What's great for a snack & fits on your back?
06/16/08
About a year ago I was trying on clothes in a Manhattan H&M store. Suddenly the dressing room attendant started singing this LOG song at top volume. It was startling and funny, especially because LOG was written and directed by my cousin in-law, the cartoonist, Bob Camp. LOG was one of those fake commercials embedded within the Ren and Stimpy Show and it is such an infectious jingle, that you might catch your self humming it later today.
Fresh off the presses
06/09/08
Immersion in the Land of
Oil is an
article about The Center for Land Use
Interpretation's recent residency at
the Mitchell Center for the
Arts in
Houston, TX. I wrote this article for the Summer
issue of ART LIES magazine, which just hit the
newsstands.
Design Science Revolution
06/07/08
There is a "The Design
Science Revolution" sweeping across the cultural
landscape these days.
This group of exciting articles and pictures about the Godfather of the Sustainability movement are most likely in anticipation of the Whitney Museum exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, opening later this month. With the inflated price of oil, food shortages in China and a US recession looming on the horizon, seems we are are primed and ready for Fuller's visionary environmental ideas.
DYMAXION MAN: The Visions of Buckminster Fuller from the New Yorker
WEIRD SCIENCE Slideshow from the New Yorker Online
This multipart GUIDE to R.Buckminster Fuller was in GOOD magazine back in 2007
More about Fuller is in some of the first posts to this blog, May 07 MACHINES FOR LIVING.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-R.Buckminster Fuller
UPDATE: LETTERS DECODE THE MYTH OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER from the NY Times Architecture section
This group of exciting articles and pictures about the Godfather of the Sustainability movement are most likely in anticipation of the Whitney Museum exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, opening later this month. With the inflated price of oil, food shortages in China and a US recession looming on the horizon, seems we are are primed and ready for Fuller's visionary environmental ideas.
DYMAXION MAN: The Visions of Buckminster Fuller from the New Yorker
WEIRD SCIENCE Slideshow from the New Yorker Online
This multipart GUIDE to R.Buckminster Fuller was in GOOD magazine back in 2007
More about Fuller is in some of the first posts to this blog, May 07 MACHINES FOR LIVING.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-R.Buckminster Fuller
UPDATE: LETTERS DECODE THE MYTH OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER from the NY Times Architecture section
Flight of fantasy
05/12/08
These days I spend most of my at work time
in the world of Progressive Rock, and as an escape I
spend a bit too much time surfing around Indy Rock
sites. YACHT makes my
favorite tour blog and Pitchfork is a great
news source, KCRW has that nifty
Now Playing feature (with a dangerous
direct link to itunes). Only recently did I
discovered the My Old Kentucky Blog
and cracked up when I read the Rules of Indie Rock
Success: Rule #1: Put a hot girl on
keyboard or bass. #2 Cover Joy Division's Love
Will Tear Us Apart. WOW- I never realized how
many bands covered that song. I am also digging
John Weeden's newest online project, a well
curated video jukebox called Square Peg.
I would love for NodeVideo (us) to do a hot indy rock tour as our next long-term engagement. I dream of working with music that you can dance to, with girl singers, in high heel boots and glitter costumes covering a David Bowie song.
I would love for NodeVideo (us) to do a hot indy rock tour as our next long-term engagement. I dream of working with music that you can dance to, with girl singers, in high heel boots and glitter costumes covering a David Bowie song.
I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original
03/20/08
Reyner Banham, the British
architectural critic and historian, keeps coming
up. I am currently working on an article about
CLUI's recent residency in
Houston,TX and read that Banham felt that city
was 'like a real life-life version of a Monopoly
game', as he saw 1970s Houston as
'simultaneously wide open and impenetrable' and
felt the renegade city made "Los Angeles in the
Chinatown epoch seem like a socialist
economy" because Houston's "property wheels and
deals operated with less restrictions than
anywhere else in the Anglo Saxon world".
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
We Want Change
02/21/08
Crowdsourcing video- "larger than any of us, made possible by all of us"
The collective video HOPE.ACT.CHANGE was created in support of Barack Obama's run for president & the video grows as participants upload their campaign photos onto Flickr and tag them with "hopeactchange".This is a smart project that lists Obama as the CEO of Inspiration- fantastic- it sounds like a line from a George Clinton/ P-Funk song.
Speaking of crowdsourcing- I am now running out to my first class at THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, an experimental school based on peer to peer learning that is taking place at the TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
02/18/08
Robert Smithson, excerpt, 1970
You Are Here highlights
01/10/08
There are short
highlights from the YouAreHere conference
now online at Vimeo.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
If I controlled the internet
01/04/08
One of the best things
to happen in 2007 was that the folks from TED put
their conference talks online. These short video
clips are inspirational, way-out-there, stimulating,
challenging and simply amazing. This clip of the
storyteller & poet Rives is my favorite.
This week I have spent alot of time digitizing the video tapes from YouAreHere, the Houston-based conference that I organized back in December. I have been selecting short highlights from each presentation to post to Vimeo, for those who missed the conference or for those who simply don't want it to end. These video highlights will be posted soon, until then spend some time with more of the TED talks.
This week I have spent alot of time digitizing the video tapes from YouAreHere, the Houston-based conference that I organized back in December. I have been selecting short highlights from each presentation to post to Vimeo, for those who missed the conference or for those who simply don't want it to end. These video highlights will be posted soon, until then spend some time with more of the TED talks.
From the Brooklyn G Train to the Burnside Bridge
12/27/07
We have been laying low in a subleased apartment
(which includes a rental cat) in Clinton Hill,
Brooklyn. Since this is a neighborhood I do not know
very well and the rainy weather in New York is
preventing much exploration- we are using this time
to bone up on 'computer stuff'. I have done some
minor improvements to my blog, which include this new
title photo that Andrea Grover
took on one of our trips to the Buffalo Bayou in
Houston. Thanks Andrea! We finally installed
Leopard onto our computers and are starting to
work on a new NodeVideo website, in
preparation for our return from the world-wide
tour in June 08 and the conclusion of
Towards A New Architecture.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
Launch of An Atlas of Radical Cartography
12/03/07
I am so excited about this project/publication!
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
We were here
12/02/07
Up: Matt Coolidge from The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Down: Rich Pell from The Institute for Applied Autonomy
Yesterday at The Aurora Picture Show
Matt McCormick's blog has great coverage of the weekend
Good luck to Your Daily Awesome
11/22/07
I was sad to read that the blog Your Daily
Awesome has come to an end, as it is one
of my daily favorites. But I love that YDA's last
post was this clip "A History of Texas" from David
Byrne's movie True Stories. This movie
was my quirky introduction to living in Texas and
I knew that I had to buy the dvd when we moved to
Houston. Numerous times I have quoted moments from
True Stories to someone in passing and it
is comforting to know there are others out there
who recognize the odd brilliance of this film!
Good luck to you Mr.YDA & thanks for all the
great bits this year.
Bike City USA Portland, Oregon
11/07/07
Seems the NY Times & I are having both having a
love affair with this bike city!
Article: In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels
Video: The Business of Biking
Article: In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels
Video: The Business of Biking
Pedi-Move-it
07/03/07
A few weeks ago, I created a slideshow about bikes
and included photos of people moving via bike in
Portland, Oregon. Having moved once while living in
Amsterdam with only a bike, the notion of moving via
bike made sense to me. But I thought those Portland photos documented a
lovely, freak one-time event. Tonight I learned
there is an actual Bike Moving movement
in Portland, which is facilitated by the
community cycling network SHIFT. The trailer
below documents a bike move, thanks to the
NAU website. While the clothes
on Nau are a tad expensive, they are a
responsible company and the designs are pretty
hot. In planning the contents for my 1 suitcase
for the upcoming year on the road, I ordered a
skirt and jacket from them. They make clothes
for the long haul - just what I need!
blog time
05/30/07
Last night I was talking with a friend who innocently
asked "Who has TIME to read blogs?" Sheepishly I
thought ‘worse yet, who has TIME to post to a blog?’
Rather than sit around for too long feeling like I
lacked an action packed life, I starting to think
about how this blog, or blogging in general,
originated. Is there a link to connect the creation
of a blog to the tradition of committed
correspondence/ Pen Pals and Mail Art, perhaps by
taking a slight detour through public access/
community television?
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
radical reference
05/19/07
In 1966 Richard
Brautigan wrote the novel The Abortion: An Historical
Romance.
The story takes place in an unusual library that
accepted books from anyone who wished to drop them
off. As an homage to this fictional place The
Brautigan Library was created and for many years
was housed within the Fletcher Free Library in
Burlington, Vermont. This library within a library
accepted only unpublished manuscripts.
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
fire fighting goats
05/16/07
The citizens of Los Angeles are deeply concerned after serious wildfires in the Griffith Park and Hollywood Hills have destroyed vast swaths of urban wilderness and killed or displaced thousands of animals during their breeding season.
These fires feed upon unchecked dry undergrowth, and endanger lives, homes, historic monuments and our enjoyment of the city. It will take decades before Griffith Park is restored to its pre-fire condition.
We the undersigned demand that the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks respond to this continued threat by bringing in shepherds with herds of goats to graze on the dry hills, a plan previously implemented with great success by UC Berkeley in the aftermath of that community's devastating 1991 fire.
Goats are economical, ecological fire-fighting machines that produce fertilizer as they clear hills and canyons of weeds, poison oak and dry chaparral. Additionally, the animals are charming, newsworthy ambassadors for fire safety, a subject that needs to be more widely discussed.
We want to save our parks and mountains. We want goats! (Reblogged from 1947project.com)
WARNING We had a gaggle of urban goats in Albany, NY. Whenever they got out of their pen the goats would happily strip the bark off the fruit trees we were growing in our lot and eat everything in the garden. But if you are still looking to hire a herd of your own, you can go here.
machines for living
05/14/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: FAILURE
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
The Supine Dome
If you have spent enough time with me you are sure to have heard about my interest in Geodesic domes. It is not a nostalgia for the 1960s or some latent hippiness that drives my leisure pursuit. I have heard about how awful it was to live in a dome; they leaked, privacy was nill as they were impossible to soundproof. But for me the Geodesic dome is a great symbol- a sign of both utopian vision and also spectacular failure.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning and Josef Albers working on the first domes at Black Mountain College.
The dome uses the "doing more with less" idea in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. At Black Mountain College in 1948 and ’49, Fuller and students spent a great deal of time working on the design and construction of geodesic domes. In 1948, their attempt to build the first large-scale dome with venetian blind strips failed, and the structure was subsequently referred to as the “Supine Dome”. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and thicker blinds, they were successful.
- Excerpt from Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, NC
Then you have the idealistic artists of Drop City, the squatter style commune that sprang up in south eastern Colorado in 1965 as "land to be open and free to the people." This commune was immortalized in the 1970 "back to the land" bible Shelter, published in 1973 and these images endure as some of the most iconic images of the 1960s counter-cultural buildings. The original four founders of the project were inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and the art "happenings" of Allan Kaprow, both of which originated at Black Mountain College. By 1968 Drop City and was overrun with hippies & drugs and the original settlers moved down the mountains and into Boulder, CO.
There is much to be learned from FAILURE and here is a book project that recently caught my attention:
Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices has been published by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. A book of essays, interviews and artwork that together offer a minor history of failure. Tracing the idea of failure through contemporary art, activism and social protest movements, literature and philosophy, the work in Failure! cuts against a notion of forward progress by instead exploring various dead-ends on the timeline of history. Failure! gives us ways to map our lives in relationship to improper paths. From Valerie Solanas to the Weather Underground, and beyond (and behind).
Available at AK Press
Hopefully soon I will have a profile here with David McConville, co-founder of The Elumenati immersive projection design firm and one of my favorite people to talk with about domes, Buckminster Fuller and the early films of Charles and Ray Eames.
machines for living
05/13/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: SHELTER
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
Before it's time- The Dymaxion House
The prototype of Buckminster Fuller's dynamically efficient prefab home from 1948 is entombed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
During his career, Fuller was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, "Bucky" campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement.
1945, the Dymaxion House was Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words: DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension). The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube. Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.
After WWII, Fuller convinced Beech Aircraft of Wichita, Kansas, to work with him to bring his Dymaxion House to life. The aircraft factory was the perfect choice as materials used in both the Dymaxion House and airplanes were very similar. Unfortunately, "Bucky" would not compromise his design which led to disagreement among the associates of the newly formed Fuller Houses Inc. and ultimately to the collapse of the company. The only two prototypes of the round, aluminum house were purchased by investor William Graham. In 1948, Graham constructed a hybridized version of the Dymaxion House as his family's home; the Grahams lived there into the 1970s.
See More, Do More, Live More- The Airstream
Wally Byam's shiny trailers hit the road in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. These factory produced mobile homes were made from lightweight, durable aluminum designed for aircrafts during the first World War.
Check out the amazing Weblog Tour America from Rich, Eleanor and Emma, the "full-timing" family and editor of Airstream Life magazine.
Pre-Fab Modernism- The Dwell Magazine Revolution ?
I heard Office of Mobile Design's Jennifer Siegal speak last month in Chicago at the C6 Symposium. Siegal might be best known for her Swellhouse pre-fab home design produced for the Dwell House Invitational. OMD's perspective is reactive, visionary and yet practical.
Check out the OMD Globetrotter, a mobile theater that unfolds from a cargo truck container and is described as "cross-breeding of high theater and high camping." (might use this later to describe my life)
While the re-use of cargo containers can be appropriate in temporary or dire situations (see the Rx Box project headed up by "me ex") there are some drawbacks to this recycling. Cargo containers are uninsulated and get too hot in some climates and too cold in others. Also when you cut into them to make a door or window the structural integrity of the steel is compromised.
OMD's philosophy is to focus on and design for our mobile lives. Bravo! I will skip over the Paul Virilio quotes and just let you listen to Jennifer Siegal in this video:
West Coast Choppers meets Prefab Modernism
This is a sexy little video about prefab production by Marmol Radziner. Like OMD, this team is building prefab model homes in the high desert outside Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge, the Director of CLUI and docent of our recent bus trip along Highway 62 commented that the openness of the high desert is not just a way of thinking about landscape. The openness of the desert extends to social norms (more personal freedom), spirituality (UFO landings and New Age retreats) and to an open environment for experimental architecture (because of open, cheap land.) While none of these modern prefab firms are building "affordable housing" (a big critique) they are operating in a utopian tradition of social and physical experimentation taking place out in the desert.
machines for living
05/12/07
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: GETTING
STARTED
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.