Patterns!

Over the course of the last couple weeks I have ended up riding the amtrak bus several times. It is much nicer than the greyhound bus. However, they all seem to beupholstered with the remnants of late 90s movie theater carpeting.

Catching Up: How To Deal With Shoeboxes

Response 3

I love that Gropius believes that “art for arts sake” came about from the ideas of cold hard business. That would be like a bookcase giving birth to a unicorn. How funny is that? Why would that come from that. Unless cave men came home from their long day out at the mammoth hunt and proceeded to draw pictures on the wall. You see Grack we need to grab about 37 percent of the mammoth market and I think our chance for that is here, in the tusks.

The issues that Gropius and the Bauhaus were dealing with themselves, during the transition from hand crafts into an age of mass production seems remarkably similar to the one we are going through now. That is the transition from an age without the internet to this fantastic one that does. How the Bauhaus got anything done without it I cannot understand.

There are many things taking place on the internet that seem to invert many of the ideals of the Bauhaus. “Goods and buildings specifically designed for industrial production”. But, these mass produced objects no longer truly have to be capable of being machined into multiples. It takes only a digital camera and, as evidenced by myself, a remarkably small amount of knowledge as to how the internet works. The majority of those who experience an object now do it through image and video.
Could it be then that this is the way in which the piece is meant to be viewed? Works responding to it are not built in the same school, but can literally come from anywhere on earth. These works too are presented by way two dimensionality. Many dialogues taking place between artists and makers have nothing to do with the actual object. And it seems to me that there is some sort of amazing freedom in this. It is something of a true democratization of process, you need not be monetarily rich to see an object, or even locational rich and located in a city. You just need the internet.

I always felt that “Information Age” sounded like the stupidest name for anything I had ever heard. Ever. But, in a sense it is right on, data not physical objects is where thing are at. Excluding of course those (lucky?) enough to be in the minority.
This transition has done something though, shifting away from the organization of the Haus and its standard types. Goods conceptualized on an equal playing field are going to be impossible to squeeze into standard types. If a million different people design a chair they will not be able to pick just one for everyone to agree on. And why should they? I see absolutely no reason, when a jpeg requires none of the difficulty of mass production and we have the hands of a million creators to churn out just about anything.

Improvisation Book Design.

While I was writing the other day I typed up a paragraph that ended with “shit”. I then went back, scanned the rest, and realizing it also started with “shit,” I changed the second one to “crap”. I then thought to myself, Mackenzie you are a fantastic writer and the internet is better off with you in it.

Observational Layouts

If you stand in a line with two other people at PNCA you're automatically in an elevator.


Men's Urinal?

Just how is Hugh Jackman defying expectations?

Our Hard Earned Craft

How Craft was thrown a Huckleberry Finn funeral and the crowd made a fool of itself...

I was at a lecture last night declaring the death of Craft. So begin with a metaphor that is not my own, the cruise ship S.S. Craft has sunken into the briny depths. The critics, academics, and gallerists drilled at the hull until it was the nautical equivalent of swiss cheese. And now the voyage is over and what a stuffy, pretentious, cruise it must have been. Good riddance.

Last night it was said that “Design does not need art for voracity,” well Craft does not need academia for voracity. Better it function without, than be attached to shuffling elderly feet. What the academics and businessmen are dealing with is the removal of the reins from their hands. Craft is not what has died. The critics, academics, and gallerists have. It was the internet that killed them. Etsy, Make, Instructables, Craft, all present a much more logical venue for making. And the kicker is that they all do it better than art. Much better.

Art came late to the scene, and has dragged its critics, galleries, time tables, and incessant fears of copyright along for its digital ride. If only it could have been declared dead instead. But, Craft networks with their openness have all been able to create a collective community that is self supporting. The individual is in charge of the work and everyone shows in the same venue. Most importantly any of the “art envy” that occurred in the gallery world immediately dries up when removed from that hostile environment. No longer going head to head with art, there is much more investment in the making.

The ideal has finally been reached just in time for the critics to declare it dead.

Binding on a Budget

ust phoned my utility company yesterday. By means of deduction through hold music I would have to guess they are located in Sherwood Forest. Oh, Robin Hood, in this time of economic recession if even you are reduced to dolling out electricity through a third party middleman, what chance is there for the rest of us?

My TV seems to receive an unconventional number of gospel and static themed networks. Anyhow, last night number 22, gospel not static, was having some sort of pledge drive. It felt very much like the ones on OPB, except rather than withholding the second half of Red and Green they withhold your eternal salvation. If OPB had that kind of leverage they wouldn’t have to feign enthusiasm for totes.

The drive was not without its mystery. Scrolling across the bottom of the screen along a thin, black bar, hiding the inappropriate portion of the program, were the following words... 100 dollars plants 500 trees. 200 Dollars Plants a 1000 trees. Accompanied by a phone number. I like to think that “trees” is slang for something else. Perhaps by “planting” they mean converting the citizens of Nepal. A demographic of whose viewership they seemed particularly proud. Something is fishy about this tree business. And it isn’t stuck to the backs of their American luxury sedans.

While I’m on this media kick I only got two of my Netflix movies today, not three. I was flipping through my mail on the elevator ride up to my apartment when I became aware. It was supposed to be there, not just Boston Legal Season 3: Disc 1, but Disc 2 as well. Thank god it was Disc 1 that showed up and not just Disc 2. Then I would have know whether or not James Spader slept with Murphy Brown, but would have missed all of the suspense leading up to the moment... or lack of moment as it may be.

The Cats and Dogs of the Scrapbooking World

This is Spoon.

She is staying with me at the moment. All she does is sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, and drop things on my head while I'm sleeping early in the morning. She's alright.

Also I am tired of designers taking pictures of their posters while holding them in front of their faces. Get a new thing already everybody.

Stamp Collecting: An Aside

I was watching America's Funnies Home Videos the other night and they played the clip of the skateboarding dog from youTube. That’s like having an internet connection that loads pages five years after you type in the address.

Scrapbooking with Grandma: A Multigenerational Affair

Contemporary Design: Response #2

The more I re-read this section of Baudrillard’s America the more I am reminded of the unfortunate time that I read Chromophobia. The over-analysis of a non-academic field through the eyes of an academic is absurd. Like trying to listen to music with a pair of binoculars.

The computer, the “video screen”, are not ideas in themselves but tools. And yet Baudriallard has divined meaning. Certainly a feat, but one usually reserved for those walking the streets with sandwich boards predicting apocalypse. Maybe he would be right at home in such a situation...

“[V]ideo or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.”

I feel like I’m falling down a rambling nihilistic chasm every time I read that.

In general Baudrillard treats old processes, updated with electronic means, as you would a typewriter that had somehow contracted a venereal disease. He refers to the academic “grappling with” a computer as engaging in “interminable psychoanalysis”. Baudrillard himself writes with what I can only assume is a stone tablet and chisel. Thoughts are carved down and he just keeps going. Looking back is no sort of option for the true philosopher. His publishers must have hated that.

Also... the “teenager / and his Walkman”? I know he was older when he wrote America, but this is about the most stereotypical thing he could have said, ever... Those teenagers and there newfangled Walkmen always desublimating their thoughts. On the whole Baudrillard sounds more alienated than objective. I have never found writings from an outside perspective particularly enlightening.

Regardless of what I just said, I found the idea of Polaroids as “ecstatic membranes” interesting. Instantaneous duplicate images are essentially brand new (last fifty years? thirty? eh). I don’t know what to think of that. In fact what I find remarkably interesting is that new technology can be considered ecstatic. I do not believe I have been able to experience this. No matter how fast technology sprints along I have not witnessed the development of something that changes our way of observing. I would like to.

Where Have All The Good Papers Gone?

I've been following manystuff.org for awhile now. I like it when I am linked to things like this. I'm not really sure what's going, because I don't really speak the language, but still, nice.

Blogging. The New American Scrapbook or Disastrous Moral Compromise

[This is the thingy for contemporary design]

During the lecture I was attending several hours ago, part of a film was shown on the Nine Evenings performances that took place in the sixties. The most notable part of this was Steve Paxton’s hands, which are like two birds panicking in their cage at the first sight of a cat. An evolution in gesturing.

Beyond the flailing digits I found a remarkable consistency between art/technology in the sixties and current practices of today. Past and present are both characterized by an unfaltering exploration of new media. And most striking is that the work being done by Rauschenburg, Stella, Paxton, etc. would not have seemed out of place today. Despite differences in technology the end results have a marked similarity. FM instead of bluetooth. Incandescents rather than of LEDs. Why is it that satisfaction in the creation of a “new” work seems to lie in exactly the same place it did almost fifty years ago? Primary motivation remains a fanatical exploration of technology. And newly introduced technologies lead effortlessly towards hardware-centric works. Results remain similar.

I would be off-base in this generalization were I not to admit that changes are afoot (or perhaps “at hand” as Paxton might prefer). And have been for a bit. Because, the constancy in this exploratory new media over the last half century has been accompanied by inconsistent access to the technology. It would not be possible for all of us to tour scientific facilities like Irwin. But, right now, and over the course of the last couple of years a drastic change has occurred in accessibility. Coding has become simpler, hardware easier to manipulate, and most importantly things are cheap to the point of drawing materials. Cheaper than printmaking, painting (at least fancy painting), sculpture, and about anything else associated with the field of fine art. God knows its certainly cheaper than photography. And when this is accompanied by, say, the internet, it becomes remarkably easy to establish a wide base of interested persons.

This brings up a point from the lecture that the film accompanied... Dana Plautz, relating her own experiences, felt that many artists working with new media were, in a sense, isolationists. Disinclined to admit the influences at play within their own work. Like the reluctant fathers on Maury who worry that one or all of their children might have come from someone else’s “seed”. And so, using a rather crude metaphor, the internet when combined with cheap hardware has created an environment where everyone is contaminating everyone else’s work. And that seems like the best place for everyone to be in order to move on past this whole technology as motive thing.

Adult Scrapbooking: An Evil Best Kept Out of The American Home

How the paths of art and nuclear physics cross. Apparently the artist Robert Irwin spent several days with touring science facilities with Dr. Richard Feynman. Let us be thankful that Irwin's work did not cross over into realm of the atom bomb.

An as it turns out, after very little research, Feynman was himself an amateur painter. How unfair is it that while Robert Irwin is unable to dabble in quantum physics, Feynman is perfectly free to paint his heart out. What an unjust world.

Work and Home Scrapbooking... Should They Be Kept Seperate?

Today marks the start of a new trend in my blogging activities, that is to say actually writing something. Look out internet here I come!