wrath of franny

2012-01-29T02:32:00.000-08:00

K'nex Mandala

2012-01-26T11:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.evanblackwell.com/repurpose.html

2012-01-22T23:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.ganoksin.com/borisat/nenam/studio-ventilation.htm

2012-01-19T23:36:00.001-08:00

if you have 15 minutes this is really beautiful

2012-01-18T01:55:00.000-08:00

yesterday, while playing chinese checkers, i realized that the more people you play with the less is in your control and the harder it is to have a specific strategy especially if you plan out a route that depends on jumping over other people's pieces. it's all about finding open spots, that lead to more open spots, even if it means jumping horizontally or away from your final destination first. the more pieces and players there are, the more opportunities there are to jump farther and get you to where you want to be even if those pieces weren't placed there strategically by you.

this memory of checkers, particularly the thrill of foreseeing a path of open spaces between multicolored but uniformly shaped playing pieces, reminds me of two things that are currently on my mind: 1) an essay by andreas broeckmann on public spheres and network interfaces and 2) our latest relapse on the topic of internet freedom.

in broeckmann's essay on public spheres he describes the city as "a zone of tension in which social conflicts and instabilities are made productive," and the importance of keeping the city a site for uncontrollability, diversity, and experimentation for different types of public domains. he goes on to describe three factors- visibility, presence, and action- and the use of media technology that affect how the public sphere materializes and constitutes social change and political effectiveness. the topic of control that lies within visibility is related to the current issue of internet censorship- once something becomes visible it is now the subject of public concern, and can be deemed either acceptable or unacceptable for the masses. this consequence of visibility leads me to think that maybe some things could just become a little more invisible, but that's probably another paradox in itself.

i am now going to leave broeckmann's thoughts for a bit, although i appreciate much of what he has to say about presence and action, to slightly leftist fantasies about what could happen if ideas were free and public in the first place. i've been reading about a self sustaining community developed in colombia during the 70s called gaviotas, and a goal they had there was for third world countries to make solutions to their own problems rather than import costly solutions from first world countries. to do this though, they searched around the world borrowing, revising, adding, or one could say stealing ideas and designs to make solar water heaters, wind turbines, and other technology for water purification and to improve the overall quality of life. propriety, money, "the good life" don't necessarily have to be as correlated as it seems. healthy food, affordable housing, leisure, and less waste can be obtainable if instead of creating more and more restrictions preventing equality, ideas were open to the public. but yes, how would one make a living and denote they were superior then?

anyways my point is however superior, inferior- i'm kidding about these terms by the way- one is, any kind of censorship, restriction, or limitation on experimentation, freedom of information, and knowledge limits all kinds of domains and not just for the people or for businesses- aren't these run by people anyway? information, ideas, communication, all make more of one another. to try to maintain control of superiority, or have the intention of restricting something, is an uphill battle when there are so many other factors involved.

back to broeckmann, "reclaiming public domains as sites of constructive conflict, and developing democratic forms of agency for the new intersections of virtual and physical public environments, are therefore imperatives of the current situation." to have 'constructive' conflict means having resources available to all publics. otherwise the resulting solution of the conflict falls short of being actual improvement, and more like a temporary replacement. what 'actual improvement' means to me, is something that starts to address a problem in terms of long term issues- such as a the (un)sustainability of an attitude that values superiority over equality or the creation of economic barriers to maintain hegemony. to allow resources to be available for all within in a conflict increases the number of experiments for possible solutions. many solutions that get recycled into companies and products come from amateur tinkering and the masses anyway so to restrict information from the public is not a smart business plan.

back to chinese checkers, two things that suck the most: 1) when the path doesn't work anymore because somebody moved a piece you were planning on jumping over or 2) when a path doesn't work anymore because the space between pieces is blocked.

stop scheming, start living, stop hoarding, start freeing

everyone's gonna get to the other side some way. even if the more pieces and spaces means it might get your opponent to the other side faster - that is way better than having things stopped and unmovable. immobility limits potential. and to say we don't want potential is to say there is no hope in improving anything, and things are not fine.

WoF

2012-01-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe the key lies in transforming-- between visibility and invisibility-- if they are going to start censoring things

2012-01-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

new doorbell

2012-01-17T14:59:00.001-08:00

Entanglement

Subsculpture 6

Entanglement is an interactive installation that consists of two identical neon signs each measuring 182 x 38 cm. The signs simply say the word "Entanglement" a term used in quantum physics to describe the strange property exhibited by two particles that behave as one. The two signs are to be placed in two separate rooms, even if they are in different cities. Under each sign there is a normal light switch that turns it on and off. However, the light switches are also linked through two computers connected to the Internet. In this way the neon signs automatically write email to each other so that they are both either ON or OFF and never independent. This means that for example, the neon will turn ON at a strange time, as someone on the other side of the world just switched his or her copy of the entangled pair ON. http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/

connectors

2012-01-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

2012-01-04T21:28:00.001-08:00

http://makeprojects.com/Project/Stain-PVC-any-color-you-like/296/1

2012-01-04T21:24:00.001-08:00

beautiful

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13073

why doesn't this already exist?

response - curating the past 50 yrs as ruin

2012-01-04T01:40:00.000-08:00

Notes on the Arts: Curating the Past 50 Years as Ruin (East of Borneo): In the midst of our economic and political crisis, we must assume that art history will be remade. New points of origin will be invented, probably starting with the 1960s instead of the 1860s. Fluxus, Archigram, Conceptual art, Minimalism, Pop—1968 and...

just some thoughts to myself and people who can read my mind: how to find hope in eventual "ruin" in terms of social design projects

1. Super interesting point in the article on the false promises of technology as a solution to... no ruin. But still sticking with NeoHippydom's holy grail of using technology to enhance revision and idea of finding loopholes out of ruin, or fatalist-nihilist-nowhereness, in the process of re-canvassing the old.
2. Gradual 'fixes' to doomed relations, based on the article's definition of doom as a capitalist model I suppose, in adaptor-hubs (my term for a transformative space where there is a constant process to first translate, then transform the old into something usable or compatible with the "new.") For example, a digital library catalog makes finding books easier than an old card catalog, but we aren't throwing the books away. The adaptor-hub would be the the people, resources, facilities, and time it just takes to make something useful out of all the data we collect, archive, and organize. Also the process of making components able to be independent of each other for easier editing of a single part, yet still work just as fluidly as a solid unit.

This on-going process of revision, instead of a one time fixie, which in this case of our doomed world would probably have to be apocalypse and a fresh start -- a hedonistic whatever -- means what we create now, isn't just meaningless stuff to add to the fire later.
3. Lastly, probably something about technology needs to walk the walk a bit more than it talks, even if there are bureaucratic roadblocks in the middle... Making it happen! There is not enough doing, viewing, reflecting and too much conceptualizing, and premature worrying. (How to have ideas, progress, adaptor-hubs manifest without $, time, space is something I still don't know and am trying to figure out...) But still, why doesn't everyone have a solar panel, if it is that much more effective or cheaper ?
4. Otherwise how else does one handle alleged artifice? (this may be a more personal life question... hm)

don't know until u try,

peace babies

WoF

2012-01-03T19:02:00.001-08:00

the possibilities with colored mirror...

http://www.eplastics.com/Plastic?search=mirror

2011-12-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

http://ernestooroza.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=42:menu-objects-of-necessity&layout=blog&Itemid=63

needing as much no studio/no money inspiration as possible

2011-12-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

from the old furniture blog, this site is AMAZING
http://woodgears.ca/

Rethinking Utopias

2011-12-26T23:30:00.000-08:00

"Tell me, Gustavo: How do composers' creative passions, which are born of random, nonlineal emotion, deal with the structure of music, which is mathematical and therefore lineal?

It was a strange remarkable question, but Yepes had heard that this was a strange, remarkable person.

"I imagine it's much the same," he replied, "as what happens at Gaviotas. People who dare to build a utopia use the same materials available to anyone, but they find surprising ways to combine them. That's exactly what composers do with the twelve tones of the scale. Like you, they're dreamers. In a dream you aren't limited by what is assumed to be permissible or possible."

"Gaviotas isn't a utopia," Lugari interrupted. "Utopia literally means 'no place'. In Greek, the prefix 'u' signifies no. We call Gaviotas a topia, because it's real. We've moved from fantasy to reality. From utopia to topia. Someday you need to come see it."

Roller slide

2011-12-26T21:52:00.001-08:00

Gravity travel

2011-12-26T21:22:00.001-08:00

check out this homemade diacro-ish jig:

2011-12-20T21:53:00.001-08:00

2011-12-15T10:14:00.001-08:00

The future doesn't start with a blank slate

2011-12-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

pressPLAY: Contemporary Artists in Conversation Phaidon

for u addicts

2011-11-29T23:39:00.001-08:00

ted's cup

2011-11-22T23:27:00.001-08:00

two different approaches to minimizing waste in living-space-creation...

GROW YOUR OWN-

training, growing, waiting & chance

Visiondivision

SUPER TECH-

downloadable designs, 3d printed hardware to fit custom dimensions, minimal assembly + (waste?)

Minale Maeda

ramon coronado

2011-11-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.ramoncoronado.info/#1560608/Mercado-Negro

2011-11-01T12:34:00.001-07:00

2011-10-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

while surfin the web for the ryan murray in furniture,
i found this other ryan murray- a witch boy
im gonna bring his neon barf tent with me to joshua tree...

2011-10-19T21:13:00.001-07:00

this kid: http://velohobo.com/2010/10/14/featured-rider-tomas-aperlo/

the last few days in sac town/ bike zine sneek peek

2011-10-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hey ya'll-
I guess this will be more of a word post rather than a picture post as I sit here on the 2002 Dell Desktop in good ol Mountain View, California. Being home, in this converted garage filled with books, and being on this computer makes me feel like I'm in a library going through a library catalog, well not the RISD library I guess, because they have brand new macs there... But you know, any regular one, since I am now a civilian. I'm scheduled to go to LA sometime soon to get the rest of my stuff, which happens to be my beloved trash can - with a computer and camera in it. I contemplated biking down there, and I was told to climb to the space station at Joshua Tree park. One of which I may do, but I also have to be back in N. California on the 5th, so I'm afraid there is not enough time to bike back and forth.

None of this post has been really necessary so far. But it's my blog so I can write whatever! What prompted it was an email from Ned, who said I could be in NY, writing for a blog, about occupy wall street. You know from being on the road, in mostly the middle of nowhere, I was kind of removed from things happening around me in the "world" and school things - although I did wake up to "Steve Jobs is dead!" one morning. But I guess a part of my degree project was about the internet, blogs, and social change so maybe I could give Ned's suggestion a try. Also school things will never be removed from life things..."be in a constant state of learning" says Lindee and Jeff.

Anyway, so I am trying to think of how to end my bike 'zine "poop water slide in the golden sunlight" and some recurring topics throughout the trip have been: The ARMY, being alone vs. being with others or being in the "world," tons of thoughts on types of people or types of people in me...-hippies, witches, outdoorsy people, religious people, building a home, survival, bikes, going up hills and the weather. Most of the time though I'll have to say I was pretty zenned out and didn't think of much, or just thinking about stuff to eat. Time went by so fast!

I've already lost the point to this entry, but it was to give ya'll a sneek peek for things to look forward to in the 'zine. Becca and Wes got a real sneek peek, when I emptied out the contents of my backpack that I haven't cleaned out yet and showed them every item one by one... the backpack that I accidently pepper sprayed... Oh, and to comment on my last few days in Sacramento and metaphorically speak about occupy wall street. So getting out of the train, Sac was probably the most city-like, suburban place, I've been in a while, even more so than Grand Junction. They had signs that told you to bike ON the sidewalk for goodness sake. But a block away from the train station was a protest, and I thought, oh yes, now I am in California. I got a cup of coffee and went to visit Claire. Later on a tour of the Capitol building, we passed a park where some anarcho lady gave me a flyer which I really hope I didn't throw away 'cause thats going in the zine, (the zine is going to be filled with lots of pictures of random stuff people have given me,) about occupying the park we just walked through. Then as we were leaving the park, on the sidewalk in chalk read something like: public space vs. empty space. let us camp in the park. It didn't say that at all, but I just realized I can't remember it anymore... Oh, it said something about city ordinances, and not being able to camp in the park, and reclaiming the park... That was the jist though. Then I immediately thought about all the parks I've slept in and how I guess I was a little surprised I could sleep in them. I was also probably surprised that nobody lived in that town, and nobody would ever use that park... anyway I enjoyed camping (most of the time) and it sucks that we can't sleep in parks here, but I guess nobody wants hobo Mac flashing his peepee at baby BJ, hahahha sorry. Oh man, I am also so sad I didn't bring that jar of poop69 stickers with me, but I think poop69 got far enough through word of mouth.

OK, this is sooo long. To get to the point. I used to read adbusters ya know, but that's totally 90s. I feel like protesting is so flashy (maybe, most probably, due to the internet) and yeah you gotta protest for smart things, not unchangeable things, like capitalism? Maybe the internet has made protesting, congregating, forming masses easier - actually definitely. Ah, I guess I'll go on another tangent here.

On my way down from SF to Mountain View, I just happened to get on the 5:33pm baby bullet and I went to the bike car to put Nimbus away and walked up the stairs to sit down. Looked down at all the people still in the bike car with their six-packs and thought is this normal? As the train set off, people were boozing, it was Friday by the way, and it felt like a bar in there. I was called down to join them, and thought why the hell not I just ended my trip. Turns out this is a regular thing that happens on Fridays, at the back bike car, not on the front one, and on the 5:33 bullet train. What luck! Oh, there has been so much "luck," on my trip - trip karma. So they were like we'll add you to groupME, do you have a smartphone? And after that every second of the day I got texts from the people in the group, like IMs, and they are all like best friends, talking about stuff and events to go to. THEN, I get an automated one that's like you haven't replied in a while, groupME is more fun when everyone chats! I had to unsubscribe... :(

So you know, people can stay connected, really easily. Ok, so protesting was probably awesome in the hippie days. I still gotta read this hippie handbook, that was like the bible of real-hippiedom, forgot what I'll post it later, but now I'll have to say I agree with Mayor Bloomberg a little that protesting is kinda useless (in the US/NYC), well especially if you aren't protesting for nuanced enough things. Protesting for jobs, and protesting against the lifestyle consumerism brings is all right, but it's too right. I haven't really read up on it yet, but of course my initial reaction to occupy wall street was:
You gotta do things underground, like couchsurfing I feel like is the secret gem of gems.
You gotta do things, instead of protest, you just gotta do it - yourself, with others, whatever. Steal oranges off somebody's tree if it's going to waste...

I don't really know anything about politics, or how to fix the problem right now, but that's my two cents. Some people probably don't know anything either and are bored, and it's so easy to congregrate and get riled up and just go out there especially for a cause that sounds good. Don't get me wrong, fight for your rights kids, but the government is smart too, and they have to do their part in the system, so there are smarter ways of doing things... But I'm glad people are out there doing their thang, bringing attention to the problem, some people aren't aware you can bring attention to the problem or that there is a problem. I'm just thinking of ways to make it more effective.

Claire and I had to go to the bathroom, and we went to the mall... The Macy's in Sac has the nicest bathrooms. They have invidual stalls sealed off from top to bottom (my dream) with individual sinks inside each one. If you are homeless and want a nice place to poop or take a sink shower, you don't write up a constitutional amendment, you go to Macy's and pretend you're shopping.

Also, I'm big on using flashiness to let people learn for themselves. Don't use flashiness to make people protest for your cause (even though it's "right") Use flashiness to promote learning for oneself. If you can brain wash people the right way, you can brainwash them the wrong way. That's big in suburbia.

so for the future-
i'd like to make this 'zine
i'd like to make some bike paths
and parks, for people to camp in, although these exist... just not in the city, maybe we can make some urban ones
i'd like to make some custom bike accessories
i'd like to have a coffee shop/ bike shop
i'd like to have a communal fruit tree database
but first
i'd like to get a job! and if i can't i'll be in a park protesting!

Peace beezys,
wrathoffranny

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An article to ruminate over- http://shareable.net/blog/open-letter-to-the-occupy-movement-it%E2%80%99s-time-for-the-ultimate-occupation#.TwYA9ekYI-g.blogger
I agree mainly with a comment posted at the end how "If occupy frames itself as a protest, it will fail... start producing things for ourselves."

Monarch pass day

2011-10-12T12:25:00.001-07:00

procrastinating in Salida

by procrastinating I mean going to the bike shop and buying a spare tube and some socks, and sending goodbyes

looking behind

Millie, Thad, and Courtney (from pvd!) at the top

a mailbox for Yumi

2011-10-12T11:56:00.001-07:00

hwy 69 w sun shining on the hills

bigass dovetails

all my shit

mm cold pizza

some cliffs

Older Colorado pics

2011-10-12T11:15:00.001-07:00

"Eric, you have a ton of shit"

the middle of nowhere

llamas in wetmore (starting to get really bad watery eyes)

taking a break from the hills

mhm pizza in Wetmore

what i stared at while eating pizza

2011-10-09T06:56:00.001-07:00

aspen gradient - did u know the ones w the same color leaves are thesame clones? They share the same root system and nutrients. They livewithin other families of aspens which makes the gradients

bridgeport tie clip!

Telluride

somewhere near Ouray

burgers in Ouray

UNIFY!

2011-10-03T08:57:00.001-07:00

2011-10-01T21:53:00.001-07:00

one day kids there will be more words but only pictures for now

Some older pics

2011-10-01T20:44:00.001-07:00

trying to get to windsor locks

keepin it real with the greens

somewhere in conneticut

rail trails in conneticut

jion from korea, in kansas

red roads in kansas

chicago

Some more photos

2011-10-01T19:08:00.001-07:00

diet sucks

nowhere to hide your bootay in kansas. peed in between the hay bales

sunrise in cassoday

96 west kansas

larned

zenning out in kansas

sunset haswell

sunrise dighton

sunrise haswell

chillen pueblo

entertainment in larned

a biker named mark has this sign on his hat. he doesn't wear a helmet and sleeps on the floor

dude named miles bikes "wherever the wind blows"

j&j in kansas heading east

2011-09-18T22:22:00.001-07:00

Some pictures

blue ridge valley from the train

somewhere in virginia

hostel in charlottesville, va

fire station at mineral

goochland baby

my bunk at the hippie hostel, hosted by Raven and Flame

Alexander House, Charlottesville

ant sandwiches

the bros in pueblo

what i eat

not drinking enough to attempt the rockies

some "gear"

2011-08-26T13:20:00.001-07:00

Tiger Iron

2011-08-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

mark bradford

camp halftime

2011-07-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

tomorrow

2011-06-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

2011-06-13T22:59:00.001-07:00

just watched mister lonely
and there was this....

2011-06-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

dp intro draft pt.1

NEO-HIPPY-DOM v.3.1

Mutability Within Identity

Introduction: Generations, technology, identity

It is hard to identify a concrete group that is the perfect model for a generation. It is even harder to define a generation in the midst of its development. Being part of a generation is not solely determined by the year of birth but by many factors that affect how an individual relates to the surrounding environment. How far political, ideological, social, and cultural commonalities extend are affected by age, class, gender, geographical location, race, religion, parenting, shared experiences in historical events, and technological development. Even though there is no way for me to describe anything beyond the particular niche I occupy within my generation and my perception of it, there is an increase in shared data, access to history, documentation, and personal stories, that I can try to piece together. So when I refer to ‘my generation’ I mean a group of people who share a conscious acknowledgment of similar desires, tendencies, and questions as I do. No matter how small or subjective this group, it is interesting to point out the common connections seen in the things we make* and compare these across generational divides to point to possible ways of rethinking realities.

*Rather than in things we consume. Hoptman, Younger than Jesus

To begin, technology is a helpful metaphor when considering the invisible infrastructures needed to build momentum before actual change can manifest on a physical level. The main technological development during the early years of my adolescence in the 90s was the mass availability of the web browser and access to the Internet— and now tools and platforms such as photo, music, video hosting, social networking, blogs, wikis, and open sourcing referred to as Web 2.0. There is a strange idealism that exists in Web 2.0 which parallels many of the social ideals of ‘60s hippiedom.’ Themes of freedom and love, increased interaction, communication, cooperation, collective action, flattened hierarchies, and broadened social consciousness, are all associated with the new web revolution. * However similar the ideals of Web 2.0 and 1960s counter culture seem at first, noting just which tools and tendencies we are currently taking advantage on the web increases the understanding of the kind of environment my generation is participating in now.

*Shirky, Friedman

The word mutability means capable of mutating— to depart from the parent type or more heritable characteristics caused by a change in gene or chromosome. Mutations can either be physical or biochemical, visible or hidden. In math, identity means a value that is always true for a variable by definition. The definition for identity in the Webster dictionary states a: sameness of generic character in different instances and b: sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing: oneness. In my generation we have broken away from some of these definitive identities, and instead have taken on a kind of relativism toward having any identity – which in fact becomes an identity in itself. The purpose of my degree project is not to critique culture or technology but to provide an opportunity to re-imagine spaces in between identities, to add a subjective view in an objective ‘sameness’ in the hopes of finding someplace new—but if new doesn’t exist—at least some place hidden. Experiencing hidden and unknown spaces is creating a chance to mutate and change in real life.

Me: Frances Kao b.1989, Neohippy v.3.1
Maybe because I am from Northern California or because I have always been fascinated by something I have never really known or experienced beside listening to The Doors, watching Woodstock the documentary, and obtaining free ‘live in love’ leather bracelets at Lucky Brand Jeans, 60s hippie culture has always been an interest to me. According to stereotype there is openness to new perceptions, altered states and spaces, belief in the mystical and unseen. To me Neo-hippy-dom v.3.1, is a mutation of hippie culture, beyond its beautiful ideals. A time when meanings are put on top of meanings and original ones lost. It is interesting to compare how contemporary society exists now compared to how the hippie ideals were perceived. Now in our vicious cycle of consumption, industrial production, and natural landscape giving way to urban landscapes, ideals don’t work. It’s how we revise our ideals to work with what is going on. An example of this increased possibility to change, adapt, and make hidden spaces and mutations manifest in real life is through the ease of production and revision through the internet.

//INSERT East Side Railroad Tunnel Story//

pt. 2 coming

2011-05-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

workin on dp book
= on house arrest for the next few days
so excited though, neo-hippy-dom-v.3.1 coming soon!

meanwhile... zoom into the internet
opte project - visualization of the wwwwwww

2011-05-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

this lady

2011-05-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

last things to work on
- wish table
- dp book
- personal karmic imbalance ...soo helpful
o ya dp conclusion is gettin increasingly weird and mystical

hello meth lab in the sun
perverse, dystopic growth will always occur
work in constant revision

neohippy
"hippie stands for hypocrite"
seth cohen

2011-05-15T17:29:00.001-07:00

In the new performative environment on the web you are an actor all the time. How you are perceived is never left entirely up to you. You can direct how you appear to others, but you will never know how they perceive you exactly, and they will never know you how you know you—But that’s all you are. This guide is intended to “flatten the playing field” so that everybody is given a chance. Everybody might be cool, but not everyone is kewl ;)

KEWL Manifesto – How to keep it real on the www.

i.
When people laugh with you. (instead of at you)
ii.
When it appears that you do a lot in real life. Bonus points when this is expressed not through your own photos but in the photos and comments of others’ or places you or others check into. When there is natural ‘scenery’ in your photos to show that you are just as big a presence in the natural world as you are on the web. You cook, eat, and go on quests for disgusting food, yet stay so beautiful.
iii.
When you have no shame in your web presence. When you are online all the time because you are just so on top of your game and people need your presence online. You add to everything, you are the center of the party.
iv.
When you know that you are kewl (and you really are). Or when you are aware of how you appear – which makes you kewl.
v.
When you look good, or badass if that is not possible. Or when you look as fucked up as possible. Bonus points when people use the name of drugs (especially prescription drugs) or references to the underworld and demonic possession in the comments. Acknowledging the photo was even taken pre-something makes it more badass.
vi.
When you do things that people wish they were a part of.
vii.
When you know other kewl people. This is your biggest immunity if you are borderline kewl, or if people just aren’t sure… How well you know the other person is determined through frequency of back and forth comments, photos of you guys together, and references that you associate offline... like when you guys know things that nobody else knows about.
viii.
When everyone wants to share things with you. Because you have the wittiest responses that seem so natural. When what they share with you is kewl. When what they share with you adds to your persona.
ix.
When kewl people respond to your responses. Your comments provide others’ a chance to appear kewl as well. You play fair.
x.
When you don’t respond to unkewl responses. This shows you have discerning taste, no time, or just don’t hurt feelings.
xi.
When you look good but pretend not to. Don’t be the only one caught looking at the camera. Keep profile pictures weird, not sexy. Or have one that shows you just don’t care… what?
xii.
When you are stalkable. Let people know as much about you as possible and the events you are going to. This will keep them checking in. List your birthday so people can further stalk you via your horoscope and fantasize over the romantic compatibility section. Or when you don’t list your birthday – so you know who’s asking in real life.
xiv.
When your narcissism seems effortless. Casual snapshots, Myspace angles, and mobile uploads are a plus. Don’t appear to update too much. Only update your profile pic with a weirder, or more badass photo. Never go back, it’s already in your album. Don’t comment on your own photos, ‘like’ them instead.
xv.
When you are “not online enough.” Buy time. Leave them wanting more. They can’t get enough of you.
xvi.
When you disappear. Maybe you have found something really meaningful to do or have died. You can’t let people know too much about you online or in real life anyway, in case the two don’t match up. Bonus points if you are kewler in real life.
xvii.
If you accidently do something unkewl try to remedy it as soon as possible. Delete comments and ‘unlike’ things before the other person has signed back on again. If all else fails, say your account has been hacked. Resign all responsibility.

WORK HARD TO BE KEWL

IT'S EFFORTLESS

✌ wrathoffranny ♥

detox

2011-05-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

adam says the best research is knowing the other side of the argument. i dont think i was arguing for bourriaud, but if i was i give up!

byebye art skewl

2011-05-11T11:28:00.001-07:00

furniture kids make cake

8-)

2011-05-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

interesting.... the web as a new performative environment
and seth's theory of delay
'KEWL MANIFESTO' coming soon
gotta get website going ...

FROM: http://122909a.com/?tag=seth-price

Performance 4 (Seth Price)
1.
According to the computer science guru David Gelertner, the increasing migration of digital information from personal hardware to data clouds necessitates a shift in the picture one refers to when visualizing the Internet. The Web—as in a relatively static network of data nodes—is out; the lifestream—as in continuously mutating network of data clouds—is in. He writes:

The Internet’s future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story.

For some artists working on the Web, this principal applies as well. Creativity is–again, for some–not evaluated on the basis of an individual work of art, but rather on the basis of the artist’s ongoing, performed net presence. For better or for worse, a week ago an artist may have created a masterpiece work of art which in previous epochs would have been discussed for decades or even centuries; in the age of the CVS Pharmacy Twitter feed, though, the artist’s masterpiece will be quickly forgotten, at best sentimentally recalled or academically cited, but no longer felt. What will be felt, though, is the artist’s ongoing engagement with time—the molding of the NOW.
It should be said, though, that Gelertner is ambiguous about this obsession with flow and the NOW. He writes, “The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.” Furthermore, focusing on an endless NOW, can be oppressive for an artist’s creative expression. Part of what it means to be working in the tradition of the history of art is to work against the demands of one’s own time; or at least working in relation to it from a skewed angle, keeping everyone on their toes. The Puck-ish delight the artist has in convoluting expectations is frustrated in this grinding system which demands one to endlessly perform, endlessly produce ever newer novelties if one is to remain relevant as an artist. Nothing becomes shocking when there’s a new revolution every week and, thus, any avant-garde action becomes neither here nor there—it’s like whatever.
In what follows, I’ll discuss this performative approach to art making and look at the artist Seth Price’s response to some of the anxieties which it brings up.
*****
First, here is an example of how an artist may come to think of their work as performative on the Internet:
An artist has a website. At first, this website is, depending on the artist, either a handy novelty or a frustrating necessity of the digital age. Either way, it’s not that super-important. One makes a work—be it digitally-created or handmade—and one, then, uploads a photograph or some other form of representation of this work to their website to serve as a second-hand reference for curators, collectors, critics, and the general contemporary art audience.
An artist maintains this website. Gradually the artist comes to realize just how handy and how necessary this tool is for the dissemination of their work. As newspapers, mainstream culture, an exploding amateur culture, communication with friends, banking, and a host of other day-to-day activities are increasingly conducted via the Internet, the artist realizes that not only do people greatly prefer, and even expect, the ease of viewing the work through this website, but the once-obvious line between the actual work and the representation of the work is becoming oddly blurry. For many members of the artist’s audience, including curators, critics, and other arts professionals, the image of the work on the website is good enough. This is exacerbated by the increasingly global nature of contemporary art, perhaps best represented by Biennial culture.
All of the sudden, the way the artist thinks about their work is at least as much dictated by how a .jpeg of the piece looks in the context of their website as they are by how it would look in the physical art space. This is what the artist Guthrie Lonergan calls “post Internet” art—the art after the Internet changed the way that art reaches an audience.
For many younger artists who, by historical accident, came of age without ever really experiencing the “pre-Internet” relationship between artist and audience, this is not a novelty, but an obvious fact that almost goes without saying. Even if one works in traditional media, art is primarily experienced on the Internet. For example, the art/curatorial collective VVORK curated a show called “The Real Thing” which was based on the idea that, as members of mediatized cultures, most of their own knowledge of art was not accrued through the original, but through art history books, lectures, conversations, and, of course, the Internet. In other words, through “versions.” In their statement for the show, which was held at MU in Eindhoven, they write:

Some of our favourite works have only been described to us, unsurprisingly as the majority of our art experiences have been mediated in one form or other. The majority of works presented in this show have been selected through written commentaries, verbal descriptions and jpegs found online. In fact most of the works presented at MU are the type of manifestations mentioned above: stories, descriptions, translations and interpretations, all understood as primary experiences.

One of VVORK’s cited inspirations for the show is the following Seth Price quote from Dispersion:

Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation?

Now, when the primary experience of art is legitimately conceived in this way–as an endless series of versions–there are going to be effects. For example, the glut of information through which media consumers are presented nudges the consumer to surf through this media, including contemporary art, rather than engaging deeply with any one particular unit. The artist Chris Coy recently described this phenomenon in terms of the way the computer urges its users to view images in sequences, as in, for example, thumbnails. In an e-mail interview conducted for the SFMOMA website, he claims:

A computer screen is very much a sequential image-viewingdevice. Which is significantly reshaping the function of the Image in my life. I have become a very adept surface skimmer – gliding my way across glossy roll over buttons, tumblr blogs and Google image searches and stock photo sites… which means hundreds, if not thousands of images pass before me on any given day. Imagery is being totally integrated into our vocabulary – I mean you can shoot, edit and upload video from an iPhone now. Even the core function of the phone is changing as technology facilitates this hypermediated kind of ubiquitous computing thing.

This understanding of the computer as a “sequential image-viewing device” necessitates a decrease, then, in the preciousness around a single instance of artwork.
This is not the end of the story, though. What one sees happening in some corners of the Internet is a new type of temporal activation—a “net presence” in which the artist’s work is viewed as one on-going performance in which the audience follows the artist as he or she performs the act of creating individual works. This performance, unlike the individual works of art made during the course of the performance, is where audiences are nudged to qualitatively sort out and find meaning in artistic experience on the Internet.
There is, though, a dangerously romantic appeal to this idea. It seems to advocate for a “survival of the fittest” scenario in which the future is an endless, regularly-scheduled assembly line of novelty and only those art workers who keep up with the administered pace of production get a gold star. Performance here sounds like “engine performance.” This is obviously not the sort of situation which would be in the artist’s favor. It’s not exciting for an artist (or an art theorist, for that matter) to follow a theoretically pre-prescribed pattern which was dictated by the pressures of the market, the audience, or the curatorial/critical apparatus around the work’s reception. Furthermore, in an endless rush for new change and novelty, it becomes increasingly unclear as to what the point is or where all this performing is headed.
In many of Seth Price’s works, for example, 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, For a Friend,and Poems, the anxiety surrounding endless performance and novelty is considered.
8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, for example, is a downloadable, eight-hour electronic dance music mix. It was created in the downtime from Price’s work over the course of several years. As one begins to stream the mix, there’s something polished about its fun—it feels really open and cool and one appreciates the labor of the mix’s flow as much as the individual tracks themselves. As the stream continues, though, an anxiety arises: What’s all of this polished labor flowing for? An hour has passed—it’s still going—endlessly, relentlessly upbeat. Two hours have passed—it’s still going. Three hours—still going. Now, one might grow tired and leave the work’s mix mid-stream or one might keep up with it as the editorial power and taste level of the mixing itself continues unabated. But––still—in either case, one may wonder, whereis this “going” going? Will it ever change or is it just endless tasteful funkiness? A hint is provided by the work’s title–8-4 9-5-10-6 11-7. These numbers can be decoded as the eight hours of the daily work day: 8:00-4:00; 9:00-5:00; 10:00-6:00; 11:00-7:00. The eight hours of music is at once both powerfully upbeat as well as nightmarishly endless and the same could be said of creative labor itself, of the eight-hour work day which blurs into the twenty-four hour work day, the intermingling of “on the clock” and “off the clock”–an endless streaming of data into an already well-clogged database with seemingly no justification other than to produce more endlessly fun content.
Similarly, in For a Friend, a pair of friends engage in a seemingly endless conversation filled with reasonably interesting observations, but, ultimately, never getting anywhere. The conversation begins with an amateur philosophical discussion concerning a journalistic trope in which a writer begins an article with a mention of the date in which the events described in the body of the article take place. However, meaningful as the content of their question may be (and there is something interesting about it), this meaning is neutralized in the text by, first, the factual inaccuracies and misspellings embedded into the examples of the trope raised by the friends, as well as, second, the illogic of the discussion which follows. The friends go from the trope of dating the events described in the beginning of a journalistic article to the rise of personal computing and network usage, hacking, personal consumption choices, obsolescence, personal charisma, looking at everything versus seeing structure, puberty, Zen, anarchy, revolution, mythology, architecture, bare life, progress, and, finally, “self-annihilating question(s).” Each development of the discussion raises a true-ism regarding structure, but each true-ism is itself situated in a wildly flimsy structure. The result is that, the text becomes its own “self-annihilating question,” picturing its own limitations–its own endless series of true-isms never getting anywhere real.
And in Poems, Price presents a series of fragments scribbled in notebooks. Snippets of pseudo-intellectual conversation networking into nowhere; analyses of philosophical thought without clear points; calls to political action lacking in direction; lists that only make sense if one rationalizes them. Occasionally, phrases seem to summarize what the poems are about. One that got me was titled “Fantasy of History.” We see a post-it note attached to a piece of paper, reading, “The idea of trying to remember something and getting it wrong–But embarking successfully on a quest from wrong information.” Unfortunately, though, one remains unsure of whether or not this, too, is just another dumb idea in a notebook full of dumb ideas. One of Price’s most powerful effects is his ability to draw one deeper and deeper into thinking they have a handle on something—anything—and then—bam—pulling the rug out from under one’s feet. What one is left with is an image of something that seems like it might be about this or that theme, but whose meaning will be endlessly deferred.
Through his career, though, Price has developed strategies which resist these anxieties. Two of those strategies are delay and re-versioning.
In Price’s text Dispersion, he discusses “delay.” He writes:

Slowness works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of speed. Moving with the times places you in a blind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add a dissonant note. But the way in which media culture feeds on its own leavings indicates the paradoxical slowness of archived media, which, like a sleeper cell, will always rear its head at a later date. The rear-guard often has the upper hand, and sometimes delay, to use Duchamp’s term, will return the investment with massive interest.

His work with the Continuous Project collective, for example, is dedicated to public readings and illegal publishing of historical art (and occasional non-art) texts. By distributing these archival works as contemporary works, they are given a new lease and sense of relevance.
Similarly, in 2009, Price exhibited for the first time a set of calendars that he originally produced in 2004. In the press release for this exhibition, he writes, “Sometimes it’s good to go forward and then double back, and circle around again. To those who turned their feet around so that their tracks would confuse their pursuers: why not walk backward?” The calendars’ content is composed of a collision between pre-Modern, WPA-era American painting and graphic design tropes dating from the early 1990s which read as “futuristic.” WPA-era painters like Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, are–for better or for worse– best known, not for their own work, but rather for paving the way for an artist like Jackson Pollock, who was a pupil of Benton’s. The “hot” cursive fonts and gradiated neon backdrops read the same way: they are—for better or for worse–all but forgotten—depreciated–not unlike an out-of-date wall calendar.
I don’t believe that in either the case of Continuous Project or the calendar pieces, Price is dedicated to the idea that the delayed effect of a given work re-introduced into the art system will ever necessarily solve anything or become all that meaningful. Perhaps what they each do accomplish, though, is to create meaning through a sort of quietism, serving as memento mori—a reminder of one’s own finitude and the inevitable obsolescence of any new novelty in art and visual culture.
The other strategy Price employs is to re-version his own work. For example,Dispersion is a text which, for Price, is a mutable document, continuously open to change and alteration. And his artist lecture, Redistribution, is likewise open to further revision. By re-versioning an older work, it is re-inserted into the cultural system and given a new opportunity to create an effect.
These strategies keep the past alive by erasing it, introducing false memories, and avoiding a static personal archive of work. As mutable digital code, the artist’s archive is just as open to continuous revision as anything else displayed on the Internet.
The art critic Tim Griffin argues that as Price disappears through a continuous re-tracing of his own personal archive, he is able to successfully elude calcification at the hands of the art world, but at a significant cost: the evacuation of any memory or stable sense of meaning of this personal archive. In Griffin’s words: “He behaves as a kind of filter, continually reintroducing a sense of this loss in his work, this emptying of memory, in order to mine the effects and affects of such depletion.”
There’s something sacrificial about Price’s work, then–killing it in order to preserve it. However, at some future date, Seth Price will himself die and will no longer be able to go back and confuse his pursuers by introducing false memories and histories, and a reading of his work will become crystallized and the galleries and museums will sum it all up and show something that stands in for it the whole thing.
Perhaps, though, one can think of Price’s project not as an endgame, but as a sort of therapy for the knots one gets into when conceiving of art as endgame. It’s a method for future artists to keep going.

2011-05-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

blog store reflection

looking back on the project i don't see the store and the merchandise as a critique of internet culture and consumerism. rather, i see that we are human and we are real, not just irl, but within the spectacle. for a generation that is considered neither "here nor there" (as with modernist binaries and definitions) or just "anywhere" (with a kind of post modern relativism) we are somewhere invisible but it exists.

the blog store celebrates a time when we are on the brink of materializing the unrealized potential in things seemingly invisible. this realization is made faster and easier through the tools and platforms available through the web.

as we continue to participate in a self-critical demonstration of people's worst fears about the future, we can turn these critiques into strengths because of our ability to constantly update and revise. in the process of materializing the ridiculous, tasteless, and offensive hopefully we see the freedom modeled through the flow of information on internet.

the internet isn't destroying morals. the ability to share, learn, store information, document, publish, interact, cooperate, raise money, fight against injustices, across distances is becoming more easy and fair. individuals are becoming less dependent on others' restrictions, control, and power. people have more freedom to do what they want, when they want. and it's easier to aggregate small individual efforts into larger shared ones.

something doesn't have to make sense like having a free store, or blog store, with 'like' trophies and dennis rodman medallions, it's there and can exist just as easily as it does on the web. the potential of turning these barely recognizable small starts into visible realities encourages alternative ways of thinking not yet realized in our current world but are on its way.

CLICK HERE FOR PATTY'S VIDEO (thank you, patty) !

i guess i will have to figure out what exactly is on its way post grad....

more free store research

2011-04-29T09:34:00.000-07:00

The Diggers Free Store

Trip Without a Ticket

[Originally published by the Diggers, ca. Winter, 1966-67. Reprinted by the Communication Company SF 2nd Edition 6/28/67. Included in The Digger Papers, August, 1968.]

...Free store/property of the possessed

The Diggers are hip to property. Everything is free, do your own thing. Human beings are the means of exchange. Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there. Stuff. A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street. Locks are time-consuming. Combinations are clocks. [Check this: "locks" in the 10/66 edition?]

So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form. Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.

"First you gotta pin down what's wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature, which means distrust of Nature. Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means distrust of Wilderness." --Gary Snyder

Diggers assume free stores to liberate human nature. First free the space, goods and services. Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking, become wide open to improvisation.

A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.

Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.

A basket labeled Free Money.

No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash-register. A salesman in a free store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept a problem as a turn-on.

Question (whispered): "Who pays the rent?"

Answer (loudly): "May I help you?"

Who's ready for the implications of a free store? Welfare mothers pile bags full of clothes for a few days and come back to hang up dresses. Kids case the joint wondering how to boost.

Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props. When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.

Where does the stuff come from? People, persons, beings. Isn't it obvious that objects are only transitory subjects of human value? An object released from one person's value may be destroyed, abandoned or made available to other people. The choice is anyone's.

The question of a free store is simply: What would you have?
...Who paid for your trip?

Industrialization was a battle with 19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage. No children of White Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to haul their raw materials.

But the tools (that's all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren't necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over to androids, clean up our pollution. North Americans could give up self-righteousness to expand their being.

Our conflict is with job-wardens and consumer-keepers of a permissive looney-bin. Property, credit, interest, insurance, installments, profit are stupid concepts. Millions of have-nots and drop-outs in the U.S. are living on an overflow of technologically produced fat. They aren't fighting ecology, they're responding to it. Middle-class living rooms are funeral parlors and only undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.

Give up jobs, so computers can do them! Any important human occupation can be done free. Can it be given away?

Revolutions in Asia, Africa, South America are for humanistic industrialization. The technological resources of North America can be used throughout the world. Gratis. Not a patronizing gift, shared.

Our conflict begins with salaries and prices. The trip has been paid for at an incredible price in death, slavery, psychosis.

An event for the main business district of any U.S. city. Infiltrate the largest corporation office building with life-actors as nymphomaniacal secretaries, clumsy repairmen, berserk executives, sloppy security guards, clerks with animals in their clothes. Low key until the first coffee-break and then pour it on.

Secretaries unbutton their blouses and press shy clerks against the wall. Repairmen drop typewriters and knock over water coolers. Executives charge into private offices claiming their seniority. Guards produce booze bottles and playfully jam elevator doors. Clerks pull out goldfish, rabbits, pigeons, cats on leashes, loose dogs.

At noon 1000 freed beings singing and dancing appear outside to persuade employees to take off for the day. Banners roll down from office windows announcing liberation. Shills in business suits run out of the building, strip and dive in the fountain. Elevators are loaded with incense and a pie fight breaks out in the cafeteria. Theater is fact/action

Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property.

[end]

Free Store (New York)

blog store merch

2011-04-27T01:55:00.001-07:00

1. Glue shows the copy and paste culture of the web in addition to connecting people through social networking.

2. Poop, Pikabob, and MS paint palette stickers show that vulgarity no longer offends people because it is so ubiquitous on the web, it is easier to make weird combinations of references cross culturally and across distances, and digital tools make things more easy

3. Similar to the idea of beer goggles, Facebook goggles are intended to bring awareness to altered states of perception and how people to see priorities. What is important these days, the image or IRL?

4. Hats are the best kind of clothing, why?

5. You can only get so close to someone with a hula hoop...

6. Only all stars have rainbow hair and play basketball

7. Lighter hack, supa flame

8. By having your own thoughts and getting them out there in the world breaks down hierarchical structures of power

9. Nostalgia for our youth, play, and 90s realness. Nostalgia for things we’ve never had…

10. Put it next to something you like

http://wrathoffranny.com/portfolio/?/projects/blog-store/

hula hoops

2011-04-27T01:52:00.003-07:00

http://www.jasonunbound.com/hoops.html

facebook goggles

2011-04-27T01:51:00.005-07:00

download the image below to customize your goggles with you or your friends!

2011-04-26T11:37:00.001-07:00

fave hat so far

new purse

2011-04-25T16:34:00.001-07:00

1 more day

2011-04-22T11:20:00.001-07:00

the beginning of the end PART I

2011-04-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

--via Patty Fung-- "yay i'm gonna graduate!"
Raw Unedited Transcriptions (will update soon)!

Frances’ Dome Project

Transcription

Location: Blue State Coffee, Outside. Rhode Island

Date: 4/14/11 :: 10AM

Last Updated: 4/19/2011

File: 002.wav

Frances: Speaking about how like how technology first of all can increase like this database of information… first of all for yourself a blog is like a journal that you can write in and but the difference is you can categorize your journal entries and by tags and you can also search your journal entries by date and see the chronological development of your thoughts and you can also just like use the computer to control find a word or a term or even search a world or term, because Blogger has that capability to easily retrieve and kind of pull up your thoughts here and there. You can…sometimes I save quotes that I read from or books and I just search something about that and I can pull it up so it’s like a searchable journal of like this journey of your own learning. (1:22) That’s the first thing. A blog is for yourself. And then the second thing is since the blog is digital it’s easily shareable. You can share it through a link so people can access it through the e-mail. It’s on the web so people can access it in different countries. My parents can access it in California. My dad can access it in Taiwan. So, then that means a second thing a blog is is it’s shareable. It’s shareable information. (2:04) And then thirdly what a blog can do is…a blog is for yourself. A blog is just shared. I think I was having this discussion with someone and we picked out three things that a blog should do. I’m not quite sure about the third one (laughs) but I think it can be used to…this kind of infrastructure of a blog can be used to you know create social change or some kind of action that my blog isn’t doing right now. It’s not making anything happen but spreading this awareness of this wave of technology change that’s happening, but some blogs whether they be like food blogs that teach you how to cook or DIY blogs that teach you how to make things actually allow people to make physical change in the world around them through the internet. Through this platform of sharing and as these new social platforms develop it’s going to change the way we like interact in society and do things in real life and like…(3:27) These things also happen on professional level. It changes professions like astronomers, scientists, lot of like engineers, researchers, and journalists are affected by this kind of new way of sharing and actually one main change is like what the economic incentive is to do these things anymore is cause the cost is lowered so much by using this free platform of sharing. That anybody can do it and the people doing it are the people that enjoy doing it and there’s not like this like…you have to invest a great amount of money to do it so you will only do it if you have money. (4:18) [sound of page turning] So like it’s really just increasing knowledge and people’s perspectives and it’s searchable and it’s categorizable and I have a bunch of things that I’ve been like…(4:37) Well, now should I just go on to like what I’m building?

(4:40) Patty: Yeah, if you could like describe your project. Feel free to say anything you want

Frances: This is the question I was suppose to answer (4:50)[question is read aloud] (5:16) Well, like the first object I built was this dome that is constructed out of card board triangles and held together by binder clips and like concept wise how it came about was like it’s kind of a DIY things. It’s been around since like Bucky Fuller. Uhm, but the funny thing is part of my work is about being really honest to the generation and culture that I grew up in. So, this dome is not actually like a real geodesic Buck Minister Fuller dome, because I like didn’t do the math right slash just kinda looked at a picture slash went on I went on three main sites to get the information to make my dome and I think that’s really like interesting to kind of examine, because the internet right now is like…people combine things either in the right or wrong way and but it’s just…(6:16) information is so accessible that you can just combine take this from that take this from that combine things. I took a picture that I really liked of a dome design but it was just a picture so I didn’t have the numbers to make the measurements, so I went on another site to find dome measurements for the triangle sizes and then I also went on a third site to get the kind of cardboard binder clip idea so (6:42) my dome became a combination of all three of these different websites and that’s basically how the physical aspect of the dome came together. But now…how like this dome relates to my project or m blog other than that is what I’m trying to work on right now. It’s trying to like…I’m trying to make this dome blog a store (7:09) just as a metaphor for how to unify all these objects inside of it [no more background noise of other ladies talking 7:16] and it’s going to be a free store because I feel like that’s where the internet is moving. It’s freeing a lot of things. It’s lessening people’s or it’s rearranging people’s ideas about money. A lot of open source software is really about sharing for free. So, I’m trying to work out my like thoughts on the internet and how it can change or affect society into the interior of the dome, in the merchandise, and in the store displays. (7:53) The merchandise is going to consist of like zines that all link back to blog entries that all have citations an bibliographies. It’s gonna have stickers that I thought could be placed in a more public space like you know under a bridge or all these places maybe the internet wouldn’t necessarily reach. It’s gonna be filled with like little junk gifts that are kind of like uhm reflecting my generation and our values in this kind of language this web language we use to speak to my peers. (8:40) It reflect like just like my generation, because I feel like this is like a point we’re going to look back on and be like this was the beginning of this new like internet collaboration networking time, but maybe necessarily…right now we don’t necessarily know how to use it for actual action. We know how to use it to make friends, we know how to use it to be really social. But I think the infrastructure of what we’re creating now can be used to create a lot of good things in the future and I think that’s why our generation is important to kind of like document little pieces of and I wrote in my other thing that I feel like my work is kind of partially an anthropological artifact in the making. So like, everything I’m making is becoming an artifact and should be like not should but could be kind of documented as like oh look at these like cave men and they painted this cave painting. What does that mean? So, maybe in the future this can document where we’re at now but also I don’t just want it to be a display of culture cause anyone can display culture. You pick a random kid off the street and he’s displaying culture. What makes this a little bit more is I have to kind of view my culture and view where we are and what I think will happen in the future and what happened in the past and put it in the context of all these changes and kind of critique our culture and this critique is also coming out through the merchandise and the blog. So a lot of the merchandise in the blog is first of all to make people aware of internet’s and slash technology’s influence on us. To be aware of the influence is number one, because I feel like right now the internet is so powerful it can connect a lot of people, but also it is so powerful that Google can secretly search all the terms in your e-mail. There’s privacy issues. There’s you know ads that attack you. My teacher recently got a virus that pretended it was an anti-virus software so things can get very tricky especially for the generations that didn’t grow up with technology necessarily when they were like teenagers. They are kind of scared of technology I think and I’m kind of scared of technology. You get photoshop 3 and next time everyone’s using photoshop CS5 or you know like there’s this kind of pace that it seems like it’s happening so fast and we’re going to be left behind and nobody wants to be left behind. Jobs are becoming obsolete because we don’t you know we don’t need people anymore we can do this with a computer and so there’s kind of this resistance to this change, which I kind of see it as smart actually, because that means we’re being critical of everything that’s happening to us which is a good kind of conscious to have because yeah I don’t know…I feel like technology is moving us forward but I don’t know where it’s moving us to. I think no one really knows that and I think that’s why this is such an interesting time to grow up in. So like talking more about the merchandise in the blog I bought a lot of stuff from the oriental trading company which is like this site used for junk that teachers like to use a lot and I basically took a lot of things that can be customized so I can customize my own things likes these trading cards you’re suppose to get from uhm for your students and like you’re suppose to put your student’s picture on it, write a little biography on the back and I guess this increases community in your classrooms. You trade them, but what I’m going to do is I’m gonna take the hottest, the hottest people from like who have the hottest web presence right now like Nikki Manage and Justin Bieber and uh I don’t know Kanye and Gucci Mane, maybe just his ice cream cone face part and put them on the front and write maybe something something about them on the back. I don’t know yet, but it’s kind of showing how like this is what the internet is you’re just trading these pictures. You’re collecting pictures. It’s just my blog is in the very first phase of like internet awareness. It’s just showing people a little bit about our culture and what we do for fun on our time online, which is just maybe trading pictures of these like awesome people, but also some parts of the blog are going to be a little bit more like survivalist oriented. I feel like we are also on this bring of like destruction maybe. The human race is kind of causing some some change and there’s also survivalist attitude about like basic necessities of food, shelter, and leisure, and these kind of are gonna come out in like zines on you know how to make your own geodesic dome. How to grow your own food. How to cook chicken tikki masala and I think I have this problem with all this information on the web is available but we just sit there and look at it and we don’t actually do it. I mean if I’m looking for a recipe to cook and I go on the internet and look for it and then I cook that’s a different story, but sometimes we find ourselves looking at all these things that we could possibly do but we’re just looking and looking and looking and never doing. So, that’s also one of the other themes of the merchandise in the blog. So, display of culture. Kind of creating this survivalist attitude and then I think there’s gotta be a third theme to all of it and I think it’s the theme of this being free and really kind of an economic critique of you know people resist change because it’s making…technology and all this stuff might be making things obsolete and we need to make money so lets slow down everything I’m just maybe trying to envision a world where this idea of needing a profession, needing money won’t get in the way of greater change or change for better. Like right now the internet is making so much information available to people. It’s creating more knowledge. Someone told me a story about how this boy in some South American country built an entire wind turbine out of found objects because he found it on the internet like the instructions how to do it and he didn’t you know he doesn’t he didn’t go to school. Like this is what the internet is doing. It’s empowering individuals. Anybody can look something up and do it and anybody can publish themselves and anybody can do it so that’s why a lot of different jobs are being broken up. Yeah, I think it’s making jobs obsolete for some people but it’s increasing jobs on so many other planes. Like this company in American could outsource a bagillion little parts of its project to all companies in India, China and like other places so little individual parts of jobs are being distributed out and according to Thomas Friedman’s book it’s leveling the playing fields. It’s making opportunities available to wider audiences. It’s decreasing like this hierarchical structure where when somebody’s in charge and everyone under them is just listening to them, now everyone can have an opinion and kind of be their own boss. I’ve also been reading Clay Shirky’s book – here we come or something like that…

Patty: Can you say his name and book title.

(17:53) Frances: Sure one moment [page flips] It is called “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky and when I read this book I get more ideas about what the merchandise should be slash I also want to paint the interior of the dome in like little chat windows. This is what we really have to do this weekend is to or this week is to get the interior like each triangle will have a little square chat window from like AOL like old school instant chat and it’s gonna just have little phrases that I write down when I read like not creating but distribution or free global platforms or this new flexibility or don’t ask permission, gradients not gaps, the age of infinite copyability, you only need to send it to one person, you are an enabler, everyone is an enabler, it’s happening, it has already happened, it can’t be undone, reproduction distribution, categorization, direct access, change in uniformity of outlooks, change in relative importance, small, specific, connected equals powerful, change in world views, old economic imperatives, we’ll no this is what I was saying earlier, old economic imperatives hinder change and movement, but you know just like little phrases that I feel like I get all the time and maybe that’s how I think now because maybe that’s what techonology’s affected me to do to kind of only think in these short (19:54) sporadic little phrases. It’s hard to kind of unify them for me. The blog is kind of my way of unifying them. I’m not a terribly good writer. I can’t like. It’s very hard for me to get my thoughts put together in concise, cohesive, clear way. So like [truck in background] this is what the internet is. It’s everyone having little sporadic thoughts but somebody has to put them together to make use of them. That’s about it right now.

Patty: Could you tell us when that truck passes, about the idea of the interior again…could you tell us what the truck is doing right now.

(21:03) Frances: Telling about truck on Thayer street/giving location of we’re in Providence, R.I…@ blue state…..(lasts till end of tape)

Patty: Why don’t we just pause for a second.

Frances: Okay.

File: 003.wav

Patty: Do you want to explain the interior again?

Frances: Yeah, so the interior of the dome right now is just made up of like triangles and it’s all white, but first of all to get rid of the white I wanna put up these little chat windows that are like either painted or stenciled or something on it and it’s very modular looking right now. It’s made up of two types of triangles and hexagons and pentagons. Kind of looks really mathematical but it’s not really because I made it up, but uhm like first of all the interior needs to have some way of displaying the merchandise put in it and I feel like this calls for some kind of like modular storage. That other little smaller parts go into. It’s just I feel like that’s how the internet works. There’s an infrastructure and then there’s like little data packets and then like everything floats around and when it all boils down it’s just a bunch of code. That’s what the internet is. Uhm and I was reading Jean Baudrillard System of Objects, which has nothing to do with the internet, but it talks about how materials of objects and colors of objects create different atmospheric values, create…how really objects can transcend other things besides materiality and he was talking a lot about glass actually, which I can give you a quote from and he says (1:34) [page turning] that glass facilitates greater communication between inside and outside yet at the same time sets up an invisible caesura or whatever that word is which prevents such communication from becoming a real opening onto the world. So, glass is invisible but yet it’s very physically material and it causes a barrier so like …truck central….[sound of truck] that’s the funniest sign ever a bunch of happy smiling people.

Patty: Start back from the invisible part.

Frances: Invisible but very present and material. I mean it’s there. If you run into someone’s glass window it’s gonna hurt even though it might not look like there’s glass there or anything there. So first of all I think I’m going to wedge, I don’t know how this is going to happen necessarily but, cause the dome is already modularly set-up. I think I’m just gonna wedge cardboard inbetween the joints of the pieces so it creates these like raised walls. Like a pool rack. Like you said. So, where the triangles meet, where the edges meet, I’m going to stick in my free cut out pieces of cardboard or perhaps they’ll be connected. I’m trying to make the…I’m trying to think about how it can be actually structurally sound to support a lot of weight. But anyways since the triangle’s already there if you just the make the edges a little bit taller it will naturally form all these like raised pull triangles that then can be filled with like clear plastic, clear glass jars that will have all my little trinkets slash little gifts slash just crap that I make in it and they’re all put in these jars which in…will probably be arranged like pool balls in a triangular formation within this triangle and the things is you then you can take these jars and move them from one triangle to the next very easily. It kind of shows you how like movable and flexible data is right now and that’s basically what’s going on in the interior slash all the AIM chat references. It’s gonna have a little bit of a street look I think just cause the merchandise in there is just kinda like inspired by skate shop kind of and concert booth free stickers.

Patty: How’d you choose those?

(4:57) Frances: It’s just what I grew up. I remember going to BFD and they gave you a goodie bag that had printed on it myspace.com and the old myspace logo and then you would fill this bag. Or when you would go to a skate fair you would fill this goodie bag with all these stickers, promotional objects, and I was thinking about how the internet spreads information really fast, through the internet, through the web. But how do we spread information really fast in real life? And uhm, that’s why the only thing I could think of was like people giving out all this like ad stuff…(5:49) it was really just concerts, fairs, and like free merchandise is always so fun and so great if you like it. I mean I don’t like getting pamphlets forced on me. But if I’m at a skate fair, if I’m at a concert and I’m already having a good time and people are giving me good stuff who are sponsoring this good time, I’m gladly take. It’s not about forcing information on anybody it’s about having a good time and enjoying yourself. I wanna make my stuff look cool too, so this is the real deal. My stickers look cool and nobody gets them but they put them somewhere and someone else looks at it and says wow this looks cool, like it reaches more people that way. It doesn’t matter if the person who has the sticker likes it or not. Once it’s put in the public sphere anyone can get it the, but yeah you gotta put the stickers up. You can’t just hog them.

Patty: That’s a cool idea. Different ways of spreading information.

(7:59) Frances and chatting about her blog and “promote a self reflexivity”…just to make us aware of the potential of technology and networking and also the hype that doesn’t necessarily benefit real progress and real action that it can do. You can get caught up in the hype very easily and right now in the time we’re in I feel like this line is becoming finer and finer and it’s very difficult to see. I mean I don’t…you don’t need to necessarily define yourself from being in the hype or not being in the hype but when you’re in the hype you’re unproductive. You’re just this digital web thing that doesn’t matter necessarily.

Patty: Digital matter, you’re just digital matter.

(10:41) Frances tells story about egg donation to her friend and poooping e-mail story and ad in her e-mail..(11:45) sometimes the internet is a little stupid and it’s funny to laugh at that. It’s like when you’re talking to a robot and it doesn’t get your reference and it’s too logical that’s what makes humans not technology I guess. We have humor. Feel like a lot of merchandise in the store needs to have a little humor. There are very human things that technology can’t recreate yet. I think that’s a lot of peoples’ fears that technology will take over. Recreate humans. Make us become robots but that’s…I think that’s completely wrong. Donna Haraway says it in her book A Cyborg Manifesto or something like that our fear of technology may be like the cyborg is taking over, but she says we’re all cyborgs we all use digital mediations in everything. Cyborg isn’t this alien creature that’ gonna come take us over. Technology shouldn’t be feared. We shouldn’t want to return to like a mythical magical stage cause it’s never gonna happen. I feel there’s this very like nature versus technology fight that’s going out the window as we speak because technology shouldn’t be this thing to be feared. It’s not about creating robots. It’s about using technology to help us as humans to become more human and communicate more, cooperate more, collaborate more. Yeah.

007.wav – Talking about blogs in the studio while surfing the web

- Talking about ordering things, like fingers, alphabet beads

- (4:00min) Making bit.urls

- (7:24) Nikki Menage Tweets

- (8:08) Internet culture…how you don’t have to fit this Britney Spears mold anymore

- (9:54) This is kind of your day to day activity and you don’t do your essay..etc..this is very transparent of the way we function on the internet.

- (11:42) Google chrome opaque beads.

009.wav – Talking in apartment about the randomness of blogs

(1:19) Frances: What I was reading today was like now it’s so easy to post personal messa…like..fuck. Well was talking about professional filtering versus personal filtering and like we can publish anything now. It doesn’t have to be serious. If I’m thinking about one thing I can just post it and that’s how my mind works. It’s random and like the blog is just a more transparent memory of how my brain works kind of thing like I can post all these things that inspire me like as I think of them in the order I think of them and so it’s kind of…it documents everything that inspires me and these things that inspire me are random and all over the place, because that’s how I like live life. One moment it’s I’m eating a hamburger the next moment I’m reading a book and like these are all very random things and I feel like a blog is a good way to organize these things. For me I can figure it out usally by the time like the time I post the posts I can kind of refer back to the chronological order. But some people may be able to search for it or just go through. It’s random. All these things are random and they’re all kind of pop culture related, but that just shows like us living life and being directly influenced by the environment.

Patty: Yeah, I think so too like….etc.

Frances: The next chapter [referring to Clay’s books] I think was talking about like the change in communication media and like the posts we post on blogs are for us mainly and for our friends but since this is kind of like a new professional medium it’s able to be distributed to a wide amount of people which back in the day was only for professionals that people don’t understand that maybe even though the information out there is available to everyone it doesn’t mean that the person who posted it meant to post if for everyone. I could have just had a blog that is for me and only me and it can be private or something but it doesn’t have to be private like it could just be things that influence me like a scrapbook and no one else in the world would get it because it’s just for me but like since it’s out there and available maybe people think it’s for them too.

Patty: Oh I see, so that might explain the randomness in thought that no one would understand…

(5:00) Frances: And if there was a way to make everyone understand people’s like personal garbage blogs, then like that would add to a lot to the knowledge database that’s out there, but like the only way we have now to filter through other people’s crap are like the comments people put on it, the captions people put on it, or the tags they put on it. Like how do you use this crap that’s out there on so many levels to kind of get something useful out of it. Cause the infrastructure is available to everyone so wouldn’t it be cool if everyone could get something out of it. Like that might be the next step to maximizing people’s random thoughts.

(6:11) This book was talking about how like there’s just comments and I can just read it [takes book out]. He was talking about how…like what do comments like Julie I can’t believe I missed you last night. Tracked (sp?) talk to you and said you were trashed off your ass. Damn I missed it LOL. Like…here’s another from a live journal. It says yesterday after the storm of the freaking century, went to the mall with the anadicts (sp?) and Chris and ran into everybody in the world there, got food, and eventually picked up clothes from Dixon. Found Katy and Ryan and forced Katy to come back to my house with me in Dixon then Diana came a little after, then Jimmy Pez, and then Lynn. Good times. Good times. I woke up. My dog barking…Like what do these little rants that are not applicable to anything…I mean why do they have to be public first of all because I guess it’s easy for it to be public, but since it’s already public and in this like infrastructure where we can search words and like tag words and stuff maybe like there’s a way to make even these like very personal very meaningless things useful. Cause that’s just kind of the culture we’re adopting right now. To just rant and an example I had of that is when Becca, when all the New York Subway sites were down because of the storm and everyone was checking the website to see if there train was running, the only way Becca new that her train wasn’t running was because someone was like…on someone’s twitter she searched whatever train she need to be on and that person had just tweeted that the train was going backwards, because it got to the snow place and it was closed and they’re like on so now my train’s going backwards. She got useful information out of someone’s like personal rant. I mean like you hear about people’s uh personal blogs become useful during like big catastrophic events because it provides information, but then it could go back to being this like ranty very personal blog. (8:20) But he’s saying that the lines are blurred between personal rants and kind of like journalistic helpful rants. It’s just all one blog.

Patty: I see.

(8:35) Frances: This brings me back to what Ben said about what blogs are. Ben, which we’ll interview I guess, this could like segway to that, but um, Ben has this whole three things of input, output, and feedback loop and he says for a blog the input uh a way of organizing your own information and the output would be a product, which he says blogs are really cool, cause you can like output things in web kind of format that allows people to…let’s say it’s a PDF that you put on it can be quickly printed it’s already like ready to be distributed in physical mode. The internet can like…you can print that PDF you can quickly bound it and you automatically have an object now so that object was like…all the potential for that object was like already uploaded on the web. So it’s easy to like become something physical and then like the feedback loop I think he was talking about how like it relates to everything else. I don’t know you’re going to have to ask him about this, but he was saying that a blog is like a tool. People make tools to do things easier. He was saying how on these food network shows like their kitchen is set up so like the camera can role across the kitchen. It’s not…the areas is already set up for what it’s suppose to do. It’s not just suppose to be a kitchen, but it’s suppose to be a kitchen that’s filmed so like this kitchen revolves around all these certain cameras. There’s areas for lighting to be place properly. Mirrors and everything. So like a blog maybe has to accommodate this new sense of like distribution and like it has to be able to distribute physically too maybe like this printable PDF thing or these different modes this data can be in like.

Patty: So how people can take this digital object and make it a physical object you mean?

(10:57) Frances: That accessibility and that ease to that. It doesn’t have to be like digital to physical but like the way things can be stored there and like easily accessed and easily put to use. The whole like can this even be put to use. I think in the future when 3D printers are available to everyone you can download a design for like, let’s say butter knife, cause maybe we can’t print metal yet then, but like a butter knife and you can print it out of your printer and get a physical butter knife and you would never have to go to the store again…but that that ease of like I need this. I’m gonna get it from the internet I’m gonna get this design from the internet and print it and that makes the internet very powerful, because it can store all these things that are invisible, but yet can become very useful later and that the modes…digital packets it’s just like stored potential energy for something to happen I think. But he was talking about tools that you like make you know like in back in the day..they had to lift heaving things…they created the lever, created a wheel or a flume to float things on like when you create your own tools to do something that’s what he compares the blog. The blog is a tool to relay information and organize information and put your own information and I would really ask him about this.

[13:20 – 14:28] Random…nothing much in between

(14:30) Frances: It’s a good question why you ask me that. Why all these web culturally blogs are just like filled with entries and entries of random disconnected kind of like either like ads or popculture crap cause it’s really trendy right now and I feel like actually half of those are very nostalgic posts they kind of refer back to the 90s for some reason and I think that’s important to note. I feel like it’s reflecting this nostalgia for like a time where it wasn’t so complicated.

Patty: I feel like in the 90s before the internet was high speed and readily available…etc.

[…]

(16:20) Frances: These blogs are funny because they can make fun of you for what you did in the last second. Maybe back in the day it took a while for people to make fun of you. Like now when I look at Julia’s blog, like she can make fun of me for searching for lyrics that I’m hearing on the radio just now. Like I feel like they’re much faster to catch onto what people are doing…(16:54) We know that people are like looking up pictures on facebook of their friends and like people can make fun of you for doing that, because you are doing that and it can be lame or something, but like the fact that we’re so open about it yeah makes it more predictable but faster like before we were able to predict things that maybe you did a year ago or two years ago, because we finally caught onto the trend. Now when we catch onto the trend it’s very like…I can catch on to this new trend that only started five minutes ago or something like that.

(17:52) [Frances talking about her G-Chat on Julie’s blog example]

(18:14) Frances: I feel like back in the day we could only make fun of culture like I could only look at pictures of my mom from the 90s and be like wow your clothes are so funny because we’ve changed so much compared to then. But now it doesn’t even matter how much you’ve changed compared to something else. You can make fun of it in the moment.

(18:56) It’s kind of like people always know what you’re doing. It’s like when you laugh at yourself for doing something stupid now other people can laugh at you too. Sometimes I laugh at myself for like wow for spending so much time looking through all these picture on facebook and I don’t know these people because I probably went off a link of my friends. Maybe this is a friend of a friend who I actually don’t know but I’m just looking at their pictures and I’m like wait where do I am doing I’m looking at pictures of like people I don’t even know and I can kind of laugh about it and be like this is weird. I feel like her blog makes fun of those moments where you laugh at yourself, because everyone’s doing it and everyone’s laughing at themselves and they’re basically like…you’re able to laugh with them because you’re all in this like self-aware cultural moment where yeah I am looking at pictures of like random people and it’s funny and I don’t know why I’m doing it and it’s what people do. I’m bored. I’m looking at other peoples’ pictures and it’s funny and it’s kind of sad.

Patty: Do you thinks it’s our new way of fighting boredom?

(20:09) Frances: It’s a good way to track your thoughts but it’s also unfiltered and that’s why I think it’s very important to find a away to make this unfiltered data useful somehow, because when it’s just unfiltered garbage maybe it is just a waste of time. Maybe it’s still boredom. Maybe there’s a way to make boredom like productive. I feel like our culture is just bored. Everyone’s bored…It’s reflected on our blogs….

Patty: It’s a good idea. I never thought of extracting those random thoughts and making it into an organized useful…

(21:19) Frances: I think that needs to be done, because that’s how we think now. It’s just random short little ADD here and there things and nothing is out there uniting it. But no I think the tools that are successful things that can unit all this shit. Like these tags, facebook photo tags, something that you tag it a certain thing and all that data comes down from it and maybe when all that data is out there in front you you can piece together the random thoughts…(21:55) Let’s say everyone makes a little tag about what they think about Justin Bieber whatever. It could be like 20 different opinions on Justin Bieber and then you have to put the pieces together…The future is the…The internet is able to organize all this information for you and put it in front of you, but you have to kind of piece it together again.

(23:07) Frances: I was reading it. Things are less personal now, because everything is for everyone…People are into their selves. That’s why a lot of people blog to journal and to tell the world what they’re up to, but no one cares. Of course no one cares if I don’t know this person. They’re not my friend. I don’t care. I think we do it because I feel like we need to feel important and like I want to publish myself I want to be something.

(23:51) Frances: Or I’m cool. I go out and party. They want to show the world something. They want to be something. Facebook you can be something you’re not. But it’s up there already. I think that’s where our culture is moving for everything to be public and up there so how do you really make use of this. You know. It’s just like the new green design like. You’re not going to go green by making everyone return to this like stoneage only cook with fire pots and use whatever use everything we’re already in this culture where we consume, consume, consume. You can’t stop that right now like there’s no way you can stop that. Even like consumer culture is being globalized and everything. Everyone’s consuming even like the poorest countries are being sucked into consumer culture. So now how do you solve issues like this is to take whatever’s happening and try to get the best you can out of that. There are examples that take very consumerist tendencies and extract them. It’s no longer this like idealized let’s return to this mode. It’s like how to be as smart as society’s evolving but one step a little bit smarter. To like use the trends in our culture

(26:00) Frances talking about Scribe Example.

(27:09) Frances I think the web culture blogs are just showing us what kind of animal we’ve become so we can better understand this. But sometimes when people who aren’t aware that these blogs are showing them what kind of animal they’re becoming as kind of an outsider look. People trying to copy it and think that that’s what we are suppose to be.

(27:55) Frances: There’s hardly any line between people who think it’s cool and people who don’t think it’s cool and people who are conscious of it and people who aren’t conscious of it. It’s very, very blurred. So you mind as well design things for the people who aren’t conscious of it. That’s the safest way I guess.

dp post #2

2011-04-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

PROJECT UPDATE
quick outline 4 blog store--
things left to do!

the merchandise all symbolizes something about organizing information in this time in society, with our technology, with our generation, with our culture. it is in 2 parts. cheap gift items, aka shit, and 'zines.

the store catalog, provided on the outside of the dome, acts like a table of contents. it has a photo of each item and where to get it (which is a link on this blog) it will be categorized similarly like wrathoffranny. the corresponding posts on the blog has a blurb about what the object means in the context of what web tech is doing/affecting society and reference links.

the zines correspond to the gift items and has a blurb about the items in a more immediate way, not through a link, but is the same information provided in the catalog links. themes for zines - food, shelter, leisure.

the modular, rhizomatic, chaotic lines and vertices of the floor and dome structure reference the many connections made through networking and social media, access to smaller more specific groups, but more groups and mega niches. you are inside the chaos (in the dome), but can also see the chaos from on top (on top of the floor)- the clear skylight also references this awareness of being watched and watching, consumer and creator. the glass jars holding the merchandise allows faster viewing of what is inside, but is invisible and material at the same time

everything is free. the dome interior will be painted with phrases in chat window form which are listed in the next post

at first these objects were supposed to transcend something beyond their immediate function and show how objects can affect people in larger social and political contexts, shape culture, history, form mass movements... but the only physical object doing all of this is the computer, and then the internet gets even tricker in terms of calling it a physical object...

so during the process of making all these things my dome store has become less about transcendent objects but about making the media(tion) between people and objects visible. seeing the cause and effect of internet references in objects in real life in the store, browsing, walking around, picking things up, talking to people allows the invisible internet process to become more transparent (got to fix this part)

claes oldenburg store

2011-04-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

... ‘I find it quite natural’, said Claes Oldenburg, ‘to work under the conditions of American technical civilisation. I know every effect, every result of the technical working processes and I believe I can control them.’ However prosaic it may sound, Oldenburg at the same time believed obstinately in the old dream of a reconciliation between art and life. He wished to attain it through the reconciliation of human being and thing. ‘This elevation of sensibility above bourgeois values will (hopefully) destroy the notion of art and give the object back its power. Then the magic inherent in the universe will be restored and people will live in sympathetic religious exchange with the objects surrounding them. They will not feel so different from these objects, and the animate/inanimate schism will be mended.’ Oldenburg criticised the alienation of everyday life in general just as much as the specific alienation of art from everyday life. In exchange he offered a ’shapeless’ universalism, which placed everything in a relationship with everything else, his ideal picture of an ‘erotical-political-mystical’ art, as he described it.
In 1961 he opened a shop, The Store, in his workshop in New York’s Lower East Side, in the wider context of which the ‘Lingerie Counter’ also came into being. The shop was not only the point of sale, but also the place of production. Its stock covered the whole spectrum of everyday needs, just like the items in the over-filled shops in the neighbourhood, from foodstuffs through clothes and shoes to writing materials. Everything was made from the same material - plaster-covered muslin - and painted in strong colours, as if in an Expressionist style. Oldenburg’s portrayal of reality worked on several levels. First of all it related to the everyday object itself, but of greater importance to him, however, was the ‘imitation’ of the different fields of activity, which allowed him to become one with the pastry-cook, tailor, bridal wear designer, butcher, sign-writer and shoe-maker. As salesman it also fell to him to distribute what had been produced. The ‘political’ dimension, on which he set his sights, consequently lay in a return to the non-alienated craftsman’s existence of a pre-capitalist economy in the midst of an American society based on the division of labour. In the art world of The Store there was not a single thing that he could not potentially have been able to produce and sell - though at the price of the transference of the things into art, of the individual articles into non-consumable and dysfunctional statues, of the shop as a whole into an ‘environment’.
As has already been mentioned, all objects were made from the same material, whether it was a question of an envelope, a sausage or a gym shoe. The surfaces were also exactly the same; everything exhibited the same fissured surface, smoothed by the glossy paint; everything appeared slightly deformed, melted on and lumpy. Some of the objects depicted Oldenburg in relief. They shared part of an unspecified background, in front of which they presented themselves and appeared as if broken off from a larger, imaginary context. The continuum, which began to evolve between the things, did not originate from the objects themselves - what have gym shoes and sausages in common after all - but from the unchanging three-dimensional treatment. It transformed the variance of the objects and materials into a cosmos ‘of the same flesh’. The Store was, as Oldenburg said, a ’super texture super-collage’, a far-reaching and encroaching, pulsating organism.
Oldenburg’s osmotic world of goods loosened the relationship between signs and the designated, in their uniform shapelessness, the individual things were suddenly several things at once. The notices and drawings about The Store contain lists of form-analogies, which immediately allow the order that they purport to create, to collapse. According to Oldenburg the following ‘equate with each other’: ‘Hair and Bacon; Earrings, Airplane Wheels, Brassiere and Breasts; Obelisk and Ironing Board; Frankfurter in Bun, Airplane and rolled Newspaper; Hat, Lips, Banana Split and Gun; etc.’ The ‘de-formation’ of individual objects and the dissolving of their utilisation connections open up novel connection possibilities for totally disparate things. ‘The erotic or the sexual is the root of “art”, its first impulse’, said Oldenburg. ‘Today sexuality is more directed, or here where I am in America at this time, toward substitutes, for example, clothing rather than the person, fetishistic stuff, and this gives the object an intensity and this is what I try to project.’ The desire of the mythical sculptor Pygmalion was directed towards his marble sculpture of a young woman; Aphrodite took pity on him, animated her and gave her to Pygmalion as his wife.
Oldenburg’s desire is directed towards ice-cream cones and microphones, towards swimwear and pieces of roast meat. The ‘bride’, also on sale in The Store, was neither more physical nor more desirable than the gym shoe, the same sexual energy being present in everything. Thus, not only did Oldenburg bring about the collapse of the capitalist system in terms of the division of labour but also the pointed fetishisation of the world of goods, which for marketing purposes enhances saleability. His occupation of the object world was as complete as it was consistent in its intensity. ‘Store: 1. Eros. 2. Stomach. 3. Memory. Enter my Store’, is how he invites us in Store Days.
Oldenburg approached his goal of the convergence of art and life by allowing their energies to merge into one another. His ‘animism’, which gives life to things, follows in the tradition of sculpture, which since time immemorial has worked with the dialectic of inanimate material and living, ‘animated’ effect. He coupled this energy, along with the desire structure of the fetishism of goods, to his ‘erotical-political- mystical’ art. Oldenburg’s Store neutralised the tradition of plastic art in that he retained it and at the same time liquidated it. The ‘anthropomorphising’ of the world of things continued the tradition of plastic art, which for centuries had dedicated itself almost exclusively to the human figure. At the same time it was released from this thematic fixation, which, from the point of view of a living world shaped by things, had begun to become outmoded...

taken from The Consumer Article in the Art World: On the Para-Economy of American Pop Art by Michael Luthy (http://www.michaelluethy.de/konsumgut-englisch.pdf)

2011-04-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

jay nelson

2011-04-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

on to the 10 flatteners...

1. 11/9/89 When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up (Berlin Wall)

2. 8/9/95 When Netscape Went Public

3. WORK FLOW SOFTWARE Let's Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application

4. OPEN-SOURCING Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities

5. OUTSOURCING Y2K

6. OFFSHORING Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions

7. SUPPLY-CHAINING Eating Sushi in Arkansas

8. INSOURCING What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts are Really Shorts Are Really Doing

9. IN-FORMING Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search

10. THE STEROIDS Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual

2011-04-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

THIS

2011-04-05T13:44:00.001-07:00

right now the pop up blog is straddling a fine line of being "social design" or cultural critique/happening
i am going to make the things inside more funny and probably less functional to make sure it's not to be taken as a real social design project. but hopefully, at the same time though, the stuff inside is effective enough that it can influence what people think and do in real life (or at least aware of technology's influence)

2011-04-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

think about a future with infrared solar panels

2011-03-23T08:02:00.001-07:00

Bill Ardolino on independent journalism/blogs/blogging:

Being an independent journalist is a hobby that sprang from my frustration about biased, incomplete, selective, and/or incompetent information gathering by the mainstream media...

Independent journalism and its relative, blogging, are expressions of market forces - a need is not being met by current information sources. i started taking pictures and doing interviews on the antiwar rallies in D.C., because the media was grossly misrepresenting the nature of the groups that were organizing the gatherings - unrepentant Marxists, explicit and implicit supporters of terror, etc. I originally chose to use humor as a device, but I've since branched out. Do I have more power, power to get my message out, yes. The Schieffer interview actually brought in about twenty-five thousand visits in twenty-four hours...

The pace of information gathering and correction in the CBS fake memo story was astounding. It wasn't just that CBS News 'stonewalled' after the fact, it was arguably that they couldn't keep up with an army of dedicated fact-checkers. The speed and openness of the medium is something that runs rings around the old process...I'm a twenty-nine-year-old marketing manager [who] always wanted to write for a living but hated the AP style book. As überblogger Glenn Reynolds likes to say, blogs have given the people a chance to stop yelling at their TV and have a say in the process. I think that they serve as a sort of a 'fifth estate' that works in conjunction with the mainstream media (often by keeping an eye on them or feeding them raw info) and potentially function as a journalism and commentary farm system that provides a new means to establish success...

Like many facets of the topic that you're talking about in your book, there are good and bad aspects of the development. The splintering of media makes for a lot of incoherence or selective cognition (look at our country's polarization), but it also decentralizes power and provides a better guarantee that the complete truth is out there ... somewhere... in pieces.

dome... structure

2011-03-22T19:56:00.001-07:00

i realized my dome isn't really an accurate geodesic dome because i kinda made it up... but it's okay, geodomes are so yesterday who has time for math now

LINKS:
+ used this for calculations, 2V dome
http://www.desertdomes.com/domecalc.html

+ looked at this picture to make form
http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/article.asp?uname=growell_dome

+ used this connection technique
http://www.cccoe.net/stars/5mdome.html

= faux dome
"structured chaos"

2011-03-21T09:38:00.001-07:00

intro to thirdspace

2011-03-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

2011-03-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

how does the internet affect people in real life? (Besides getting data mined!)

to get started here is one possible view... (to be taken as observation rather than critique via patty and the sj mercury) and also a quote by patty --

"the internet and social media helps to create community and networks across distant space. but at the same time i feel it isolates us - in that we are more alone in our physical space as we search for stimulus in a virtual space"

2011-03-14T09:19:00.000-07:00

so the bigger an earthquake/natural disaster gets the more locations it affects... isn't that scary? instead of it being somebody else's problem it will be everyone's then whoz gonna help who out??
nothing is limited to a single region we are 1 earth
thinkin about applying "pop-up" blog/ (internet --> real space) in locations like japan right now
yeah what happens when we are no longer plugged in?

since the disasters the means for communication is being seen as a living necessity rather than a commodity (free phone calls and txts from att and verizon)
but do we need disasters to realize this alternative value in basic necessities like food and shelter?

it's refreshing to see that people care though

cute find by walker... http://furnitureseniorstudio2011.blogspot.com/2011/03/robots-show-potential-of-humans-for.html

git yo sway on

☮♥

2011-03-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

biography research

Bill Watterson

Cartooning and Calvin and Hobbes

I don’t think of comics as just entertainment. It’s a rare privilege to be able to talk to millions of people on a given day, so I’m eager to say something meaningful when I can. There is always pressure to write some snappy one-liner that will buy me another twenty-four hours of lead time on deadlines, but nothing depresses me like thinking I’ve become a joke factory to fill newspaper space. Whenever possible, I just use the strip to talk about the things that are important to me.

I think the best comics (like the best novels, paintings, etc.) are personal, idiosyncratic works that reflect a unique and honest sensibility. To attract and keep an audience, art must entertain, but the significance of any art lies in its ability to express truths—to reveal and help us understand our world. Comic strips, in their own humble way, are capable of doing this.

The best comics expose human nature and help us laugh at our own stupidity and hypocrisy. They indulge in exaggeration and absurdity, helping us to see the world with fresh eyes and reminding us how important it is to play and be silly. Comics depict the ordinary, mundane events of our lives and help us remember the importance of tiny moments. They cleverly sum up our unexpressed thoughts and emotions. Sometimes they show the world from the perspective of children and animals, encouraging us to be innocent for a moment. The best comics, that is to say, are fun house mirrors that distort appearances only to help us recognize, and laugh at, our essential characteristics.

Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than the truth. When cartoons dig beyond glib punch lines, cheap sentimentality, and tidy stories to deeper, truthful experiences, they can really touch people and connect us all. As frustrated as I am by the way this business works, I continue to believe that comics are an art form capable of any level of beauty, intelligence, and sophistication.

I’ve written and drawn over three thousand Calvin and Hobbes strips now, and to the extent that the strip reflects my interests, values, and thoughts, my cartoons are a sort of self-portrait. The longer I’ve worked, the more I’ve used the strip to explore personal issues. When I come up with an idea that surprises me, I’m happy to offer it to anyone who shares my interests. I’m flattered when people respond to my work, but I don’t feel accountable to public demand. Trying to please people encourages calculation, and the strip is valuable to me only insofar as it’s honest and sincere.

It’s not hard to write jokes—good characters will always have something amusing to say about their situation—but it’s very difficult to keep the strip’s world energized and expansive year after year. At the beginning of a strip, virtually every installment explores new territory, but it’s frightening how fast stories and situations become predictable. Today’s funny innovation is tomorrow’s stale formula.

My early strips look crude and forced to me now, but the characters were still introducing themselves to me. The first couple of years were exploratory efforts to create a engaging world and rounded characters. I began writing longer stories when I saw how they added dimension to the characters’ personalities and relationships. Lately, I’ve had trouble writing extended narratives that satisfy me, and I’ve been doing fewer of them. Instead, my enthusiasm has drifted to the visual possibilities of the larger Sunday strip. Over the years, Calvin and Hobbes has changed directions, but I don’t control where it goes. When everything is working, I’m more surprised by the strip’s destination than anybody.

The trick to writing a comic strip is to cultivate a mental playfulness—a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. If I keep my eyes open and follow my interests, sooner or later the effort yields questions, thoughts, and ideas—unexpected paths into new territory. Like Calvin, I just head into the yard in search of weirdness, and with the right attitude, I make discoveries.

Putting myself in the head of a fictitious six-year-old and a tiger encourages me to be more alert and inquisitive that I would otherwise be. Sometimes I resent the pressure to exploit every waking moment for strip ideas, but at its best, the strip makes me examine events and live more thoughtfully. I love the solitude of this work and the opportunity to work with ideas that interest me. This is the greatest reward of cartooning for me.

I’ve always loved cartoons. With Calvin and Hobbes, I’ve tried to return some of the fun, magic, and beauty I’ve enjoyed in other comics. It’s been immensely satisfying to draw Calvin and Hobbes, and I will always be grateful to have had the opportunity to work in this wonderful art form.

//

if it's honest and truthful
and affects of a lot people
those people will have something
honest and truthful in common

2011-03-06T20:09:00.001-08:00

golden poots

2011-03-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

to me twitter is genius because it can do this:

STUPID INFORMATION
(organized in a good way)
TURNS USEFUL

ie.
Tweet: I have to poo so badly but the E train is stopped cuz of the storm
Search for #E train... oh, I shouldn't take that today...

with how many poots there are out there this is truly an amazing way to juice that for knowledge (poots my term for internet farts) hey but pootin aint bad. we wouldn't have any knowledge without the poots of so many people. this is where the new revolution is: not limiting our habits, not limiting our "joys" of consumerist culture but tappin into those habits for a different wealth, a wealth of knowledge. some of us understand our lives our beyond what consumer culture tells us, some of us don't, and then in that case poots are just poots. big wet ones spreadin more poot culture on yo undies

next thinkin about this in terms private/public

pure form/polished form/final conclusions

2011-03-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

there is something valuable in the process; // of thinking // may add more confusion // may be hypocritical to the conclusion
even though it may not be relevant; // anymore
to the; //final
conclusion;

there is something valuable in the process even though it may not be relevant to the conclusion

2011-03-01T08:40:00.000-08:00

http://dismagazine.com/

dp post #1

2011-03-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

blog definitions:

hippie – the focus on specific issues of sustaining basic living needs: food, shelter, leisure,
environment

this fits into a larger picture of promoting these solutions through the web, such as
new open source interfaces, ways of spreading information, d.i.y, downloads, blogging,
spamming

invisible – to show the invisible transitions between material and immaterial, digital and
physical, etc…

kewl/picxxxs/summer/humor/urban vernacular – My cultural environment evidenced
through objects. Things I find funny, is self-referential or ironic, commodities that I think
are cool. Shows understanding of culture through a personal example, me, a product post
? values

paper trail – to provide theoretical contexts and a lens in which to view the blog posts and
reading links for accessibility and trace-ability

proj – other projects by artists that I have found interesting or inspiring in terms of
aesthetics or content

school – transparency on the development of my work edited with real time

:( social norms – to flatten hierarchies by providing alternatives to widely accepted views in society

world as body – to show the interconnectivity of things, the metaphysical, and the
indescribable

Why Design Now? Slide Presentation for Tomorrow

2011-02-28T21:45:00.000-08:00

for me, design is not a type of production, but rather a type of translation or bridging between two or more sides and made accessible to the public. i see my work as an expression of a constantly evolving autobiographical narrative in relationship to my environment. and rather than saying i consciously produce work for a purpose, i see it as a kind of anthropological artifact in the making. by making an honest display of my mundane daily living activities public i hope to show that i am a direct product of society, my generation, and its values.

however, i am not a fan of letting it stop there. in order for my work to be any more than just a display of culture (symptom), one viewpoint in an age of relativism and indifference, i have to process this viewpoint (criticism) in the context of how people relate and are affected by their environment and relate it to a collective understanding of larger view points in the world around us, through different cultures, time periods and to hopefully find solutions to injustices created from misunderstandings along the way

i am a cultural product of a transitional time in the digital age...

due to the speed in which digital tech and web tech has developed, there is only a short period of time between people growing up with no web tech and growing up with only web tech (not including the army internet) // or for example, not too many people like our parents or us had cell phones during the period in which we were growing up, but now cell phones are a social fact, and whether children have them or not while they are young, they are undoubtly around //

the speed in which adolescents learn, adapt, and forget obsolete technologies only shortens the span of this transitional period. for example there may only be a one-year difference between kids who grew up listening to the sound of dial up versus the kids who had DSL, or fiber optic etc... (this is also in the context of growing up in silicon valley where everyone’s dad is an engineer)

a recent story of somebody’s four year old cousin not understanding where the projection of an image came from other than the pushing of a button shows that maybe the digital doesn’t even need to correlate to the physical anymore. and maybe now this understanding of technology is based on the current form determining a past function (another story of a kid today referring to records as big cds) // comment in class: maybe our expectations of technology have changed (to be able to do magical wonders) //

compared to the generations before me, whose understanding in the development of technology may primarily consist in the functioning of physical interfaces like wires, film, ribbons in cassette tapes, and floppy disks, (versus the shiny, reflective, not as easily understandable, continuous CD) and whose understandings follow the chronological development of technology: from records to CDs and then to mp3s, the generations after me, and some parts of mine, (i did not buy backstreet boys on a record...) lack the experience of really growing up with these relics of the past technological era crucial to the understanding of translating material origins to what we know as the equivalent digital invisible // comment in class: do you think the generation after doesn't understand this? no. i don't think that, but our generation is in a unique place to see this process develop //

i design to bridge this gap between the differences and unique understandings of each of our times

but this bridging can take place in many forms like sharing one's personal vision of beauty, finding the perfect equilibrium between form and function, reinterpreting a solution to a problem, conveying an internal understanding to someone else... as long as it is seen in relationship to the whole

i'm not saying we are greater than other generations because we grew up in this time, but by having this privilege we can try to communicate understanding across the 'gap' through the metaphor of technology

in fact to many our generation may actually be seen as especially 'unprivileged'... our skill isn't in rebellion, or creating great social movements, or making political changes, but in social indifference and solely being a 'web presence' (60s / 70s vs. now)

but our unique privilege of understanding can be easily shared and distributed through the many rapidly developing ways in which we poot through the www.

this transparency in understanding our differences in the development of digital technologies allows a concurrent analysis to occur between our generation with younger and older generations, and to be used as a metaphor for seeing one part among a larger, collective understanding. //for us, the ability to comprehend the development of technology allows us to have a wider scope and understanding of the issues and confusion that may arise from somebody who did not grow up during this time, and therefore allows us to help appease these misunderstandings because we can// transparency, although sometimes intimidating in our intricate and overlapping time, // ideas in the process may contradict, or connect with the end conclusion // but this process allows an organization and mapping to occur side-by-side the chaos of currently developing trends // we still need good ways of organizing information so that parts of the process can be easily accessible again and in relation to a conclusion point (which will also continue to evolve.) an example of such is twitter. #tagging makes terms easily accessible (but maybe only in relationship to the moment they were thought about and not to a conclusion point or to see it in its overall development), a standard form/limited system for content: twitter's restriction of only 140 characters allows everything from pictures, videos, etc... to be translated into a standard form and easily accessed // this immediate reflexivity is important in a time of instantaneous production and reaction when we are affected by something and don't even have time to realize before we produce it again with slight alterations. we do not have time now to follow an old model of understanding that allows us to look back on things that have happened and then learn from it because horrendous misunderstandings happen in that time in between. especially now more than ever when confusion is escalated by tricky, self referential, ironic signs and meanings. we must understand the context in which our actions take place as we make them and in order to do this we must also maximize a collective understanding.

2011-02-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

somebody else's revelation on maybe how our role as bodily functions is always changing...
a virus one day, a white blood cell the next...
if it's all relative though,
the only trend we know is that we are spreading 'the infection' whatever it is, good or bad,
faster and faster

2011-02-27T09:47:00.001-08:00

A quote from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse:

....

“A remark of Haller’s gave me the key to this intelligence. He once said to me when we were talking about the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: “These were not the horrors in reality. A man of the Middle Ages would abhor our whole manner of life today as nothing other than cruel, horrible, and barbaric! Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its style, its own appropriate tendernesses and hardnesses, beauties and cruelties, accepts certain sufferings as a matter of course, puts up with certain evils patiently. Human life becomes actual suffering, becomes actual hell only when two ages, two cultures and religions cut across one another. A man of antiquity who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably, just as a savage would suffocate in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when an entire generation is thus caught between two ages, two styles of life, so that all self-comprehension, all custom, all security and innocence goes out the window. Of course not everyone feels this equally strongly. A nature like Nietzche’s had to suffer our present misery more than a generation earlier, – what he had to undergo alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.

I often had to think of these words while reading the notes. Haller belonged to those who are caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and innocence, to those whose fate it is to experience everything questionable about human existence in the heightened capacity of a personal agony and hell."

....

2011-02-16T09:09:00.001-08:00

CONSTITUENTS IN THE POINT (Greenpoint):

sophisticated poseurs

pissants

feign carers

freaks

a work in progress

by seth braunstein
"the middle will probably be labeled douche bags"

2011-02-06T21:40:00.000-08:00

(in order: bataille monument, cavemanman, hotel democracy)

been thinking more about thomas hirschhorn and his use of pedagogical installations in relation to my degree project and "transformative" objects ...
all I have so far on spreading information through education is... communication (vs. documentation), the www., blogs, diy, graffiti, posters, graphics, stickers, free merch (advertising like at concert fairs)...
here's a critique of hirschhorn's cavemanman from caves of new york, artforum 2003:

And in (probably inevitable) contravention of the artist's intention that the photocopied pages pasted to the walls be registered simply as evidence of research carried out rather than plowed through conscientiously, a few visitors insist on making the attempt. "Here's chapter four!" someone shouts. "Now, where's chapter one?"

right... so i guess i could take it the other way and not have people read anything
+ wrathoffranny.blogspot.com + the digger's free store + buckminster fuller = dp??

also,
instructables
CUP

2011-02-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

pie lab

recently

2011-02-01T20:00:00.001-08:00

rndiy.com

2011-01-27T11:03:00.001-08:00

why are people afraid to talk to strangers??

2011-01-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

run on sentence warning:

ok, more on my version of the quasi scientific theory of the world being a bigger version of the body
which becomes more and more apparent in the hustle of bustle of nyc (what are these people doing??)
this next revelation however does not involve tons of people but it does involve moving around

so i think dancing is similar to becoming a nerve ending/receptor/cell connector
waiting for that magical moment to fire between the synapse
and it doesn't matter how that moment is done but the connection is made
uhm,

also i would like to reference the 4d torus for my next example of zooming, from the surface of a big body into a much smaller μscale space

the 4d torus takes the surface stuff and takes it through the hole of the donut and back out onto the surface again. inside is outside, is inside, kinda thing

starts with space, the planet, big, continents, countries, cities, buildings, people, right, then beyond the hustle and bustle which i think are like major streams of something, blood veins?, energy something or other?, information?, into the home and into the lives of individual people

and we begin to focus on the activities of these individuals, and people start to become these smaller nano scale body particles like nerve receptors, or synapses firings, cells, blood cells, bacteria, etc...

i think instead of looking for small particles in the universe such as atoms and quarks to represent these miraculous body occurances they happen within the actions of people and the interactions of people

people are big in comparison to cells, but when we zoom (like fractals) into the bodies of people and their actions we zoom into these nano scale happenings

uhhh startin to get lost
yesss

whatever, everything is connected. and everything is okay.
we are one body
peace

2011-01-25T14:12:00.000-08:00

nyc scavenger hunt item #1

there is a small book with a green cloth cover filled with forest and flowers at printed matter on the back wall.

it is like stepping into an enchanted hippie land when you open it

2011-01-25T14:09:00.001-08:00

2011-01-23T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Gift- Lewis Hyde

2011-01-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

kaleidoscopes are magical
made one today

it's crazy what 3 mirrors can do