Saturday, November 21, 2009

"It's so beautiful. It's hard to believe these spores could kill me. "

_________________________________

EVERYONE: you should watch "the cruise" its a great documentary.. and offers an interesting and philosophical perspective on life... You can get it from the library for FREE in media viewing room just ask for "DVD 4374"

Steffffffff! I really enjoy your stop motion work thus far this semester... the differing textures you made with the clay was really great... i love the ambiguity of it... Check out Stop motion artist Jan Svankmajer... you can find more of his work on youtube!


Abbey: "This is totally better than the brain!!" jk... im not sure if ive told you this but I REALLY love your work... i love the very biological aspect/scientific nature that influences it ... I loved your decisions in placement of the cells and especially the transformation...Check out Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, its an affliction causes by the lack of an enzyme that produces heme which is the main component of hemoglobin found in the center of the red blood cell



Lizzzzz: I really really enjoy the textures and colors of your piece. The size seemed right for it. I loved the organic and abstract aspects of it... i could not help thinking about Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the valley of the wind... it reminded me of some sort of plant-life form from the post apocalyptic world in the movie ... check out the trailer... and i definately recommend the movie!!!






_______________________________________________________________________

I feel as though I have been making a certain kind of work because it is comfortable for me, i question my work and whether i should continue in the the same vein (no pun intended) or to try and explore somethign outside of my comfort level... I am curious if all my work is starting to look alike... and if my identity as an artist has solidified to being the "skin-girl" ....

the world weeps


"Artist Jeanne-Claude, who created the 2005 installation in Central Park called ``The Gates'' with her husband Christo, has died. She was 74.Jeanne-Claude died Wednesday night at a New York hospital from complications of a brain aneurysm, her family said in an e-mail statement." Take from WCBS

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Monday, November 9, 2009

and she said, "but everyone loves the grid"

and in saying that, she excluded me from everyone... 


Timothy "Speed" Levitch: The anti-cruise is an attempt to imprison us. At every level of living it exists. Younger cruisers have asked me, "Why?" "Why is the anti-cruise so avaricious and constant in its attempt to stop the cruise? And I have no answer. There is no answer. I mean, it's gravitational, it's a relationship that's made up of reciprocals and pulling gravities. It simply exists. Where there is cruise there is an escort of anti-cruise. But even in a bastion of anti-cruise fodder... there is cruise. Somewhere in there is a sparkle of cruising energy. Deeply sublimated, within the bellowing belly of the beast. 

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Nauman's Beckett Walk// Kathryn Chiong

in order for a knock to be a knock, which might be recognized as "someone at the door" the sound must normally recur, the second proving that the first was not just the banging of a branch but the work of communication. Roman jakobson indentifies this operation in verbal behavior wherein duplication signals "that the uttered sounds do not represent babble, but a senseful, semantic entity.:" what if on the other hand as Watt proposes the knock is not simply a knock in that it occurs not twice but too many times? What happens for instance when a word is repronounced until that senseful semantic entity collapses into a series of too distinct phonemes? the result is not simply babble. rather, what the excess finally signals is its own presence. the sound then, not of someone at the door, but of knock knock knock knock- and this mechanism of repetition.

Jacques Derrida describes repetition not as posterior to the origin, but somehow simultaneous with it, "a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present". the notion of an autonomous origin, then, is a kind of lure, a fantasy: "... once it lends itself a single time to such representation- that is to say, once it is written,- when one can read a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a center in the center, it is the abyss, is the bottomlessness of infinite redoubling"

Affirming, like Jakobson, that signs are born in their capacity to be repeated, derrida goes on to venture that at the mystical center where there is no such play of origin, we find death. Repetition is thus conceived not as supplementary accumulation, but as an essential "bottomlessness" that provides the very grounds for existence. It finds voice in Beckett's and Nauman's production, when a spoken phrase becomes a maddening refrain, when a sound begins to grate in its seeming sameness. through these repetitions, refusing an isolated origin, Beckett and Nauman show being, so that one might have mentioned to the other as did Estragon and Vladimir, "We always find something, eh, Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"


These exercises, however, consistently maintain themselves as failed affirmations, as finally only "impressions" which in their patent actuality always ever return to the question "We Exist?" for this is also the function of repetition, to unmake the very identity that it seeks t confirm, disrupting the hierarchy of model and copy, as Derrida describes: "We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing; faced, so to speak, with a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double." Rather than reaffirming the identity of the one, repetition inspires the rabid production of another, from which the one cannot extricate itself, but with which it will never be identitcal. It is this relationship of non identity, somewhere between parasitic and symbiotic, which Beckett and Nauman force their characters to endure with every recurrence

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Constructal Theory

The constructal theory puts forth the idea that the generation of design (configuration, pattern, geometry) in nature is a physics phenomenon that unites all animate and inanimate systems, and that this phenomenon is covered by the Constructal Law stated by Adrian Bejan in 1996: "For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it."

Interestingly so... the examples they use to define this theory includes BOTH water and blood.... 
Some domains of application
ApplicationWhat flowsTree channelsInterstitial spaces
Packages of electronicsHeatHigh-conductivity inserts (blades, needles)Low conductivity substrate
Urban trafficPeopleLow-resistance street car trafficStreet walking in urban structure
River basinsWaterLow-resistance rivulet and riversDarcy flow through porous media
LungsAirLow-resistance airways, bronchial passagesdiffusion in alveoli tissues
Circulatory systemBloodLow-resistance blood vessels, capillaries, arteries, veins
diffusion in capillaries tissues


Interstitial Space= "small opening or space between objects"

I should take cues from Tufte...


A not so pretty visual display of information

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

"Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven... "

"What speaks to you?" 

::inhale:::
as i walk through spaces I am conscious of patterns and forms that occur on the ground... in particular i look for quadrilaterals... and at each of the corners of these quadrilaterals... i draw an imaginary line from each corner... as i traverse towards these polygons... i am conscious of where my feet are placed... as i walk i consciously overstep or understep in order for these lines to not be covered my my passing soles.... with my head partially tilted downward i am constantly looking for a path unhindered by these "lines".... the diagonals.... 
::exhale::

          "water, skin, and light..."

"You like light? All light?"
    
            "well... no i think im more interested in light which passes through objects... "

              (inside) when i was younger i fascinated by the effect of placing your palm and fingers over a flashlight in a dark space.... illumating!... my hands glowed red/pink... and i thought for a fleeting moment that could possibly see through them....

"So you mean you like translucency."

        "yea i guess so..."
         (inside) though I think its not just translucent materials... i think its what happens when a new element is added to it ... i mean... its the relationship between the two materials... when these two elements are combined and joined together in this marriage of physical and metaphysical... where some sort of material exists in tangibility and the other doesn't... and the glowing... it seems to transcend some sort of notion of solidity in that once solid object... and yet as the light manifests itself in the object it takes on a new physical form... each "material" gives up part of itself for another... to create a new beautiful form that is entirely both of its originators...

"Why are you interested in this?" 

"Why does it matter?" 

"What is the abstract machine, or the driving forces in your work?"