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10:33 AM (5 hours ago)
Carina Downing
to Jeffrey

show details 10:33 AM (6 hours ago)

used canned air

and thought about snow

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Jeffrey
to me

show details 10:41 AM (5 hours ago)


I am making snow now, as a tribute to you.


Carina Downing
to Jeffrey

show details 11:26 AM (5 hours ago)

I like that very much.
- Show quoted text -

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Jeffrey
to me

show details 11:28 AM (5 hours ago)


It made my hand really cold.

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Carina Downing
to Jeffrey

show details 11:59 AM (4 hours ago)

you actually did.

i like that even more.


where did the snow fall?

- Show quoted text -

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12:01 PM (4 hours ago)
Mohr, Jeffrey
to me

show details 12:01 PM (4 hours ago)


On the floor near megan’s lace-less converse with pink socks.


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12:15 PM (4 hours ago)
Carina Downing
to Jeffrey

show details 12:15 PM (4 hours ago)

what a nice place for snow.

- Show quoted text -

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Jeffrey
to me

show details 12:16 PM (4 hours ago)


Its more fun when it lands on someone, surprised.

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Carina Downing
to Jeffrey

show details 1:56 PM (2 hours ago)

it is.

for a moment, i imagined you secretly making snow in the back room.









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watch: no sex last night aka double-blind

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle joins with Gregory Shephard to create a voyeuristic tour de force. Armed with camcorders, Calle and her collaborator/partner Shephard head West in his Cadillac convertible to produce and document a real-life narrative of their journey and their relationship. With America as the backdrop for this unconventional coast-to-coast road movie, Calle and Shephard each narrates and records a personal diary, presenting strikingly different versions of the narrative/relationship. Aiming their dueling camcorders, the protagonists chronicle the elusive landscapes of human relations, wrestling to reconcile self, sexuality, and desire. The viewer is challenged to reconsider the subjective and cultural roles imposed by gender, sexuality, power, and tradition. Throughout, Calle seeks to redefine through personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject/object, public/private, truth, fiction, and role-playing. The quasi-documentary style evokes the films of Chris Marker, to whom Double-Blind is dedicated.

browsing through ubu's videos i noticed Sophie Calle's name. being a fan of her work and not knowing of her video work i decided to check it out. well worth the watch. super interesting relationship dynamics. the two hardly know each other but set off on a long adventure together hoping to figure out their relationship and each having vastly different understandings of it.

very humanizing to see somewhat into Calle's real life instead of just thinking of the artist as a remote idea. someone somewhere else, in another world practically whose work just shows up and is consumed.

searching: in old things i've made

in a search for a method of transferring a line drawing from a print out onto foamcore i went back to an old book of mine where i'd written down the name of a blending marker that dissolves laser toner and allows you to transfer it onto paper.

i found a writing of mine which i realized has the same spirit that i'd like to use with my current work.

odd but real
detailed but incomplete

"he was a little boy but everyone seemed to think he was an adult. i guess his age two years older than it really was. his favorite food is cheese and that is nearly the only thing he eats. quesadillas, grilled cheese, string cheese, orange cheese, melted cheese, cheese and crackers, cheese in cheese, cheese on cheese.

he lives in the mountains with a dog named Lady and a father and a mother who don't live together. in the event that somebody touches his hair he becomes upset and brushes them away because it is too much to handle having so much hair that is so luxuriously curly. for spring break he stays with yolanda, his father's first wife. together he and yolanda and her brother oscar fling cholcolate bunnies and radishes all over the apartment with a monster sling shot. today there are red blotches on the walls and chocolate on the ceiling. there is chocolate on the ceiling, although i'm not sure how much. in the daytime his father and brothers and yolanda talk on the phone to figure out who will pick up his other brother from the airport at 3 except now its at 5 because Ecuador Air delayed his flight. He'll arrive at 5 and his father will pick him up and take him to the mountains too, with his small brother and his curly locks."

(room for inference is key)

making: some progress

traced

trial run animation.

concluded that the idea has potential for working out.
going to make a clean version today.

Light like after rain.

searching: in things others made

In the middle of a night that was both sleepless and cold, I woke her up. I asked if we could share her sleeping bag because mine was too thin. Without hesitations she said, "Of course. Here". At the time, I remember being impressed with her gesture. It was hilarious to me. We didn't actually fit in the sleeping bag but I fell asleep within minutes thinking about breakfast.


daniel melo

super stuck -- > unstuck

i became too rational in my approach.

and afraid of making art that sucks.

so did a series of very simple chance experiments.
dropping feathers onto construction paper and taping them down with silver tape
tearing all the wrappers off crayons and dropping those on paper, spinning in circles after each release. taping those down.
asking pam to list the first thirty animals that came to mind. backwards though, she had to write the 30th one first. asking her to assign them numbers as she wished, between 1-156 (the #of pages in a national geographic magazine)
then i drew each animal haphazardly and she cut out a small image from each corresponding page in the national geographic. i taped the image in the stomach of the animal (sort of chance-y mostly because i didn't know what she would do)

you can't really be blamed for chance experiments sucking... thats the beauty.

and then

i pulled up video that I had taken over the summer. interviews with southern humboldt residents and static shots of the landscape.

and i treated it as one would treat a 30 second sketch.

pushing things around here and there. cutting clips, moving them, layering them, unlinking sound from video, moving that around, going all together crazy with things in the spirit of a quick sketch.

and it was liberating.

because i couldn't and wouldn't blame myself much for these sketches going awry either ,or not looking perfect, because they weren't ever supposed to. that was built into the approach.

and doing these things brought up other ideas in my mind and got my thoughts spinning around and about. odd pairings brought up third ideas that would most likely not have occurred to me otherwise.

they got things rolling, started a rather nice momentum.

ideas surfaced. the fountain animation. and others too.

Fourty five minute drive in warm fog hugging california's southern coast.

I <3 Pine Flat

reading: fake lawns

Orange County cities review ban on fake grass

Jean Orban thought she had found a simple solution to her green grass quandary.


The Garden Grove resident considered having a healthy, pretty lawn the mark of being a good neighbor -- plus, residents who let their lawns go brown can be fined by the city. But she wanted to spare her husband the Sunday morning ritual of mowing the lawn, and she thought it was a waste to use hundreds of gallons of water to keep the grass thriving.


So she had an artificial lawn installed. The blanket of bright green that stretches from her patio to the street always looks freshly mowed, and her water bill is about the price of a couple of bottles of Dasani.

Alas, Garden Grove doesn't share Orban's affection for her fake lawn. As she soon discovered, the city bans artificial turf. Although the city has yet to take any action against her, others who installed the lawns have been warned that they will be fined.

read the rest here

reading : Cadillac Desert

1911


"The Owens River created Los Angeles, letting a great city grow where common sense dictated that one should never be but one could just as well say that it ruined Los Angeles too. The annexation of the San Fernando Valley, a direct result of the aqueduct, instantly made it the largest city in the world in geographic size. From that moment, it was doomed to become a huge sprawling, one-story conurbation, hopelessly dependant on the automobile. The Owens River made Los Angeles large enough and wealthy enought to go out and capture any river within six hundred miles, and that made it larger, wealthier, and a good deal more awful. It is the only megalopolis in North America which is mentioned in the same breath as Mexico City of Djakarta-- a place whose insoluble excesses raise the specter of some majestic, stately kind of collapse."

and the people of the Owens Valley were pissed



"For Los Angeles to take their water to fill their washtubs and water glasses was one thing. For it to turn their valley back to desert so that another desert valley, owned by rich monopolists, could bloom in its place was quite another"

and that is how the story goes time and again with the big city prevailing over the small town.

and now, Los Angeles is the second most populous desert city on Earth, right after Cairo.



the dry bed's dust = 800,000 years of salt deposits, with arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and chromium. making Inyo County a pretty unhealthy place to be.

listening : steve roden

download steve roden's music for free here

Project Name:
Fountain (working title)

Project Description:
A stop motion animation dealing with water culture in California.
The piece will be an animation using dirt in the shape of the William Mulholland Water Fountain on paper. Using glue I will create a line drawing of the Mulholland water fountain and sift dirt onto the paper, allowing it to stick to the glue’s lines. Later, I will use more dirt and stop motion animate it as if it were the water from the fountain. After creating the animation I will watch it and create sounds to accompany it that are informed by the piece itself.

Conceptual Concerns:
Water fountains have become a common part of California’s landscape. Found in public parks, plazas, business districts, malls, schools and shopping centers, fountains are generally an accepted use of water resources. These decorative waterspouts make a place look nice, calm and refreshing through their allusions to naturally occurring water sources. Its no wonder that we want them around. They bring a hint of the natural and serve as a place to relax at in even the blandest of environments.

At times though, it seems that the original intention of the fountain is lost. Some fountains run throughout the night, others in the most remote of places and even more peculiar are the very ugliest, run down fountains. About these I wonder if the owner sees any fountain as better than no fountain at all. Also strange, are the most extreme and gaudy of fountains, fountains on steroids, some which shoot hundreds of feet into hundred-degree air. I never stopped to think much about fountains at all until I starting noticing these odd types.

In a state which imports most of its water and has nearly dried up its own aquifers, in a state where every river, save one, is dammed and water is sent thousands of feet over mountain ranges to get to our cities, oddly, we find that water, after its long and arduous journey, coming out of water fountains.

Thanks to William Mulholland’s efforts Californian’s are privileged with an abundant water supply. Without the hundreds of reservoirs and miles of aqueducts that he helped put in place, Southern California could in no way sustain the enormous population that it does today.

How long exactly has it been since the last rain?

The last time I remember I was in downtown Los Angeles. It had been more than a month since the rain before that. The rain sprinkled and I was happy to have it falling on my face. Then I remembered acid rain.

Technical Skills Covered
It will be difficult to get the dirt to mimic water motions and to find the appropriate amount of shots to get this type of motion across. I will be shooting JPEGS since RAW would be crazy to process with so many images. I’m concerned that there will be inconsistencies with white balance between the shots and will have to find a way to figure this out. I am also concerned about the final projection of the image because the projector shifts the colors, contrast and brightness of the image. I am going to work on adjusting these things in final cut to deal with the projectors inconsistencies.

Formal Guidelines:
This project will consist of digital images used to create a stop motion animation, which will include sound and be projected in its final form.

I find I like works the most when I go through drafts of them.

So I set up a series of progress dates.
mock up due Sept 26
first draft due Sept 30
(if there is going to be any major fixing or change in direction i would know here. for instance, i might find that there is no way to make dirt animated as a fountain look good. i might realize that I can't create the image i see in me head. so i would need to reevaluate and continue to work the project out)
second draft due Oct 12
final project due Oct 19


Artistic References

Blake Gumprecht
Bradley Monsma
Elizabeth Rossof
William Mulholland
The Owens Dry Lake Bed
The Eel and Russian Rivers
The people of Southern Humboldt County
FOER
Natasha Elliot
Regina Spektor
John Nichols
The Sespe

Readings
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
The River Why by David James Duncan
Fish Story by Alan Sekula
Dictionary of Water by Ronnie Horn

Grade
The project is successful if people walk away from it thinking a bit about the significance water fountains.

Goals List
1. Learn about water, culture, history and people’s connections to the land
2. Push beyond my normal tendencies in art making and grow, by using new materials and processes while dealing with something close and important to me
3. Figure out how to make the best of a poor projector

yikes @ grad school

Milee Tibbs


Self Portrait Behind a Tree


Self Portrait Behind a Rock


Self Portrait Behind a Pile of Gravel

Three others float about pretending they are in Italy.

Meanwhile, a little covered boat with a little family inside floats by, just past the buoys.

Three people stand in a triangle, in chest deep water. They jump and jump.

An elderly man with blue goggles, swims in maybe 3 feet of water.

A grown man operates a toy motor boat.

Such a good writing on the problems of an art education.

The discussion that the GLAMFA panel had got me thinking about the values and drawbacks to art education and reminded me of this biting critique by Hickey.

Dave Hickey
Revision 6
Addictions

So we live in a moment when works of art are defined by their opacity, and we don't care what they mean. Art criticism that seeks to endow difficult works of art with an element of transparency is regarded with suspicion. Members of the art world, like the adepts of a mystery cult, tread softly, lest some casual explanation shatter the altars at which they worship. This moment of willful incuriosity seems an appropriate occasion to reconsider the sites upon which the franchise is extended and the regime of difficulty is escalated--to parse the costs and benefits of graduate education in art in the United States. The wind shear in these schools is at its most extreme, as educators with marginal credentials indoctrinate students of marginal literacy in a discourse that is utterly irrelevant.

go here for the rest:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_3_97/ai_n31979616/?tag=content;col1

Maybe my favorite quote about art.

--

Through art alone we are able to emerge from ourselves, to know what
another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and
of which, without art, the landscape would remain as unknown to us as
those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one
world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at
our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more
different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite
space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from
which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or
Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust

I thought this was neutral but looking back on it see that it has a magenta cast to it.


Here I removed the magenta cast and made the whites neutral. Looking at it on the monitor it looks like it has a green cast but looking at the numbers shows that the whites are neutral.

I had tons of trouble trying to get the color balance right in these images. I'm still not happy with the way they all look together. They were shot in low light, with weird artificial lighting and at 1600 ISO. I watched a bunch of Lynda color tutorials to try and figure these out but most of them depend on blacks, whites and gray tones for neutralizing images and most of these don't have neutrals to begin with.

All images by Summer Kemick
www.summerkemick.com


The image has mainly cool tones and an overall cyan cast. Detail is lost in some shadow and highlight sections.



Detail is preserved in the shadows although it doesn't appear that way from looking at the monitor. The sand has a green cast to it. Areas that appear black actually have a blue cast to them.


The sand in this image also has a green cast to it. Some small sections of the sky are completely white although most has minimal detail preserved.


Cool tones here again. Lots of green some of which has a bluish cast to it. The sky is mostly neutral with just a few blue areas.

Looking forward to GLAMFA performances.

3 of them in total, beginning at 6:00PM this Sunday.
Patrick Ballard will be in the final performance.
Got a hint of what this performance will be like today. A must see. Be there.

Played a super fun show tonight with The Clouds

Exhilarating being on stage.
Also, there is something so awesome about total strangers coming up to you after you play, being excited and wanting to talk to you about your music. Wish this would happen with vis art more often and why doesn't it?

Farmlab

I highly recommend checking out Farmlab. It is an awesome art space.

Farmlab hosts public salons with all sorts of interesting artists, artist groups and other creative people, nearly every Friday at noon. And serves delicious FREE lunch to everyone that attends!

This Friday September 4.

Dan Ethridge

http://farmlab.org/2007/01/2007-farmlab-salon-schedule-every.html

eel

Some of you already know that I've been working on a project about how rivers influence the communities they run through.

This summer I spent two weeks along the banks of the Eel River.

This is part of what happened.

I started out by exploring the towns that border the South Fork of Eel River which is the section that runs through Humbolt County and found out very quickly how small the towns are in that area. Most are unincorporated communities of less than 1,000 people. My original idea was to interview people by the river so I spent a lot of time in Fortuna, the largest city that borders the river, with a population of 10,500. There is a levy there where people walk along the river, so I camped out there for a couple days, interviewing people that walked by and were willing to participate.



Most of the people were into it and I got a lot of interesting people on camera but there were two major technical difficulties that I dealt with. One was getting the proper microphone. The first one I had picked up too much wind. The second one was a wired lavalier and people kept pulling on the cord and then a few dogs and a horse got all tangled up in it and pulled it off the person I was interviewing. The other problem was that in order to frame the person properly and also control the camera they had to be standing at an uncomfortably far distance from the camera and me, which was awkward and made the conversation and interview seem too impersonal.



So I came home with bits and pieces of footage from that first trip and got a wide angle adapter and wireless lavalier microphone and then went back up to the river. I wanted to get people from different cities so I decided to go to the Avenue of the Giants (HWY 254) and talk to business owners along that stretch which runs right by the river. Most of the towns along the 254 have populations between 100-200, so I figured asking the business owners or employees would be a good way to find locals since most of the people along the road are tourists camping and visiting the Redwoods.

I got a lot of good interviews here and the wireless lav and wide angle adapter worked like a charm. After talking to people during this last trip, including the director of Friends of the Eel River (like FOLAR but for the Eel), I realized the complexity of the situation with this river. When I saw the river I only saw the surface, which compared with rivers I knew, was natural and wild and free, however the river is in very bad shape right now. The water level is really low due to drought and to the rerouting 80% of water from the Eel's headwaters to form Lake Pillsbury in Mendocino County and also the rerouting of water to the Russian River which gets sent to Mendocino County and in part is used in vineyards. The people I spoke with, most of whom grew up on the river, felt like Mendo has been stealing the water and the redistribution of water has been causing serious loss of habitat in the Eel for salmonoids and steelhead. The overly heavy flow in the Russian is also tearing up habitat. Now I feel like I have a one sided story with the voices of people in Mendocino missing so I need a while to go over the footage and plan for what to do next.



Originally I didn't think of the project as being a platform for discussion of water issues and environmental concerns. I thought simply, that I was going to talk to people and find out how the river affects the community members, how they use the river, how they feel about it... I didn't realize that it was such a heated issue. Many people were very happy that I was concerned about the river and let me know how lucky I was to grow up around the undammed Sespe River. They wanted this project to educate people and make them aware of the issues that surround the Eel River so that it may be saved. A couple of women I spoke with were nearly in tears talking about the river being a dead river now and telling me to let everyone know what danger it is in.



I'm not sure where to go from here. I feel like the issues are so big to tackle. I need to reevaluate the project and what direction I should go with it.

I'm taking an Oral History Methods class this semester. It's in the History Department and will help me with how to better interview people and what the proper procedures are for collecting Oral History.

I found out that playing the piano helps me think more clearly and have decided to play the piano more.

Thinking about going to this performance tonight.
See Saw (I consider you, consider me)
Alexander May

see details here