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!

How to scrapbook on a tightened budget after your child costs you an arm and a leg talking to their 27 year old "partner" in alaska.

On a routine exploration of Seattle (via google maps) I discovered the nexus point of another universe. It's only a matter of time before it births a hairy multi-tentacled beast. Watch out Seattle.


If it's anything like that trailer for hellboy 2 you're going to have your hands full.

That First New Page or Strategies For The Ill Prepared.

I have a show opening tomorrow night in Portland. There is at least one sculpture involved, that I know of, and at least one photograph. It is something of a collaboration between myself and Charlie Olson, whom I have know for quite awhile now. It looks like this...



That is if you cover up the left half and extrapolate what's there already five, maybe seven, fold. Still there's certainly something up our collective sleeve that you have yet to see. With the exception of Caitlin and Brennan and of course everyone who has walked by the gallery over the course of the last week. I would give you the address, but given the astronomically low chance of anyone who hasn't already been invited reading this in the next 24 hours I'm not going to bother.

I saw something in the store that I've seen a lot of recently and was surprised as to what exactly the pressing demand for such an object was. Funny.