atlas(t)

the san francisco earthquake blend

just sticking my head in here for a second to draw your attention to these awesome photos by Shaun Clover. He selected archival photos from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and then took photos from the exact same spot and blended them together. They look like sci-fi stories where two moments in time are blended by a wormhole or time-warp, or whatever the current fashion calls them. Awesome.

More on the project here.

Via Dino Ignacio.

the silent evolution

awesome. This artificial reef was created by artist Jason deCaires Taylor in Mexico out of environmentally friendly materials. It comprises 400 sculptures cast from members of the local community.

I saw this and thought: now that's some reparative terraforming! It's one of the less grandiose things we can do to reverse the damage we've done to our biosphere (although I think it's plenty grandiose as it is) but it hits a lot of buttons.

First of all: who doesn't love a reef? There are already schools of colorful, curious-looking fish taking in the sights. And seaweed hanging off the cement people's faces.  Who doesn't love a reef?

Secondly: it's an invasive/noninvasive project. I mean, yeah, the guy did just plunk down tons of concrete into the ocean where no concrete was before. The fish might find that invasive, particularly during installation. But no one is actually seeding chemicals or changing the terrain, or blocking the sunlight or anything. Just dumping concrete.

And then there's that whole aesthetic issue: i.e. the non-issue until you ask yourself why. Why isn't terraforming aesthetic? I mean, if all the stuff discussed during the conference is really as science fictional and underfunded as all that, why can't they play around with more aesthetic attempts at a fix?

I love that the figures are looking around in wonder at the fish surrounding them. It's cheesy, but effective. I can't wait to see what they look like a few years from now, wreathed in kraut and crusted with molluscs.

This could very well get me to learn to dive.

hyperart: thomasson

i'm so proud of our new book trailer!

I've been working with Kaya Press for about a year now, and we've produced two book trailers, each one for a book that it's really difficult to describe in words. The one above is for our new title -- available next week -- HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa. Akasegawa is a Japanese conceptual artist -- a contemporary and colleague of Yoko Ono -- who came up with the concept of "Thomassons" in the late seventies, early eighties.

When an urban structure loses its usage, but remains standing, attached to the property it used to serve, and still being aesthetically maintained, then it is a "Thomasson." We're talking about staircases that lead to nowhere, bricked up ticket windows, outside doors in the third story of a building, etc. Akasegawa contends that these things are not stairs, windows, and doors, but rather art shaped like stairs, windows, and doors: unintentional art created by the city; hyperart.

He and his colleagues refined the name to "Thomasson" because at that time, 1982, American baseball player Gary Thomasson was playing for the Japanese team the Yomiuri Giants ... or rather, NOT playing, because he couldn't seem to manage to hit a ball. Yet they still paid him to be there. Akasegawa thought him the perfect, living hyperart, and named the whole phenomenon after him.

In the mid-eighties, Akasegawa had a column in a Japanese photo magazine about Thomassons, where he accepted submissions of thomassons: photographs, and descriptions. He published these and discussed whether or not they were thomassons, why, and what kind. These columns were eventually collected into a book in the 80's which quickly became a cult classic among Japan's youth.

This publication is the first time that Hyperart: Thomasson has been translated. To mark the occasion, translator Matt Fargo created a Thomassons website where people can submit their own thomassons, as well as vote on whether or not submissions are thomassons, and discuss these.

And I'm working with Kearny Street Workshop to develop a guided performance tour of local San Francisco thomassons. The project is called "SF Thomassons" and there's a special page on Matt's Thomassons website for local exemplars from our stable of photographers.

And finally, Kaya and KSW are having a book launch partay on December 18 in San Francisco, where you can get a free preview of the tour. Yay!

cityscape paris rug

lust, desire. Caution.

Yes, it's commodity. Yes, you can own it. For 3200 English pounds.

It's the felt Cityscape Paris rug by Hive. And I want it.

There's also a New York version, and, you can commission any city you want. And here's the best part: you can commission street maps as well. Omigod, I want a Berlin and a San Francisco! Arrggghhh!

I'm actually drooling.

drawing cities in perspective

a lousy tutorial, but a fun visual. (A clue to why it's a bad tutorial: he was a big Frank Miller fan. Plus, this is his first tutorial.) Anyhoo, don't watch the whole ten minutes, just skip through it.

This one has no soundtrack, which is also a mistake. And it's hard to see what's going on. Also, not as cartoony, so not as fun.

Whoa. That is trippy. It's a 180 degree image, as if taken with a fish-eye lens. This guy says he can go up to six-point perspective. That's drawing on a sphere. Wait, he's got one:

Isn't that crazy? Dude has insane spatial relations in his head. That's something I might could learn to DO (with pain and suffering and a lot of help), but could never learn to SEE.

This just makes me remember that all these drawing tricks are just tricks, to make us think we're seeing what we see when we look around us. 2D drawing is an illusion. Adding points to perspective doesn't bring you closer to how you actually see the world, it just allows you to draw more from the same vantage point. More from your 360 degrees from the same vantage point. Which is ridiculous, since you can't SEE 360 degrees from one vantage point.

So, how many points could you add, just to be ridiculous? And how would you do it? Where would you add the seventh point? Where would it take you, anyway? Would you be drawing 360 degress in all directions from the same vantage point, rather than just 360 degrees around the horizon line? And at that point, does it lose all visual coherence and become illegible?

soaring over mars

well, I really haven't checked in on the NASA Mars missions sites in a while (something like three years.) Part of the problem is that the massive amounts of data the rovers are collecting (yes! they're still active!) take a while to sort through, and even then, the globally significant implications (Yes! there was water on Mars! Yes! There was rainfall! Yes! There's still localized magnetic fields on Mars!) are few and far between. And slow in coming.

Of course, my main, perhaps my only, interest in Mars is for my nobble (seven years and counting I've been working on that thing.) So I'm looking for very specific information, and I get bored and wander away fast if I don't get it.

So I've been missing this sort of coolness (see above.)

Anyhoo, I just talked about this with someone a few days ago. Perspectives on what Mars looks like have improved enormously with the rover missions and the reconnaisance orbiter missions. Before then, all you had was basically a satellite view, and a dog's eye view from the previous rover. The dog's eye view of a dog with a very short leash.

Neither of these perspectives is a human one. Our elevation from the ground, or our shape or wiring, is such that we don't look down, or feel a closeness to the dirt and rocks under our feet. We're always stretching up and up to get a higher view. And the first thing we do in terra incognita is to go find a hill or promontory and get on top of it, so we can see around better. The human perspective is one of constantly changing perspective, five feet off the ground, but off an extremely variable and quick-changing ground. The human perspective is the one that fills the gap between the dog's eye view and the satellite view.

The current rovers are much taller (man's eye view) and can go much farther, and have lasted much longer. So there have been many opportunities to change that perspective. And the reconnaisance orbiter has come far lower into the Martian atmosphere than intended, and of course far lower than any previous orbiters have done. So much so that the orbiter's images have been almost at fighter-jet-eye-view. That's close to the range of human perspective.

But. There's still a gap between the rover's perspective and the orbiter's perspective. They're filling that gap with clever science and CGI. But the CGI isn't Pixar enough (even Pixar isn't Pixar enough) to read as "realistically" as a photograph. Nor should it. So the human perspective on Mars is still missing.

The end of the video above demonstrates exactly what I mean. (Starting at about 3:30.)

map animation iii

this one is nifty, if random and, ultimately, pointless. And half of it is credits. But I like how the figure gets smaller as it goes off into the distance: perspective! Yeah! And it proves that you don't have to be able to draw to create lifelike movement in an animation (although it sure helps.) Mild kudoes.

manufactured landscapes

the subject is photographer Edward Burtynsky, and the film is a documentary about his work on ... well, Manufactured Landscapes. The trailer is above.

And here's the opening shot, an amazing, eight minute rolling shot of row after row of worktables on a factory floor. You start out thinking, oh this is just a boring factory scene ... an interior. And after about a minute of row after row after row going by, you start to get it: this is a landscape, not an interior.

And here's a segment with Burtynsky himself speaking from a Canadian tv show.

I still haven't seen the film, but this whole things excites me to no end. I'm gonna go consume some of his product and then report back (maybe).

maya lin's systematic landscapes

all I can say, really, about Maya Lin's show Systematic Landscapes, is that the title is appropriate.

Lin takes a number of materials and objects, and systematically finds a way to impose landscape/topography on them, or to use them to depict topography and landscape. Some of these are beautiful and successful, some are strained. All are cold, minimalist, and uninviting.

Which is not to say that I disliked the show. It's up at San Francisco's de Young Museum right now and was the impetus to finally mounting an original exhibition of Asian American art from 1900-1970 that had been years in the making. The Asian American exhibition is rich, vibrant, diverse, and full of high-energy, extremely skilled landscape paintings of the very landscapes Lin is depicting in Systematic Landscapes: Yosemite, the San Francisco Bay. The coldness of Lin's work doesn't contrast with the warmth of the other work to the detriment of either; the Asian American historical work enriches and contextualizes Lin's work, and Lin's work gives the obvious tradition of Asian American landscape depiction continuity and contemporary currency.

But I think Lin's work would have suffered without the juxtaposition. Ultimately, this is an intellectual show that takes little pleasure in its aesthetics, and doesn't love its materials very much. This is especially apparent in her 3-D topographical "drawings." She imposes a grid on a topography, and then transposes  that grid to 3-D space using plastic tubing or wire. I have no doubt these topographies are very precise, but they don't look precise; they look messy and unloved. I would vastly prefer that she had fudged the scientific precision a bit to make the pieces look more precise, and to perhaps express her love of the hard definition more ... er, emotionally?

I did like the look of the wooden topographies [one set of vertically placed 2x4s (to the left) and one set of horizontally placed pressboard depicting mountains, and one set of horizontally placed planks representing landlocked sea basins] and of the topographically carved atlases (one of which is in the image at top.) But the atlases might have made more sense if the actual topography of the region shown on the atlas page had been carved, rather than something more random. And even the good work was all one-liner.

I think I rather appreciated the show as a palate-cleanser after the rich meal of the Asian American history show, than as a free-standing set. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the difference between simple (her best work) and simplistic.

urban flora

the description on youtube says:

Urban Flora is a project that aims to alter city dwellers' experience of their environment through a series of stickers that identify objects in the urban environment. These "urban flora", such as mailboxes, lamp posts, and fire hydrants, are presented in a traditional taxonomy such as one would see in an arboretum or botanical garden. By defining these man-made artifacts in the context of the botanical world, the project draws attention to the presence or absence of nature in the urban space.

but it's really just a time-spender for urban artsies with too much time on their hands.

Either that, or these people are "artists" who need some "projects" under their belts. That would be indicated by the earnestness of the text. I'd actually prefer the former. My friends and I used to sit around and drink beer and come up with ideas galore for projects. Sometimes we'd even do them, but we mostly just sat around and talked. Doing the projects was problematic because it always required some work, and the projects were always one liners, like this one, so it never felt quite sane to spend 200 hours--or 20 or even two--making something that people would look at for a second, say "huh" about, and then walk away.

But I realize that these sorts of one-off projects are how artists cut their teeth so I'm trying not to be too much of a bitch. And it's a neat idea, for about a second. Then it's just precious. My main issue is art that purports to invite random mans on da streets to "think about" something. Unless the artist is very careful, and very thoughtful, these invitations are more along the lines of demands. Condescending demands that offer an ill-defined idea in the confidence that viewers have never thought of such things before.

Such projects also do all the thinking necessary for engaging with the piece, so that when your two seconds of engagement are up, so is all the thinking around the piece.

The problem here specifically is that this idea requires a great deal more thought and discussion to really give anything new to the random viewer. Pretty much every city dweller has thought, at some point or another, about the lack of vegetation, or wished for more trees or green or just plain shade. Pointing out that we've "replaced" trees and shrubs with hydrants and streetlamps doesn't really cut it--for anyone.

The fire hydrant sticker was starting to get somewhere interesting with its line about hydrants now serving multiple purposes. But the format of the stickers was too brief to allow thought to go anywhere. This could have been solved in a number of ways:

1. making the stickers a little bigger and giving oneself a little more leeway to spin out fantasies
2. making a lot more stickers about a lot more objects, and shaping a discussion by sheer accumulation
3. adding a url to a website that included longer (and maybe not so earnest) discussions about the taxonomy of street furniture, or a map of said street furniture, or a taxonomic table or family tree, or maybe simply an interactive component where viewers could suggest other objects to taxonomize

I hate to see a good idea go to waste.