Blue Collar

I am really inspired by Ed Ruscha's "Blue Collar" Series right now (painted in 1992).

The construction of time.

I am really inspired by the work of Mark Formanek (above) and Maarten Baas (below). Both of these videos were featured alongside Eternity in the O'clock exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. They both feature performances of people literally constructing the time in real time. Genius!

You think of all the other ways that your life could have been, but will you marvel at the way that it has gone?

Woody Guthrie's New Years Resolutions from 1942 (from here)

(title is a quote from Cloud Atlas)

Bodies upon the gears.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

(from Mario Savio's speech at UC Berkeley, 1964)

(Police pepper spraying student protestors at UC Davis on November 18, 2011)

Turning the Place Over

Unreal

(An unrealized project by Felice Varini)

T_XT_RT

"Red Sky at Night" by Tim Etchells

"Nah/Yep" by Cody Hoyt

"Unlimited Promise" by Christine Wong Yap

(These works and more were featured in the T_XT_RT exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in NY)

Mechanical drawings

Radiating Cylinder Yellow Profile and Kaleidoscope Cylinder, 2008 by James Bills

Barely legible.

("Soapy Smith" by Edward Ruscha)

(when does text stop looking like words and start looking just like dots and lines?)

The way of progress is a disappearing path.

("The way of Progress" by Nathaniel Shapiro
and "Disappearing Paths" by Richard William Wheater)

Obliteration

(from Stefan Bruggemann's "Obliteration Series")

Live and Die

by Bruce Nauman (1984)

oh, yes!

(by Nick van Woert)

Hello from camp!

I have been busy learning crazy and amazing things about electronics and interactive technologies at ITP Camp in NYC. Here is a project I will be learning more about in a class tomorrow (it's a program that uses real time information about the whereabouts of subway cars to make music!):


Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

--> --> --> !

(found here)

For the reason that; since

Photo by Meggan Gould (from her Blackboards series).

In pursuit of something elusive.

"I think a great deal about what it means to be an artist.

I reflect on the elaborate psychological mechanisms required to pursue something so elusive, so ambiguous. I often wonder: ‘Am I talking to myself?’

I don’t make work for other people, but as an artist, I need to be in dialogue with the world that exists beyond my overpopulated cranium. I’ve concluded that to be effective-to be functional-I must guzzle an eye-popping cocktail of delusion and narcissism.

It occurred to me that being an artist is a great deal like being a dictator.

Just like a dictator, I must live in a closed loop of self-delusion. A place where my words and ideas always ring true. A gilded daydream of grandiosity. There can be no room for doubt. I must be convinced that I have something vital to say. I must believe that the world is waiting in keen anticipation to hear my message."


(This text is copied from the artist statement of Phillip Toledano, who also made that photograph of his daughter - read more about it here. Thanks, Genevieve!)

When's the last time you took one of these?

(I just found this on facebook and I think it's brilliant. There are some ideas I really wish I had had myself.)

My next sculptural material....

An ominous shadow.

IT'S A PAINTING ON THE GRASS! (By Brigitte Zieger. Check it out.)