound, 212 pp, no date, acquired by the library in 1947 as part of the J. A. Fairlie estate. It’s a beautiful volume and I enjoy Loti’s writing.

Buskirk / The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art I have read some of the essays in this volume and would like to borrow it again. Topics include: authorship and authority, original copies, medium and materiality, context as subject, contingent objects. The essays revolve around individuals and works that deal with these topics, and I’ve found them useful in developing my own point of view. Might be good to have as a reference.

Olafur Eliasson / Photographs An exhibition catalog I’m sorry to part with. Wrote about it here.

Hiroshi Sugimoto This one I’ve had for a year and a half. The seascapes are my favorites, but the theater photographs are up there, too, for collapsing time. Fortunately, available on amazon. It’s been influential but isn’t one I need to buy this summer. I think I’ve written about it somewhere.

Damien Hirst / Museo Archeologico Nazionale / Napoli Another beautiful book I’d like to have for my personal library. The interviews and essays were good; there’s something about the work that sticks. I’ve written about the book someplace. They run about $90 used on amazon.

Alexander / Space, Time, & Deity I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, because CSLewis drew a discussion of subject, object, enjoyment, and contemplation from this book, and for the last five or seven years those distinctions have stayed with me. I’ll read it over the summer, somehow.

With mixed feelings:

Twilight Memories / Marking time in a culture of amnesia / Huyssen There are some essays in here that I would like to read. If time is short (I guess it always is) I would read nos. 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, and perhaps 11. There’s a focus on Germany that I didn’t realize; I was just captivated by the title and i-shared the book. I got into it because of the Ruscha paper, maybe.

Bill Brown / Things A book of essays that I might once have read; my interest has shifted from things to time. Things can still be powerful, but time ends up being the ground for everything else. Arguably my interest has always been about time and observation (what else is experience, anyway?) but for awhile I was distracted by things, since art often involves things, or some form of physical matter, as well as the act of looking. Although for me it can be nice, I think it also misses the mark - it’s not the thing, but somethingaboutthe thing. Well, anyway, I might find the essays useful. Really.

The Lure of the Object I might also find a couple of useful essays in here, but they may be published elsewhere. (Material as language in contemporary art / Scheidemann. Photography’s expanded field / Baker. The object as subject / Lajer-Burcharth. Responding to allure / Buskirk)

Sean Scully / The color of time I connected with Walls of Aran far more than this (and still harbor a wish to learn the art of dry stone walling), but it was nice to see. I go back and forth on how I see old things - sometimes they are dear, sometimes not. These photographs fail to become dear, although they are nice documents of material and time. What I like looking at: the blues and some of the greens, and light through old windows.

Olafur Eliasson / Minding the World Some beautiful works in here, and essays/interviews I haven’t read. Sometimes many pieces becomes too much. And sometimes just creating one effect… better experienced over time, or maybe it becomes flat. Or needs something else; another person, a conversation.

Buffalo Heads The book weighs nine bounds; it’s huge. I haven’t read it.

Mary Miss / Texts by Mary Miss, Essays by Abramson, Giovannini, Heartney, Marpillero and also Mary Miss / Whitney Library of Design I didn’t connect with the work, though it was interesting.

Szarkowski / The Photographer’s Eye It’s the kind of thing you read ‘cause it’s good for you. I probably have read portions, but I don’t want to dissect the form right now; I don’t think it’ll do me any good.

Bloom / How Pleasure Works I read the whole thing; easy reading for bedtime. It all seemed kind of obvious, just a different approach to what I already knew. I might still enjoy books he’s edited or coedited (Language acquisition: core readings | Language and space | Language, logic, and concepts) since I have had a thing for words as one way of constructing meaning and/or reality.

With little regret:

Jeff Wall / The Crooked Path. It’s a book of essays. The man seems to be art world savvy and art historically savvy. That’s nice, but not how I want to operate. And not enough pictures.

Performance Research / On Ritual I hope to read a bit of this in the next week. At least I can buy one relatively inexpensively on amazon. Update: it wasn’t what I hoped.

And the last of my Ruscha (bibliography here):

Ed Ruscha / Richard D Marshall

Art and Artifact: the museum as medium / James Putnam

Ed Ruscha: photography / Wolf

Ed Ruscha / Benezra and Brougher

Modern dreams: the rise and fall and rise of pop / Alloway et al

On the museum’s ruins / Crimp

Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles / Schwartz It’s a good book, but I’m kind of Ruschaed out right now.

Some Things, Vol. 6

Wed, 23 May 2012 22:57:13 -0400

Okay, okay, so I’ve been a little busy and haven’t been browsing the Web too much. Today’s theme lies, suitably, someplace among: communication, articulating things, using words, the limits of words, and the difficulty of finding words.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/12/hi-art-art-education_n_1500671.html A program called Hi Art! gets kids looking at fine art when they’re young. One of the points I particularly appreciated is that we connect to art but can’t necessarily articulate or communicate that connection. Personally, there’s a lot that I am able to articulate, but just as much (or more) that I cannot. Because of the pressure to be articulate about one’s work, I fear leaving the latter part behind at some point. I hope that the inarticulable will keep sneaking in, though, and making my work far more powerful than the mere sum of its parts. I hope, I hope.

And this: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100791040&fa=customcontent&extrasfile=A12617B6-B0D0-B086-B6807CE40778E226.html This I like. (Again with my dismay at how much, it seems, must be expressed in rational terms. And yet, physicists look more and more like mystics. How does an artist exist in academia? Or, put another way: is it better to attempt communication with a broader or less broad audience? For example: some people are still really into abstract expressionism. It leaves other people cold. Well, it depends upon one’s goals.)

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100791040&extrasfile=A1261758-B0D0-B086-B6A81323CFE72901.html More recognition of the difficulty of finding words. And the construction of meaning. And the construction of language. Both sources of frustration and wonderment. And brushing against the inability to communicate: Williams’s voice in his poems was the colloquial, and definitely uneducated, outbreak of passion that no properly refined reader could recognize. Could recognize! The article is about William Carlos Williams, author of my favorite poem:

so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.

Pina Bausch, and Thinking about Choreography

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:51:05 -0400

Collision of two lines of thought. Some paragraphs.

Thinking about choreography:
I’ve done some pieces that might be word-arts, but might be productively considered as choreographic scores. They could also be thought of as event scores, perhaps. What does it mean to write a performance that may be performed, or not performed; performed in private or in the presence of others (who may or may not be aware of the performance); or perhaps enjoyed as a set of instructions, imagined as performed. What of the ways that words’ meanings can slip and be multiple?

Thinking about it because of two works I experienced:
Part of what got me thinking about that was watching Dancing Dreams which I wrote about here (and was visually enjoyable, but dynamically so - a still image doesn’t do justice to movement). And part of what got me thinking about it was a piece that Kathleen Kelley did (not here / not this), and for which I had the privilege of being the audience. Twice. And learning and talking more about the piece and its construction.

So, then, Pina Bausch:
Related: some art-stalking, and there shall be more. Pina Bausch. I watched Dancing Dreams and there was something about the work that connected. I’m still trying to figure out the question - never mind the answer.

I can note some things: the staging seems unusual; it brings a world to the stage or creates a fantasy there, but in a fashion more real than represented. There’s that. She was, it seems, unconventional in her ways - in her works. This infuriated some, but it seems that the works themselves enthralled others - and that the approach was integral. My impressions, below, from watching, are confirmed in the sorts of things that I read, after that. Also, Bausch tends not to talk about her work - instead insisting that the work speak. (I don’t know that people in my position - young, grad students - have any option but to also be articulate. I worry about making work that only *can* be spoken about… but there’s a lifetime for other things.)

Some links:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bausch/ This was thoughtful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/03/pina-bausch-tributes This was nice.
http://artsfuse.org/48270/fuse-dance-review-dystopian-dancing-pina-a-3-d-documentary/ This makes me want to see the movie.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/aug/09/pina-bausch-edinburgh This is descriptive of her work and makes me fall in love with it more. The closest connection I can think of is Marina Abromovic.

Something of a description of impressions from watching bits of Bausch’s work:
insane, hopeless, senseless, filled with longing, sometimes tender, sometimes violent. beautiful, though; always, it seems, a beauty in movement, even if sometimes in horror and sometimes relational. the way people touch each other doesn’t speak to something ephemeral but to something visceral, embodied. but sometimes ephemeral. and sometimes bodies are used as such, as matter that moves and makes things. and maybe most importantly, something gets into a space of experience that words won’t reach.

Searching for Utopia: A casual bibliography

Mon, 14 May 2012 23:38:00 -0400

On Friday I turned in my first 20-page paper. Its working title was Searching for Utopia... (I think I want to disown the title so I’ll cut it off there.) It’s an interesting essay, though! I read a lot more than I cited.

Works Cited:

Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. William Alexander McClung. University of California Press. 2000. Also possible to read as a case study in the invention of utopia and of arcadia.
Leave Any Information at the Signal :　writings, interviews, bits, pages. Ed Ruscha. Edited and with an introduction by Alexandra Schwartz. The MIT Press. An OCTOBER book. 2002. With interviews through page 381, it’s a good way to understand how Ruscha talks and thinks about his work.

Works by Ruscha:

Some Los Angeles Apartments. Edward Ruscha. 1970, 1st ed 1965.
Thirtyfour Parking Lots. (Thirtyfour parking lots in Los Angeles). Edward Ruscha.
Nine swimming pools. (Nine swimming pools and a broken glass). Edward Ruscha. 1976, 1st ed 1968.
Colored people. Edward Ruscha. 1972.
A few palm trees. Edward Ruscha. 1971.
Various small fires. (Various small fires and milk.) Edward Ruscha. 1970, 1st ed 1964.
Twentysix gasoline stations. Edward Ruscha. 1969, 1st ed 1962.
Records. Ed Ruscha. 1971.
Crackers. Edward Ruscha. 1969.
Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Edward Ruscha. 1966.
Then & now : Hollywood Boulevard 1973-2004. Edward Ruscha. 2005. (Note: interesting book, but it invites comparison, so is hard to think about as an artwork itself. The size is good - folio is enormous, but lets EBotSS be printed at its original size. I’d rather have seen it in the same format as EBotSS, and without the original for comparison. Also: why not reprint EBotSS?)

More books:

Typologies : nine contemporary photographers / organized by Marc Freidus ; essayists, Marc Freidus, James Lingwood, Rod Slemmons.
On the museum’s ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. (Only read one essay in this one.)
Ed Ruscha, photographer / [curated by Margit Rowell].
Ed Ruscha and photography / Sylvia Wolf.
Ed Ruscha : Road Tested / Organized by Michael Auping ; With texts by Michael Auping and Richard Prince, and an interview with the artist.
Visions of America : landscape as metaphor in the late twentieth century / essays by Martin Friedman … [et al.] Read the essay on Ruscha.
Modern dreams : the rise and fall and rise of pop / Lawrence Alloway … [et al.] ; the Institute for Contemporary Art [and] the Clocktower Gallery. Checked it out just for one article - that was mentioned repeatedly in something else I read. And that is Lawrence Alloway’s seductively-titled The Long Front of Culture, which is reprinted from Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 (1959). In it, Alloway proposes that “acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our notion of what culture is. Instead of reserving the word for the highest artifacts and the noblest thoughts of history’s top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of “what a society does.”” He argues against the existence of a mass audience as such, and in favor of a more heterogeneous understanding. It was a lot of work to track down this essay, but worth it.
Ed Ruscha / Richard D. Marshall. Published by Phaidon. Whatever else Ruscha’s work may be, it’s evident from this 270-page survey that it’s intensely visual.
On the museum’s ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. I read “The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject” and “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism.” There are other essays I want to read, though.
New topographics : photographs of a man-altered landscape / Robert Adams … [et al.]. It’s an exhibition catalogue and Ruscha isn’t in it, but nonetheless.
Rebels In Paradise : The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s / Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. There’s a chapter on “The Okies”.
State of the arts : California artists talk about their work / Barbara Isenberg. There’s a brief interview with Ruscha.
Art in Los Angeles : seventeen artists in the sixties : [catalog of exhibition] : Los Angeles County Museum of Art / [edited by] Maurice Tuchman.
Ed Ruscha / Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher with a contribution by Phyllis Rosenzweig. (This one’s an exhibition catalogue; I may have missed noting that on others.)

Articles:

Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography / Aron Vinegar / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 852-873.
Auto-Maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography / Margaret Iversen / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 836-851. The performative comment is important here; so is a comment on “the importance of the linguistic premise” to Ruscha’s work.
Introduction: Photography after Conceptual Art / Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 825-835.
Conceptual art / Buchloh / jstor778941
Something Else: Ed Ruscha’s Photographic Books / Kevin Hatch / October 111, Winter 2005, pp 107-126.
Bookwork as Demediation / Garrett Stewart / Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010) pp. 410-457
Art in Los Angeles : seventeen artists in the sixties / Peter Plagens / Art Journal, Vol 41 No 4, Winter 1981, pp 375, 377, 379.
Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner / Elizabeth Armstrong / OCTOBER 70, Fall 1994, pp 55-59.
Leave Any Information at the Signal :　writings, interviews, bits, pages. / Interestingly, the review records the book as being by Schwartz.. Review by John-Paul Stonard in The Burlington Magazine, Vol 147 No 1229, Aug 2005, p 566
Living in the Long Front / Julian Myers / Tate Papers Issue 16 / 1 October 2011 / http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/living-long-front
Benjamin Buchloh / Conceptual Art, 1962-69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions / October, no. 55 (winter 1990): 105-43.

More fun to have: books waiting to be read as a result of this paper:

Century of artists books / Riva Castleman.
Twilight memories : marking time in a culture of amnesia / Andreas Huyssen. I’ll read some of the essays.
Learning from Las Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural form / Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour.
I am a monument : on Learning from Las Vegas / Aron Vinegar.
Art and artifact : the museum as medium / James Putnam. I’ll read some of the essays.
Jeff Wall : the crooked path / Hans de Wolf (ed.). Who is this Jeff Wall guy and how does he have a relationship to nearly everything? This I want to know.
Phenomenology of Perception / Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Being and Time/ Heidegger
Modern dreams : the rise and fall and rise of pop / Lawrence Alloway … [et al.] ; the Institute for Contemporary Art [and] the Clocktower Gallery. There are essays in here that I’d like to read.
On the museum’s ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. There are essays in here that I’d like to read.

More fun to have: articles waiting to be read as a result of this paper:

Almost Merovingian: On Jeff Wall’s relation to nearly everything / Wolfgang Bruckle.Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009
Roni Horn’s Icelandic encyclopedia / Mark Godfrey / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009
…That old thing, art… Roland Barthes in his book The Responsibility of Forms
Phantasy and Utopia /Herbert Marcuse

Some Things, Vol. 5

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:34:08 -0400

Topics: architecture (work and profession), architecture criticism, a Rube Goldberg machine, counterspheres, Damien Hirst, and geohashing.

On architecture, both the work and the profession:
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/04/the_architecture_meltdown/singleton/ Just go read the whole article. It’s good.

An honest blog on same: http://archi-hell.blogspot.com/index.html and by a teacher, no less. Teaching is being both Jekyll and Hyde, he(?) reflects. And as someone who wants to teach at the university level… I wonder about that, too.

Remind me to visit this building so I can level a critique at the wishful thinking in this article: http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2012/05/Museum-of-Contemporary-Art-Cleveland.asp Hint: large things do not go away just because they are faceted and mirrored: they become icebergs without (at least in this photo) a human scale.

Enough depressing news! Watch this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w I watched a 30 or 40 minute film of a Rube Goldberg machine, but this was a lot more fun.

A critique of a particular architecture critic: with a lot of quotes, so it’s possible to consider criticism as an art form. I need to give this one another read: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12708

Be your own counter-sphere: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/bertrand-russells-10-commandments-for-teachers.html Just read it. Ways of being countercultural and being yourself. Be the change, man. Be the change, man, be the change.

A bit on Damien Hirst: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/24/damien-hirst-brimming-sheer-cheek/ I confess to admiring Damien Hirst’s work. I never meant to; I had a book on his work from the library and nearly returned it, but flipped it open and found, from a fragment, that I wanted to read the whole thing. So I did. And now I have a thing for Hirst’s work - at least, for the represented version of it. (That’s a funny thing, huh?) The titles are compelling. The stuff that changes over time - well, at least the idea of it, since I haven’t seen any of those works in person. I like to watch things change, slowly, so what I’m interested in is going back, over and over, to let these vitrines become experiments in I-wonder-what-happens-if. The static works - like the paintings, and the butterfly pieces (one of which I have seen in person) are beautiful. The man - I don’t know what to say. I read a book of interviews conducted over some years, and watched the personality shift as fame set in. Poetry I want to make, but I don’t care for the rest. I bought a copy, as a reminder.

Nerd alert: geohashing. Different than geocaching. Daily geohash can be found here: http://relet.net/geco/ and the globalhash (more on that) is on the map, too, if you zoom out far enough. New goal: do one by bike before I leave C-U.