last [semester fourth] year : : final(ly)
2002-10-20
 

Artist statement : : Written for Southern Exposure's juried, no-entry fee show and film festival. I'm pretty happy with it.

All of my work invovles repitition, endurance and mark-making. My pieces exist in very specific and controlled time-spaces from real to digitally manipulated time.
My work has roots in the study of urban cultural anthropology. I am specifically drawn to video and performance as it relates to an anthropological record of existence.
By leaving a record, I trace my own existence and provide an outline for others to view their lives and the spaces and ideas around themselves.

 
 

I'm in the middle of OS X goodness. I'm having a wonderful computer geek moment, which is making the BF feel unloved over there. But, I've got a new toy...

 
2002-10-10
 

While living in Chicago this summer, I had the joy of reading the Chicago Reader on a weekly basis. The Reader is compelling evidence for a more literate approach to "alternative" weeklies. Four sections every week, some of the best writing on film and politics even sports that is being written today. It puts the San Francisco Bay Guardian to further shame for refusing to be literate and, despite its criticism of the SF Weekly, for completely selling out to big advertisers. The Reader feels like a very, very well written community paper. Restaurant reviews are written by staff and the community at large. The Classifieds are endless and better than any other Chicagoland paper. It's truly brilliant and much better seen in person than on the Web.

This is all a very wordy introduction to Jonathon Rosenbaum who writes reviews for the Reader. I'm not always his biggest fan. He often seems to not be able to sit back and enjoy schlocky movies without being overwhelmed by film and Marxist theory. He makes up for it by being a brilliant writer who makes the most wonderful literate references. I'm also a big fan of the critics at the New York Times as well, especially A.O. Scott and Elvis Mitchell.

The connections gets more sticky between all of these guys. Rosenbaum was chosen along with Scott by David Edelstein, who is the film critic for Slate.com, to participate in one of that online magazine's e-mail forums on the best movies of last year as part of Movie Club.

Edelstein, this week, contributes to a very wordy discussion (sound familiar?) of David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film with Rolling Stone's Mim Udovitch and New York filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt. They all gleefully hate the book as a piece of self congratulatory rubbish by a past-his-prime blowhard. It's good dish from the world of film criticism from one of my favorite online mags.

 
 

I'm going to be a terrible parent. Or I would be a terrible parent if any adoption agency was stupid enough to give me a child. I can't even keep a plant living. Seriously, I either over water them, or they die of dehydration. Really nothing more needs to be said, right there is pretty much the way I deal with everything. Feast or famine.

So for you daily checkers of my bLog, either (a) get a life; or (b) find someone else who can satisfy your obsessive needs. I can't be that person.

Instead you might want to check out some of the other bLogs that people I know have decided to put together. Like David's or the one at Andre's site. These people are generally more compulsive, thereby giving you new bLog junkies the fix you so crave.

Now I've resorted to lamely insulting you, the reader, in order to fulfill some sort of contract with you that I don't remember signing. Accept my apologies. And don't hesitate to look elsewhere. We are not in a daily sort of operation around here. Our readers come dead last. That's our promise.

I have to stop now. I'm writing in the third person.

 
2002-10-03
 

partial DEFINITION : (2) something that represents with clarity suggestive of a map (from Webster's)

my DEFINITION : a broad definition of map (which might encompass all of my brainstorming) would step outside of the words' etymological roots (from mappa Latin for towel) and think about how the map functions >>a map then might be a representation of relative positions

mapping BRAINSTORM :

sentence diagram (language) >2
audiology exam (hearing)
blood work (microbiology)
timeline (history)
family tree (geneology) >1
hospital map (orientation)
evacuation plan (exits)
internet map (information) >4
myers briggs (personality) >3

family tree : Genelogy is examined through a relationship diagram that begins with the youngest generations. Placeholders are made for each family member. Direct bloodline connections be they siblings or marriage are drawn with lines. Each generation is kept parrallel in order to effectively demonstrate all relationships graphically (i.e. aunts and uncles to neices and nephews.

sentence diagram : Language is examined through a structural diagram of the relationships of the words in a sentence. Spacial arrangement within the diagram is determind by parts of speech. The system used by the best how-to site was introduced by Stephen Clark in 1863, modified by Alonzo Reed and Brainder Kellogg in 1877, and expanded by Homer C. House and Susan Emolyn Harman in 1950.

Myers Briggs : Through a series of multiple choice questions a personality profile (or type) is arrived at the falls along a continuum of personality types. There are skeptics. (I'm ENFJ extroverted, intuitive, feeling, judging.) Each profile lines up with certain job sills and offers advice on life partners. It's like a Western Science version of astrology.

internet map : How do you represent the flow of information? How do you represent the 3D landscape of hyperlinking documents that link to other hyperlinking documents? Cybergeography.org links to different mappings that look at internet traffic from hub countrys, word relationships and earlier historical maps of government and research sites plus more conceptual work on things such as the conversations inside a chatroom.

 
 

mapping MY BODY :

I spend an inordinate amount of time in hospitals. This goes back, way back. I'm accident prone. I have a rare genetic condition. And now, HIV. So I am familiar with the knowledge-through-mapping, data-collection-as-truth model that our Western medicine is based. Actually, all thought is rooted in assumptions about categories. How to map? My body is mapped through blood tests, hearing test, MRIs (with and without dye), skin maps, spinal x-rays, video-taped orthroscopic surgeries. I have a left a trail of medical records going back until birth, of course. We all have. But, I've littered the highway with a much larger amount of information than your average person. Getting my medical records sent when I move or switch doctors is a like trying to launch an invasion. An ever increasing pile of theories and mapped microbiology.

And, I want to take claim back from this information. How can I take this data and transform it into another form, which reveals something entirely unexpected? Herein lies the question for me right now for my performance workshop and for the entire semester? What to make of the maps?

 
 

Now that the dust is settling from all of that dot-com silliness, we can once again concentrating on all of those glorious random stuff that is out there on what has become the World Wide Web, but used to just be on gopher sites and all of those other pre-technologies.

I was wonder what Naoki's name means. And came up with the appropriately titled Asian Names page, which in turn led me to the giant The Monash Nihongo ftp Archive site of all things Japanese which is "curated" if you will by some guy in Australia. Definitely go check it out. Every link from fonts to Kanji learning games to important telephone numbers for foreigners in Japan. Amazing, really.

 
 

Building a Theremin is sort of a rite of passage for anyone interested in electronics and electronic music. Or, so this is how I'm justifying my fascination with it. I've selected a "very simple digital theremin" design from Maxies Pages which is referenced elsewhere as being "not recommended as a serious project," but really, to hell with Bob Sexton and his electronic snobbery. You know?

Maybe it's because I was raised by a teacher (thank god for Freud) or maybe it's because I'm anal like all Tauruses (failing Freud, there's always astrology), but either way, I have trouble jumping into the middle of something. If I'm going to be working electronics in my art, I want to have begun at a very fundamental level, which is why I'm reading the Radio Shack's Basic Electronics. But I think it might be deeper than all of that — a connection to my anthropology background — where I hope to connect with a culture on a deeper level. There is nothing worse than being a poser, right? In some ways, I'm kicking myself now for not paying attention more to my childhood friends with the my first circuit board kits. I coulda been a contender(!) So now I've got to make up for a lost pre-education. The theremin is my start.

Some good theremin sites that I've found. Thereminworld.com which seems to be hosted by the University of Glasgow, which explains The Reindeer Section in a strange way, doesn't it? Perhaps all of the Scottish indie scene has sprung from the physics department... You might also check out Theremin.info which has an amazing amount of data too. All of these sites, link to other sites, which all seem to link to Art's Theremin Page, which is the most technological relevant of all of them. Happy hunting! And let me know if you are trying one too this semester.

 
2002-10-02
 

Thank you David Sherman for intruducing us all to Bobby BeauSoleil last night at the PFA. After seeing a Web site untitled beausoleil.net in the credits for David's film To Re-Edit the World, I knew I had to check it out. Bobby BeauSoleil was the Albino Lucifer in Kenneth Anger's Invocation for My Devil Brother and sort of a musician-about-town in the late 60s West Coast music scene. Later he got involved with the Manson family and has been jailed for life on murder charges stemming from a drug deal gone bad. Despite this background, he's now just a middle aged white guy and the site reflects a sort of aging Marin-ite quality that is as much Mickey Hart as this guy.

Maybe it's the weather, but as a white person, I certainly don't want to grow old in California. I'd find myself emersed in New Age pseudo-worship and "world music" while living Lafayette and really you might as well kill me now.

 
this bLog is a compendium on my thoughts on my art and work for Fall02, my last semester at the California College of Arts and Crafts

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Location: Brooklyn, NY, United States
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