Wrapping Paper

Nov 102010
 

Collaboration isn’t always easy; particularly not the start-up phase. Over the weekend I worked up some more sketches for the new Palimpsest series. The operative word here is sketches, which signifies a nonstandard practice that caused a “spirited” exchange with my partner. Until now the opening image in a series has always been part of the final series; the series may evolve, but “sketches” haven’t been part of the process. Palimpsest has been a departure from my normal working modality. In the first place all of the base images come from three separate shoots over a one-week period in totaling about 12 hours. I took pictures of trees, or more specifically of leaves. This involved a fair amount of standing around waiting for the sun to get right, and working off the tripod.

In the past both Shel and I shot the base images which have been pretty much snapshot quality vacation pictures. Prior to this exercise I’ve never really had a clear concept of the final product while I was shooting. But for several years I’ve been carrying around this “vision” of a Fall series, Vermont, the Berkshires, and various past lives; Palimpsest hopes to be the realization of that vision. Add to this that I haven’t been working for the last six months or so, not quite sure why, but it’s led to a bit of insecurity.  A couple of weeks ago some sort of karmic switch was thrown and I felt like working.  The odd thing was that it was no big deal, but at the same time totally different.  I bought a new Wacom table, took pictures of leaves, and built a new graphics machine which is by the way screamingly hot.

So I had the means, and material, but I also had a clear vision of the end product which was a new experience. It turns out, however, that the transition from vision to realization isn’t going to come easily. So sketches; the problem is Shel isn’t used to sketches, and when I proudly presented 6 x 8 prints (note to self: test prints are for your personal use and not for sharing) she was politely enthusiastic. The thing is Shel can’t sustain “politely” for protracted periods. Thus a bit later she was asking, still politely, “Why are you making wrapping paper?” “It’s not wrapping paper!” I replied and here there followed a long complicated, introverted, slightly defensive, art history ramble which concludes with, “It’s not wrapping paper to me, and even if it is wrapping paper, I don’t care.” What I didn’t say, was, “Please reserve judgment, wait-and-see.”  It would’ve been little hard to say that because it would’ve made the possibility of failure more or less inescapable and it’s easier to work when you’re not worried about producing crap. The thing is that, art history aside, the line between abstraction and surface pattern design is about as fine as the one between art and entertainment. Here’s one of the sketches, and I have to admit it’s pretty much wrapping paper. I’d argue that it’s pretty nice wrapping paper, but really that’s all it aspires to.

Here’s a slight evolution, with berries added, that’s a little closer to what I have in mind; you might put this in the tapestry category.
Finally, here’s a sketch that actually suggests where I hope all this is headed:


Of course we’re still confronted with the inevitable question of whether works on paper can aspire to paint, and whether digital works can aspire to paper. Whatever the outcome, what’s important, again to me, is that the torturously painful collaborative process is what will determine the eventual product. We’ve never really been able to explain how Shel I work together; we typically mumbled something about, “acting like an editor,” but mainly she just tells me that it might be crap and more often than not she is correct.

Palimpsest

Nov 012010
 

So the new series has a working title

A New Series

Oct 282010
 

Here’s a first sketch from a new and as yet untitled series. It’s a bit hot and requires some patience.

Galleries

Oct 192010
 

Check tho links on the right for a more or less complete look at our image work to date.

The Problem Is

Mar 092009
 

From Paul Graham:

Be relentlessly resourceful.

That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don’t think so. This isn’t the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they’re mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.

The Set Up

Jan 292009
 

ears

we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun nor learn anything useful if we knew what we were doing.

The whole reactive mind can be in fact reduced to three little words – to be “the“. That is to be what you are not, verbal formulations.

And what then is the written word? My basic theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host… (This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)

I’m trying to weave a number of threads together to see what sort of tapestry appears; one can play without understanding any of the following references; indeed it might be preferable to proceed in that fashion. But for those who need more structure I offer the following (there’s a lot of links and therefore information here, even if you don’t click on anything in the Wikipedia articles; feel free to skip around):

  1. while I didn’t start there, it turns out that this project finds its foundations in Alfred Korzybski’s work on General Semantics. In other words, it’s about words. How the word, or what Marshall McLuhan called A-B-C-D mindedness, shapeo our thinking and behavior; and how the Web might/does act as a pharmakon.
  2. an underlying premise is that the World Wide Web and particularly recent developments such as twtter, and seesmic, function in the manner of the traditional surrealist methodology, which was further developed and applied to electronic media by William Burroughs. The cut up has been redefined as social bookmarking, and citizen journalism.
  3. the real subject of this project, insofar as there is one, being identity. most of the current metaphors for the Web are spatial; Whitman’s body electric sings us all.

    The is of identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The is of identity always carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the is of identity.

    The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherent in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation.

    This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun is in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb to be can easily be omitted from any languages and the followers of Count Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain in force so long as the unchanged language is spoken.

    The definite article the. The contains the implication of one and only: The God, The universe, The way, The right, The wrong, If there is another, then That universe, That way is no longer The universe, The way. The definite article The will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take its place.

    The whole concept of Either/Or. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of or will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition, by and. This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where two concepts stand literally side by side. These falsifications inherent in the English and other western alphabetical languages give the reactive mind commands their overwhelming force in these languages.

    the idea is to publish the interaction of three (?) individuals who share at least one common factor, that they know Don, and to let each of these individuals introduce one other participant into the mix. other than that, we just watch what happens.

I should note that all the block quotes in this article are from William Burroughs. I don’t know that this explains much, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless. let’s move on to tools; this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but rather a starting point; these are the tools that started me thinking about this project. I’m open to additions and other suggestions, but here’s the minimal starting point:

  1. twitter; everyone will need an account
  2. seesmic; again everyone will need an account. if you’re not familiar with it, seesmic is a video blogging/conversation application.
  3. a WebCam
  4. beta version of twhirl; you can get it here but you’ll have to sign up for the beta; this isn’t absolutely necessary but it will make integration and cross posting much simpler. if you go this route will you will also need to install Adobe Air. the final piece is a ping.FM account, which will allow you to tie into all your other favorite social networking haunts with a single send.

video is the prime information carrier for this project but remember, “Playback is the essential ingredient.”

The basic operation of recording pictures, more pictures and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems it depends on maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder 3 then tape recorder 3 loses power. God must be The God.

the careful reader will have noticed the absence of the word game despite the invitation to play . there’s a simple reason when we think game we think about winning and losing and the next thing you know you have the whole Middle East situation; were looking for something better…

That is what this revolution is about. End of game. New games? There are no new games from here to eternity.

Anyone Want to Play?

Jan 272009
 

friendsI’ve been experimenting with twinkling thwirl and sweet sounding seesmic and that naturally, given my current reading, led me to thinking about William Burroughs and the Electronic Revolution. So, I’m looking for some folks who are interested in experimenting with asynchronous conversation. I don’t have any rules as yet, but the research set up looks something like this. I will identify three friends who do not know each other but only know me. Each of them will identify at least one friend who knows none of the other participants. Using twirl, twitter, and seesmic we will begin a series of public discourses with online video as the primary carrier. Exactly who talks to whom, and how these conversations get cut up, is yet to be worked out, but we will take the Burroughs text as a starting point.

Original Photo Credit

Smart History

Jan 232009
 

Just because I haven’t been posting doesn’t mean I haven’t been working, thinking, researching, that sort of thing. Martin Heidegger suggested that we knew there was such a thing as art because we could find things which we recognized as art works. A kind of circular logic that was hard to argue with and tended to make your head hurt, particularly when you had to start defining things like thing before you could really get going. I believe we’ve progressed some, as we now know that there is such a thing as art because there are things made by people called artists. Heidegger touches on this, but it was early and he couldn’t really imagine where things were headed.

noble

Original Photo Credit

I just discovered a new website called Smarthistory which brings all this into focus. If you follow this link you can hear two obviously knowledgeable people enthusing about “Untitled” by Eva Hesse; there’s also a picture which will bring context to their discussion. The problem I have is that if this particular Untitled been made by someone other than a real artist, you or I for instance, and it hadn’t been framed by a museum none of this would make much sense. (I don’t mean that the museum actually framed this, that would obviously missed large part of the conceptual point, but rather that the museum itself acts as a frame which makes the discourse possible.) I mean Untitled is nice enough, but then as Marcel Duchamp noticed so are a lot of things.

duchamp_fountain

10,000 hours

Jan 132009
 

It’s a new year, even if I’m a bit tardy in recognizing that fact, and I’m going to be taking some new directions. In part that means simplifying my web presence to two main sites. Learning Aesthetics will be primarily day job-related; learning technology, higher education, and the like. SightWork be a combination of things that I make, and things that I like.

I haven’t figured out of style or voice, so you can expect a bit of exploration, which is a polite way of saying stumbling about. In fact one of the reasons I’m so far into the new year is that I haven’t figured out how to explain starting, what I’m doing, what to do. Perhaps some visual aids will help. For quite a while I have been calling myself a photographer, and for the past few years: the work product drawings. This because the images have tended to start out as snapshots and then most of the work has been done in Photoshop. Actually the line between Photoshop and photography has grown increasingly blurry for everyone; as has the line between the real and the ideal. There’s room for a lengthy digression on the relationship between retouching and reality, but I think I’ll save that for later. Also for later some of my thoughts about what counts as art, or maybe the relationship between art and beauty, or art and the sublime. But I was leading up to visual aids. I’m now working in Corel painter, which is sort of like a ghetto branch of digital image manipulation. I just started and Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes about 10,000 hours to get good at something; that’s about four hours a day for 10 years, something like that. This is almost as daunting as putting something up on the Internet in the face of everything that’s already there, or as the Flatlanders put it, “…a lot of those boys make a lot more music than I can.” But who knows 10,000 hours from now I may have figured something out.

I decided to start with dachshunds.wd1

Original Photo Credit

1986 Viral Video

Nov 172008
 

This was meant to be show in a little dark room in museums; be patient it takes a while to get going:


Chess from Donal Little on Vimeo.

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