hammerhead rabbits

Archive for the ‘context’ Category

Clay Shirky talking man

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

This kind of thing is exactly what I’m talking about when I say I’m excited about the possibilities of my humjam website. I want to draw links between what this guy’s talking about and things happening in art and beyond.

I don’t want to talk about it in too much depth here as I’d need thousands of words and this is not the time for that. In brief, he’s talking about the power of social media and the way it’s dog-gone blowing everything we know and hold dear to small pieces.

Week :& – Drawings of time

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

I like this website.
www.icastic.com
I am tempted to ask people to submit drawings for my questionnaire as well.
Maybe my show space will have a little area with crayons. That would be fun. I like the sense that people can get involved with the work in a more direct way. That’s part of the idea in the first place, after all.

Max Frisch’s questionnaires

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I’ve found a very useful piece of context for my questionnaire. It’s a book by the playwright Max Frisch called
'Sketchbook 1966-1971'. It features a series of questionnaires that pose some quite challenging questions. There are nine or ten of these questionnaires in the book and each one takes on a different theme. These questionnaires were quite highly acclaimed when the book was released. I can’t help but feel a lot of them are quite reductive though. A lot of it seems to be a Socratic form of argument with Frisch bullying people into sharing his beliefs.

Each questionnaire consists of twenty five questions. Here’s a sample of questions from the different questionnaires:

The human condition in general

• Are you sure you are really interested in the preservation of the human race once you and all the people you know are no longer alive? State briefly why.
• If you had the power to put into effect things you consider right, would you do so against the wishes of the majority (yes or no) Why not if you think they are right?
• What in your opinion do others dislike about you, and what do you dislike about yourself? If not the same thing, which do you find it easier to excuse?

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Another good data visualisation project

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I just saw this on Flowing Data. I think this kind of thing might provide a very raw blueprint for my own graphs and charts. I like the page full of bars and percentages thing. I remember at the start of the course I blogged that I was a bit influenced by the way I felt when I looked at picture books as a child.I loved all of the details and joining up the different parts.

Anyway, I like this. I wouldn’t mind seeing it get a bit more curated though. For example, what are the likely consequences of the massive disparity of annual births between developing and industrialised countries? Can well presented data begin to suggest answers, or at least inroads in to answers to such questions?

Data Visualisation

Friday, February 6th, 2009

I haven’t blogged for ages. In fact I’ve barely blogged so far this unit. This is because I found myself having fun down the rabbit hole we call the internet. I set up an RSS reader for the first time and have been reading design blogs and other interesting things. So, I have things to write about.

I think we still don’t really understand what the internet is. It’s seen almost as a magazine or newspaper. The design of most web pages doesn’t really take in to account the changing sense of space online. The information visualisation potential of a web page moving from one state to another is incredible. I’m often slightly bemused by the fact that this isn’t explored further. I guess these things take time, money, research and are a nightmare to bring into standards compliance.

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Participation

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

I haven’t really blogged about my PGPD in any direct way yet. It feels kind of rude not sticking up a link about it though. So here you go. Regardless of any dissatisfaction I may feel with it, it did help me think through a lot of things, and I’m finding I’m taking a few things more seriously as a result of it. I’ve already said that haven’t I? I’ve also already said that it’s left me with more questions than answers. But such is the way of these things.

I think one of the key reasons I’ve been getting interested in participatory art leading up to writing my PGPD is remembering an exhibition we had at the house gallery years ago, back when it was still just a gallery and not a gallery and cafe. The exhibition was called the Library of Unpublished Books by a woman called Caroline Jupp. I thought it was rather wonderful, not least because my friend Ben and I contributed a book to the project, which in itself was brilliant fun. My memories of the show are that it had a lovely feeling about it. It was very open. And I felt truly privileged to have been asked to take part, even though Caroline obviously just wanted to get as many books as she could. It was quite liberating creatively to do something for sake of it. We ended up binding the finished book together with old socks.

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Tony Oursler at the Lisson Gallery

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Andy asked us all to go to see the Tony Oursler exhbition at the Lisson Gallery. I wasn’t that impressed by the show, but it did deal with a crucial thing regarding digital art, namely taking something that exists as digital bits on a disc and turning that into a real, viewable artwork in real space. Oursler does this by projecting looped film on to sculpted objects, like ears, or patchwork dolls.

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Reconstruction

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I’m still interested by this reconstruction thing. I’m interested by the idea of there having been an event, a moment, something, and someone taking whatever traces of that which there may be and assembling them in a manner offering us a fresh (also dead?) angle on it. I’m reminded, funnily enough, of Damien Hirst saying we have to kill something and put it in a tank in order to look at it. By that point, of course, it’s long since ceased to be the thing that really interested us.

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Things of old and also of yore

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I went to the British Museum a while back and took some pictures. I was looking for Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse artifacts to give me a feel for the way people were living

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Void #13 by Anish Kapoor

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

I was going to put this picture in the big bang post I wrote earlier but it looked weird and out of place so I’m giving it its own post. The picture below is of Void #13 by Anish Kapoor. Here’s a link explaining a thing or two about it: Queensland Art Gallery

I’m very fond of Anish Kapoor. I love the way he uses materials to create a sense of either weight or lightness. He also manages to make things look like light is being sucked in to them. That’s a bit of an achievement in my book. His work makes me look again, and inexplicably. It’s very meditative. This is a good way of representing that void I’ve been on about. As good as any other I’ve seen anyway.

Hmm, I Wonder if there are any zen koans or poems about the void.
A quick web search throws up the old tradition of death poems, when a zen master would express his insights into the process of dying to his disciple. I just remembered this one, which I’ve loved for years:

Magnificent! Magnificent!
The Ocean bed’s aflame,
Out of the void leap wooden lambs

I may well end up buying this very interesting looking book about zen poetry: Triumph of the Sparrow.