03.10.10

I have the immediate need to put more complete contents of the concepts of migration into words. When I think about or talk about migration, I am not just relating to species migration, or human migration due to social, political, or environmental conditions, or the general migration of sentient beings, I'm thinking about the migration of languages as diversity diminishes and we are left with polyglot mergers and Esperanto-like leftovers into a superfluid global tongue, I'm also thinking about geological migration: the time it takes for a forest to migrate across a mountainside, or the land extension that is the result of a volcanic eruption, or man-made addition of Manhattan Island. The nomad is a subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity.

Curiositite:
-zip lines
- mobile buildings
- is geological migration considered Land Art?

A few days ago I was in Denton Texas for the Fluid Frontier symposium on art and the natural world ,the philosopher Emily Brady discussed the sublime in nature and the translation to art. Those moments of sublimation described perhaps best as a "delightful horror" of the subject, I equated to most every moment in life. At my laptop right now = delightful horror. The fried chicken joint outside and sidewalks littered with chicken bones = delightful horror. Times Square = horror and delight. The desert. The same. The suburbs. The same.The future. Delight and horror. Technology = at times, delight and horror. Can we be struck by the sublime in every waking moment? Maybe it is too much for us to bear so we dull our nerves.

03.09.10

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=620 - on writing and cell phones. On technology and human conditioning. I think that this writing is pretty interesting and I'm a big fan of C-Theory "So do we serve technology, or vice-versa?"

03.08.10

The only way to escape New York is to fake your own death.

03.07.10

I just returned from Denton Texas, from the Fluid Frontier symposium.

03.02.10

02.21.10

http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/exhibitions/mary-mattingly-nomadographies

02.19.10

A NEW BREED

EXIT ART 475 Tenth Avenue NYC 212-966-7745 www.exitart.ort
When: 8:00pm Fri 2.26.10

Music performances by:

Lemonade : This popular brooklyn trio are reinventing electro-dance-rock through their big beats and entrancing shows. Lemonade replicate "that first sensation of losing yourself in a peak-hour, strobe-lit reverie where the communal act of dancing teeters between liberation and disorientation," says Pitchfork.com, "imagineMetal Box-era John Lydon bellowing out Sigur Rós' Hopelandic lyric sheet-- but layers it with Arabic-accented melodies, machine-gunned synths and a pounding 4/4 beat." http://www.myspace.com/bananasandecstasy

Class Actress : Elizabeth Harper, deemed "Brooklyn's very own Madonna" by NY Press, with her new electro-pop trio Class Actress, is using older 80's syth influences to break new ground in music and peformance. Pitchfork.com describes them as "freely appropriating the sullen synthetics of New Order, the Human League, and Depeche Mode [while offering] a playful, breathy coo that hearkens back to hipster queens like Blondie's Debbie Harry and Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell." http://www.myspace.com/elizabethharper

Brahms: Newly formed in Brooklyn, Brahms is already making big waves with their electro-pop beats and creative performance style. They are quickly taking over the local music scene, as Deli Magazine notes, with a line-up of great shows with well known bands including Telepathe, Boy Crisis, Body Language, Javelin and Lemonade. http://www.myspace.com/brahmsisaband

Performances by:

Shana Moulton will perform her piece "Nature Mediation." Moulton is a video artist listed by Paddy Johnson in Art Fag City and L Magazine's "Art: Best of 2009," who uses video and performance to "create oblique narratives combining unsettling humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility. Moulton's work frequently involves a character that navigates the enigmatic and magical properties of her home decor while interacting with consumer products toying with an issues about commercialization, subcultures of self-help and low-brow spiritualism." Moulton has performed pieces at Performa '09, the Bellwether Gallery, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, Smack Mellon, and has an upcoming performance at the Kitchen.

Brina Thurston is a multimedia artist who works with video, sculpture and photography and social practice. "Seeking out the humor, sexuality and absurdity in the everyday while maintaining a critical view of our contemporary social systems, many of these pieces are steeped in institutional critique and become reactions/interventions to the artists immediate surroundings." Thurston has exhibited at Rivington Arms, Dean Projects, Gavin Brown @ Passerby, Location One, and was part of the 2009 Frieze Fair Projects.

Video by:

Aleksandra Mir's art focuses on "faith in possibility, and those coincidences that make an expanding world a little smaller. Her work is about social systems,demography,ephemera,distribution, and tourist economies. Mir advocates new ideas of community by forming strong collaborative relationships and encouraging public interaction with her art." She has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. This will be the first public screening in New York of her video "Gravity."

Simone Leigh will present her video, “Uhura (Back and Forth), 2008. Leigh’s work has been exhibited nationally, including solo shows at Rush Arts Gallery Project Space and Momenta Art gallery and in group exhibitions at Exit Art, The Kitchen, The Fine Art Work Center, Rotunda Gallery and more. Leigh uses the "anthropological term skeuomorph as a reoccurring concept in her work, describing a derivative object that retains some sort of physical or metaphorical elements of the original, a substitute used to ease a sense of loss."

Charles Stankievech,an artist, writer, educator and curator was an "artist in residence" on the Waterpod. He will screen his film "Ghost Rockets" from his series of rocket launch spectacles occurring at sites around the world tracing the history of ballistics. Adapting the form of a rock’n roll world tour, each site is paired with a pop song, which often becomes the performance’s title and inspires a choreographed spectacle involving amplified sound on location, smoke grenades, lighting effects, and the rocket launch. "Ghost Rocks" will be exhibited at an upcoming exhibit at Palais de Tokyo in Paris

02.18.10

http://roughcopymag.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/artist-interview-mary-mattingly/

02.17.10

From Hannah Whitaker's text about her exhibition opening tomorrow at Kumukumu Gallery:

Rules for Invention:

7. You should make pictures about nothing. You should learn to look at an empty sky and feed its total dark sublime. You should make the last word the first. You should tear the energy of the old world down from the heavens and embrace a different virtue. You should recognize that we inhabit a finite world of limited possibilities, which are still largely unexplored.

02.17.10

MoMA's RISING CURRENTS EXHIBITION: The Rising Currents exhibition and studio work at P.S.1 demonstrated the challenges that New York City faces from climate change, as well as the opportunities we have to rethink how we interact with the built and natural environment.
New York City already faces real and significant climate risks. We currently experience hot, humid summers and severe weather events, including heat waves, torrential downpours, snow and ice storms, and nor’easters. These weather events affect every New Yorker. As our climate changes, increasing our resilience to these events will become even more necessary. Read more

01.14.10

11.30.09

11.18.09

Waterpod, the sixth of the SEA (Social Envrionmental Aesthetics) program, is a survey of the Waterpod's five-month voyage around the boroughs of New York. It includes videos, photographs, relics, art works, journal entries, and ephemera that tell the story of this unusual public art project.

Waterpod was a floating, sculptural structure designed as a futuristic habitat and an experimental platform for assessing the design and efficacy of living systems fashioned to create an autonomous, fully functional marine shelter.

A New York-based multinational team, led by founder and artistic director Mary Mattingly, drew upon the talents of artists, designers, builders, civic activists, scientists, environmentalists, and marine engineers to launch the Waterpod, a free, participatory project and event space that visited the five boroughs and Governors Island, for a voyage between June and October 2009.

In the event of global climate change, desertification, overpopulation, and rising sea levels, the Waterpod offered a pathway to sustainable survival, mobility, and community building. It intended to prepare, inform, and offer alternatives to current and future living spaces.As a self-sufficient, navigable living space, the Waterpod showcased the critical importance of water within the natural world. Collectively embracing the richly-patterned folkways of the five boroughs of metropolitan New York, the Waterpod reified positive interactions between communities: private and public; artistic and societal; scientific and agricultural; aquatic and terrestrial.

11.02.09

Foam Farm

10.24.09
The Waterpod is in Bayonne, NJ right now in storage for a couple of weeks until we begin the take-down. I got back to land about a week ago and since then, have been tending to a slew of the last-minute details. The Waterpod was a wild journey! I’m currently working on so many things including typing up 5 months of journal, and redoing my website, and a new public project. Last night I showed a video in a show about performance from one of the journal entries. It’s strange to be back in the city. I have been house sitting for Cory and Leslie, and looking for an apartment. This time feels slightly relaxing and vacation-like. Unlike getting up with chickens on the Waterpod, I’ve been sleeping in until 9. It’s raining today. If I was on the Waterpod I would be really happy about it, but being back on the grid I’ve contemplated staying inside all day because it is just so nice not to get wet. I found all of this writing from a couple of years ago and put it in the blog where I thought it belonged - [here]

10.22.09

The Red Coats Are Coming MP3 for Lifeboat, a project I did with Paul Middendorf

10.15.09

The Singularity of Humans

Marshall McLuhan said, “When an environment is new, we perceive the old one for the first time.” McLuhan also wrote at great length about Continuity in Discontinuity, or chiasmus: the reversal-of-process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. Kurzweil states that, with the exponential acceleration of development in technology and so-called progress, the human condition will reach a point when we can no longer process our environment from our present perspective as the accelerating speed of growth outpaces our faculties. However, Bertrand Russell made an excellent point, saying that if the bath water got only half a degree warmer every hour, we would never know when to scream. Perhaps it is only with the acceleration of change that we can notice and react to it. Finally, Vernor Vinge defines the Singularity as the postulated point or short period in our future when our self-guided evolutionary development accelerates enormously.
The Singularity, though, has been a condition felt by humans that perhaps began before Gutenberg, with alphabets, cave paintings, with artistic expressions that removed us from ourselves, and with the Greeks who abstracted and objectified nature by creating their own cosmos. With these advances, humans need and accept history as myth and an “electric merger of past present and future become today”. In 1962, the philosopher William Barrett used an image of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture to illustrate his book, Irrational Man. Irrational Man is a story told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead. When the condition of existentialism was defined (maybe with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first half of the 19th century, described by philosopher Edmund Husserl and his student Heidegger, but perhaps we finally had a poster-boy with Jean-Paul Sartre), we understood Ivan Turgenev’s nihilism, which Heidegger defines well as "there is nothing left of Being as such," and we understood existentialism as the consciousness of death, the purposlessness of life, the individual construction of identity to fill the void of meaninglessness. Giacometti was friends with existential and surrealist writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and André Breton.
The discussion of human civilization evolved from a human-death dilemma to human-machine civilization. Kurzweil is predicting singularity as a future happening, but as far as I can tell, it is already here and will continue to grow. It has been depicted by artists from Giacometti to Bellmer, to Friedrich, Goya, Godard, to some interpretations of Reinhard’s black paintings, to name just a few. Technology aids in abstracting us from our face-to-face community, and can be a surrogate for real people. When people are imbedded with different forms of technology, from the wireless to the plastic to the drug, and when we procreate solely outside of the body, we just continue the abstraction from nature and person that began before the Greeks invented the cosmos.

singular:
c.1340, "alone, apart," from O.Fr. singuler "single, separate" (Fr. singulier), from L. singularis "single, solitary," from singulus (see single (adj.)). Meaning "remarkably good, unusual, rare" is from c.1400, though this was a common meaning of L. singularis. (www.eytmonline.com)

Other Definitions of Singularity

Mathematical Singularity - a point where a mathematical function goes to infinity or is in certain other ways ill-behaved.

Technological Singularity - a theoretical point in the development of a scientific civilization at which technological progress accelerates into infinity or beyond prediction. This is believed to occur when artificial intelligence or intelligence amplification reaches a certain level.

Singularity - (operating system) - an operating system research project by Microsoft.

Gravitational Singularity (physics) - an infinity occurring in an astrophysical model, involving infinite curvature (a mathematical singularity) in the space/time continuum, namely black holes, white holes and worm holes.

According to the standard big-bang theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. Singularities are thought to be zonesof in finate density that exist at the core of "black holes." The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density. Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense.

The Prandtl-Glauert singularity (sometimes referred to as a "vapor cone"), is the point at which a sudden drop in air pressure occurs, and is generally accepted as the cause of the visible condensation cloud that often surrounds an aircraft travelling at transonic speeds, though there remains some debate. It is an example of a mathematical singularity in aerodynamics.

(http://www.big-bang-theory.com/ and www.wikipedia.org)

09.09.09

09.05.09
Queens Citifield Willets Point

Waterkitty. Pictures by: http://www.dripbook.com/Nico/book/the-waterpod-project/

08.31.09

Speech prepared for Bloomberg’s arrival to the Waterpod and Atlantic Salt Company:

The Atlantic Salt Company has been a wonderful, inviting harbor for us, and we know it will remain so for decades to come. It has been a magical and wondrous privilege during our short sojourn here to witness the ongoing evolution, reconstruction, and beautification of this landing place.

The Waterpod could not have happened without the generous and energetic help of cores of supporters, including the Mayor’s Office, the City of New York, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, the NYC Dockmaster Unit, our legal counsel Blank Rome, GMD Shipyard in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, and dozens of foundations, corporations, and individuals, not the least which have been artists, scientists, engineers, and volunteers.

They say that the first recorded European contact with Staten Island was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano, and all of us have been truly blessed by its Dutch and British successors, as well as the rich fabric of recent arrivals on these shores.

Our main purpose and objective in this venture has been collaboration, innovation, recycling, transformation, self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, learning, curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. I am not exaggerating when I say that we are deeply grateful to the citizens and government of Richmond County for augmenting, catalyzing, and affirming our mission and our voyage. - Mattingly

07.05.09

Daily life on the Waterpod.
6:30 am. Feed the four chickens, clean the coop
7:00 am. Water the gardens, prune gardens, make coffee
7:30 am. Have breakfast
8:00 am. Clean the deck, put things away, prepare for the day
9:00 am to 11am. Personal work (one person giving tours on Thursday and Friday)
11:00 am. Meeting: Work for the day and for the future
1:00 pm. Work on Waterpod and give tours
3:00 pm. Feed chickens
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Waterpod personal work
7:00 pm. Prepare dinner, evening tasks
8:00 pm. Eat dinner, clean up, water gardens
9:00 pm. Free time: Read, Email, do artwork

Working on a sustainable cycle:
Capture rainwater with a first flush system that collects from the different structures and drains into a potable tank. Water is pumped via bicycle and solar to a purification system and a 55 gallon potable drum at mid-level on a crows nest. When we need to use it, it is gravity fed to a sink and shower at 4.5’ high. After use, that water enters a greywater purification system: a series of seven 4’ bins with different irrigation materials including gravel, sand, and freshwater plants. At the end of the seven-bin cycle, the water can be reused to water the gardens. The gardens grow a variety of different vegetables and fruits, and four chickens have been producing roughly 3-4 eggs a day. We have begun to fish.
Since this project takes place inside and off of the grid, we have been surprised with the number of gifts given to us at both the South Street Seaport and Sheepshead Bay (since we began living on board). Captain Jack Schachner of White Cap Marine Rescue Services Inc. came to the Waterpod on Friday morning with a 4x 4’ fish cage. When fish are put inside the cage, the cage is kept under water until we are ready to take them up to eat them. Later that evening, Captain Jack returned with his red tug and put seven fish, caught that day, into the cage. The next day an interested couple came by and taught us how to kill, skin, and prepare the fish to be eaten. Not two hours ago, a woman asked us what we needed if she came to visit us again. She returned a few minutes later with a bag of ground coffee. These moments of physical gifts or emotional gifts (whatever the reaction of a person who comes on board), given to us, in exchange for gifts that we attempt to give back with this project, and after, I hope will help start many chain reactions. The gift elements have all been a surprise but have all increased the wellbeing of our spirits and systems on board (a woman in Tribeca brought us a homemade worm box that we have been using to create compost).
Compost is a big part of the system. The chicken and scrap food compost is extremely useful to replenish soil nutrients after a harvest.
Since we are starting with seeds grown this year, we would ideally give ourselves another year to can some of the first harvest to use in times when the next cycle is growing. We would also need to make the gardens into a greenhouse.

05.04.09

Waterpod is simultaneously an intervention and a gift, brought to life by a collaborative group of forward-thinking artists, designers, and activists working with numerous companies, groups, and communities on a pro bono publico or “for the public good” basis to create a space that is both an inclusive public resource and an experimental private dwelling, an interior and exterior malleable space, an aquatic and terrestrial mobile hybrid.

This project is a work in progress that demands simultaneous creative engagement of producers, designers, builders, visitors, residents, and guests.  The design of Waterpod is made up of a mode of social, political, and ecological actions and engagements that describe mobility, autonomy, and relational freedom while respecting water, nature and natural systems.  Waterpod is an expression of collective decisions and intent, based on available resources, trial and error, as well as an object and a space that continues to be negotiated through democratic participation and implementation. We are aiming to launch June 1 from South Street Seaport.

04.27.09

04.02.09

Everything You Own, Including the Shirt Off My Back, 2009

04.01.09

NOMADOGRAPHIES OPENING AT ROBERT MANN GALLERY

03.15.09

Everything you own, including the shirt off my back. The installation I am working on is full of the boxes that I have been traveling with for years, indistinguishable from the boxes I found on the streets around the studio in the Lower East Side, or traveling in Mexico and brought back, or picked up and saved during other trips, some are heiroglyphic relics from the future, and others mysteries from the past. Some of these boxes caused me such agony carting them around, treasures of other people that i became responsible for, struggles to remember things

Collage is the way we now interface with the world, our broken up communications frayed by urban striations, collage mentality is realer than you and I. What is our functional space now? Advertising, Internet...

After being in Mexico, in the hospital, and back to work on the Waterpod, Two weeks before Nomadographies opens at Robert Mann.

02.22.09

Appropedia and Waterpod - Lonny Grafman's Engineering 215 Class notes, mind-mapping, plans, and teams.

Waterpod Living Systems Blog

Veronica Flores just arrived in NYC!

02.18.09

Artlog
UPCOMING ROBERT MANN GALLERY SHOW

02.13.09

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/2/11/133437/617

01.29.09

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/01/29/waterpod-floating-eco-home/

01.20.09

January 15th, 2009, Space and Culture Blog
Oil and rising waters don’t mix
My advice to every architect and civil engineer: dikes and levees are going to be hot.
In its 11th hour, the Bush Administration has authorized a new US Arctic Policy (National Security Presidential Directive 66), which will serve as a continuing, broad policy guideline to government agencies until replaced. That is, it has effect until the next Arctic policy (which can take years to produce). It governs seven broad areas of the American approach to the Arctic: national security and homeland security, international governance, extended continental shelf and boundary issues, promotion of international scientific cooperation, maritime transportation, economic issues, including energy resources, and environmental protection and conservation of natural resources.
Although there is sceptical acceptance of ‘the effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region’ the main focus is access to oil and gas reserves on the extended continental shelf, beyond current territorial waters north of Alaska. These reserves are technically recoverable and would be easier to control.
One intended audience is the US Senate, where as the Guardian summarizes: ‘One of the main obstacles to staking a [American] claim on the Arctic seafloor [ie. the extended continental shelf] has been opposition in the Senate to ratification of the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea Convention’
In concert with this policy, US News and World Report mentions that in one ‘midnight regulation‘ by which the outgoing President is attempting to tie the hands of incoming US President Barack Obama,, the Administration recently eliminated an important provision in the US Endangered Species Act requiring “independent scientific reviews” before construction or drilling can occur in an endangered species’ habitat - such as polar bears.
Another major focus is on the right to over-fly and also to freely navigate the Arctic - which will be contested by Canada should the Northwest Passage routes across its Arctic Archipelago become ice-free enough to transit. China’s Xinghua News Agency quotes Bush saying:
Preserving the rights and duties relating to navigation and over flight in the Arctic region supports our ability to exercise these rights throughout the world, including through strategic straits.
The document ignores the signing of the Ilulisat Declaration by all Arctic coastal states, claiming ‘aggressive moves by other countries’. This raises fear without providing facts, as Gunnar Sander notes in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article. Although commentators do not appreciate it, one key audience of this policy is likely to be China, which plans its own voyage to the pole in 2010 and anticipates that a shortcut route over the pole to Europe will become its main shipping route for goods if the polar cap melts.
Ironically, anticipating that melting ice will make access to hydrocarbon and other resources easier is rather ghoulish: give the extra absorption of solar energy by dark-coloured ocean compared to the white ice (the albedo effect) this implies that the planet will have been heating up at a faster than anticipated rate with sea-level rise affecting major capitals: New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mumbai, all of Bangladesh, the Yucatan, the San Francisco Bay Area and so on. Perhaps the extra fuel will be needed for the lifeboats or for constructing dikes.
(Followup: Google this)
-Rob

01.16.09

Cities In Process: Waterpods . Ten Steps To Create Waterpods
1. Research and investigate available vessel/floating platform sources within a 50 km radius
2. Describe the project to local nautical professionals and generate interest, enthusiasm, and willingness to give guidance.
3. Link in and get the support of municipal officials, both at a high level and at an operational level.
4. Secure a sufficiently large vessel/floating platform and negotiate insurance, environmental permits, and the ultimate disposition of the vessel/floating platform.
5. Assemble a design, engineer, and building team, and link in local educational, artistic, and scientific resources and programs.
6. Secure a team to help raise funds via grants, donations, and internet-driven support from foundations, government bodies, corporations, and individuals.
7. Plot out a reasonable voyage with appropriate docking locations that celebrate the historical, social, commercial, cultural, civic, architectural, geologic, and maritime development within local waterways.
8. Secure towing resources and/or mobile power for the vessel/floating platform.
9. Via the internet, engage and organize volunteers to operate the programs, live on the vessel/floating platform, and help build the structures.
10. Encourage others to create similar programs in coastal, littoral, riparian, riverine, limnological, or harbor-based aquatic environments.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.” - Margaret Mead

01.14.09

01.10.09

'Climate fix' ship sets sail with plan to dump iron - New Scientist
Sea Level Rise: We Decide How Much - Worldchanging.org

" I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything "financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people. Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent living-it-up.
These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still* getting it in the neck. The injustice of that upsets me. The bourgeoisie who kept their noses clean and obeyed the rules, I never had anything against them. I mean, of course I made big artsy fun of them, one has to do that, but I never meant them any active harm. I didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they were consumers." -Quote by Bruce Sterling: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009

01.08.09

On some form of apocalypse: The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html

12.26.08

Opening Reception: February 18, 5 - 7p.m. Anxious Ground: Contemporary Landscape Photography Curated by Anita Allyn and Sarah Cunningham
February 18 - March 25, 2009
NOTE: Closed 3/9-15

Anxious Ground will explore the distinctive currents in contemporary photographic practice and examine the condition & perception of landscape at the beginning of the 21st century: the future utopia, the invisible, the dismantled, the post-apocalyptic, the over-romanticized and the constructed. The landscape itself and idea of the landscape will be interrogated by artists working in diverse photographic media including: film and digital; print, video and installation; object-based and conceptual. Artists include Edward Burtynsky, Stephen Chalmers, Danny Goodwin, Sze Tsung Leong, David Maisel, Mary Mattingly, Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint, and Holli Schorno.

The College Art Gallery, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ 08628. Gallery Location: 111 Holman Hall, Regular Gallery Hours: Tu, We, Th 12p.m.-7p.m.; Su 1p.m.-3p.m.; and by appointment www.tcnj.edu/~tcag 609-771-2198

12.22.08

http://www.celestemattinglylcsw.com/aboutcm.html my Aunt Celeste

12.21.08

WHAT's going to happen to the climate over the next 10 years or so? Is it time to buy that air conditioner you considered during the last heatwave? Should you rip up your garden and replant it with drought-resistant plants, or can you expect more rain - perhaps even floods - in your part of world? The other possibility, of course, is that your local climate will change little in the near future.
On the one hand we have weather predictions for the next few days. On the other we have climate forecasts for the very distant future. But what happens in the middle? Why don't we have forecasts for, say, 2010 or 2018? Knowing how temperature and rainfall will change over the next few years would be invaluable to many people, from farmers to the tourism industry to those in charge of our water supplies. Yet while you might think predicting how the climate will change over the next few years would be a lot easier than saying what it will be like in 2030 or 2050, it's actually harder.
Nevertheless, some meteorologists and climate scientists are now trying to make just these kinds of forecasts. It is a new and controversial field, but over the past year some groups have published the first short-term forecasts. So what are they predicting - and can we trust their conclusions?
Underlying trends:For long-term forecasting, what matters is underlying trends, and at the moment the key trend is warming due to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Predictions made two decades ago are pretty close to the mark. In the short term, though, natural variability matters more than the underlying trend - global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the preceding one.
The problem is a bit like trying to predict how the weather in New York will change over January compared with how the weather will change from January to July. It's hard to say whether the last week of January will be colder than the first, but you can confidently predict that it will be colder during January than in July.
So making forecasts is all about figuring what dominates the state of the atmosphere on various timescales. Some things, like accumulating greenhouse gases, matter over many decades while other things, like warm and cold fronts, dominate over days and months. Over periods of a few years, there's growing evidence that the oceans are the key - and this is encouraging researchers to attempt short-term forecasts.
Ocean oscillations: "It takes the oceans a long time to heat up and cool down," says Doug Smith, who runs 10-year forecasting trials at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, Devon, the UK's official centre for climate change research. "That makes it a lot easier to predict than the atmosphere. We now think we can predict the key ocean fluctuations 10 to 20 years ahead."
The oceans are crucial because they store so much heat. It takes more than 1000 times as much energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1 °C as it does the same volume of air. Globally, this means that if the oceans transfer just a tiny fraction of their heat energy to the lower atmosphere, there can be a big rise in surface air temperatures. Conversely, if the oceans soak up more heat from the atmosphere, there can be surface cooling. (read entire article)

12.18.08

Thanks to: J. Halverson. LUX VFX these renderings have been created

12.18.08

Laying out the Waterpod: structural design, architecture, plan. This one after Duchamp's Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even). Also, my mission is to try to mimic the surrounding land. The Waterpod layout is actually a map of Manhattan and the five boroughs, turned counterclockwise.

12.17.08

Today, Cory Mervis, John McGarvey and I met with John Daskalakis from the National Parks Services at a diner on Rector Street, before attending a council meeting hearing on the abandoned vessels in the New York Waterways. It was pretty disturbing to find out how little some of the NYPD officials actually know about what is going on out there, and how many derelict and abandoned vessels that there are in these waterways. We took a trip with Ralph Mannetta of the NPS last week and saw at least 30 abandoned boats in Mill Basin alone, and this was just what we could see. Many more were submerged, and we had to get quite close to them to view the massive gravesites of trash left behind.
Later, Cory, Leslie, and I met with Richard Singleton and Glen Oxton of Blank Rome, the law firm that is doing pro bono work for the Waterpod. They are outstanding to work with and we are very excited about joining forces with them.
Later in the evening, we met up with Dan Glass and Derek Hunter, and we plotted peak oil, theories about what people will do when they really begin to get scared: the hoarding, the greed that we already see in the latest being Maddoff, multiplied exponentially. Here is a relevant link on a quiet situation going on with water in the United States (coming soon to a city near you): http://www.propublica.org/feature/buried-secrets-is-natural-gas-drilling-endangering-us-water-supplies-1113

12.12.08

An important article on water privatization from the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122610638674310287.html

Sunken vessels around the rockaways, left by their owners and retrieved by the Parks Department

11.18.08

When I was 19, I remember I was about to move from the shed in Somers, Connecticut (I lived in the shed in my parent’s backyard) to Boston, MA with an old classmate from high school. Finally, my move date was two weeks away - I would move there in mid January, 1998. I had spent a year and a half attending Manchester Community Technical College to get some credits behind me before applying as a transfer student to Massachusetts College of Art. As a resident of Massachusetts, that college is relatively inexpensive.

I didn’t get into Mass Art the first or second time I applied, but I was working three jobs that I liked and they supplied everything I could need. I worked on films. It wasn’t until after I decided that I was moving to Oregon that I was finally accepted as a film major. Unfortunately, by that time my mind was set on Oregon, and I convinced a friend from the bookstore I worked at to accompany me. We found an apartment in the newspaper, and applied for it over the phone. 3 bedroom for $725 on SE 92nd Street. We would get another roommate. We drove to Oregon a few weeks later. I went to school and worked a number of odd jobs out there, literally from the sacred to the profane, before events sent me back to Connecticut. After studying at Yale for a summer fellowship I moved to New York, to study there and to finally be in the city that had first challenged my ideas, strength, peaked my interest, and impressed my eye. It was like that week all over again. The months ahead were economically frightening, I took whatever random job I could for skills I had halfway. I was a printer, a scanner, a designer, a wedding photographer, an assistant, a digital tech, an organizer, a babysitter, anything. Through those things and a community of good friends, I managed to feed myself most of the time. Now...however...apparently I need to eat better...
Over the last few days, friends, family, and I have been passing this link back and forth:
http://www.infowars.com/?p=5938
Here are some of the responses that the article has received (I think that Marguerite's response propelled me to write the above):
From: Fred Fleisher -18 Nov 2008 4:38 pm
Subject: Re: Fw: WILD Prediction!
huuuuhh, this sounds like the collapse of capitalism leading to Marxist change - kinda like what Marx said.
don't know. I don't eat much anyway . . . but it's good to be prepared with, I don't know . . . MOBILE PERSONAL SHELTERS like Mary's been saying?????
best,
F
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Jim Mattingly <mgraphix@aol.com> wrote:
lets hope he's wrong, or maybe not so right
--- On Wed, 11/19/08, Fred Fleisher <fredfleisher@gmail.com> wrote:
Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2008, 9:59 AM
I second that one for sure!
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Marguerite Day <margueriteday@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hi Fred and all,
Wait, what is negative about this? The man is just saying that instead of Christmas being all about $$$ and consuming more and more that people will now turn to making gifts for one-another. Isn't that much closer to the spirit of Christ? Of course no one wants to go hungry, but since people are starving to death in the US right now, maybe if the rest of us start to understand that kind of hunger then ultimately a solution will come out of this so NO one starves. I'd be willing to take a few years of pain, if ultimate we have a better world as a result.
-M.
Fred Fleisher responds: i also agree with these points. maybe pain isn't the word. Maybe everyone will live a bit more with a sane agenda and life. biofuel takes FOOD and makes it into environmental problems -- everyone needs more info so NO ONE will starve. Maybe this time (instead of the 70s) people will actively make things work for ALL. While still maintaining a free market system with social concerns. - F
From: M. Ajerman <m_ajerman@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, November 17, 2008, 7:58 PM
> as for infowars.com...not the kinda thing that i would wanna watch before bed - but the most important thing is people livign in their means -- i personally think there is going to be a great job growth in the renewable resources industry -- heck it's been one of the few growing industries over the past two years -- image what obama and co can do with the industry and investments...
From: Alison Ward <texandtrixie@hotmail.com>
Date: Monday, November 17, 2008, 11:32 PM
it was a fox news interview after all...

11.04.08

In 1934, Walter Benjamin asked "What is politically progressive culture?" In his essay "The Author as Producer" he answered, "It's not the progressive content of culture which makes it progressive. The bourgeoise apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed can propagate them withhout calling its own existence...seriously into question". That is, the most radical of political themes, expressed through standard cultural forms, seem to threat to the most conservative of pollitical systems.

11.01.08

Prix Pictet opening, Palais de Tokyo / Nane and Kofi Annan / Some of my photographs

The Prix Pictet event was held at the Palais de Tokyo on October 30, 2008. Benoit Aquin won the pictet prize for his work including a series that he did on China's Dust Bowl. He has done many other series of work on pertinent topics related to the environment, and is one of the nicest, humblest photographers I have had the pleasure of meeting. My personal highlights of the event were meeting Kofi Annan, the organizers of the Pictet, and especially the other photographers. I have wanted to meet Susan Derges for some time, and she is another person, like Benoit and others, who does incredible work and is yet extremely humble at the same time. The short time that I spent in Paris was very enjoyable, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't think about moving there for some time. It is very apparent that one could do nothing else but spend months on end in the Louvre, Pompidou, d'Orsay, and hundreds of other museums in Paris and be completely fulfilled. It was an extremely envigorating trip to say the least.

Detail shots of Paris / Musee D'Orsay

10.27.08

Entire interview: http://www.kopenhagen.dk/index.php?id=15560

Exerpts from an interview that Mie Olise Kjærgaard and I just completed after the show opened at Standpoint: The exhibition The Ruins of the Future at Standpoint Gallery in London is an intriguing collaboration between the two highly praised and young artists Mie Olise Kjærgaard and Mary Mattingly. The exhibition is a voyage of discovery into an abandoned land which shows our failed utopian ideas and possible future in which nature lies. Mie Olise Kjærgaards video work installed in an elevator shaft absorbing paintings and a site-specific architectural space is jointed with Mary Mattingly’s reflective and aesthetic photographs of her “wearable homes” and “Kart”.

Interview:
How do you know each other? And what fascinates you about each other’s work?
MOK: Fiona curated us, a year ago, so we met up in New York during the summer, and I really understood why Fiona had paired us. Our work discuss the same topics, yet it is has different angles and expression. I am extremely fascinated with Mary’s way of seeing the world, the ecotopics, and her new project Waterpod. I am going to New York this spring to participate, and Mary says that she will include an artist space for me at “the pod”, yeah!
MM: I met Mie through Fiona and became awestruck by her paintings, a distortion of her architectural background, but much more than that. Like me, she is fascinated by remnants of cultures and abodes, combining these symbolic objects with her architectural manipulations to create post-world environs. I have never met anyone who was as thrilled by refuse as I, and for this reason and many others, I am very excited to collaborate with Mie. Also, as we worked together, we both accepted each other’s ideas, and were at once pragmatic. This is very important when collaborating.
How did the exhibition at Standpoint gallery become a reality and how have your collaboration with the curator Fiona MacDonald been?
MOK: Standpoint is a non-profit organization. So it is something you do because you really believe in the project. I liked Fiona’s idea, and love Mary’s work. Mary and me e-mailed a lot before the show, because we wanted to do collaboration with our sculpture work.
MM: Yes, we emailed a lot prior to the show, to decide on the best ways that our works would compliment, merge, and play off of each other’s work. It was a necessary exploration but really came to life when we were face-to-face in the space. I think that Fiona was very curious to see how our collaboration would turn out, especially since she paired us initially. Fiona and I had collaborated the year before on a performance at Braziers, and through that I knew that she was a Powerhouse!
Can you point out 3 of the most important aspects in the exhibition?
MOK: The collaboration, that is a merging of Kart, a bike construction, with boxes, a structure that Mary made and photographed earlier this year in Mexico – and the structure I made cutting through the elevator. We wanted the boxes to meet and merge with the larger and heavier structure, and up in the air, near the ceiling. My structure cuts through the space from the entrance, through the elevator shaft, and out again to meet Mary’s.
And another thing for me is the fact that so many disciplines, video (sound), sculpture, photography and painting are put together in a smaller space, yet still connects very well. Constantly you see things of resemblage, through the medias, even through the artists. I think that is exciting. Because discovering the exhibition itself, is like you would if you came to one of the specific places we are describing.
MM: I agree, the collaboration is one of the most important aspects. I like how it evolved, and how the elevator successfully suggests a mineshaft, and the struggle between an immobile, old structure with a mobile, kind of fantastical one. It was interesting to find close links within the show, like some of my “Anatomy of Melancholy” photographs evoking the same mood of despair as some of Mie’s video stills of Pyramid City. Lastly, the beginnings of new works that will evolve from this point in time, forward. For instance, Mie’s paintings and objects as new instruments, or perhaps my mobile sculptures merging with the immobile. Also, the beginning of further collaborations with Mie Olise Kjærgaard.
One of the main themes of the exhibition is dealing with remote places and disintegration of utopian ideas. Why are you interested in these themes?
MOK: For my part it is a fascination with the Uncanny idea of approaching something abandoned. Curiosity paired with alertness and fright, and the questions it raises. I see these structures as empty pores of a bigger society. That are open for mutation or inhabitation, A utopian idea that fell to the ground and can become the base of a new idea. It is a fractal structure that I see in all scales of the world, man-made and in nature. In the end I have to admit to a very romantic and melancholic interest in the failed ideas and dreams - the dead! The mourning of the lost. If you think about conceptual ironic, sarcastic and humoristic art, this is the opposite; the pathetic well-meant mourning. Fx the sound of the video really is almost too much, so it starts to become a little like you don’t know what if you should laugh or cry – I like that feeling. Last year in Istanbul I showed a video with a Swedish distorted folk tune that Goodiepal made, this had the same effect.
MM: For me, perhaps a little bit disillusionment. From reading futurist novels as a child to growing up in an idyllic countryside where only imagination keeps you from absolute boredom, I have always desired a better place. As a child, I would organize events in the town like a circus, or dig underground forts. As a teenager, I became fascinated with underground dance scenes and would create and hold rave parties in abandoned warehouses. It occurred to me at some point in time that it is necessary for me to create and to live in an environment and reality that I create, and maybe I am trying to create a space like this with the Waterpod, but with decades and centuries of historic failures to observe, learn from, and be aware of.
The exhibition is also a reflection on failed human stories and the discovery of possible futures. Why are you both engaged in this matter and which message is the most important for you to bring forward to the viewer?
MOK: I think I just try to communicate something that I find extremely fascinating myself, something that goes to my stomach and moves me. I would like to evoke these feelings in others. I also think it has a lot to say about the world and society – and that is for people to go and experience. It is not to be explained, that is why we have to build, paint, photograph and film…..
MM: I am very apprehensive about the future of human life on our earth if we keep traveling the same destructive pathways. We see misuse of water creating mass desertification, consumer waste at it’s historic height, and it is very sad to see the current situation in the United States that consists of towns full of houses that were almost never lived in, built during a boom that has come to an end. I think that this is very sad, but somewhere there is a twist in my thinking and I imagine that these towns could be our future playgrounds, and that excites me. I believe that unless we are aware and decide to make changes, perhaps personal or revolutionary changes, we will be forced into a world that we did not take care of and have no choice but to live in and with our refuse.
The exhibition is structured around the elevator of the gallery’s, where Mie Olise Kjærgaard have created a architectural space functioning as a room divider and as a movie room. It seems that the space has grown out of the gallery’s construction, Mary Mattingly’s “Kart” and Mie Olise Kjærgaards experience from the North Pole. It must have been a challenge to unfold and develop such a site-specific space. What is the most important meaning behind the creation, and why did you choose this construction?
MOK: we discussed different ideas. When you approach a new space it always has it specific problems and features. The elevator in the middle of the room, makes the room impossible as a white cube gallery room, but it immediately became something for us to want to work with. The problem becoming the challenge. Both Mary and me had different ideas about structures to work into each other, and we kept it open until we stood next to each other in the Gallery Space. And then it came naturally. Transformation through space; entering, breaking, heaviness, lightness, the static and dynamic all coming together as a journey through the space.
MM: Mie and I both like challenges, and the shape of Standpoint felt more like our work, so it was quite exciting to have the ability to inhabit and alter it.
Mary Mattingly, what has inspired you to make art narrating the beauty of nature and humans in a hostile climate?
I do like the dichotomy between something that is equally beautiful and hostile. Nature has more vastness and power than people ever can, and we try to change it, but it just destroys us as we change it. I like to surround myself with things that I am in awe of. I like to see how I can deal with challenges I put in front of myself, and create a blueprint for hostile conditions, and I hope that other people can learn from my research, experiences, and creations, as these conditions become more and more omnipresent.

Mary, your intriguing photographs for this exhibition visualize failed utopian structures and visions of the future, but what reality do they address in 2008?
Well, besides the current “failures” that we see all around us, I suppose right now it is directly relational to our political and environmental struggles, not to mention the current economic crisis, as it is being termed in the US. It implies that the chaos of over-inflated economies (like the US) are now forced to deal with the outcome of excessive leveraging, improper use of derivatives, poor structuring of mortgage-backed securities, over-speculation and non-transparent, misguided regulation in forms of trade including credit default swaps that have gotten many economies into their current states of chaos, and that are basically now being realized as fictional, unreliable systems the more segmented that they get. This is a very interesting failed utopic system that we will constantly try to revive and sustain, because it is in balance with many systems of control, that at times do and will continue to fail (think of prison revolts and health care in the US, or Bechtel in Bolivia in 2000). Honestly, I hope that they remind people to learn from history.
Have your “wearable homes” and “Kart” been applied by others than you?
In a way they are both replicating and extruding what is around all of us. The mobile sculpture “Kart” is inspired by the somewhat regular action on a street in Brooklyn that I lived for many years, where these wild, accumulative, prophetic, and tragic structures are created. To me, they describe the food chain, the cycles of capitalism and waste, our need for sustenance, and the value of the forgotten things that our societies produce: some peoples’ refuse heaped into carts inside of bags, tied with bungee cords, stacked with furniture, locked with bike locks. The Kart sculptures that I have been creating are made of items found in the streets, and the structures that I am using to travel with have items that are very important to my survival, so they are more exact and less, you could say, whimsical.
I began working on wearable homes largely as a result of the year 2000, during which I moved five times. I imagined that I was acting as a model for future nomads, as now we are beginning the culmination; to a point where everything is flexible, because it needs to be, because living is about survival, functional space is a luxury, products all want to be smaller, houses all want to be prefab, and waterfront property is on a market downturn. A wearable home should not only be equipped for the city nomad but for the future nomad who will need to travel through each of the prevailing climates of the near future: arctic, desert, and waterlogged tundra, illustrating different modes of survival. Prescriptions like this are a reality that more and more people may take part in. It is predicted by the United Nations University scholars that about 50 million people worldwide will be displaced by 2010 due to rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding and other serious environmental changes. Others may have their own sort of wearable homes as they begin to travel more for positions at jobs that are more global, and so forth.
Both, what is your next project and where is your next exhibition?
MOK: I have all these residencies to go to, first Iceland, then Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York. I have been making 3 big exhibitions this year. So I am trying to take some time to experiment, read and reflect on what has happened… I have group shows in Dublin and Italy. A solo show in Berlin later this year. And then I am talking to institutions and a few galleries. But for now, I want time to study and reflect. I am going to build big constructions to make music from at Iceland, and will invite musicians Nikolaj Hess, Goodiepal, and others to come up and play along;-) And then I would like to collaborate and exhibit more with Mary;-) We have different ideas cooking.
MM: For the immediate future, I am going to Palais de Tokyo to take part in the Prix Pictet exhibition that opens this Thursday. In April I will have a second solo at Robert Mann Gallery in New York, and in May the Waterpod will open. I will live and work on this structure for the entire summer, and in October, have a show at the non-profit space called Occurrence in Montreal. Intermittently, I will have work at the Tucson Museum of Art and plan to collaborate with Mie! Next fall I will build a permanent Waterpod that will be my new home.

10.23.08

The standpoint show opens later today; it's 2am, and I returned from a very nice dinner at the home of Fatima and Eskandar Maleki in honor of the Prix Pictet. I actually relaxed for the first time since arriving in London, but not completely. Besides being awestruck by the incredible pieces of artwork that they own, so many that one could get lost in a world of her own thoughts amidst crowded rooms, people that I spoke with tonight were hopeful about our future and especially about the heightened awareness of individuals everywhere for the earth that we inhabit (and want to continue to inhabit). People I spoke with also had a great deal of concern for the upcoming United States elections. People are in awe of Barack Obama and hopeful about what good he can accomplish in office.

At Standpoint, it has been wonderful to work with Fiona, and to meet Elsa Tierney, who has been helping Mie and I out for the last couple of days. Elsa is truly superhuman. Not only can she find anything in London give her a half hour, she can also construct future architectural spaces with us, and we suspect that this is just the beginning of her superpowers.

10.18.08

Through the generous assistance of the City of New York, the Waterpod has acquired a barge.

10.13.08

On Sunday I fly to London to install a two-person show with Mie Olise Kjærgaard. at s t a n d p o i n t (The Ruins of the Future opens Thursday 23 October 6-9pm), from there I head to Berlin to stay with Eve and work on the Waterpod, and finally go to Paris for the Prix Pictet opening event, held at the Palais de Tokyo (link). Today, I drove a U-Haul truck up to Chelsea and Somerville, MA to deliver a crate to Marion Intl. I am on the train heading back now. A full train because of Columbus Day. The train has halted in the Bronx. We have been here 15 minutes with no announcement. People are starting to wonder and sigh...The LHC in Cern stopped working.

10.03.08

The flight was long, there was an extra stop thrown in. It made sense. Going to New York from Cancun, the flight was almost empty. I’m back at the studio now, after a long day of traveling, and barely getting by on what little Spanish I know. Food in the airport: A coconut smoothie for 30 pesos. A coffee: 15 pesos. Three magazines: Economist, Time, National Geographic: $16.80. This week the US news is centered around Pakistan, (pitbull) Palin, North Korea, and the arduous process of economic reform that the USA is currently undergoing. The direct monetary cost of the Iraq war for US taxpayers has reached $653 billion, very close to the amount of the bailout bill ($850 billion would be needed here). I presume that this means that on average, each US taxpayer would have to pay around $7000 to bail out Wall Street, although the government and Paulson hope that by just investing this money back into the quite unstable stockmarket, the value of these corporations will be brought up to a level that will allow for some savings to be acrued to government funds: sounds too perfect! "This is scare tactics to try to do something that's in the private but not the public interest. It's terrible." -- Allan Meltzer, Carnegie Mellon School of Business "If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public -- all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims." --William Greider, The Nation

Working with Veronica on this project has been very special, and full of surprises. Overall, I am happy with what got done there.

Being in Mexico: I can’t imagine anything nicer than waking up to her particular view of the sunrise. We went to Mexcaltitan. It is believed to be the first settlement in Mexico of the Aztecs, who roamed the land until they witnessed a holy symbol of an eagle atop a cactus eating a rattlesnake. They settled the island Mexcaltitan using some of the most advanced building techniques and high-tech aquifers known to man. The roads formed, and still form, a compass, going directly north, south, east, and west. We ate shrimp fished locally (not from massive shrimp farms that destroy mangrove forests) and dried in the sun on the lagoon-like sidewalks, then fried. People took canoes, paddleboats, gondola’s, and kayaks around the streets and along the island’s perimeter. There are no cars, but I noticed a few bicycles with large basket frames built into the front wheel.

09.29.08

I am here sitting under the lamp with a crooked neck, the only light in the room, and my shadow is big, projected onto the white clay wall. The computer is on the desk with two mugs, both with some leftover tea, one still warm. I have been here for several days now, knowing a little more about Mexico and Guadalajara, and about the struggle to hear myself when there is less noise around. I am trying to make a film about hunting down void, about being stuck in the circular pattern until one dies or realizes, I will never die. I am here to be tortured and it will never end. We were preparing to embark on our exploration.

She (the void-hunter) will have the bike filled with boxes out in the summer heat tomorrow. We will roam the jungle on the way to the mountains and coastline to find the place that some of the first rituals done on Mexican soil, the place that they were done on.

The room is dark, waiting for sunlight again. Bug repellant on the end table, round, table: round, glass jar with water: round, lamp: round, phone cradle: round. Derrida in Spanish on the table. The duvet, the wool blanket, the bamboo on the closet doors, the lamp in the hallway with green jewels and chestnuts hanging from wire, reflecting striated teeth-mark patterns on the ceiling above it. The bathroom door that is always left open because the bathroom is so long, and the toilet separated with a partitioned wall. The wood stove in one corner of my room, made of clay. Books on round bookshelves, everything is curvy and nothing is smooth.

The long night of drinking wine and storytelling with her oldest friends in Spanish, and there was something Fellini-esque about this entire dramaturgical explanation, the notes on how the friend will do it, the friends yelling at her to get over herself, the bottles and bottles and cigarettes and marijuana passed around like it was all part of the party and all part of the script. I kept trying to pursuade her to leave and get going but I had to learn to take time.

We would ride through towns on rock-filled dirt roads, while kids ran out of the way, while owners moved their horses aside, while dogs watched, where the character of an old man could be seen on the face of a 4 year old kid who opened the gate for us to leave the little road that we paid 20 pesos to enter. Here we were, exiting, meeting with him again not more than five minutes later. We had some things to see! The bike is a giant thing piled well with boxes and their contents, the things that we will or may find that we need along the way.
We went to dinner after that. I had mango chicken. We both drank. We had sashimi and talked about when we met.

Then when finally we dressed up in the uniform and began functioning as nomads from some time in the not so far off future, she understood, she realized the way things would work. There is something unlike any loneliness that we can imagine, and we are heading towards it.

09.26.08

Here all night at the airport in Mexico City. Finally, it is 4am, and the terminals will open back up. I am now allowed to check back in to the waiting area for the short part of the trip, from Mexico City to Guadalajara. Cafes are just opening up for the early morning passengers, and I am first in line after the cold night and the row of chairs in the the airport’s lobby, where some of us huddled for warmth. For part of the night I played the main character of the film I am coming here to create - the immobile mobility of carting around three pieces of luggage back and forth, up and down the corridors of the lobby, looking for a comfortable corner to just stop and sleep. The large suitcase weighs 35kg and contains most of the equipment, and the other two carry-on size. Not good for exploring in my current tired state, every step is forced. Now I sit and watch, with an extremely good Bustillo brand espresso and condensed milk (brand Nestle of course), watching sparks fly over a drywall barrier that is obstructing the rest of the view, where it seems a ship is being welded or something to that effect... I'm overly cautious about my body's ability to ingest the different microbes in the water here with my current health being still so-so.

08.10.08

Two days after my birthday, going north. Last year at this time I was in Alaska, so in some way it's natural that I should be going north again. As opposed to Northwest Airlines, there is nothing like taking Amtrak. Maybe it is nostolgia for the train now that the plane is so commonplace. I don't take Amtrak often enough, mostly because it's quite expensive to go anywhere in New England or New York, and I usually don't have the luxury of that much time to go further, especially since most American trains are extremely slow, and even more so when they venture outside of the East Coast. Amtrak rents the use of train lines from the bigger freight train companies, so it's not unusual to be six hours to one day late upon reaching your destination. Today, the special day that it is, I am heading from New York to Montreal. We are passing Lake Champlain at 2pm, the current time. The train departed at 8:25am and should arrive at 7pm.

Eve K. Tremblay and I spent the last five days working intensively on the Waterpod from New York. Eve has an opening this week in Val-David, the town that she grew up in located a half-hour outside of Montreal. We will work intensively in the countryside, and attend Waterpod-related meetings in Montreal. The bus is an overnight shot, about 7-8 hours, and the train is 11. 11 glorious hours in the lunch car with a sprawling table, a laptop, drawing pad, camera, cup of tea, and streamlined oval window for gazing at the intensely beautiful nature and countryside spotted with red-roofed homes.

On my birthday, I spent the morning writing emails, the afternoon at the DMV renewing my license, the evening at the New Museum, and the night at Clandestinos, one of my new favorite hangouts in the Lower East Side, a couple blocks from the studio.
What I learned: Matt Jones has two new tattoos (although he claims to have had them for some time), one is a giant 12, like his series of paintings. I don’t know how I feel about that, although I have been thinking of getting a new tattoo. Actually the tattoo I want to get is a giant 12 too…hmm… (this is probably funnier to me because when I had a small circle tattooed on the inside of my left arm, that is what my friend Adrian Gaut said to me, and he DID get the same tattoo...hmm...anything's possible)

Kadar came by too, and he now works right down the street from Clandestinos as well, at Terrance Koh’s studio. Others that it had been too long since I had the chance to sit down with: Stephanie, Orly, and Fred. Fred was doing a show in Switzerland and had been gone for a very long time, Stephanie has been nomadic and super hard to keep up with, Orly has been recovering from a hospitalization, and then Mark Gibson…wait, Mark didn’t come… Anyway, it was a blast and thank you Alison for bringing cake, and the awesome bartender who was so sweet, and Jason for even more cake. It was extremely fun! And sorry Mae and Donna for not being there much later than midnight…I was pretty exhausted from all of the sweat and tears Eve and I had been plummeting into grant applications, meetings, research, and model building… Lesson 1: Get some sleep before birthday party.

07.30.08

Guadalajara, Mexico. On September 25, I will meet Veronica Flores in Guadalajara. We set the parameters for a pilgrimage to the end of the world, a pilgrimage that has no defined end, one that will revolve around creation and construction: of mysteries, of spatial adventure, and nomadographies. Since it is undefined, I do not hope for anything.On our pilgrimage, the passage of time will help us understand our own ephemerality. The ephemeral is the truth of our habitat. Mobile, variable, retractable structures roam our living theaters. I call it my one-piece paradise. Paradise. A word grabbed from the languages of advertisement and propaganda. It is a one-piece world. The six wheels can transform into a boat for the tides.

07.30.08

After spending weeks on end in bed, and after inventing story after story, plan after plan for my wishful agenda upon leaving the hospital, I was told that I had to stay on a liquid diet, stay away from any strenuous activity and not to lift anything over ten pounds - for up to four months. On week three, I convinced a family member (John) to accompany me to Arizona (I didn't lift anything heavy and kept pretty much to a liquid diet). On a trip that began as a Speed Voyage and ended in a crawl, we spent time touring the Biosphere II (Biosphere I being Earth, we are told), the Titan Missile Museum, and a missile ruins site. Aside from a variety of strange Inns that we managed to stay in, the highlight was meeting Chuck Penson, an archivist and very knowledgable man at the Titan Missile Museum. We stumbled upon luck meeting him! Our final mission was to make it to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff before nightfall, but an unusually stormy day caused an oil tanker to flip over in the middle of the highway. Traffic was lined up for miles, engines off, waiting for news. Occasionally cars turned around. This was the one road from Phoenix to Flagstaff (well, there are others if you drive 3+ hours out of the way but we didn't think that we had the time), so we waited for a couple of hours to see if the road would reopen, but finally decided to reevaluate our route. Our new trajectory took us not far from the Hoover Dam, so we slept nearby for the night and in the morning we drove to Vegas where John flew back to Connecticut and I stayed on for a couple more days.

John made it back safely and is now planning to visit his sister in Germany. He teaches highschool and tries to travel in the summer. Last year he took a summer-long road trip with my brother and uncle.

Cory and Leslie, who are letting me housesit their abode this summer while they work in Las Vegas, agreed to take some time off and meet up, so we took their Airstream up through the Nevada Test Sites, past Yucca Mountain, the Electric Test Sites, and on to Mono Lake where we parked for the night. Mono Lake is the spot where an approximate 80% of birds are born within the state of California. We explored Mono Lake, and headed north to Bodie. Around this time, there were still a total of 8 fires burning in California and we could see, feel, and smell the residual smoke, thick on the horizon and in the surrounding air.

07.23.08

Interview with VSD Magazine, France:
VSD: In Seven Firm Oligopoly and in The Overaccumulation crisis, you show a pessimistic vision of the future of the earth. Do you really think it could happen to our planet?
MM: I grew up in a flood-prone area and would regularly worry about, clean up after, and protect against floods. During my youth, water was a controversial topic in the town, as pesticides such as DDT from the surrounding farms had polluted the well water, and buying city water was a new solution to the pesticides found in the water table. I really started researching issues surrounding water when its privatization started to become more prevalent. I was reading articles about riots in Cochabamba, Bolivia, because the city’s residents were not able to afford the price of the newly privatized water. That same year, the news described cataclysmic, devastating floods from the UK to Cambodia, and Madagascar to Mozambique. There was immense flood damage that year. Simultaneously, here in the United States, bottled water and jugs of water are an essential commodity in our society. Watching the position of water drift from being a natural resource to a commodity just literally scared me. It continues to scare me that, as an overall trend, people are depending on buying things, while forgetting how to make things, or, for instance, depending on a large levee and relying on an inadequate evacuation system. These are quick fixes for a global trend of not taking care of nature, and of no longer knowing how to.
 
I began working on wearable homes largely as a result of the year 2000, during which I moved five times. I imagined that I was acting as a model for future nomads, as now we are beginning the culmination; to a point where everything is flexible, because it needs to be, because living is about survival, functional space is a luxury, products all want to be smaller, houses all want to be prefab, and waterfront property is on a market downturn. A wearable home should not only be equipped for the city nomad but for the future nomad who will need to travel through each of the prevailing climates of the near future: arctic, desert, and waterlogged tundra, illustrating different modes of survival.
 
For my recent work, I have been traveling to places that were and are in danger of drought, in need of water, or that have an excess of water due to melting glaciers or storms. I was able to experience hardships from lack of water and difficulties communities face from changing climates first hand, to study floodgates and rising tides, and at times I was fortunate enough to be able to help in relief efforts. With the inclusion of sculptures, the images that I make border fiction and reality. Depending on the particular image and the sentiment that I want to evoke in the viewer, I use 3D imaging programs and digital editing programs to create or alter initial photographs so that they may tell a story and suggest a feeling that borders between a warning and a reality I believe we are heading towards.
 
Are you inspired by the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC about the future of climate? Where do you find inspiration?
In October of 2005, the United Nations University predicted 50 million environmental refugees by the year 2010, as the result of environmental crisis and slow-motion disasters due to the instability of infrastructures resulting in famine, drought, disease, sea-level rise. I try to figure out survival solutions daily, especially for the nomadic, whom I feel will become a population majority in time. I have learned a lot through studying Inuit cultures that have been surviving in extreme cold for centuries, and nomadic desert tribes like the Tuareg tribe in Africa. This also helps me learn more about human nature and fragility, needs, strengths, and our intuition. I have worked much of this information into the Wearable Homes. I am inspired by a lot of work by different organizations including the IPCC. I read blogs related to the environment and technology, I regularly read magazines like The Economist and Mother Jones, am inspired by attending conferences, listening to a variety of podcasts, and reading a variety of theory as well as fiction.
 
Do you know what scientists think about your art? Did some of them come for example in New York, at Robert Mann Gallery, to see it?
The scientists I have met are largely intrigued by what I am trying to do, which is partly to add imagination to ideas based in science. Some own installations or photographs I have made. I have made “inventions” that are do-it-yourself interpretations and solutions to problems like purifying dirty water, for instance, by reusing three plastic bottles to create your own easy-to-make water purification system. My urge to make useful, easy to use and easy to recreate inventions comes from the need I feel to relearn people on how to live with nature, because we will need to. Some of what I try to express in my photos is the danger that comes with forgetting how to make things. We become dependent on having the option to buy everything, and that gives the sellers so much power over us. The Waterpod project is allowing me the chance to work closely with more scientists and inventors.
 
What about the Waterpod, is it currently floating around Manhattan?
The Waterpod will launch May 2009. Initially, I had planned to launch it this year, but the city of New York promised more support if I were to wait a year to do the project. This alongside the fact that in December and January I went to the hospital for two separate operations due to appendicitis. The additional year to work on the project has allowed me to expand it a great deal, I am now working with three other artists and a growing team of volunteer scientists and “green builders”. We now have more time and are gathering more support to do a wider experimentation with materials and the portability of the overall design.
 
What is the message you want to send to people?
I want to raise questions about the role of the individual in a society and on our earth. I want people to question their proscribed societal roles, and be independent from markets and other systems of control. I want to motivate people to feel that they have the ability to change things, make things, to create and recreate reality.
 
What do you think about the behaviour of US government about climatic problems?
The United States was, as of 2005, the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The US government is largely ignorant and extremely slow in dealing with climatic problems, and it is apparent that this is because of the interest in big business. The fact that the government will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol until there is participation by developing nations is extremely immature and irresponsible. On the other hand, there is a very large grassroots movement (and not-so-grassroots movement) in individual states, towns, cities, in Silicon Valley, within organizations, and on individual levels. -mm

Innovation only really occurs when people with desperate human needs can afford to pay for solutions to those needs. The great innovations of civilization generally followed either a great equalization of wealth (e.g. the printing press, the assembly line) or a huge crisis (e.g. modern 'catastrophic' (monoculture) agriculture, nuclear power). For the last 50 years neither has been present and innovation has arguably almost completely ceased.

This is an effort to design very low-footprint houseboats inspired by various traditional waterborne communities in Asia, North America and Europe, using modern materials, designs and construction techniques. In addition to providing an excellent platform for testing self-sufficient designs these shelters may provide a means to quickly provide semi-permanent emergency housing in areas threatened by innundation from rising sea levels.

Walter LaFeber:
The new transnational [corporation] became so global by the 1980s
that a single government had power over only a part of the firm's
total operation. The size of many transnationals, moreover,
dwarfed the size of many governments. Of the hundred largest
economic units in the world of the 1980s, only half were nations.
The other half were individual corporations. (10)

As such, community is invoked through the appeal to military defence, national security and civil order, and with greater legitimacy after the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11. As fear is increasingly globalized, anti-terrorist laws are used to target those who fit the 'racial profile of white anxiety': Arabs, people of colour, Muslims, black youth, 'but also anyone with an unusual head-covering'. (20)

Providing a model for global export, the United States is refashioning authoritarianism as a form of rabid patriotism. This is coupled with anti-terrorist legislation that legitimizes limiting civil liberties and basic freedoms while sanctioning the surveillance of dissenters and the arrest, if not torture, of those marked as a threat to the collective safety. As Mike Davis points out, however, government and corporate elites do more than translate collective fears about uncertainty into privatized concerns about individual safety. They also create the conditions for a 'fear economy' that fuels corporate profits. In addition to being frisked, searched, monitored, scanned and interrogated, the populations of the United States and its allies will also be subject to the pressures of venture capital that will make 'germ warfare sensors and threat profile software', along with 'discrete technologies of surveillance, environmental monitoring and data-processing ... into a single integrated system. "Security", in other words, will become a full-fledged urban utility like water and power'. (21)

As important as immanent critique might be, it always runs the risk of both representing power as being in the absolute service of domination and failing to capture the always open and ongoing dynamic of resistance at work in alternative modes of representations, oppositional public spheres, and modes of affective investment that refuse the ideological push and institutional drive of dominant social orders. (54)

Ruins of a Titan Missile Site in Arizona, 2008

07.20.08

PRIX PICTET - LINK

07.13.08

Berkley University urbanist Christopher Alexander and his group have built a movement which, in their words, ”lays the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will replace existing ideas and practices entirely”. At the core of this movement is the idea that people should design houses, streets, and communities for themselves. This idea may imply a radical transformation of the architectural profession, but it emerges quite simply from the observation that most of the beautiful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. "For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for "going through," not for "staying in."

Last year, through various examples, Adam Greenfeld showed how “we killed the street” due to cars, traffic, overplanning, the “repeating module of doom” (succession of franchises) leading to what Augé calls “non-places” and Rem Koolhas refers to as “junkspace”. - liftlab

This is an interesting solution to our ever-growing problem of non-place or unusable public space. What will we do with the ghost towns of the early 2000's in America? The rows of empty tract housing and community developments that may never be inhabited? After the credit and financial crisis is smoothed over, the bankruptcies all filed and in place, Can they eventually become part of the commons? If so, there should be a set of controls in place to urge their growth and use. Can we make them into tourist attractions? Bed and Breakfast or Hotels for the ever-increasing populations of nomads?

"...like refugees from a plague city, they carry that which they fled with them. As soon as they arrive, the subdivisions start multiplying, a strip mall goes up (inevitably, as has been noted, bearing the name of the local landmark it replaced), and people start clamoring for Starbucks and high-speed Net access. Pretty soon, people look around, say 'this place ain't what it used to be,' and start looking around for the next place to go. ...With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be." - Neal Stephenson quoted by Alex Steffan here

07.10.08

The biggest experiment in particle physics: the Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - will be switched on this year. Better yet, according to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, a pair of Russian mathematicians, the LHC might just turn out to be the world's first time machine. More on LHC from Wikipedia - here (since I wrote this, the LHC is set for a 2-month cooling phase to fix a part)

07.03.08

It has been a month, and I have spent it in two different hospitals, New York Presbyterian (68th St.) and Baystate Medical Center (Springfield, MA), both of which I found to be excellent stays with great doctors and compassionate, extremely competent nurses on my recent mandatory tour of hospitals. This is time number three in the past few months, due to complications from an appendectomy (actually my first surgery) back in December. On the mend, I have a prescribed liquid diet for another week, have taken to ordering packages upon packages of books from Amazon, the latest being Buckminster Fuller's Universe and Alternatives to Economic Globalization (second ed.) In creative moments I found myself photographing the shadows on the walls and the 70's orange that hid the radiators in a faux cabinet, atop rested my father's copy of Accounts of Padre Pio, that same orange on the spine. It’s amazing how resilient our bodies are. After nearly a month of being fed intravenously, my arms were bruised beyond belief. That was two weeks ago, and there is no longer any physical sign. Reflecting on the stay and my thoughts during, I understand patience, peoples' sufferings, pain, and happiness on a slightly deeper level. Tomorrow is the 4th of July. On Wednesday I will take a trip to photograph some structures in Southeast Arizona, and head Northwest towards Mono Lake.

06.26.08

Life on the fringes of U.S. suburbia becomes untenable with rising gas costs
By Peter S. Goodman
Published: June 24, 2008

ELIZABETH, Colorado: Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the outer edges of metropolitan areas.
Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief.
They still revel in the space and quiet that has drawn a steady exodus from U.S. cities toward places like this for more than half a century. Their living room ceiling soars two stories high. A swing-set sways in the breeze in their backyard. Their wrap-around porch looks out over the flat scrub of the high plains to the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
But life on the distant fringes of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel. The price of propane to heat their spacious house has more than doubled in recent years.
Though Boyle finds city life unappealing, it's now up for reconsideration.

06.24.08

Buckminster Fuller: Starting With The Universe, Whiteney Museum
About the Exhibition
on view June 26 - September 21, 2008

One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth's resources. Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.

Buckminster Fuller Symposium
Friday, September 12 - Saturday, September 13
The Great Hall of the Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, at Astor Place
Visionary designer, philosopher, poet, inventor, engineer, and advocate of sustainability, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of the last century with a legacy that extends to nearly every field of the arts and sciences. This symposium takes its cue from Fuller's dictum, "I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment," and explores the diverse ways in which contemporary scholars and practitioners are pushing Fuller's ideas and projects into the 21st century.

05.17.08

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. – Edvard Munch

04.24.08

04.06.08

I was just asked to answer some of these questions: In what ways does your work reflect a concern with environmental changes? From what sources do you gather information pertinent to your art? If you feel artists have a sense of social responsibility, how does your work reflect this? How does the prevailing point of view in your work connect to the way you choose to live? Artists have the ability to grasp momentous changes, so how can the arts have an influence over public consciousness? How can art institutions—such as museums—make a crucial difference to the future? If you feel that environmental activism is a movement that will define a generation, or help to define the beginning of the millennium, what would you say is key? In what way is your choice of medium influenced by the statement you want to make? How is your career fed / fueled by politics?  (sense of idealism, despair, distress, activism) How do you think art – or a painting—can solve or help to solve global problems?  What can an artist and art really do to change the world a little? How interested are you in art’s influence over the public consciousness? Since your work reflects the state of the environment, how does your work promote or convey your critique and commitment to change/activism? I thought they were very interesting...

04.05.08

I just received this email in my inbox. Really nice! :

Collaboration available for 85¢
Whitney Museum of American Art Bookstore
April 2, 2008

The art collective M80 announces Collaboration a limited edition piece in the form of a postcard. It is not a reproduction of art, but is, through the process of interacting with the public and museum, the art itself. Created to compliment the Whitney Biennial 2008, the piece becomes fully realized when purchased, as the purchaser becomes a collaborator in the project. To receive a certificate of authenticity and edition number (out of 250), collaborators can emailM80collab@gmail.com. All proceeds go to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

M80 is a New York-based team of visual artists who use benevolent guerrilla tactics to promote awareness of, and solutions to, issues facing the art world. Begun as a think-tank in 2007, M80 seeks to identify systems and behaviors in the art world that can lead to conformity, detached commodification, gender and race exclusion, elitism, and passivity. After a process of problem identification M80 then creates projects that, via example, offer hopeful solutions.

04.01.08

A good friend of mine, Derek Hunter, (http://www.derekhunter.net/)has just constructed a truly unusual "camera" for his exploration of Islamic Mysticism, specifically the Sufi dance called whirling of which his wife (and my collaborator on the Waterpod), Mira Hunter, studies. The results of this machine brings the ideas of the "virtual camera" into the realm of the physical world, by capturing "bullet time", a surround view of an object in motion that (until now) only a virtual camera could capture.

03.23.08

31 Under 31: Panel Discussion on Photography

Last night, I spoke on a panel about women photographers that was held at 3RD WARD by Humble Arts, and moderated by Amy Stein. The rest of the panel consisted of Tema Stauffer, Dina Kantor, Cara Phillips, and Sarah Small. It was interesting to hear peoples' perspectives on the photography market, experiences with mentors, with jobs, galleries, magazines, working with models, and struggles with living in New York.

As the panel progressed, we were asked basic yet important questions that need to be asked and re-asked because they are questions that our answers constantly change for: How does your sense of gender identity inform your work? Everyone's experience is going to be different, but to contextualize each experience under the umbrella of females doing photography is important. My gender identity is a part of me that I am proud of, but I really think that to feel one's gender is essentially to feel one's humanity. We try to not let any one label define us of our work, but it is important to realize what the label means, how it is contextualized and how it changes meaning. I also think that it is important for artists to understand and know their influences if they want their own work to progress, and that mentoring is a two-way-street; if it stops with us than it is not real mentoring. We need to give and to get from all of our relationships. I am greatly inspired by Francis Alÿs because of his overall compassion that comes through in his work, his critique over systems of control that is also always present, and his participatory actions. I am also inspired by Sophie Calle for her experimentalism, Rebecca Horn, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Constant Nieuwenhuis, Don Delillo, and Ray Kurzweil to name a few.

I think the consensus on living in New York was that we are all glad to live here, because of the exponential energy and opportunities available. Then we went on to discuss living expenses in New York. This standard-of-living debate is something discussed in all circles of New York life, but probably the most in the art world. I found people to be surprised to hear that I spent as much time working on art as I do, and after the panel, as I reflected on this surprise, I concluded that these are simply the choices that we make. I chose to not attend graduate school at this point in my life, so that I wouldn’t be fighting with debt for the next ten years over things that I believe can be provided by a rigorous community of art cohorts, and I choose not to pay an expensive rent, and in general live sparsely because it allows time for art.

We were asked to give advice to emerging photographers, and I would answer: Be disciplined, structured with your time, put pressure on yourself to move past your own ideas. Your friends are also very important. A circle of people that you respect who you will allow to critique your in-process work has definitely been a very important part of my practice, and finally, be even-keeled about peoples' responses to your work. I get excited about art when I am making it, but rarely do I let myself be emotional about others' responses to my work. Overall, I hope it was informative and keeps these discussions moving forward.

03.16.08

At the LMCC studio building the Waterpod Beta

03.08.08

Carving the Foam

03.03.08

02.28.08

On March 1, 2008, in honor of Women’s History Month, Humble Arts Foundation, in collaboration with Ladies Lotto, will present “31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography,” a month-long exhibition celebrating 31 of the most innovative young women in emerging art photography under the age of 31. The Exhibition is co-curated by Lumi Tan, Director of Zach Feuer Gallery in NYC, and Jon Feinstein, Curatorial Director of Humble Arts Foundation. It opens Saturday, March 1, at 3RD WARD, 7pm. www.flakphoto.com

02.20.08

Albert Pinkham Ryder lived on thirteen cents a day, slept in a carpet roll, wandered bridges, ferries, and waterfronts of NY “Soaking up moonlight and watching shadows of sailboats upon water.” The artist must “live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord and costly studio. A raintight roof, frugal living, a box of colors and God’s sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one’s daily work”. - Quote from "Has Modernism Died?"
Robert Barry in 1968 – "The world is full of objects more or less interesting; I do not wish to add more". In Holland I visited the studios of many artists. The spaces were so large in comparison to most of the studios I have been to in New York, and many were stocked with years and years of artwork. I remember thinking how transformative our cities would be and how creative our streets would be if all of the art was displayed on the outside and the blandifying color-coded buildings were not the norm. Why the aesthetic zoning laws? Am I missing something?

01.26.08

More than half of the nearly 7 billion humans on this planet now live in cities, in ecosystems that are disconnected from the resources and places and plants and animals that we depend on for food, water and energy. To that extent, cities are 'artificial' environments -- they are not sustainable without resources that come entirely from outside them, 'mysteriously' (because the people in the city have no direct personal experience or knowledge of how their food, water and power gets to them). Children in cities can be excused for thinking food 'comes' from the grocery store, that water comes magically from the tap, and that electricity comes from the switch.
We cannot expect people to care about factory farmed animals' misery, because to them it is invisible. It is no more 'real' than what they read about in story books. We cannot expect people to care about the end of oil or the end of water or the end of electricity or the end of telecommunication because they don't see or know where these things come from, and their scarcity is a mere abstraction. I have spoken to people who lived through the Great Depression, and deliberately read first-hand accounts of the incredible suffering and deprivation that those people lived through, and their astonishment that things they had 'taken for granted' could disappear so quickly. But this is lost knowledge, and we cannot expect people to care about it now. - Dave Pollard

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for we will not fight to save what we do not love. - Stephen J. Gould

01.12.08

plastic foam is changing my life

01.11.08

Chris Eastland and John Snyder visited the studio today.

01.11.08

The scar after my operation

The horse that grows in the kitchen | Scoreboard on Marguerite's fridge (she put that up there for me)

01.09.08

Scouting at Fort Tilden with John Snyder for a film.

01.05.08

Picture Theory W.J.T. Mitchell

01.04.08

Waterpod

Text I'm working on for the Waterpod: A FLOATING WORLD

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming. It embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces. In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis. As a malleable and autonomous space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities; an archipelagos that has the ability to mutate with the tides. The Waterpod codifies the language of mobility in contemporary architecture and historicizes the notion of the permanent structure, simultaneously serving as composition, transportation, island, and residence. As with all art forms, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. Based on an economy of movement, this structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies. With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now.

12.30.07

Pictures from Animal Kingdom

12.18.07

Sick in the hospital:

Before Miami, I drove to Key West to scout for filming. A deserted beach...

The Shoot. (Then a piece that Orly did for the Jersey City Museum)...

Miami. Containers. Versace Mansion. Martin Margolis Collection

12.13.07

The Way We Dress.
For the people who wonder why I don't sport a Wearable Home more often in New York, let me explain. Usually, I test them out in rural locations, in places with fewer resources, to see if their adaptation methods fail or succeed. Part of the appeal of the Wearable Home to me is the aspect of uniformity, given time, within choice. I believe that in the not so far off future, our choices could be limited for a number of reasons, and we may not even realize or notice this change in our perspective on choice. It is for the future what our uniforms are today. The Wearable Home is as much about survival as it is about being the uniform for the future. It camouflages you with everyone else just like Tommy Hilfiger, Banana Republic, Dockers, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, Benetton, Armani, Gap, Guess, Lacoste, H&M, Walt Disney, Diesel, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Dior, Hermès, Gucci, Ecko, Chanel, Calvin Klein... do today. In this case, I believe that the way to affect change is to slowly seep an idea into the fabric of society. There are Wearable Home items that I make and wear singularly - to bridge the gap between one set of uniforms to the next.

In preparation for the launch of the Waterpod, I have recently started wearing anything that references nautical culture. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to being on the water.

12.10.07

12.09.07

Imagining the Future

The typical image of the future might be one of Tokyo: advanced gadgetry, pollutants, and space issues derived from overpopulation. It is of course a common misconception that the future is going to be slick, one propagated by movies and sci-fi stories for a ubiquitous future frequented by “replicants”, clones, and avatars. This view is quite unfeasible aside from the elements that will exist in outcrops (i.e.: forgiving any disasters in these areas, it is most likely that cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Delhi, New York will grow in numbers and could, perhaps, look like a scene from “Blade Runner” in the future, but their future is probably better described in the movie “Brazil”).

With economic globalization comes a backlash against it, a re-tribalization, and a fight for ones “community” and oneself. I don’t doubt that tribes (by tribes I mean any group of people, usually banned together by viewpoints and person/group identity or birth) will continue to have wars about this.

With overpopulation and the overproduction of goods will come a lack of resources (as we already are seeing), and a necessary reusing of products (think of tee-shirts made in the USA in the 60’s that have just reached India through the and can be seen on kids in Bangalore). Simultaneously, we see corporate power at a high and a global move to “Do It Yourself” – the Internet is a big propagator of this. DIY sites are all over the web, and “First World” missions to infiltrate and “help” “Third World” states, through NGO’s, companies, and grassroots movements are all based on this methodology, if successful. So again, we have an action and a reaction, a balance. As we make strides in biology and technology, we tread backwards environmentally, for example. As Vietnamese strike at a Nike factory in Hanoi, a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) closed its manufacturing facility in Ansan, South Korea, and Zamil Steel, based in Dammam, is to build a new factory in Thailand.

As I assume that Robert Bigelow will continue to send billionaires into space more and more frequently in the future, the disparity between rich and poor will continue to grow, the need to be mobile will continue to increase (with the instability of borders, the environment, and with the ease of mobility as a social goal), and the need to reuse our finite resources will be a new economy. People will still want and be able to obtain power: monopolies, mergers, and oligopolies, “One-World Governments,” will continue to strive to be a new communism – expanding and expounding their products on masses of mobile populations. Imagining the future requires a broader scope.

11.20.07

11.17.07

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for we will not fight to save what we do not love. -Stephen J. Gould

11.05.07

In "The Life of Reason", the philosopher Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Mark Twain said, "The past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
NYPL - Time Is Falling Asleep

10.28.07

Published on 4 Dec 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 4 Dec 2006.
Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
by Dmitry Orlov

On China "The glaciers that ripple off the peaks of Anyemaqen, a mountain range in the western China province of Qinghai, are shrinking rapidly, endangering hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters flowing eastward through the Yellow River. 0801 02
With the rest of the country punished by record heat waves, floods and droughts this summer, it’s no wonder that Beijing, which has long viewed global warming as a problem that rich nations should solve, is waking up to the fact that China may be especially at risk.
Qinghai, a poor, Texas-size stretch of the northern Tibetan plateau where yaks outnumber humans, became the unusual focus of attention when U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson visited there Monday at the start of a four-day trip to China.
Rather than climbing the peaks, he visited Qinghai Lake, a saltwater body about 200 miles away, to demonstrate U.S. concern for the effects of global warming.
“What’s happening in terms of climate change globally is impacting the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, and what’s happening here also impacts the global environment,” Paulson said, according to news reports.
Deaths from floods, lightning and landslides across China in recent weeks have reached nearly 700, state media reported this week, and officials warned that global warming is likely to cause even more violent weather." -San Francisco Chronicle

To read more: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/01/2911/ (links found on: How To Save The World)

10.27.07

FRONTIER - GALERIE ADLER

10.17.07

10.15.07

"Frontier" at Galerie Adler opens next Thursday

10.14.07
Our Blog: http://constructedmoment.blogspot.com

10.09.07

Speedvoyage Alaska 07
With the severity of price cuts and decline of reliable airline service, I am at once surprised and largely unburdened by getting to Anchorage 8 hours later. The first night was spent at the Chelsea Inn Hotel on Spenard. This hotel reminded me of all of the live-in hotels Gabriel used to take up residence in over in Oregon. The smell, the insects, the shower mold, the leaky faucet. Upon entering through the side door, a guest walks up the steps and into a fascinating lobby where deer, elk, and moose heads reside; adorning the forest-green walls, landscape paintings of the Alaskan frontier, a mini-cooler for ice, and a coffee pot. I checked out at 8am, and headed for Seward. Every moment was a view, and every 200th view was a photograph. It's day one and half of my film supply is used. At Seward I took a boat equipped with binoculars, two video cameras and two still cameras. I sat underneath the vessel to begin writing this, protected, watery scene-after-scene framed in the 2' long windows and I'm thoroughly thanking God for glass and sealed structures. After today I know that I only have 3.5 days to get as far as I can by car.

09.23.07

This is a picture of my current key chain. There are keys to three apartments in NYC, the LMCC studios,
a card for a grocery store and a gym, a compass, a light, and a tag. Being a nomad in New York is virtually impossible without friends.

09.10.07

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. - James Joyce (Sent by Mira's friend Raphael who is currently writing her thesis on Joyce with a Foucauldian approach.)

09.08.07

Some thoughts on Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, with more to come: Mediated by exchange value, forms are never perfect. Yet, however compromised, artworks may by the structure of their forms, the coherence of their references, and their very exalted status as fetishes "strive to escape the confines of universal practice" and function as "anticipation of a nobler condition." It's my birthday. After driving back from Valdez, through the breathtaking Thompson Pass, Bridalveil Falls, Copper town, I found an amazing Bed and Breakfast in Palmer, Alaska, and wow. It's the second night on the trip that I haven't slept in the rental car out of sheer exhaustion from travel. I will post pictures when I return to New York. The place itself couldn't have made me happier.

09.05.07

On Being Blue
It’s still amazing to me, the way that we let ourselves be completely controlled by others, or our heartstrings. These five days in Alaska are about being, alone. Not an artist colony in England, not a primordial festival in a desert with 50,000 people, but it is myself on my own, and on my birthday, which has a very sad tinge about it to me, but I did it for that reason. I want it to be a time to let myself be sad or happy or to just to see how I was feeling, to experience nature and this side of reality, to think about what my relationships mean – uninfluenced, to be minimal, to let myself be alone like maybe we always are.

On Burning Man
The real-time five-act opera in the desert. This was the first year that I stayed through the burning of the man and the temple, however I arrived after the first time that the man burned. It burned twice. The drama was unprecedented. The feeling was conspiracy, the irony was "green", the camps were spirited and maybe the best thing to redeem the tragicomic conceptual representation of whatever this figment becomes or has become.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. - J. Conrad

08.29.07
Madame, do you know what your house weighs?

Waterpod is a malleable space. It is built on a co-acting model made up of multiple collaborations. It codifies the language of mobility in contemporary architecture and simultaneously historicizes the notion of the permanent structure. It is a composition, a transport, an island, and a residence. Residing on watered bodies, the Waterpod is able to dock temporarily or travel to international waters, where it can acquire the status of a contained micronation.
As with all art forms, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. The Waterpod is heavily networked with communications technology, exemplifying a trend towards immateriality, an objectless but continuously recorded space. The Waterpod acts as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-volving water communities that mutate with the tides. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, the only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity.

* The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death. - J. Conrad

08.18.07

Braziers castle, Yason Banal on a bench made by Andrea Heller, and one image of the magnificent detailing throughout.

Braziers, Oxfordshire, England, has been my home along with 15 permanent residents, 25 artists-in-residence and seven artists-as-coordinators for the past two weeks. Tomorrow is the opening, when we will display our projects on 50 acres of land.

Images of work by Rose Eken, Dennis Glaser, and Zeeshan Muhammud

A sample of Veronica Flores, Juan Pablo Echeverri, and Marianne Engel's work.

“The Celestial Telegraph"
An exploration of extra sensory perception
35 people (from 16 countries) on the Chiltern Moors have discovered a new group state of mind. Activities such as presentation of individual philosophies, myths, folklore, perceptions and dreams have enabled them to develop a hidden language. Group dancing played a large part in the creation of this altered state, fostered by group rolling – whereby rapid rotation on the ground was alternated with slow peddling of large rolls.
An altered group state ensued involving all members and even some astonished spectators. All experienced a new clarity of inner vision, which allowed a group perspective that could be applied by each person to making work seemingly effortlessly at extraordinary speed. All were documented in detail; they form the historical basis for the phenomenon. Participants look back in awe. - A summary of the experience by Dennis Glaser.

Barn on Thames is a study of a small shed in a remote locale, and its effect on its inhabitants’ personality. The space is composed of the character traits of past residents of the shed, pop icons infamously associated with sheds, conspiracy theorists, and the current denizen of the shed. B.T. represents a state of paranoia about the present and future, about technology, communications, the reality of being continuously watched and in turn becoming a watcher. It exhibits personal boundaries and their natural extension into geopolitical borders. It foretells the future in the form of a seed-bank collection, bunker-like provisions, and architectural plans preparing B.T. to be fit for its natural exposure to the periodic flow and rise of the River Thames, until a river runs through it. Floruit Tamesis, floreat Tamesis.

08.16.07

Tale of Three Cities. Being in England again (for the second time), I am, well, reminded of the first time. Yes, hitchhiking and backpacking through England with Larry at nineteen. The goal of living in every city is to keep moving, some sort of a necessary continuous movement to grow with the place, and to live with the place, is a generous requirement. In every city I have resided in, I have attempted to move to at least three different neighborhoods within that city, although usually I can't help but to move more than that.
Boston: Brighton, Allston, Jamacia Plain, (Everette)
Portland: NE, SW, SE, NW
New York: Bed-Stuy, BK, Crown Heights, BK, East Village, Upper East Side, and LIC coming soon...

08.14.07

Quote from Freeman Dyson that I read today:
We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

He also wrote about the idea that new tree species could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulos, and predicts that open source sharing will be extended from exchange of software to exchange of genes.

Exerpts from Industrial Society and its Future:
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence, and most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always pure surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn.
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the "mundane" business of satisfying their biological needs, but that it is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. We suggest that the so-called "identity crisis" is actually a search for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of modern life.
74. We suggest that modern man's obsession with longevity, and with maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. The "mid-life crisis" also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.

08.02/07

Without an element of curelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds." Antonin Artaud, Theater and its Double
The White Box show, Theater of Cruelty, was one of the strongest shows I have seen in a long time.

07.22.07
Droughts and floods.

BBC: July 18th: Water find 'may end Darfur war'. A huge underground lake has been found in Sudan's Darfur region, scientists say, which they believe could help end the conflict in the arid region. Some 1,000 wells will be drilled in the region, with the agreement of Sudan's government, the Boston University researchers say.

Another water link from the BBC: A team of divers who set out to solve the mystery of the drowned village of Bowood in Wiltshire has found the remains of buildings under a lake. These are both sides of the future of humans' relationship with water.

07.08.07

Since June 3rd, I have been nomadic. Stephanie, Clinton and I will have officially given up our Brooklyn apartment as of August 1, and although Clinton is touring Buffysings this summer, he is technically the only one still living there. Stephanie went to Jason and Miranda's Bushwick space for a short period of time, and now she is staying between her studio and her friend Chris's apartment. In August she will go to LA. On June 1st, Mira arrived to begin planning the Waterpod. By June 3rd, we had moved to Juan Puntes's place in the East Village while he toured the European art fairs, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. The space was the perfect work environment: a large studio loft with an immense amount of reading material, a great coffee percolator, and wireless Internet.
I stayed there until July 2nd, when an old friend's place, this time on the Upper East Side, became available. She is currently in San Francisco and isn't exactly sure when she will be back to New York. Meanwhile, in August I head off to Oxfordshire for almost the entire month, and return to New York to head directly to Nevada, and then Alaska. On September 12th, I return to New York, and am looking forward to perhaps a month in Williamsburg. It is possible that I might be a nomad in New York until the Waterpod is ready to be lived upon, a situation that would be more than fine.

06.20.07

Advanced Forestry: to represent the prosthetic collision of nature and technology. These trees are a cross between cell phone towers and natural trees. Webs of copper wire and other braided or latticed semiconductors surround these hybrids, with satellites made from maps and with variety of metal antennas.
As we know, a recent connection has been made between cell phone towers and the harming of nature, specifically, the bee population. Scientists are stating that a 25% loss in bee population in eleven countries may be due to their homing sensors conflicting with the amount of cell phone radio waves running through the air. Maps from every country suspected of bee loss due to cell phone rays were used to make satellites and bee hives on Advanced Forestry.

06.17.07

J. Lehan took these stunning images of Art Omi

05.28.07

Top 15 Books that have shaped and influenced me, in no particular order:

America: Jean Baudrillard, Silence: John Cage, In the Absence of the Sacred: Jerry Mander, The Revolution of Everyday Life: Raoul Vaneigem, Valparaiso: Don DeLillo, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art; A sourcebook of Artists' Writings, Phenomenology of the Spirit: Hegel, Irrational Man: William Barrett, The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemmingway, Eroticism, Death and Sensuality: Georges Bataille, Pale Fire: Valdimar Nabakov, On Being Blue: William Gass, The Lover's Discourse: Roland Barthes, The Ten Trusts: Jane Godall, and The Fall of Public Man: Richard Sennett. These are all books I still fully recommend.

05.26.07

Mach 2: A brief history: For years, patents for Mach 2 were pursued but suffocated by the oligopolistic reaction of the travel industry. The danger in Mach 2's ranged from their DIY nature (they can be homemade from common materials and custom fit to the user) to their renewable source of energy (they are charged with Hydrogen Peroxide). Run through the patent M2 filter, the most polluted of waters would sufficiently complete a Mach 2 engine. Upon closure of the digital divide, D.I.Y. Internet sites circulated the plans globally until they were commonplace. In 2009 the airline industry began to embrace different forms of the Mach 2 because the common man finally demanded personal flights. Flying a person out to a private destination had become the norm. Airline industries regulated a brand of Mach 2’s that exist alongside the unregulated called "N-wave": the car for the modern man, the extended environment, the bubble, the appendage, the prosthetic. Click Here for More on Mach 2 at Art Omi 2007/2008

05.20.07

Advanced Forestry includes the study of prosthetics, fakery, the common machine,and
Honey Bees
Aside from the United States, other countries reporting bee disappearances are: Canada, Spain, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and England. This is speculated to be a virus, radio waves, or maybe all of those Monsanto plants...It's very bad, whatever it is caused from.

An interesting article on the remapping of history and Iraq/Iran borders by Wilson Quarterly

Helpful Cellular News Link

A cell phone tree "nursery" at Preserved Treescapes International in Oceanside, California.

05.02.07

Mach number is the number of times the speed of sound an object or a duct, or the fluid medium itself, move relative to each other. It is named after Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. I have spent the last three days on 88th and CPW at the Snyder/Lawrence residence using John's wonderfully complete shop to construct Mach 2 (successfully surpassing the speed of sound).

04.27.07

Day 2 of 3 of the C6 conference in Chicago has concluded. Tonight at 9pm, Lynn Hershman Leeson's film "Strange Culture" will be screened at the Art Institute, but I decided to use that time to digest, discern and reinterpret the conference so far. I arrived late on Thursday due to increased cancellations and overbookments of flights to Chicago from New York. I heard the tail end of a truly riveting, moving, open, and affecting keynote given by Peter Sellars about the somber and explosive "Isenheim Altarpiece" made by over 112 women in Hamburg, South Africa. For the part I was fortunate enough to hear, Sellars spoke of everything from Monsanto

(“Monsanto would like nothing more than to be the sole source for staple crop seeds in this country and around the world," said Joseph Mendelson, CFS legal director. "And it will aggressively overturn centuries-old farming practices and drive its own clients out of business through lawsuits to achieve this goal.") - Center for Food Safety

to nature to death to evil (evil equals the straight line because the straight line can never be equated with equality) to the cultural weight of African cloth and the cultural reality of AIDS deaths yet the plain love that one can see within the community and the family, the support for the weak and the hurt, and the togetherness this results in. He quoted Rumi, "The wound is where the light enters" after stating that in America the weak are constantly under attack (because success is our only standard). His keynote ended with a standing ovation, his passion poured out like water on fire, and his dedication was so earnest in his tears of sorrow and joy that would erupt from his entire body as he spoke to a room full symposium-goers.
I was of course immediately determined not to miss a minute of the conference, and rushed out onto Michigan Ave. to locate my hotel, check in, change clothes, and rush back, just in time to be 15 minutes late for Tiffany Holmes, a very progressive artist, cultural thinker and "new technologies" professor. She explained Second Life, Greasemonkey and Google bombing as forms of public art. She had a terrific perspective but her talk was unfortunately limited to the idea that new technologies, when used by a dissenter, could inspire audiences to take their own voice. I came away not sure whether to applaud the dissenters' efforts that she covered or whether to see them as nothing more than novel distractions, not really doing anything positive or negative, rather as just sort of cool and just sort of there but hidden (greasemonkey) and you are cool if you know about it. Then she touched on some work that was more affecting like polluted air sensors (think of MOMA's SAFE show) and then her art, which is incredibly good. She works with eco-visualization concepts that allow a viewer to translate data into pictures. Of course the history of this is the richest - map making and its evolution is an absolutely amazing study.
Anne Pasternack gave an infinitely interesting rundown on Creative Time and how it came to fruition. She talked about Karen Finley and a project they did together called 1-900-ALL-KAREN, their expansion from New York. Ms. Pasternack was an extremely funny, genuine, and caring speaker. She spoke fast to cover a ton of information in her twenty minutes, and it all enforced what a caring facilitator she is, and what a prominent, powerful, and provocative institution Creative Time is. After her, Ruby Lerner took the microphone and spoke about another great non-profit arts realization group, Creative Capital. She talked about the markets, her interest in microfinance and new ways of thinking about and getting the most from invested money, about their working process with artists and creating a legacy of a piece of artwork. It was so wonderful to hear both of these powerful and strong women talk about their complete dedication to art.
Here were some other interesting explorations from day 1: "the institute for the future of the book"
Industry of the Ordinary
I caught a little of the next panel but left at about 3:45 to head over to Chicago Art, the art fair where Robert Mann Gallery is exhibiting.
Day 2: Today. John Winet was the first speaker and moderator of an interesting panel. He is an artist, activist and heads the Intermedia program at the University of Iowa. He had us watch a You Tube clip that he really loved because of the multicultural aspects, the mass appeal (Houston Rockets jerseys) and the insane amount of passion they had for the Backstreet Boys song "I Want it That Way". He showed another video and talked about citizen journalists and citizen artists, wanting to get both of those things away from their stigmas and their elitist club-like nature. He shared a lovely Gibson quote, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" and that summed up his message nicely. Francesco Bonami was the second speaker. He curated the 2003 Venice Biennale "Dreams and Conflict. The Dictatorship of the Viewer" and he had great points to make about the shift from a supply market to a demand market in the art world. He later spoke about that shift being a positive in other situations, where an audience could demand a company to be a better company and they might listen to keep their audience, but he is right in the fact that art doesn't have to be there for mass approval, it has to be stretching boundaries of thought, ideas, platforms, interactions, everything. Like companies who have to do better than their last quarter, every quarter, a museum now acts that way. They need to do more blockbuster shows and may or may not feel comfortable doing an edgier show because it probably will not bring in the numbers that Cezanne to Picasso will, for example. I'm convinced that this has a lot to do with peoples' overconsumption, with wasting resources, and almost every unethical business practice. This is the need propelled by shareholders to outdo oneself every quarter and every year, propelled by the media's portrayal of a company's situation. They are under attack from their demanding audience and their motto is to outdo, outsource and over expand.
Susan Harris was the next speaker. She works with Words Without Borders, a truly necessary institution that helps publish translated books, that publishes their own translated books and periodicals, and had an important website with translated texts. She spoke about the insidious way that our government tries to keep these texts, especially from embargoed countries like those included in the "Axis of Evil" (one of the most bigoted catch phrases and media buzz words I can remember) countries, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, North Korea...She points out that this censorship allows the US to promote these countries as backwards and inferior when a country like Iran produces 10,000 scientific papers yearly that are of course banned from translation in this country. This was a truly inspiring talk.
I missed a couple talks in there but was back in time for Rick Lowe, who discussed hybridity: of space, of ways of public interaction, of ideas, his Project Row Houses in Texas, and subsequent projects done in New Orleans. He discussed with us the need for a criticality that exists within the art dialogue for centuries to be transferred onto community art, but now there are too many reservations. He wants to "raise the criticality bar".
Day 2 part 2 began with an inspiring and energetic lecture from Erica Dalya Muhammad. She talked about electrocultures, futurist Diaspora media, and her amazing Mt. Vernon Hip Hop Arts Center project that she has turned into a social entrepreneurial model with the next one opening in Miami. Simone Aaberg Kærn walked the audience through an exciting project that she did called "Sky Sisters", named after a girl raised in Afghanistan who wanted to fly. Simone entered a dangerous mission to reach Afghanistan in a baby plane from Denmark. She described terrifying calls with governments and army patrols that said that they would shoot her plane if she dared enter into some territories. She, of course, went anyway with the fitting motto, "If you are small and persistent, nothing can stop you." After Kærn, Steven Burkes spoke about his design work for groups like Aid to Artisans based in Hartford, CT. right near my hometown. Finally, the keynote speech for the evening was Bruce Ferguson. To sum up his speech, here are some thoughts: Art has gone from supply driven to demand driven. "The word is coming to an end." The Modern Art Popular Culture show that were held at MOMA where "high" art was refreshed by the "low". Now, are we in the third period of art? Post Colonial environment, mediated, post... representations of all standards, cultures, and visions: 1- cinema 2- TV 3- the Emerging Hybrid Screen. The Mausoleum of Imperialism can't be kept any longer. Mass Culture is the dominant form of culture: Oprah, Brokeback Mountain. Crisis and opportunity is the redemptive moment? The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Is Globalism just a new form of cultural tourism, of neocolonialization? The net/web condition. The fact/fiction condition. They can't be separated. Atlantic Monthly listed Howard Roark as the most powerful person. Are we living in a global theme park? Weapons of mass distraction? Swag. spam. spin. Libraries without books exist but more paper is being used than ever. The increase in production of information does not equal the increase in production of knowledge. Freedom on the Internet is a delusion. Brazil, Turkey, Iran, etc. 35 countries only have deep web penetration, and most countries have 8.5% access. Can technology ever be a substitute for mourning? Can one grieve in the same way by taking a pilgrimage on the web? Cell phone culture. Swarms. Porn: loyalty, interactivity. Duchamp said that the artist thinks he is a genius, but he has to wait for the approval of the spectator. Referring to something in a work of art is NOT forming an argument. Art is part of the attention economy. We are going in a circle. From the world of literature and language and text BACK to sound and image. A new Esperanto is organically emerging. Recent arguments state that reading and language actually stunt creativity. Language can de-emphasize other sensory knowledge. "Spatial Literacy" was recently coined. A term that allows us to dumb down our culture with some scientific theory that begs us to consider this a good thing. Like doublethink, doublespeak, and double entendres such as "wage management initiative" meaning to fire people from jobs. The shift away from narrative and to common sense, understanding of role and meaning "Complex semantic map" collision of popular and elite. Art can have intervention, discursively, etc. however, responsibility and ethics are ever more important. Everyone may have a voice but these voices matter. He ends with a quote by Godard and Proverbs 23 Verse 18: People perish and there is no vision.

Day 3 - Natalie Jeremijenko,1999 Rockefeller Fellow, starts off with a discussion of structures of participation and how it fits in to sociotechnical change. Natalie created a website called How Stuff Is Made documenting the labor conditions, manufacturing process, and environmental impacts involved in a product. One of my very personal upsets is the section explaining the shrimp process with the shrimp market's destruction of ecosystemic mangrove forests that provide much of the protection needed to protect against storms and to breed healthy ecosystems in estuaries where many shrimp are farmed. Another wonderful project was titled "Zoo Backwards". Natalie created electronic ducks that could interact with real ducks by remote control and camera/sound control. Then there was Bruce Mau. Mau talked about his book Massive Change. His motto for massive change is Global Media=Pessimism and Massive Change = Optimism. He acutely pointed out that optimism is a structural necessity for sustainability. Massive Change needs to be about seduction where "green movement" has come to stand for punishment. He spoke about E. O. Wilson and Ray Kurzweil, and Kurzweil's time and learning curve trajectory. Like art, one of Mau's goals is to liberate design from "the eye". He ended with a quote from Stewart Brand, "If you really think things are getting worse, won't you grab everything you can while you can? If you think that things are getting better, you invest in the future." Jennifer Siegel followed Bruce Mau, and her talk was identical to a talk she gave a year ago, all the way down to the same Paul Virilio quote, so that was less interesting for me even though I really admire her work, and she mentioned the fact that she is now buying up property to sort of start her own sustainable town which is a very admirable feat and really exciting to hear. Lucy Orta was next, and she is sweet and passionate and it really comes across when one hears her talk. She creates wearable protective units to draw attention to homelessness and community, and talked about her new project in Antarctica called Antarctic Village. She covers tents with flags and inhabits Antarctica with other artists and some scientists creating a free community, as Antarctica is owned by all. Then we all had the privilege of hearing a discussion between Lawrence Weschler and David Buckland. They discussed David's Cape Farwell project after we all watched some video clips, saw some of David's video work about time and breeding and posthumans. Ruskin said curiosity is always optimistic and Ian McEwen said "Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self pleasuring. Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented era of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian Summer of Reckless denial? Is this the beginning or the beginning of the end? We finished the conference with artworks from Amy Balkin who was also working with public space (Antarctica) but with these interesting projects of collecting space for sale or free and taking steps to make it public, or taking steps to protect the atmosphere. The "atmosphere of commons". The "Kyoto gold standard". Her work was humorous and serious and just really brought the problems to light. Daniel Peterman showed us some great projects. My favorite things said were, "I use the art world as a receptacle. A place where things can spend time and gather meaning". That aptly describes some of the more random pieces, like the blown up airplane flight stub that I guess over time gathered the meaning or the questioning, "What is it worth getting on a plane? (What is my carbon footprint?)" Fun.

04.18.07

all ads are inverse ads

"All advertising is aimed at "hacking" our human capacity to ignore ads." by Deconference.com A real sign of the times (what isn't?)

04.15.07

The End Is Near.

Recently, there have been more and more studies that say cell phones don't cause cancer. Over a billion people use cell phones today. In the late 1990's, George Carlo ran the cell phone industry's six-year research project into mobiles' potential for harm. Carlo concluded that they were dangerous, increasing cancer risk and affecting pacemakers. The companies disputed his claim and told him they would no longer be requiring his services. I like to think of this as coincidence. Nevertheless, my suggestion would be this: as text messaging and email phones become more and more common, consider using the keypad more frequently. When you start to notice RSI, head for the closet and plug in the rotary. Here are a few interesting links sent to me by Leslie: SF Gate from January 14th and one on Bee Migration. Finally, find cell towers in your area: http://www.cellreception.com/towers/

04.09.07

View Pangaea Ultima and other artwork at: http://newclimates.com

04.08.07

Lately, as I read statistic after statistic of land-loss, desertification rates, factory farming land-depletion, and so forth, I have felt more and more passionate about the fact that humans are steadily creating (our) own destruction. This week's New York Magazine has a wonderful article on "Skyfarming", the brainchild of Dr. Dickson Despomier. "Skyfarming" is a way for cities to be local producers of their own fruits, vegetables, flowers, etc. These skyscraper greenhouses could allow for replanting and returning of precious forests and wildlife sanctuaries, and let factory farming move indoors. In the design, the building is outfitted with solar and wind power, titanium glass, and is modular and circular for maximum efficiency. At first glance, this would also seem to eliminate the need for GM technologies (many of which have been harmful to animals and sooner or later, people) as insects and animals will not have access to this indoor ecosystem. The planned date of arrival - 15 years. Much too distant. The prospective makers? Dubai, Iceland, and Japan for starters. Perhaps a more affordable version could be adapted, opening up the door to a plethora of cities and countries. With an overabundance of monsoon storms in parts of India such as Uttar Pradesh, only one growing season has been allowed. One ideal place for a "Skyfarm" would be Delhi. If Delhi could build a rendition of "Skyfarm", it would be useful for the people living in the city as well as the people on the rural farmlands, making food a less expensive commodity: smaller transportation cost and a more abundant food supply.

So, yesterday I read Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff's book, The Ten Trusts. They published this book in 2003, and it is a wonderful summary of their work with animals, their environmental work, the state of the world, and what we can do about it, including inspiring stories and the creation of the JGI "Roots and Shoots" program. This was a phenomenal way to prepare for some of the work that Mira and I plan to do on the Waterpod. Waterpod testing begins in June. Mira and I will experiment with new sail designs, new calendars and seaworthy maps, domed organic garden designs, local animal research and outreach, as well as a scholarly program on storytelling.

Economics: Largely, in the current exonomy, the success of a company is determined by its ability to achieveconstant growth and upward mobility. The pressure of shareholders in a public company seems to have reached a highly accelerated rate. Instead of a slower, sustained growth, companies now reach a tipping point much sooner at the expense of ever-decreasing resources and the waste that inevitably accompanies this. I learned recently that after rent, Starbucks's second greatest expense is milk, not coffee. Milk, what a giant, disturbing business (and not the most disturbing, by any means). Growing animals in a factory farm (recent article in NYTimes link) is a major cause of rainforest destruction, desertification, leading to speed up rates of global warming, species extinction, food and water waste, alongside air, land and water pollution. In small steps: Burger King has just announced it will stop getting its pork and eggs from farms that confine animals to cages or crates. Some of the more viable solutions that I have read about salvaging the environment demand that the earth be included in economic trade. For instance, if the carbon trade is done right, it could mean that a company actually paid a tax to its particular government, and that tax money would be used to clean up the damage done to the earth. In the Forbes April 16th issue, Jesse Shapiro wrote an article called "Should Clean Water Have a Price?" raising very poignant questions regarding the respect people give to products that they must purchase over handouts. Studies conducted through Harvard Business School show that when a person has to pay even a small amount for something, he or she is much more likely to get a better use out of the item. Ben Franklin once said, "When the well is dry, we will know the worth of water."

Reiterated from The Ten Trusts is that if we are the more intelligent life forms on earth, then we need to be the stewards of the earth. (Here: Dave Pollard has 10 suggestions for something each of us can consider) A philosophy of the Western world has largely been that of "humans first". That belief has misled us as a capitalist culture, as we assume the right to overuse the land, unnecessarily kill animals even to the point of extinction, dredge swamps and wetlands to build malls, etc. etc. etc. Here is a quick sum up:
• Human beings are adding to their current population of over 6 billion at the rate of 100 million new people a year; by 2050, a world population of 9.2 billion is predicted according to a just-released UN assessment.
• Industries have chopped down half of the world's rainforests and over-fished 70% of the costal areas, lakes and major rivers, causing numerous side effects including destroying essential mangrove forests and leaving nothing for locals.
• In a warming world, glacial ice and permafrost arerapidly melting in the Polar Regions, Greenland, and mountains, destroying animal habitats and creating millions of environmental refugees through rising sea levels and destructive storms as a result of warming weather. Many species will die because of increased heat and disease, including ourselves.
• Human consumption levels currently exceed the planet's regenerative capacity by 25 percent.

03.18.07

The SpeedVoyage began three and a half hours after the sleepy Kansas City Airport. It began when Stephanie Dedes and I picked up our Avis Ford Focus in Los Angeles, and plugged in the borrowed GPS system. We explored the desert-jungle called Los Angeles that night and awoke to a Los Angeles sunrise. Warm, vast, simulated, joyous. We arrived in Joshua Tree midday, where we unpacked our many recording devices and cameras, did some minor rocketry, tree testing, sampled the water, and took specimens of every plant we came across. The desert: a truly extrordinary piece of drama. We met up with two Californians and ate at the Carousel Restaurant, a place on the edge of the park. The Restaurant reminded me that I was in movieland, as I suddenly realized that I had turned off Lost Highway to find this Fellini mansion full of ex-circus workers on their way to try out for Carrie 2. The restaurant was spooky, dramatic (the word "bitch" and tears were flying from the eyes and mouths of the waitstaff), topsy-turvy, and spectacular. Later, we examined the specimens against a book of native Joshua Tree plants, to see what changes in their makeup had occurred, since the time that the book was written and the recent environmental disasters that have taken place. At 4am, we were heading towards the Salton Sea. The speed of driving continued to clash with the slowness of geology. Sunrises are enormous on flat land, and south of Palm Springs, California, it is quite flat. Amazed, we stopped and mediated this experience in every way possible. We spent the majority of day number two circling the sea, exploring the contents; the fish, the once beckoning and now nearly abandoned towns, the springs and the wildlife surrounding Salton Sea South. We chatted with the neighbors and tried to understand the wasteland before making our way to the Imperial Sand Dunes and the Chocolate Mountains, and finally on a whim, down to Mexico. By the time we crossed the border in Mexicali to get back into the US, it was nearly dark (7:30pm became our necessary bedtime on dark open roads after driving nonstop). We slept overlooking the sand dunes and awoke at sunrise (6am in March) to the slow, subtle appearance of windblown dunes. We collected some sand to use later, and spent day number three exploring middle California: a pastoral land America has deemed "reservation", some groves producing fresh oranges, numerous types of Californian drip coffee, and even a strip mall or two, reaching LA again at 5pm, avoiding the worst of the parking lot California calls I-10. Here the desert has been turned into an inhabitable series of loops and gracious curves, promising flux and mobility, and finally merging with the stillness of the land. We spent the evening in LA attending a lecture at the Skirball Cultural Center, had a fine dinner, camped out at a magnificent hotel, and stayed in LA until 5:30am. We pulled out of the hotel to the glow of another LA sunrise, movie-magic, warm and cool, effervescent and calm, dead and undying. Finally, we traversed much ground and reached Death Valley at 4:30pm, through Shoshone to Devil’s Golf Course, at the center of the dry seabed, where the salt loomed 5' thick, tall, hard, static. Death in all of its majesty. It was luxurious to tour like we just had, and now we would spend the rest of our time here in Death Valley, so we started on foot from Devil's Golf Course, to test fate. We slept under the stars and after four days, the full became the empty, and the silence the screaming life, the invisibility, and the discovery.

03.03.07

Last night, I attended a wonderful dinner party at John and Jenny Snyder's home. In a room filled to capacity with writers, naturally the conversation about the positive and negative sides of a digifying textual world were brought up. I have been working on a collaborative story, in an accessable choose-your-own-adventure style, that has not made itspresence online yet. However, the website does contain a future space for it. In the meantime, I would love to know peoples' thoughts on an ever-changing medium. If people are so inclined to share thoughts on the present stage of writing, I would like to use that space to publish these thoughts. Recently, I have been studying some of the theories of N. Katherine Hayles. She is one of a handful of theorists who promotes the many facets of digital change in writing, including collaborative writing and other experimental forms of digital texts. I am interested to see if people think that these experiments might be a progressive or regressive step towards something, and to see what people think about collaborative storytelling (is this closer to natural tendencies? Will it create wonderful things or just bad, garbled texts?) Is a proliferation of producers a good thing, as it inspires, stimulates, and adds to our collective experience, or a distracting thing, as it creates more often mediocre or poor results?

02.28.07

New Studies have found a 10 point drop in IQ Over a Day's Time With the BlackBerry and Similar Partial Attention Devices
In our Always-On World that includes constantly scanning for opportunities within a galaxy of possibilities, BlackBerrying under the table at dinners or meetings has been found to keep people in a stage of ADD-like alertness from 7am-10pm, and finally cause them to seek refuge at a yoga or meditation class at some point before, after, or during a mediated meltdown. Recent studies have shown that the output of good work getting done during these hours is 30% less, and the ability to have a "decent" conversation 15% less. (Paraphrasing Linda Stone, formerly a senior executive at Apple and Microsoft, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review of Feburary 2007)

Then... Leo Villareal's show at Gering & López, up now.

02.25.07

When the public finally took notice, it was 43 years ago. Two billion people worldwide were mobilizing through desertified lands. 1/5 of Amazonia had been destroyed in fifty years' time. That escalated in an astounding unprecedented feedback loop. Nobody had suspected the impending doom. Constant seismic shifting had destabilized our continental understanding, as we veered back towards Pangaea. Pangaea Ultima. What had remained of the forests were only fields of petrified wood, and as technologies proliferated man's existence, the only remainder of forests were cell tower farms, that had been molded to look like trees. In extreme places here, the sewers were overflowing into the land, corroding its edges and seeping into the clean water reservoirs in the lower water table. The sewer pipes had corroded and rusted due to mass excavation of irons and other toxic metals. When the human population reached eight billion, rainforests were turned into deserts. Entire lands were paved and as the permafrost began to melt, it would cause the concrete to wither and melt, buckle and sink into the earth. Where once there were grass and shrubs, now there was a black, bubbling, netherworld. Pangaea Ultima

02.23.07

Pulled from the Stern Review: Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, and it interacts with other market imperfections. Three elements of policy are required for an effective global response. The first is the pricing of carbon, implemented through tax, trading, or regulation. The second is policy to support innovation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies. And the third is action to remove barriers to energy efficiency, and to inform, educate, and persuade individuals about what they can do to respond to climate change.

sidereal time link >
making sense of time, earthbound and otherwise >
the latest on 3-D printing is actually on Wikipedia? >

02.13.07

The feedback loop and the notion of reflexivity: that which is used to generate the system is in fact part of the system, and as it relates to the economy. The notion of the self creates the rise of the economy (Mataronos neologism meaning self making: autopoiesis)

difference between cognition and consciousness...is huge. cognition can basically be found in any living or nonliving entity, this places less emphasis on consciousness which usually links with embodiment, making it a small step. whate about distribulted cognition with web programs uniting many people working on the same document

dismanteling our body boundaries

by the body not in the body, and they are all prostythes - the computer even the body, is there an external memory storage option for our bodies?

01.31.07

I think this will be amazing (launching February) WiserEarth: an open source editable relational database of social and environmentally responsible businesses or organizations that need to connect. This is really an enormous movement, but until now, each organization was in relative disconnect from its like-minded brothers and sisters. This will be a great resource and most likely a giant alliance-maker. It has the possibility to give a place to an exponential, placeless movement.

01.25.07

For more graphs, charts, decipherable systems, maps, see Dave Pollard's Blog

01.24.07

Click to virtually visit the Waterpod™ Life in the future. In water, the Waterpods™ are communal resting places, replacing islands because of their own mobility and built-in safety infrastructure.

01.18.07

Recently, I have had a handful of inquiries about my title choice with "Loss-Accountability of Top-Down Ontologies" and "Seven-Firm Oligopoly". so I just wanted to put it out there. Loss-Accountability is about the political struggle of nature versus large corporate agendas, and similarly Seven-Firm is on the globalization struggle and the shrinking seven bodies of land. Currently, I am working on a video where the land begins to head back to Pangea. (NY Times Link) Yes, I''m not the only one who thinks so.

Right now, human activity is producing 300%more carbon dioxide per year than the earth's natural carbon sinks can absorb. (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and human well-being; synthesis report. Washington DC Island Press 2005). It is fascinating that humans have come to the high-plane on the scale of evolution wherein we know that we are causing our own extinction.

01.17.07

Ramsay Barnes got married! Momi, whom he met via his scooter in Baltimore, is a very talented artist, amongst other things. I flew to Oahu (my first time in Hawaii) on Friday for a SpeedVoyage, and currently I am in the Atlanta, GA airport waiting for my connecting flight back to New York. Wow! What majestic, magisterial, magnetic vistas, views, and voyages over there. The wedding was one of the most heartfelt, lovely, loving and touching weddings I have ever had the pleasure of attending. Ramsay asked me if I wanted to photograph the wedding, and looking back I am thankful I did not, as I have a talent for screwing up weddings. More than that, it gave me a better chance to meet and talk with Momi and Ramsay's new friends, listen to the sermon on the hillside, let my thoughts drift off with the sunset...and that’s how the whole week went, drifting off into the sunset. So the wedding was unforgettable, held right next to sacred Polynesian grounds, and right in front of the South Pacific. The next day I was off for the Big Island. I landed in Hilo around 10am, picked up a rental car and headed up rt. 11 towards Volcanic National Park, stopping to check in at the lovely "My Island Bed and Breakfast" run by Gordon Moore, an author and photographer as well as owner of this fine B&B nestled an acre away from Old Volcano Rd. in Volcano Village, in the oozing green mossy paradise sprinkled with flowers and heavily wooded. I headed straight away for the Volcanic National Park and was literally blown away by the first steam vent emitting from the earth that I crossed, and probably spent an hour photographing that one not realizing that an entire park-load was awaiting my next twist around the bend.
So after breakfast, I make my way to the southern most tip in the US - quite a jungle down there! Really rickety windmills next to their progressive new counterparts, and then the bakery the best on the island. I had some bread, and headed back up to cloud level - 4000ft. Today it wasn't raining so I cut it as close as possible and re-photographed everything I had photographed the day before, but this time in the sun and light mist, before racing down to Hilo for a helicopter’s view of the volcanic action. WOW! Never have I seen such things! Was this earth I was on? Planet Hell? I filmed and photographed the place to death. So then we land. I wind my way around Banyan trees and waterfalls before finding RT 200, which takes me up to the dizzying height of 9000ft above sea level. Enough to make you sick driving. And on the way...the snarled land had been ripped, torn, uprooted, shredded into globular, mangled black messes. Every 100 feet, a petrified tree would stand, tall and ashen. At the top, the air was thin. Cows grazed, the wheat glowed iridescent in the sun, a few shrubs, lava fields, dirt; red red dirt. I wandered until about 6pm when I decided to coast back to Hilo, get some take out and return to the Volcanic National Park, this time sans room, only with car. We camped together in the gloom and creep of the park at night. I warmed up the car 3 times and took it out to the southern rift once. Parked, watched the sky as it was quickly swallowed up by sulfur surrounding and suffocating me like a ghost. I returned red to his parking spot and we slept. At 4:30 I was up for good. My flight leaving the island was at 9, so I decided that if I left then, I would make it down to Pahoa, and then from there could go see the molten lava, but from the opposite side, at Kaimu Beach. It took me all of an hr. to get there and at 530, it was still dark except for my headlights. At 6am I reached a "road closed except to residents" sign and since I could see nothing beyond the sign I decided to obey it. It sounded as if the ocean was right there. Well, it was 6, I had a few more hours. I was a bit nervous to get out of the car. I decided to go to the southeastern most point of Kapoho Bay and take the highway to it, then make a loop back to Hilo to catch the plane. As I embarked down this narrow road, I could feel the water close in. The road was like a covered bridge; giant banata trees expanded a block and covered the sky with their entwined leaves. The monstrous Banyan trees with their hanging vines and roots and doorways made me uneasy in the dark. At the first reflection of a sun on the earth, I could see the waves crashing up almost to the side of the road itself, the sinister water. I continued on this road that drove like a children’s rollercoaster, through jungles, passing a few huts, a couple resort-type destinations, dark roads, a family of gravestones. I then saw flowers all placed on a bluff, like an offering to the sea. ) I manage to make it back to the airport and back to Oahu somehow, though. So there I am, my old rental SUV that I left parked at the airport, and I. We drive under, around, and through these foggy mountains not unlike Scotland's bluffs and reach the sunrise side.

01.07.07

FORE CAST - MIDNIGHT MASS

I'm not sure just how many people attended the Midnight Mass performance on Christmas morning, but people came and left and came and recame and people stayed. The midnight mass was 2.5 hrs long, and accompanied by the hymns of my family; the McElheron Family Singers. Armed with blow torches and other implements, Corey Mervis, Jenn Wirtz and I performed the candle-lighting ceremony.

01.05.07

The problem is, to quote John Maynard Keynes, "Practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
The prisoner's dilemma: China is building a coal-fired power station a week to feed demand, and India's economy is close behind. If either decided to suddenly stop (or even could stop) their carbon-fuelled development to lift their billions of people out of poverty they would face a revolution, yet if they continued, rising CO2 and temperatures would kill off plants and produce famine. (I paraphrased this from Jeremy Lovelock, with whom I consensually agree on this matter)

Are there alternatives to the fiction that is the Market? Here is a sampling of a variety of economic strategies:
Household economies
Gift economies
Barter economies
Gathering economies
Cooperative economies
Community Market economies

We need to create our own "churches", our own societies, our own mutual-aid collectives. We need to create our own viral words for such things, to adopt the connotation of church as community while eschewing its ideological baggage.

For the past year, I have been inspired to keep a dictionary of a new word per day. There are two kept, actually. One is a word that is new to me and the second is in collaboration with David: a newly invented word per day. Here are the top three in the 2006 dictionary of words/phrases/concepts new to me:

Eruv
Scopophilic
The Prisoner's Dilemma

12.10.06

FORE CAST.
AN OPERA by MARY MATTINGLY with live performance by Derek Junck and Mira Burke with THE REDCOATS ARE COMING!
Opening December 19, 2006 at 6pm – December 25, 1am.
WHITE BOX. 525 W. 26th Street. New York, NY. 10001

Fore Cast is a clarion call anticipating the looming environmental urgency. Fore Cast is an interactive Opera, opening at White Box on December 19, 2006, at six o’clock pm. Fore Cast will transform White Box’s space into a waterlogged, apocalyptic swampland, soundscape, and videosurround. The opening night will feature live performances with an original opera score by members of The Redcoats Are Coming! Antonious Block and Apples and Arrows'.
Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness the land’s predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a topographical perspective of the new world. The marshy waterscape is the setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV, a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. The installation explains the tragic outcomes of this hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.
Multiple video projectors arranged in a circle fill the walls of White Box and present a “Fore Cast” that will loop for six days and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly’s proprietary uniform time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical methodology and translated to a system for future use.) The videos play continuously in White Box's waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV, fought by six groups of combatants ---The World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestlé, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.--- colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered and borderless world. The belligerents’ leaders plot together in corporate conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, sticks and stones, the war unfolding in aqueous and terrestrial environments everywhere.
Fore Cast will run for six days and one hour, from the morning of December 19, until 1:00 am on Christmas morning. (I will be living in the gallery.)

(My bed at White Box during the show)

(Derek Junck's sculpture "Artists Survival Suitcase" was part of the Fore Cast installation)

Art In the Age of Global Communication, Commodification, Consumption, and Celebration.
Art Basel, 2006. It was a brief trip for me. Since the last time I attended (two years ago), the already abundant fairs had multiplied. At least 12. The art could be seen from the highways, projected onto the sides of buildings, from the beach, oozing out of shipping containers, from the sidewalk, hotels emitting videobox light and the proliferation of flyers leading to a never-ending paper trail of rented space for a small show to an impromptu performance in a parking lot. In a way, I want to equate it to Burning Man although at the essence, one has to do with Fame and Fortune, while the other still prides itself on Community and Collaboration. Of course, there's more: One takes place in a major city and one in the middle of the desert, one you buy a ticket at the gate, and the other you sell your soul for (ha!) - however, they both do like to have an enormous amount of give-aways and spectacles. The DiVA fair in containers at the beach was quite seductive (I stumbled onto it at night, with the spotlights illuminating the sand, water, and comparitively low-lying containers, arranged into a fitting panopticon shape, with the center being "The Village." White Box had a great installation the night I came by. Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce Korotkin, both exceptionally intelligent people who curated a really well-done show that I was part of called "Out of True" (an architectural term for skewed construction) - a show about a varying array of visions discerning our contemporary world and the disparity between reality and dis?reality, was, surprise surprise, one of my favorite exhibitions. Perrogi also had a great show on the Antarctica Ice Block, cut out and saved by Tavares Strachan with the engineering help of MIT. On Friday, Dave Smith and I took a small road trip to the everglades area, stopping on Key Largo, in Florida City and the speedway, Manatee Bay- where we saw a vast array of those monstrous beauties, the mangrove trees. We stopped at tree farms, gas stations, empty lots, and out of all that, but the mangroves were my favorite sights. We probably spent most of that day in traffic talking about the ego and art - a subject not to be ignored at a location such as Miami in December. All in all, every art fair came complete with its own style, and each style was redeemable. Of course it has to be, styles change so fast. You have your classics, your Yves Saint Laurent’s, to your Issey Miyake’s and of course your Imitation’s of Christ.

12.04.06

Tonight. 12.04.06. 10:44pm, and the first time in months I have sat down to write. I have been working diligently on Fore Cast, a water-opera that will open at White Box, a non-profit art space in Chelsea, NY, on December 19th. With tree stumps, sand, salt, steam, sonorous operatics, streaming video, sea-water, and a story about WWIV, Fore Cast is about the future. People wear masks (just like in Victorian England), and really, time is time, time is unexplained, irrelevant, played with and time is completely over explained, in 360 degrees, in the new week, in the fact that I will live at White Box for the entire run of the opera.

On October 4, 2006, The Financial Times Energy Editor wrote "The incidence of moderate drought will double to affect half the world by the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, according to a study backed by the british government. It also suggests a rise in extreme drough from 1 per cent at present to 30 per cent. I saved this article because the study's results are horrifying and political action is necessary. This article in the FT was following a series of articles in the New York Times about the current water crisis in India and the developing world; the rationing, the lack of any clean water, the rancid water pollution, the economic expense, and the death.

Like millions of others, I have become fascinated with Second Life, but not from playing it, but from reading about it. Could this be like Burning Man was for me? I was fascinated from afar by Burning Man. To a great extent, even when I was there, I was fascinated from afar. How much does one really understand something without fully immersing him/herself in it? How can we compare the experience of book knowledge next to the physical experience? Can Second Life ever be the physical experience? Will I really see people buying from American Apparel? Is abstract literally the new realism?

In an article titled "The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe," which appears in the May 28, 1999 issue of the journal Science, a group of cosmologists and physicists from Princeton University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory survey the wide range of evidence which, they write, "is forcing us to consider the possibility that some cosmic dark energy exists that opposes the self-attraction of matter and causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate." The simplest explanation for dark energy is that it is simply the "cost of having space": that is, a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy. This is the cosmological constant, sometimes called Lambda (hence Lambda-CDM model) after the Greek letter ?, the symbol used to mathematically represent this quantity. Since energy and mass are related by E = mc2, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that it will have a gravitational effect. Although Einstein later abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it a blunder, it would not go away. It is the one theorized form of dark energy that does not change with time. Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said, “We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” about dark energy. Adam is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. -NY Times and Wikipedia

I was in awe of the beautifully simple title adorning the front page of the NY Times, Science Times, Tuesday, November 14. Ancient Crash, Epic Wave. The article explores something I had never heard of, chevrons in the earth's surface, composed of the ocean floor. They contain deep ocean microfossils and metals formed by COSMIC IMPACTS. This article was about the discovery of four new chevrons near Madagascar, "as deep as the Chrysler Building is high". The explanation is a large asteroid or comet smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a Tsunami at least 600 ft high, 13x larger than the one that engulfed Indonesia almost two years ago.

There was an interesting article in New York Magazine on the 27th of November about weather patterns, hurricanes, and how New York is long overdue for its big storm. The article went on to lay out the devastation the city would face, with the buildings acting as wind tunnels, a "Bernoulli effect" (named after the Dutch/Swiss mathematician/scientist Daniel Bernoulli which states that the sum of all forms of energy in a fluid flowing along an enclosed path [a streamline] is the same at any two points in that path.) Apparently, 5 years ago, Malcolm Bowman, a SUNY professor must have been reading my blog, because he met with the heads of the Port Authority to propose a trio of massive hydraulic gates to protect New York from the huge storm surge in the event of a hurricane. I read that and felt like something good came of those late nights of exhaustive stream-of-consciousness gushing about apostruptures and how NYC needs to build a sea-wall out into the streaming, feeding, connected world.

10.06.06

NY TIMES article: How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization. It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.
So far eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized and 85,000 have sought medical attention, paralyzing the fragile health care system in a country divided and impoverished by civil war, and the crisis has forced a government shakeup...

Ivory Coast, September 2006

10.03.06

For the past century, marketing has been geared towards the individual because hey, we can continually sell that way, discovering and marketing a new niche, expanding our audience with more differences within the same, all for unnecessary things, because as we simplified and automated life in the developed world, we still needed a challenge, and the fruits of our challenges are contained in material ends.

Machines Make Life Easier and The Case for Human Dignity.

10.03.06

Last night, Christina and I carried an enormous amount of logs from Tompkins Square Park over to S'mack, a new restaurant that serves over ten types of Macaroni and Cheese. Simultaneously, David and Romny were on their way down to Lafayette and Bond, where I had noticed all sorts of fake plants during the day and the two of them (or I have a feeling David coercing Romny) so kindly volunteered to meet me there to see if they were still there. I arrived at our meeting spot in awe to find an entire forest of potted plants still by the roadside, and not only that, they were all fake and placed near the trashcans at each corner of the intersection. We collected as many as we could and filled Romny's trunk, drove up to the East Village where Christina had picked up our Mac and Cheese order, ate heartily, and (David) managed to stealthily stuff the logs in the trunk of a cab before the driver knew what was happening. With the yellow trunk tied shut with a bungee cord, and the plants stuffed in Romny's trunk, Christina and I were off. Have I mentioned how much I love David's heroic acts and adventurous antics? Today, in the studio, I am working on a powerpoint presentation for the Waterpod, and begin to carve the logs into war weapons. In small victories, I have recently gained the excitement of White Box and 3RD WARD to help with the Waterpod. Now all we need are Mira Burke, and Mayor Bloomberg...

09.25.06

In 1994, Robert Kaplan wrote an essay called "The Coming Anarchy" in the Atlantic Monthly, predicting that environmental scarcities would contribute greatly to insurrection, civil disturbances, and finally the next world war. To speed up the expedition of clearcutting Asia's rainforests deadly violence is taking place in places like Iran Jaya. Israeli-Palestinian conflicts are over water as much as anything else, and in the Ivory Coast and Liberia cocoa, diamonds, and timber are the cause of most civil wars. With the enormous and steady population growth, these situations will only worsen until societies plan with a sustainable infrastructure, until people provision, repair, and replenish. We can be aggregators for our community, and potentially a limitless audience of users.

The Japanese Esquire team comes to my studio, 2006

09.16.06

When Buckminster Fuller was alive, he predicted that housing would one day become a service, similar to the service that he assumed water would be. Something that should be provided to everyone. His idea was a polemical change in the way we are starting to think about housing. As a nomadic lifestyle becomes more and more necessary, the wearable home will become a more sensical, practical option, and the printable wearable home will have the opportunity to be a free service worldwide. Right now I have been spending a lot of time designing the WaterPod, a good alternative to overcrowded, shrinking landmasses and a great place to stop and rest for the nomad.

I have been reading a book on Posthumanism, a collection of essays. Half-way in, an essay by Baudrilliard is particularly interesting. He writes that viruses (biological, network/computer related) and terrorist acts all keep humanity at bay from our ultimate goal and quest of a completely networked posthumanism. In another essay, Paula Rabinowitz states "Eliminating the distinction between action and articulation, deed and word, the posthuman body is still saturated in the stories of humanity that circulate around it; it speaks through a language straddling the borders between health/sickness, male/female, real/imaginary. It tells its stories, however, through those already told." ... So, Richard Sennett wrote this book called "The Fall of Public Man", and one part that has stayed with me to this day (and probably will continue to stay with me) is his deconstruction of eras, particularly the Victorian Era with his description of the masks people learned to wear. It is 12:30 on Tuesday morning and I am in the studio, working on photographs, a drawing, doing some reading and rewriting the opera's script. Yes, all that. Today, I did get out. I went to Laumont and Beth Schiffer, then spent an hour at Le Gamin, a cafe near the studio. I had a coffee with fruit and yoghurt at 2pm. Shirley and Katherine came over around 4pm and we sculpted some mangrove trees and worked on a tower of babel sculpture. We also had a few pieces of swiss chocolate with pralines that David brought by. Delicious. So I have been here all day for almost the entire weekend, I am working on these files that are too big for Photoshop CS to (re)open, so I have to transfer the files to open them in another program. It occurred to me tonight, looking at test prints, looking around the studio at the gold masks, the drawings of the gold masks, and the wearable homes, that they all act as barriers. The composition in the photographs, especially the recent photographs taken out west, all contain natural barriers before getting to the subject. Bodies of water, trees, plants, or a human with his back towards us. A subconscious distancing. What happens when subconscious finally becomes conscious? Hopefully, I'm a step closer to posthumanism through photography.

Tuesday and Wednesday evening were both openings for the ICP's triennial. Below are pictures of Bob and Orly, and some pictures of the outside of the ICP, to illustrate an extremely large "New Mobility of Home (The Nobility of Mobility)" on the building's side. Wow!

09.03.06

SpeedVoyage: The fastest amount of time it takes for one to have a grasp and understanding of a culture, of a geological standing, of the terrarium of life within the specific place, and the ability to relate one's grasp of the greater place to a global reality. I just took a SpeedVoyage to the west coast. The trip officially began in Black Rock Desert for Burning Man. A trip I shared with best friend Ashawnta Jackson and her beau Matt LaPenna, Mira&Derek, the Love Army, David, Corey, Leslie, Mike, and Bill. I did not stay the entire week at Burning Man, but instead embarked upon a SpeedVoyage, with two days to go from the Reno Airport (where I picked up the rental car) across on Rt. 80 (stopping at and everywhere in between Pyramid Lake, Winnemucca, staying overnight at Stockmans in Elko, Angel Lake, the Bonneville Salt Flats, the Great Salt Lake, Provo, Eureka, Delta, Ely, Austin, Sand Mt. and finally back to Reno. 1,300 miles in 2 days. Budget Rental was shocked!) On the last leg of the trip, racing with the setting sun, I was lucky enough to experience a full-on desert storm, not had I experienced one like that since the summer of 2001. Bolts of lightning illuminated the sky, temporarily breaking through the darkness while the moon would occasionally peek through the endless storm clouds. One's depth of field and vision is greatly askew in the desert. Until it was upon me, I had no idea if I was close to or far away from the rain. The majesty and grandeur of the mountains, flats, desert, bushes, tumbleweed, evergreens, the shale, the gradations and striations of rock, the salt, salt, salt, was breathtaking. The elementality of the earth, encroached upon by the fabrications of technology. It has occurred to me that the earth has become a stage for contemporary culture and homogenous non-culture, a stage for action and interaction. Place is alive for people during their time and space with it and has only the significance of memory when it is not present. The subtleties of the earth's language and voice are often overlooked, as our contemporary languages are so loud in comparison. One comes away realizing that the unrelenting monochromatic land is so powerful because of its monsterous quietness. (Below: Snapshots from the SpeedVoyage, 2006.)

There are two interactions with the earth: absorptive or reflective. I am constantly trying to capture and express a yearning yet an inability to absorb. With the combinative process of photography, a placemerge is allowed to happen; several places create new collusive possibilities - in landscape; new predictive telluric changes and re-location of imagination. As the cut-up maps and mapping of the land from aerial photographs, photography configures new and predictive spaces. The nomadic subject adjusts, re-configures, and re-learns what it means to survive. When I think of the nomad, that person can be an environmental or political refugee, a wanderer, a displaced worker, an explorer, a gamer forging new virtual lands, a voyager, a helper, a mapper, and in not much time I expect essentially anyone and everyone will be re-focused on survival, acclimation, and movement. (Below: Snapshots from the playa, 2006.)

07.19.06

From Businessweek Online, June: "You won't need a VIP invitation to attend the forthcoming grand opening party for the newest American Apparel store—you just need a virtual avatar. The Los Angeles-based maker of trendy T-shirts is currently organizing a late-July soiree at its latest location: a computer-generated boutique within the parallel online universe of Second Life.
BUILDING INTEREST. Next month, American Apparel will start hiring virtual sales clerks from among Second Life's citizens. But while buzz has been building, not all of it has been flattering. Not long after the virtual store opened, a group of Second Lifers staged a protest against the company's controversial use of sexually suggestive images of women in its real-world ads. Still, attention is attention, and, as some observers say, American Apparel's move might signal fresh marketing strategies for retailers and video game companies alike. "We wanted to charge something for the clothes, so that they would have value," says American Apparel's Schionning. "We're not trying to make a profit. But we know there is a lot to be learned in this arena."
While the American Apparel store is the first major retail outlet in Second Life, it isn't the first online. Way back in 1999, Active Worlds, a Newburyport (Mass.) maker of software for constructing 3D virtual environments, launched an online mall called @mart. It featured stores by small businesses—arts and crafts vendors, for instance—as well as big-brand retailers like Banana Republic and J. Crew."

07.08.06

Last night, after working quite late, it occurred to me how much globalization sounds like glow-ball-ization. David's reaction was, "Wouldn't that be a great Burning Man theme camp?"

06.28.06

Some of the biggest news to date is the 30.7 billion dollar contribution given to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Each year, 5% of BH shares will be gifted to the Foundation, on the condition that either Bill or Melinda is alive to head policy for the Foundation. The next few weeks will be spent prioritizing the funds from the Foundation between the Global Health, Education, etc. The philanthropy is so inspiring, heart-warming, and necessary, especially on this enormous level. It will really set a magnificent, transcendent example for other companies and individuals behavior, motivate others to give back in a food-chain effect. AND the bar is set so high - 60B.

06.25.06

click here to witness some really egregious anti-environmental propaganda (visit: http://streams.cei.org/)

The MOMA has a terriffic show from the Edward R. Broida collection, including the artwork of Jake Berthot (a professor of mine at Yale for the summer), Vija Celmins, Christopher Wilmarth, and a truly beautiful multi-panel piece called Rhapsody by Jennifer Bartlett. I only got to begin the DADA show - a show that needs its own day, especially after immersing oneself in the Broida collection. However, something that has affected me me even more was the second floor of the Morgan Library/Museum, just reopened after three years, redesigned by Lorenzo Piano, and housing some of the rarest illuminated texts, scores, letters, bibles, notebooks, relics, seals, jewelry, etc. etc. etc! WOW!!! IT was so touching, extraordinary, engrossing, and really really inspiring. The Bronte Sisters, Mozart, John Cage, Dickens, Rembrant, Rubens, Gutenberg Bibles, Twian, DaVinci. Amazing. Then - Clinton McClung writes about the East Village Dumpling Wars (visit his blog at: http://residentclinton.livejournal.com/). I have a few brilliant interns working with me this spring and summer, one of whom is Shirley Hu, daughter of the owner of Plump Dumpling, so Clinton's blog entry takes off on that.

6.23.06

< Allan Pinkerton > link (visit:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Pinkerton)

The race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Keeping control - New robo-ethics recommendations
Safety Ensure human control of robot | Security Prevent wrong or illegal use | Privacy Protect data held by robot o Traceability Record robot’s activity | Identifiability Give unique ID to each robot | Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics | Robot may not injure human or, through inaction, allow human to come to harm | Robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with first law | Robot must protect itself if this does not conflict with other laws

Bruce Sterling just wrote a great piece in this month's Artforum Magazine; an attempt to persuade more people in creative fields to step up to the plate and talk about global warming, supposedly following the footsteps of the fashion industry. He talks about the recent green issues coming out of magazines like the Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Elle Magazine. Unfortunately, he neglects to see all of the work done in other industries, believing fashion is the only place that global warming is rightly being talked about. Fortunately, it is being talked about everywhere, from BusinessWeek to The Economist, to General Electric, to Wired Magazine, to Morgan Stanley, to the NY Times, to Al Gore… and I could go on and on. Sterling basically wants to defend the fashion world and tell environmentalists to get off of their high horse - which is an important point - we will get much more done if we all work together, and the "better than thou" attitude that so many people have is exceedingly counter-productive and ridiculous.

6.06.06

Just in case you have not been turned on to The Urban Dictionary, a very developed, informative, interesting, intelligent way to track the American English language through a wiki form, the popularity of items, new terms, new proper-noun-become-verb words. Besides that, like 04/05/06, today we have 06/06/06. It will be a long time before this happens again. Six is one of those magic numbers that fits perfectly into the 360 degree day.

6.01.06

There is a rumor that biosphereII will be torn down. (visit: http://www.fredbernstein.com/articles/display.asp?id=150)

5.25.06

This Monday I attended this city's first ever mobile living conference. It was part of the design-week openings, and in conjunction with some openings and events geared towards the city's architecture. One of the greatest quotes from a panel at the mobile living conference (consisting of Paola Antonelli @ MoMA, Kevin Hunter - Calty Design Research for Toyota/Scion, Adam Kalkin – Adam Kalkin, Brett Littman @ PS1, David Mcfadden @ Museum of Arts and Design, Karim Rashid @ Karim Rashid) was "The experience of just talking to people is quite useful." I also liked one statement that harked back to Koolhaas's "Mutations" but never gets old - the "Blanding of Destination", a panelist's very own take on "the Blandification or Brandification of Destination" among other things. It was great to hear such an insightful panel discuss mobility with the audience, and I especially enjoyed the opinions of Paola, as well as the well-balanced and decisive constant comments by Karim. The panel discussed living units like prefab, mobile homes, modular homes, living virtually, physical presence versus teleconferencing, the need for physical things and intimacy, the behavioral changes that take place when new technologies are introduced into the fabric of culture, the disposability of the material world, housing on Mars, and the reasons for mobility, from boredom to refugees to job displacement. Important sociological designs became buzz-words and were dropped casually into the conversation, from the covered wagon to the walkman to the cup holder in the car to the sat phone to imbedded technology.

5.16.06

My father is working hard on the film he is making about Saint Faustina. I have completed the script for WW1V, and am currently so inspired with the process of making sculptures. Stephanie Dedes and I filmed the intro in Trinidad/Tobago a few weeks earlier. More on T&T, their differences and similarities later.

5.14.06

One day at 60th and Lex, there was a man I wrote about walking but not moving. He was in a feedback loop. Was this universe the relic of an earlier collapsed universe? A pregnant dot. Are we a continuous feedback loop of expanding and collapsing universes?

5.13.06

One of the first artists to make a significant sculpture as society was abandoning its medieval thought process might have been Michelangelo with "David". Michelangelo's "David" was armed simply with a slingshot and courage. In WW1V, the weapons that we will have at our use include plain sticks, stones and slingshot, homemade devices ranging from the sacred to the profane, laser technology, and (of course) the nanobot. Finally. Are we abandoning our medieval thought process?

The dews still fall slowly, and the dreams still gather, but no matter the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries of unknown perishing armies in Yeats’s poem, we wonder, and we wait, and we go about our business, even as the sound of something terrible slowly approaches from across the hills.

5.3.06

September 8–November 26, 2006
Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video
In a time of rampant natural disasters and urgent concerns about global environmental change, this exhibition demonstrates the ways in which the most interesting and engaging contemporary artists view the natural world. Shattering the stereotypes of landscape and nature photography, the thirty international artists included in this survey boldly examine new concepts of the natural sphere occasioned by twenty-first-century technologies; images of destructive ecological engagement; and visions of our future interactions with the environment. Considering nature in the broadest sense, this exhibition reflects new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants, and—increasingly—frightens us. Ecotopia is being organized by Brian Wallis, Christopher Phillips, Edward Earle, and Carol Squiers, and Joanna Lehan.

5.3.06

Church's Starbucks card giveaway draws thousands
A Florida church had a standing-room-only crowd Sunday after offering $10 Starbucks gift certificates to first-time worshipers. Not everyone thought the coffee campaign was a good idea. ''Church is not about Starbucks or money but learning about God or your religion,'' says Alex Castro, 14. "It's kind of tacky... People won't keep coming here for this.'' (Miami Herald/reg. req.) - April 17, 2006

After all, while loss of place at the local, personal level is (literally) unsettling, even devastating, loss of place at the global level is catastrophic:
Our neural pathways were formed by millions of years of existence in communities of our fellows where daily congregation and rituals and exercises made us what we became, and thus whole...whole cultures, ways of life, languages, beliefs, landscapes, climates, now falling at a cataclysmic rate along with millions of trees in the Congo basin and the Brazilian rainforest and along the Mongolian border. The echo of their crashing is a prelude to the final kiss-off, the extinction of our species along with every other that is made to suffer by us...There is not a power upon the earth that will stop progress. Except progress itself. When the air can't be breathed, when the psyche starts running amok from too many others crowding the elbow, when the spring comes four weeks too soon, when the floods come, when the trees wither, when the billion diverse creatures that weave together in ways we cannot comprehend to make the net that holds us up die, when selfishness calls the chickens home to roost, then it will stop. Too bad we won't be around to celebrate our triumph over ourselves at last. Here our civilization has entered its final century, and that there is no stopping it from bringing about its own demise, as all civilizations before have done, smug in their belief that they are somehow different, unique, immune to the inherent failings of empires built on the presupposition and need for endless growth.

4.5.06

This is the only day in history when at 1:02:03 am, the date and time = 1:02:03 04:05:06. It is a beautiful day. I spent most of it in Cambridge, the last day of the Body Sensor Networks 2006 conference at M.I.T. While in Boston, I had a chance to see the lovely Clinton McClung who runs most of the amazing programming at the Coolidge theater. Clinton is also an ex roommate of mine when I lived in Beantown, and soon to be an on-again roommate of mine in New York, as he trades young collegiates and job security for the Big Apple. At the BSN conference. Some of the highlights of the conference for me were the improvements in energy-scavenging (and these are of course for providing power to devices that are only a few millimeters large many times) from power storage based on vibrations to motion to slight degrees of thermal heat change. The wireless sensor networks, possible improvements in limb replacements and full movement, cornea implants, neural implants, wearable monitors and sensors, eWatches, neuromotor prosthesis, new security architectures designed through an ASS generated from a personalized physiological signal - a fingerprint of PPG readings, cardiac, blood pressure, etc.that is uniquely your own with error-correcting coding and auto correlation. The beauty and potential of compact wireless wearable sensor networks for dance ensembles powered and sensored by gyroscopic movement. I also learned that I probably have a disease called Sleep Apnia, which affects approximately 40M Americans, although many will never be diagnosed. With pulse-oxymetry, 8 PSG signals, Bluetooth, the XPod can help me realize this and potentially solve this light-breathing problem. Other sensor-network platforms were just as impressive, and there were interesting experiments with social-emotional prosthetics and other unlikely cohesions. Now I am on Amtrak crossing the Connecticut/New York line.

3.30.06

Benjamin Franklin's Thirteen Virtues.

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11.TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

3.28.06

In the city we are machines. We wear Streamline to blend with the movements of the city – to make everything quicker, sexier, and workable. In bright, sunny suburban Somers (the town I attended high school in) I remember a group of Parisian exchange students that attended our small school for about a month. What I remember most about them were their clothes. They wore blacks, shades of brown, tan, grey, khaki, and more black. They stood out because of their individuality within our school, which for them was their sameness with each other, was what united them to everyone in Paris. We liked their style, but in the small group of 80 people, wearing converse hi-tops took an extremely confident and strong-willed person. I come away now with this recollection, and with the knowledge of, in fact, many suburban towns, and with the day-to-day interactions or realizations with and about people in this city, and come to several conclusions. Let's begin on a practical level: People in the suburbs generally stay cleaner. Maybe this is a left over habit from each cities individual industrial era (I like to think most cities are a little cleaner now), but the smoke, smog, dirt and grime of the city could have something to do with clothing color choice. Also, it is an easy sophistication. Those two words describe what 50% of city-dwellers strive to be and to have. In this case, the ease of a dark color's practicality and a given level of sophistication generally associated with dark left over from Beatnicks, associations with writers circles like the Algonquin, jazz enthusiasts, depression because of all of society's perils, a disenchantment with those Tide commercials trying to constantly break through TiVo. Of course fashion fluctuates like the wind, and when New York gets warm, it wants to be the Hamptons or even LA. I’m going off on a tangent here. What I am really interested in is groupings, clusters, swarms of people that relate to one another through their clothing, costuming, tags, brands, general and specific nomenclatures. Sports have a great deal to do with this classification – it isn’t like going to Catholic school and being forced into plaid skirts every day, it is being the best in the school, the best in the league, the finest, fastest and being associated with likened-spirits. How can we make people excited to be part of a global uniform? By making it desirable through the economic system? By making me feel it is all right to learn from the French girls, and adapt some of their styles, thinking, culture? Next week I will be at M.I.T. for their convention on new Body Sensor Networks which is somewhat related - how will we be bodily linked in the future?

3.26.06

The state of the world I know: A growing populous in America, BRIC, Europe, and increasingly in some other countries inside Asia, Africa, and South America, live vicariously through digital avatars in flourishing, sumptuously rendered virtual environments. It could be said that in order to function, we will rely more and more on the digital metaverse as an escape from our physical space. Baudrillard, in his new book, The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, restates the point that since a great loss of belief in the transcendental world (with the onset of the Age of Reason) we have begun the giant undertaking of eliminating the natural world in all of its forms. He suggests an everyday embrace of digital tools but a deep-seeded denial of change. The countryside has become "landscape" in our vocabulary and in our thoughts, which is, in our heads, a duplication of itself. We first acknowledge a media-generated version of countryside called landscape. Augmented Reality: denCity, Dodgeball, google earth, blogjects and participatory media. Virtual worlds: Second Life, Project Entropia, World of Warcraft. Simulations: pilot training flight simulators, Nintendogs, Scenario thinking, Darfur is Dying (visit:http://www.darfurisdying.com/), etc. As these three spaces have a greater importance in our everyday meeting, tasking, playing, breathing, what is the iReality of this? ? What will happen to the physical? Right now in China 3,600 sq. km of former grass/farmland is being overtaken by desert conditions yearly (by Chinese statistics while remote sensing statistics report this figure at around 15,500 sq. mi.- roughly the size of Holland!) with the Chinese "Green Wall" project proving to be overall, unsuccessful. As we help solve the plight of the ever-growing number of environmental refugees (prediction by 2010 United Nations University estimates 50 mil. worldwide) due to large disasters like Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami in Sri Lanka and slow-motion disasters like drought, famine, disease, sea-level rising, we have at our disposal virtual, open-source game models like "Bordergames", out of Lauapres/Madrid, which allows us to try out solutions in a simulated or trial game before enacting in physical life, as well as physical groups like "Burners Without Borders" who are continuing to work magic with inexpensive wifi, rebuilding, getting donations, etc. after Katrina. They are an interesting between-place because Burning Man, where the group originated and gets its communal gifting inspiration, is in a sense a physical-virtual community. It exists physically for about a week yearly and virtually for the remainder of the year, it physically practices what has fundamentally begun as a technological, economic, and political movement referred to as open-source, which I like to describe as the contributions of a community of contributors for the good of the whole (and perhaps the recognition), for the freedom from top-down ontologies, for progress, results, and strength of a mass-mind. Now, in some ways, the community of Burning Man (visit: http://www.burningman.com/) parallels the community of Michael Griffin's wiki-like space development of "Ancient Spaces" (visit: http://ancient.arts.ubc.ca/). "Ancient Spaces" is an online experiment which, when it is built to the "game stage" players will be able to earn points by contributing historically accurate structures to places like Mesopotamia or Egypt, "adventure down the Nile or fight in the Peloponnesian War." It is a learning and a community tool depicting places that once existed in that state and now are online. The further coalesce of these many spaces are games like World of Warcraft or Project Entropia, where the actor John Jacobs spent $100,000.00 on an online space resort that he now plans to rent rooms, storage, mall space, etc. to other players. Wired Magazine this month makes a parallel between online games and Disneyworld (which I LOVE, as I am such a fan of Disney's ability to encroach on every corner of economic policy, life, thought, dreams). Wired also writes about the fusion of games, platforms, and individual creation within these interfaces. One of the main points of the article was to offer a positive light to all of the gamers who "learn to treat the world as a place for creation - not consumption (as possibility-space)". The frightening thing about this is that as we create a world that last year was the hottest recorded year on the planet in the history of recording (145 yrs) and using Bore Hole Measurements (boring into the earth's surface), the hottest in 500 years, and with proxy-data (tree rings and coral growths) we are looking at the warmest time on earth, and as Antarctica loses 36 cubic miles/yr. in freshwater (L.A. uses approximately 1/5 cubic mile of freshwater yearly), are we going to want to live in reality? Are we going to want to distinguish between our simulated, virtual, and integral realities, or are we going to care about real-life creation - something we are getting further and further from daily?

3.16.06

Currently, I have been working on the Triennial at the ICP to take place in September of this year (called Ecotopia), where I will show, besides otherworldly photographs of wearable-home wanderers and ad-hoc machinery, a new version of marymattingly.com called marymattinglyglobal.org. Simultaneously, I have been working on a giant installation to take place at White Box Gallery about WW1V, Albert Einstein, and immersion in time, place, sound, as well as moving image. The installation will take place for one week of New Time in the White Box in December of this year and will outline the course of the Pyrrhic victory of the not-so-distant future.

3.13.06

It is one of my goals to make reality and fantasy interchangeable. 1 billion of us humans play virtual games in online communities, to date. I want that virtual game to be on the physical street, and I want the hollograms to be so seamlessly real that we are not sure if we are flirting with, shooting at, pummeling, driving into a fellow human or his/her avatar. Won't that be fun?

It’s about time SOMEONE expressed, in prose form, the importance and the future of the Blackberry in the modern world. Here is a starting point that quickly jumps to fantasy:
In the PRESENT: The Blackberry today allows for a contemporary nomadism, a contemporary trip, travel, traverse, commute, cruise, excursion, expedition, navigation, passage, trek, and voyage from the office. This is not the same as self-employment, of course. This is your laptop on the beach. This is your perpetual lunch. This is you - in the space it takes to house an (obsolete) wallet. Now that our wallets are housed with electronic codified signals and typepad keynotes, now that our daughters picture is something we call up in the “ photos” menu, our cash is liquid 0’s and 1’s, everything we know and need to know can be recalled at the punch and enter of a password.
IN THE FUTURE: One day the iPod became the wePod, around the time of it's merger with friendster and myspace. Unbenounced to anyone (until RIGHT NOW), R.I.M.’s proprietary software actually does include the iPod shareware. R.I.M. of course, took it up a notch, but finally G-Simpod was created by HP/Google (in the Mattingly Studio), the company that makes our VA Googles, that brought us aggregated search, freeware and shareware, a new community, a new love of life, downloadable everything,- announced the G-Simpod as HP/Google’s gift to the world, in the collaborative spirit that we love, with: Googleplex, God, and Heaven. Yes, it’s heaven.

1.30.06

the wearable home

1.10.06

Essay by Renee Vara and text by Herbert Lust on Second Nature.

Now, a few days after the opening. I spent the weekend reevaluating via way of the word web. I spent tonight with Stephanie and 10 others evaluating Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, lead by Alex. Brilliantly, it was decided that The True is the Whole. This is Hegel's entire thesis or answer in 5 words, but of course you can not really grasp the whole without experiencing it, meaning traveling with Hegel through the Phenomenology, and traveling consciously and consciously unconscious through life. Systemically, the end is a new beginning and the beginning a new end and we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire.

1.09.06

US Postage has just increased .02. Frankly, I am openly looking forward to the day the world's postal services fall apart (ref. diary entry 1.30.04) . It won't be long, UPS! The opening at Robert Mann Gallery was a few days ago. I was very happy. Here are a couple of pictures, taken with film

12.10.05

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine nor between physical and virtual reality. - Ray Kurtzweil

Right now I am reading one of Baudrialliard's new books -The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact - so far, it is clear that he wants to eliminate the distinction between reality and virtual, and even eliminate this way of thinking altogether.

the installation in progress - for Second Nature at Robert Mann: This is the hybrid tree. Hopefully the future of trees, it grafts banana, pineapple (yes, now they grow on trees), olives, apples, and a hope is that it will also begin to grow coconuts. The tree is made from recycled elements; plastics, fabric, water, wire, twine, and liquid nails (petroleum, resin, and distillates). The tree will be growing from an island (not pictured here) formed from Styrofoam I have found all over the city (and from the ReCONNstruction Center in Connecticut), earth, muslin fabric, metals and wood layers that make the island's inside a haven for those afraid of nuclear attack or some other disaster involving falling or poisonous debris.

12.03.05

Essentially, we are all the same; we all have something a little bit different to add

12.01.05

About Second Nature (Robert Mann show right around the corner): What happens with Globalization? We lose our sense of roots, of a home, of neighbors. We have new homes, new communications, new environments, a global home. The show is about a time in the future where person-to-person interactions become harder and harder; our old ideas of home and community change and are replaced by a giant, global community. Our physical reality is nomadic and sustained by re-use, while our virtual reality is even greater. Personal satellites, water purifiers, and wearable homes all have a place in the show.

The future lies in the corporation, and the individual’s acceptance of the corporation. During the World Economic Forum in Cuba, my good friend Peter (with others) spoke on the possibility of forming a corporate UN - a United Nations composed of corporations wanting to make positive change. This makes complete sense and really should be done. For so long, we have known that corporations hold power over governments - basically because as we transition into a flatter world, economy is the connector, not politics. Of course, they are very tied together, and philosophically they are relatively the same, but money and production of goods and services really control everything. Corporations have the power to get things done, and many times the speed that governments don’t have. We saw this change (globalization) really before the onset of Y2k, with the realization that everything was connected to the point that: if one part of the global infrastructure collapsed, it would greatly and exponentially affect everything else. This wasn’t the case during a time of global nationalism. Now, we have the choice whether to participate or not. I think now is the time to participate in this motion, flow, dialogue, whatever you want to call it. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does tremendous work getting aid to parts of Africa, websites like worldchanging.com are great sources, links, or actions of corporate/individual participation in the transition to globality. Here, I would like to add something about water: "The water crisis is one of the major problems preventing Africa from participating in the global economy."- Maria Mutagamba, Minister of State for Water of Uganda, and chair of the African Council of Water Ministers
Then, For weeks, no, months, I had been expecting to receive David Darst’s writings in the mail - from Portfolio Investment Opportunities in China, to Russia, to Western Europe, to his personal writings. I received a letter shortly after meeting him at Burning Man, stating that I should be receiving them shortly. They never arrived. I figured he was busy or had forgotten... so last week I mailed him a request to re-send. David (quite possibly the most genuine, nicest, caring and considerate man I have met in a long time) calls as soon as he receives the letter, so happy to know that the reason that I had not called to thank him, was that I had not received the package he sent to 302 Eastern Parkway. 20 minutes later, he arrives at the place I am working, dapper, pinstripe suit, and a large expandable file in his arms. It made my day! Inside I found a card, pictures of Burning Man, pictures of David and friends, the writings, his book in English, his book in Chinese. WOW! Captivating! Then, Matt Jones is reenacting his studio in the window of artists space on December 3, from 4-8pm.

11.20.05

Now there are about 6 weeks until the show - Second Nature - opens at Robert Mann Gallery. Needless to say, I haven't been doing much else. The photographs continue to evolve - although this weekend will have to be the end of that. The installation and catalogue are what, after the remainder of the weekend, I will concentrate on (well, besides my continuous search for property in Chinatown and love after one date). Patti (one of the few people who can lead me astray of the studio) insisted I go to Benjamin Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream performed at the Julliard Opera Center (it seems opera is all I am writing about these days, but really, 8 years ago I was tag-team DJing with Cities in Process the best jungle and breakbeats you could have heard - in Connecticut, at least.) Anyway, Patti will never read a blog so I can just give a little shout out, never having to fear that it will go to her head - she is an amazing piece of work. We love that woman! We went to dinner afterward - she was concerned that I wasn't eating well - I'm not - I'm pale as a ghost as , like I said, trying to just stay in the studio. So, we ate a huge dinner. What else? Some great friends had openings in the past two weeks - Brian Dulaney at Rare, Matt Jones, Kadar Brock at Buia Gallery. I went to a lecture revisiting the war in Kuwait with Juan and Jee Won, and after to Cafe Loupe where we ate with an Argentinian artist - we had in common the week we both spent wandering NYC streets seeing if we wanted to life here, and a gallery owner in Austin who gave up the priesthood to celebrate art. Speaking of, the other weekend Fred and I went to mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Midtown - this place is amazing - if you never have been, go. You find yourself unsure of the dynamic - should you stare at the priest or watch the tv of the priest on the column nearest you? Then it is really disconcerting when the camera would pan the audience and jump-cut to the statue of Mary from Guadelupe, to the tabernackle. One of the discussions Fred and I had afterwards was, if art at times tries to be the secular religion, than that makes artists the equivalent to the left-wing intellectual that can never get anywhere with his voice because it, by default, will never be en masse. The artist is a lone loner.(?) The religious are a massive power. Bill Gates has followers but may be a loner. (what a great term, hm?) The thing that is really interesting now as everyone struggles for power and a voice in a flatter world is - are religions heirchies made of leaders and followers? Are cults? Do the better communities have both - the group mentality and the singular mentality? It seems that that is healthier but not more powerful. Can a successful religion (I am using this to mean community in the broader sense) be as successful with a multilateral power structure or a flat structure with a bunch of people who have consistent ideologies on the idea of progress within their community? So a couple of weeks ago Peter and I went to Connecticut to the birthday of Jay Walker, owner of Priceline.com and tons of patents on ideas (his library and house were amazing). During dinner, his assistants staged a surprise comedy act about Mr. Walker and his family. It was hysterical. In the comedy and I am sure in reality as well, Jay had turned his family into an idea factory. Instead of a family vacation, he suggested, how about a Brainstorming Session? What a great idea - produce an idea factory! It is at the same time heirchial as it is mutually profit-sharing. Victor Burgin rightfully remarked once that "The market is behind nothing, it is in everything". Besides the study of the business model, I think about a great deal of untouched subjects being in the studio sans internet for so many hours a day - I haven't read news for at least a week, have no idea what is really going on out there, and less of an idea about what is going on internally - like the pandora's box we opened back in October 2001....so I am going to get back to work...

10.15.05

Today, I am in San Francisco. Last night I went to see Dr. Atomic, the opera about the creation and execution of the Atomic Bomb in Los Alamos. I thought that the opera was actually the best that I have ever seen, hands down. Its mix of new techniques, stage design that took from Gus Van Sant's psychological movie Dogville, a storyline that excluded the most obvious bravados, and was through-and-through about the psychology of Oppenheimer as a microcosm of everyone performing, of the main players as their complex selves, and then of the macrocosm of an entire community, and then the entire United States. Now opera, in my opinion, is sort of a hick's pasttime. I am not excluding myself from this category by any means. I mean - this form of experiential art was big hundreds of years ago, yet we continue to indulge in its fabric, afraid to let go of the past, clinging to nostalgic ideas of passion and romance that were always vicarious. That said, I would like to drastically change the topic to something more present-day and talk about the current intersection between technology and sex, as fabulous advances are being made. From chat rooms to the development of full-body sensors to holograms to VA chambers. Currently, an Australian scientist is in the process of creating a life-sized doll, complete with imitation skin, that is fully controlled over a computer system. In this podcast, Ray Kurtzweil goes on to talk about new inventions in sex-technology, describing a place, communal or private, where the user can communicate with an actual or a virtual lover. She can then decide who she wants to be for her real-life long-distance lover, and of course her lover can override this decision, and they go from there. (10.31.05 - Derek Junck - amazing artist, rock fabricator, and fiancee of Mira Burke just sent me a great follow-up link from VioletBlue (link: http://archive5.libsyn.com/podcasts/violetblue/open_source_sex_13.mp3) that is more in depth, regarding toys and software.) Sensor technology allows everything to be real. I like this idea as, because of my constricted Catholic upbringing, this is the most feasible option. The singularity is near.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI), places electrodes in key locations on the user’s scalp to detect nerve activity

which is then translated to walking or movement of the virtual character’s hands. The team of creators has

incorporated a fully immersive Virtual Cave for a mind bending walk by thinking. [nature article at: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/full/050926-5.html]

martha stewart farmhouse communities (link: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2005-10-12-stewart-homes_x.htm) - Thank you for bringing nostalgia to the forefront of kitsch, it was lagging behind. We have to appreciate everything Martha has done for our culture, and for instilling in us, through architecture, a lasting sense of place and roots, beginning with a North Carolinan community modeled after her farmhouse in New Jersey.

For a moment, let's regress from technology and sex to talk about THE ORGY OF COMMUNAL SPENDING. Finally, as a society, we are looking for love in all the right places. On weekends employees will find themselves online, blogging on product sites about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a product with a passion equivalent to the feeling of good drugs. Or they will find themselves on an adventure, trekking to the malls to view and participate in the S&M (standing and modeling) part of communal spending. Today’s successful business model might want to mimic that of many religions’ models’, of the 12-step program, or of the Tree of Life. The successful business will convince its employees that it is ejecting meaning into his or her life, a meaning that will finally be found by following a step-by-step program towards enlightenment. In order to retain employee satisfaction, the employee needs to think of his or her business journey as a path that brings him closer and closer to reaching the phenomenology of the spirit. Here is a preview, steps 1-6 of the 12 steps for today’s successful business:
1. As employers, we admit that we are powerless without our employees.
2. We must believe a collective mind (rather than just our own) can improve our brand
3. As an employee, you must make a decision to turn your creative will over to the brand
4. In order to break new grounds within the business and capitalize on ideas, everyone - the employees and the employer must work together to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and our collective goal.
5. As a business, we must openly admit to the public the exact nature or our wrongs, when and if we make them.
6. We then must eagerly accept and change all these defects of the brand

09.25.05

I have been working on the database for "Mattingly Maps - new cultural uniformity". You can follow this link or manually select: A New Breed | A PUBLIC WARNING | and then Mattingly Maps.

09.19.05

Well, it is now almost a day after the Collector Circle talk and I can surely say, it was an extreme test of a highly unusual narrative structure that I embarked on. The talk was an exercise on how abstract one can humanly be. (Now, this is something that I have been considering may be an interesting way to live life, but I will [for now] continue to just try this every once in a while). My technique was an updated version of Godard's Jump-Cut, complete with an ADD train of thought that included scenes of tragicomic silence not unlike some in Bronenosets Potyomkin, the cut-up techniques of Cassavetes, Kerouac, Burroughs, and of course I took a cue from the Warholian "I'm a freak and don't know how to talk to people" state-of-being. I was brilliantly attaching one thought to something entirely out of left field, and it wasn't making sense to me, nor the audience. This went on for what may have been a good 5 minutes and I had 15. Renee compared it to some kind of Dada performance. (Wow! I never knew I had it in me!) So anyway, talking with Fast Forward at Barbacon in London back in the beginning of August was smooth, what some would call engaging, with the distractions of audio, video and still imagery. There, I enjoyed having more time and a machine between the audience and myself. A panel is great, but standing up in front of 30 people on the 28th floor of a building overlooking the east river, and they are 3 feet away from you, that is intense. That is my conclusion here.

09.12.05

OK, a little brainstorming the other night when I couldn't sleep. Take, for example, water that is poisoned with arsenic. We can purify it with the simple tools of steel wool and copper, or even ferns will balance the ph levels in the water. If we then run it through a second container of carbon, we could drink the water. We can use this basic idea to rebuild New Orleans (alongside a reality-t.v. show). We can begin by determining the toxins that are toxifying the destructed building materials, etc. neutralize them with their opposite, and build a landfill. First, a structure needs to be put in place, similar to the structure that was built to extend Manhattan, out of concrete. Second, the materials that will fill the landfill will be placed on top of the concrete, and then filled with dirt. This process will normally take decades of treatment before all of the chemicals will leave and biodegrade, but it could be sped up with using opposite ph. methods. This circumvents the problem of: what are we going to do with all of the rubble? This is a solution in progress.
I spent the past two weeks on the west coast, first at Burning Man, the festival in the Black Rock desert outside of Reno. Burning Man has a lot to teach about the sustainability of gift-economies and the impermanence of utopias. I was a guest of the Love Army (link soon), a group of incredible people based in Vancouver, BC. who embody the spirit and love of Burning Man everyday, harness, and bring that love with them to the desert for the magical week that everything is burned away. (More on this trip soon.) On Sunday I will talk about my work for collector circle - check out www.collectorcircle.com. This is in Manhattan on 76th Street. I am going to use this time now to prepare for that. Hopefully, I will still remember the finer details of the trip a week from now so as to recount the sublime moments that will then transcend my mind into digital space, hopefully by Monday. Some pictures from Burning Man:

08.12.05

Global warming thawing Siberia, scientists claim
Aug. 12, 2005
World Science staff

The vast land of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago, the BBC reported this week, quoting the New Scientist magazine.
“The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” the BBC reported. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to snowball, scientists fear.
The situation is an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming,” researcher Sergei Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, Russia, told New Scientist, according to the BBC. The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun thawing, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years,” he was quoted telling the magazine.
Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere on the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 3C in the last 40 years, according to the reports. The warming is believed to be due to a combination of man-made climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation and feedbacks caused by melting ice, reports noted.
The 11,000-year-old bogs contain billions of tons of methane, most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures called clathrates. But if the bogs melt, there is a big risk their hefty methane load could be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, the reports added.
Scientists reacted with alarm, warning that global warming predictions may have to be revised upward.
“When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it’s unstoppable,” David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, UK, was quoted telling the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper. “There are no brakes you can apply.
“This is a big deal because you can’t put the permafrost back once it’s gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing.”
The intergovernmental panel on climate change speculated in 2001 that global temperatures would rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees celsius between 1990 and 2100, the BBC noted. But these estimates only considered global warming sparked by known greenhouse gas emissions.
The Siberia situation hints new forces could exacerbate the warming, Viner said—feedback cycles in which the warming itself leads to events that cause further warming. When scientists devised their earlier estimates, he added, “they had no idea” how much this feedback would speed up to the warming.

Tom Friedman: “There is no room for vanilla in a flat world.”

Cheap Genome (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/08/05/cheap.genome.reut/index.html) | Global warming - oxygen eaters (wow: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/08/05/cheap.genome.reut/index.html)|

08.04.05

In his newsletter, Pip Coburn writes, “Last nite, in the presence of some tech gurus I posited that BlackBerry may well have altered the long-held sociological observation that no person can maintain more than 150 meaningful relationships at one time. With new technologies such as BlackBerry I think that for those aware and desirous of meaningful relationships, one can blow past 150 pretty easily. The world might one day be better for it.” I met Mr. Coburn at a party a while ago - a really funny guy.

08.02.05

Talking to Peter last night (he was discussing a company that wanted to hire him to influence the online public for political reasons, and then Cluetrain Manifesto came up) it occurred to me that, when we are all mackin on our simputers in the grocery-store line, we will forget about the tabloids, too busy being connected to like-minds, whomever they may be. Then I suppose San Francisco will push LA to the wayside, and prevail as the ruling cultural force. Like the Clash of the Titians, the mods and the rockers, we will witness the Plastic Beauties versus the Bohemian Brains. In 2010, LA will be known only as the place that krumping really took off.

Networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge. I am going to use this platform for a mini-educational session on cell phones (as per August 2005) because - over the campfire this weekend in Maine I was talking with a man who astutely realized that if we didn't make plans, we would be completely happy. It is because we are beholden to deadlines that we fear failing, that we endure stress, and entertain ideas of success (there were definite references to, for instance, success in a 9-5 paper-pushing job). I told him that it is actually quite nice that now our society allows for constant communication - therefore enabling us to forgo duties and appointments because we are constantly reachable... "In Korea, there are these raves," says Sky Dayton, CEO of wireless joint venture SK-EarthLink. "Kids go to an abandoned warehouse, and they're dancing to music they're each listening to on their own cell phones." New York has a party in Union Square once a year where everyone jams to the music in their headphones. This, while odd, is so natural now. WE are extremely social but will sit in a group and talk on our cell phones. We would rather communicate via IM than via actual conversation.

some new links on cell phones 1 2 3 4 We don’t think about being digital—we are digital.

Maine is really beautiful. to the right is our crew. Myself, Stephanie, Maria, and Dave. To the left is a serene picture that Stephanie took on our last evening.

07.21.05

On the virulence of “fantasies”’ – “A fantasy talks back, speaks as a master, not a slave; it exists like a son finally free after long suffering under an iron rule and who diabolically, remorselessly is ecstatic over the murder of his father; he exists freely and reflects none other than human nature unchained.” George Bataille

The language of fantasy is restricted to our increasingly limited perspectives composed by a dictating media. Our thoughts are only allowed by our understanding of language.

For greater efficiency and greater enjoyment, consumption is being standardized.

NOW: The unknown merges with the known. The real mixes with the fake. There is an ongoing flux that happens between the two. There is no need to simulate – simulacrum is now an outdated term. Simulations are now as real as the smell of your morning coffee – wait, isn't that the smell that you downloaded to emit from your laptop every morning, to entice you into waking up? Were you really sleeping before, or did your brain just vegetate into its natural iPod state? The back and forth is unnecessarily indiscernible.

We stayed in the Hamptons last weekend for a project with the `scope art fair. My hair was blond then - I intended to dye it blond to be portrayed as more "beach-like" as part of our performance where Paul and I transformed ourselves into buff, tanned beings. Now the hair is back to dark brown. I would love to stop changing it, I think I just am bored easily. The pool Paul and I constructed for the Hamptons project was on the cover of Artnet.com. Today, Thursday July 21,is the date of the second London bombing incident, not second ever, of course, but second after the War on Terror was proclaimed. Heightened security on nyc trains, there is a possibility at any time of anyone having their bags searched. Also, I am afraid to say, there is a ghost in my apartment - I slept in the living room last night, while Paul took the bed. Ramsay was passing through on his way to Baltimore with a Jeep full of moving boxes. He stopped by and stayed over as well. In the morning, Ramsay and the two cats were in the living room as the statue in the middle of the shelf in the living room flew off the side. We were all witness to this. In the past, at night, if the front hall light is left on it turns itself off, literally the switch flips down. I can walk over to the switch and flip it back up. I have never experienced living with a ghost before. Enough about that though, I can not really describe it well, but I can say, I have no reason not to believe in ghosts, and I really can't figure out how any of this is happening. However, on to other, more frightening things. I have been experimenting with sound podcasts. That sounds like nothing, and maybe it is nothing. I am taking the sound, compiling it and making one track in "Soundtrack" - free with Final Cut. People probably recommend even garage band as a better program, but with Soundtrack, I really haven't learned how to have any control over the sound, so I am forced to leave the tuning to a minimal, and that is of course good for this project. Then a control group listens to the sound and translates it. The major podcast stopped working 2.5 weeks after installed, abruptly. I then took them all offline, because... Sound art can be a dangerous thing. The search engines are of course recording everything we think may be ephemeral, so the podcasts are tagged somewhere. Of course we filled the pool with nothing but the silliest of status waters:

Here - a nice quote from either Wired or The Economist (the two magazines I was reading last night, one of which I copied some text from:) " Visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently, a typical scene: a drive through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about 'how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt.' On Sundays, children played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. "

The RCID is the name for the territory that Walt Disney World occupies, and it is a uniquely autonomous zone, which hardly has to answer to the state government at all. The zone can build its own nukes, run its own building codes, and generally do whatever it likes.

06.19.05

A year ago around this time I was in the desert outside of Bend, Oregon. testing a desert-specific wearable home with a homemade WPS. Blackberry let me test a 50mileRAD wifi phone (meaning there did not have to be a wifi connection for 50 miles and it would work.) DJ rigged a portable satellite so the blackberry's rays wouldn't be as harmful to me. I could set the satellite 5 ft away from me and my connection to the real world. Anyway, next weekend I will meet Peter (completely fun and smart person I am fully enjoying spending time with) at Wired's Nextfest, Chicago Pier. I am very interested in the following exhibits at nextfest: Nomads and Nanomaterials by Univ. of Mich., Cyber Warfare Integration Network by Northrup Grumman, Future Force Warrior, by the army, Water Scarcity Solutions by GE. Fogscreen by Fogscreen. Mars Suit by NASA, Interactive Pillows by the Interactive Institute, oh, and Genetic Savings and Clone is a great name. I would like to test some of these prototypes on my second trip to the desert, at the end of August. Dave Smith recently had me re-look into Constant's New Babylon (http://www.notbored.org/homo-ludens.html), and Constant had some beautiful ideas about social order, city-as-ocean, efficiency, and the attractiveness of spatial freedom and dynamism.

www.waterways2005.blogspot.com | www.lifeboathamptons.blogspot.com

06.04.05

Renee is in Venice. She told me to" take it easy" after I told Jerry Saltz what was wrong with the world. Luckily, he agreed.

This is going to be about Walking. The comments people make, the flyers people pawn off to you, the thin heel of your shoe as it jams into the unnoticed crack in the sidewalk... Two people behind me. The guy tells the woman, “I had a dream I had sex with Paris Hilton last night. It was really weird.” The woman with the Bloomingdales bag on the side of the street, “Alright Asshole” she says out loud to the bus driver as he beeps the horn at us – a signal reading - get back on the sidewalk because I might run you over. One hour later I was that woman waiting for the C train, swearing under my breath, and then swearing out loud when the A train would screech by. I probably should attend manner school. Before I went into the subway I was walking in front of another couple, man and woman. The American looking woman says to the man in a turban, “You know what would be great here?” (As we are walking down Lexington at 61st) “A Starbucks” she finishes. I think to myself, should I turn around and tell her to walk 3 blocks down? Of course not. I just thought that whole 3 hours was beautiful before I went underground.

05.19.05

We are constantly attempting to define and redefine ourselves and everything around us.
We are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the work of attrition of that adaptation to which people must resign themselves so long as they fail to change the world. Age is a role, an acceleration of "lived" time on the plane of appearances, an attachment to things. Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to remain on the level of appearances! The media gives wide currency to a whole personal hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions, watch your blood pressure, eat less, drink in moderation only, survive in good health so that you can continue playing your role. We die of inertia, whenever the charge of death that we carry with us reaches saturation point. -Raoul Vaneigem has some other extremely great things to say like - You always learn to dance for yourself on the off-beat of the official world. And you must follow your demands to their logical conclusion, not accept a compromise at the first setback. Consumer society's frantic need to manufacture new needs adroitly cashes in on the way-out, the bizarre and the shocking. Black humor and real agony turn up on Madison Avenue. Flirtation with non-conformism is an integral part of prevailing values. Awareness of the decay of values has its role to play in sales strategy. More and more pure rubbish is marketed. It goes on to talk about the figurine salt-shaker of Kennedy with bullet holes through which to pour salt...

05.14.05

We Love this review (visit: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=33632&category=22127)..
I have spent the last four months working on "We go round and round in the night", as well as forming, with 3 others, G-77, an outlet for all of our dreams. I have been traveling to Portland, OR., Silicon Valley, and San Francisco, CA. Next month I will be in Venice for the Biennial where with Renee Vara, Elena Bajo, and a few others recently associated, we will create "Waterways". Waterways is an installation to take place on a large 200 person boat in the waters around the Biennial. Artists participating will contribute work that can be seen in a social context, that is related to environmental and community ideas. Please email me if you would be interested in participating. In July I will participate in SCOPE Hamptons, with Paul Middendorf. We worked in Miami together, on Lifeboat. In the Hamptons, we will create an amazing, and hysterical installation/performance that I will announce more about later. And for anyone who reads this in the next week, and is free on Sunday, my studio mates and I are going to have a bbq/party = Par-T-Que in the studio and on the roof of May 22nd. Our studio is 510B Waverly St, Brooklyn, NY.

As events roll past on the screen and are forgotten as quickly as possible, so at the same time nothing must disappear and everything must be preserved and excavated. What's bad about this is not that we are burdened with a waste problem, but that we are becoming waste ourselves. The Net turns human traffic directly into waste. Baudrillard goes in great detail into Biosphere II, a project beyond apocalypse and the end, without having solved the problem of the end. This evil ecology assumes that soon there will only be interactive subjects, without objects. Natural selection has been eliminated, everything is neatly embalmed and offered up to artificial survival.
The compact disc. It does not wear out, even when one uses it. That is terrible. As if one had never used it, as if one had never existed at all. Baudrillard cannot laugh at all at this sort of ad-speak. He shivers at the fallacy of realization, which wants to exhaust all possibility. Everywhere around him he sees an impulse to perfection, a maximalisation of capabilities, limits which must be reached. The universalisation of data and knowledge is merely a preliminary stage of their disappearance, just as with stars: their maximum expansion is followed by agony. The indifference which arises from this is burdened by a lack of difference. The transparent neo-individualist (no longer self-directed but other-directed) can no longer jump over his own shadow, because he no longer has one. He no longer differentiates himself from himself and is therefore indifferent to himself; not a schizophrenic but an isophrenic. Our computers too long for difference - they are autistic, bachelor machines: they suffer, and avenge themselves with an unrestrained tautology of their own language.

03.71.05

Now it is March 16th, 8pm. For the first time in 3 weeks I’m hanging out in the laundry mat, washing, working on a story about what the future will be like. I am completely distracted by thinking about the past weekend. This is just a revised stream of consciousness. Topic: What goes on with art/art fairs. I am working through some thoughts I revisit now and then. NY is the capitalist art center. An entire social system revolves around art as a commodity. How do the artists deal with this? Are we concerned with how we fit in? Should we be? After this weekend of attending parties, being part of a scene, seeing some good friends and plenty of acquaintances, stirring up some trouble, at times attempting real conversations, at times looking and watching fashion. After all is done, I am left wondering (not a new thought) about art versus fashion. About artists as producers not unlike fashion designers, with a new line each season. In the following paragraphs, reader, prepare yourself for some blanket statements, but keep in mind, I have seen some amazing work this weekend by the likes of Paul Noble and other diligent, imaginative, detailed draw-ers. I am going to single out drawings for the sake of this argument, because of how fashionable they are at the moment, and how it is so hard not to take part in that, if it isn’t your real love. For a great majority of artists, drawings are completed as commodity. Young collectors love drawings because they are affordable, whimsical, and a sort-of secret (many times now contrasting dark and pretty - because this has been in fashion for like 10 seasons now.) Oh yea, us nihilistic artists are quick learners. We pretty much all produce these fast commodities to go alongside our artwork now, or sometimes, that is our contribution, total. I don’t mean to say that drawings aren’t necessary to process or not to say they don't put us in another enjoyable art-making mindset, but if we really sit down and think about it, 9 times out of 10 we make these for the collector, or the fashion. I was brought up with the idea that artists were sort of radical, extreme, challenging people to see another side of things, forward thinkers.
In our society, order occupies all of our lives, the struggle of playing in systems and working cleverly around them, subverting, agreeing, falling away. Coming from a person who talks with many artists about their work, ideas, the social atmosphere of art in NY, I realize artists on average, here, make what they want to make but also make what predictably sells, what will get them invited to the prestigious parties, accepted, and god, do we want acceptance and approval. We are the boys and girls that want a taste of rock-star fame, with the prestige of the intellectual, and that is usually enough. Yea, we get off on cool ideas, but then we put them through a process, a conceptualization we learned in college, we tack on meaning, we reference it slightly, we allude to something more - open to a viewers interpretation, of course. At the armory, I saw from across the room some work in flashing neon referencing death metal. I didn’t need to get any closer or think about what it was doing. It was so automatic. Wow, brilliant! Just like walking by Forever 21 and seeing the 70’s revival happening inside. Wait, but this was tongue and cheek. Yea, this would be something to comment on inside of a club, white interior, when you get tired of staring at the person you came with. You really feel like you are part of something cool. When you are in on the joke, you are most likely falling for a product. It is the easy way not to think. It keeps us static, it makes us feel elite, it is a superficial feeling. I am thinking back to the election. One complaint we had about John Kerry after he lost the election was that he was not the Visionary that Mr. Bush was. I want to see some visionaries. I want to see some more people that care about the world, not just the art world. I want to see more people being true to themselves, and damnit, I’m not making any more drawings - so get ‘em now. They are very limited. (RESPONSES FROM NINETEENEIGHTY)

02.22.05

What is the speed of the body when it has been force-fed by high-tech? Genetic enhancement (technologies that transfer genetic material to modify non-pathological human traits) is unlike gene therapy that treats disease. Gene enhancements mainly provide cosmetic alterations. Physical traits that could be altered include appearance such as hair or eye colour, height, physical build, muscle mass, decreased body fat, improved strength and increased endurance; behavioral traits could be changed as well to improve intelligence, temperament and altering basic personality traits are already in testing stages. Herein lies a new society. In media-saturated societies, being surveyed has gradually been made "friendly" and transformed into an activity, to the extent that it is no longer a condition to be feared. but one to be courted and desired. The here-to-stay phenomena of reality television, blogs, webcams, and the rise of the media mise-en-scene as the primary form of social authentication. Tiny transponders or RFID (radio frequency identification) tags -- which can be embedded in just about anything, including humans -- allow precise locationing of objects within flexible production and distribution systems. They are what allow customers to precisely track the trajectory of their Federal Express package. Gillette has already embedded them in cheap disposable razors, and of course the military was an early pioneer of RFID. I am constantly reminded of this book "Holy Anorexia". It talks about a time where girls vying for God's love, beat, tortured themselves, and compared it to girls today vying for the approval of a society, a media that has become a God worthy of starving for, or abusing yourself for. In this case, media has become one of a few strong catalysts in a future superior society. Personally, I am going to get some wings engineered so i can finally fly instead of always walking.

ok so here's the plan, according to this month's Z MAGAZINE in the autonomous
zone of Chiapas, Mexico where indigenous (mostly Mayan) rebellion has taken
root under SubCommandante Marcos the forty or fifty or so villages are adorned
by many hundreds of locally created murals celebrating/commemorating the local
historical struggle. you and i travel to Chiapas and you photograph (primarily
the murals but also scenes of local life) while i write a travelog both of which
to be compiled/edited into a book. waddaya say sista souljah?

(I declined for now but) email jason if you are a photographer and a sista souljah and this is appealing to you @ overripetripe@earthlink.net - he is a funny guy and great writer anyways.

01.03.05

In the 18th century, masks were what we shared, our ability to play a role in public and drop the role through a process of intimacy. Lost communities are quickly rebuilt by disasters or a need to fill something. Who are we? Is the we to I important? Were we ever meant to be happy? Is our life about our happiness? The less people speak, the more that the tools of fantasy continue to bond and a sense of common personality is unearthed. Personality? What a bizarre concept, and oh how much time we spend cultivating them. We can't sit still when we're alone. We go from one thing to the next

12.06.04

Due to the recent re-election of G. W. Bush, the strengthening of embargos and trade regulations, flux within the idea of borders, the power structure within our country, the lack of concern for the environment within our administration, Paul Middendorf and I decided to make something. This took careful consideration. Art is one of the few spheres of our society where we can - and are even expected to speak freely, to offer an alternative. So we put out a call to artists. We told them what we were doing – going down to Miami Beach for Art Basel to build a Lifeboat to use as a base for showing off artwork. We told them that we would sail this boat and dock it a few times a day so that people could come aboard and view or listen to the artwork, and talk with us. We gave ourselves 2 days to build, and then it would be ready. Miami Beach is the perfect place to, through the artwork aboard, explore immigration, pirates, utopias, natural and unnatural environments.
For the two weeks prior to Art Basel, from the time that we thought of building the Lifeboat until the time that we did, I was pretty excited and anxious. We both spent the time contacting and securing artists, trying to find funding and supplies, people to help us when we arrived, and devise a plan on how/where to do this. I arrived at the airport first, and met a friend, Jill, who was just moving back to Miami from New York. She arrived in a large Penske truck with two others. It was only the day before that I had secured the large 55 gal drums from Cintas Uniforms, located pretty far away – almost in the Everglades. So on the way there with the moving truck, we stopped for abandoned usable wood, and by the time we were done, Paul had arrived. That night Jill donated the truck and her power tools to the cause. We collected more supplies and slept in the truck in the parking lot for the Positions (the shipping containers that galleries participating in Art Basel turned into exhibition space for smaller galleries.) In the morning we began the process of weaseling our way into the Positions and building the Lifeboat there. By the end of the day, all of the people in charge of the Positions thought that we were an official part of Art Basel, were bringing us food, drinks, and when Paul left to do errands, they even stepped in to help me build it. That night we attended the opening parties, and as the night’s end approached we gathered a group of radicals and asked them to help us move the Lifeboat out to the shore. Before we had moved it 10 feet the barrels escaped their casing, and the boat broke apart. We carried it piece by piece to the beach (Coordinates: 22nd St. and the Beach), and reassembled it as “Twisted Sister” was playing, not 100 yards away. In the morning we repaired the Lifeboat and created an installation with the art.
Mike Nirenberg made the mast-head and was driving down from New Jersey, he would arrive the next night, and packages for the Lifeboat from artists kept arriving. The exhibition throughout was continually expanding. It became about excess. At night, people would tag it with their own marks – including Jeroen Jongeleen of Influenza. People would cross it on their way to the beach or come specifically to see it - one day, three separate people from Cuba came up to the Lifeboat and told us stories of the memories coming back to them by seeing this installation, telling about the (usually) five days it took with compass and 5 or 6 people on a raft smaller than what we had built, and making it to Miami Beach. Another day, we were asked to participate in an event in the Design District, across from ©Dietch. It was organized with performances. We re-created the boat-part out of cardboard brought everyone’s artwork and showed it off to enormous amounts of people. Much of the work touched people in one way or another. We gave away music CD’s – The Red Coats are Coming wrote a song specifically for Lifeboat, gave away John Vitale’s Propaganda photographs in a bottle and Sam Gould’s pamphlets on masked activities, text by Elena Bajo on the whale held captive in Miami – Lolita, and Libia Pérez de Siles de Castro and Olafur Arni Olafsson text that accompanied their poster work – Etnothriller. Buyers and dealers were interested in buying some of the work that they saw on the Lifeboat, and we have passed the artist’s contact info to these people to contact them directly. It was an adventure and we will do something similar soon.

11.15.04

10am on a Tuesday morning at 59th street station – the 4 train. I take the escalator from the bottom level to the upper level. I slide through the space between the top of the escalator and the railing, saving me the distance of 4 people who actually turn the corner where the designers intended turning. Then I am stopped in my tracks. There is an older gentleman. He is walking in place. He is trying to get out of the station, but he is stuck in time. Stuck in a loop of movement but the same place, I think P. Virillio would call this “the feedback loop” Should I tell somebody that this man is caught in the feedback loop? I decided not to since it was far more likely that this man was in the right place and I the wrong, as I passed him, exited the subway and made my way to 767 Lexington Ave. Perpetual happiness is a myth hatched in Bloomingdales.

11.01.04

The process of traveling from Brooklyn to Newark Airport wouldn’t be so daunting if it wasn’t a 6am flight. I found myself leaving at midnight to catch the last NJ Transit line (the last train is at 2am) for all of a 1/2 hr drive. I in the silent airport slept after a half awake conversation with a guy who was working two jobs after immigrating to New Jersey from Cuba. I told him that I had to lie down and he directed me to a couch. At 4:30 am, when a man walked by me with a Seattle’s Best cup, I got up and headed to the café to re-open the Socialist Review with renewed strength emanating from a paper cup of fresh brew, and sat down with the article I half-finished, in which Noam Chomsky discusses everything from Nixon/Kissinger professions to the Military-Industrial Complex to Regan and the formation of the early Al Queda. At 6am, I paid $6.95 to log onto Newark’s airport connection so as to send off some emails. I opened one from Matt Jones outlining a project that he has been working on with Kadar Brock. The idea as explained was beautiful - the email came complete with visuals as well. The last few times that I have talked to Jones since the recent selection of Bush as our Leader for another term, he has pulled out his copy of the Communist Manifesto. As miniscule and flash-art meets Surface – if we can use magazines to describe cold, appearance-biased investments, this seemed to have tripled my respect for him. Matt was going to read that book and re-evaluate our “democracy” and probably go “red”. These ideas make me want to dump this disgusting cup of Seattle’s Best all over Newark. The vast impenetrability of the American landscape that I can see outside the 360 degree panoramic windows don’t allow me to do this, as the view is separated by some damn thick glass and miles of empty parking lots. Chomsky mentions Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first official/state propaganda in the US. Its goal was to drive a relatively pacifist population into becoming hysterical anti-German fanatics, and it succeeded. I am ready to leave to fly to Portland, Oregon. The election is still very much in the air here, and peoples' emotions are high on either side. Private radio stations are having a field day with insults. I manage to run from one “blue zone” to the next. This, of course, does not really distort my very balanced reality : ) I still get to be in touch with my “red” roots as my family from birth is quite a religious/conservative group. Where NY allows people here to live on a parallel to the majority of the country –it can very easily be said that we all create our own realities, our own happiness, our own islands. The island is the driving force – where we all are – or all want (know it or not) to make this our reality. We can sail these concrete islands out into the ocean and each one of us can live out his/her own “Kon-tiki” or “Survivor” fantasy. The tent show on flooding is coming during pinnacle time. Behind-the-scenes corporations like Bechtel accumulate more and more private rites to water in the third world and the first world. As the landscape changes there will be mass- exodus from places where once water was good and plentiful but has since dried up or become unusable/contaminated. This will determine crops, migration, community roots in a world that is becoming more and more transient. Will we crave community in the traditional sense or will we let technologies be a surrogate? In times of survival, technology will become useless but those already ingrained and constantly used will be a part of us. What will the distortions be in interactions? It seems it is not far off a time when water and oil will be the causation of many wars and tragedy.

11.03.04

Right now so many of my friends are talking about ways to take their minds off of the election, so I wanted to quote this recent New York Times article by Ron Suskind - he is describing his encounter with a senior aide to Bush. He writes: "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" Also, this brings up 1990 Summer. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we had the first full-on TV war as entertainment. That brings up the co-opting of realistic video games by private sector and the military.

I got this great email from my friend Dave today, "We can realize today that we are in the middle of our adventure story when we thought we were at the end. Like the heroes of all adventure stories we have to redouble our efforts, face our fears and call upon hidden reserves of power. We’re going to have to intensify our challenges to our elected officials, the news media and the culture of fear and repression. We are going to have to build grassroots coalitions, pool our money and talent and maybe even run for office. Certainly we are deeply wounded, but we can scrounge up some reasons to be encouraged for our country: The left is more organized, better financed and more wide-spread than it has ever been; Alternative media is gaining power and influence. The idea that America can be a functioning empire has been seriously discredited. We have reignited a progressive movement that has grown rather quickly and it will continue to grow."

This evening, Matt Jones said he began reaffirming what is important in life and what is a waste of time (always an important thing to do), he is figuring out what he wants to focus on. I had friends from Holland here not too long ago who described usa as the third world. Maybe they just meant NYC, at the time I didn’t question them. I guess they were talking about the disparity between rich and poor, and that makes sense. [This got me imagining: The streets, the mall of the third world, the equivalent to the way parts of S. Africa is - people with shopping carts malling the streets. Malls don't escape any walk of life - and that was a sad thought.] OR maybe they meant things like the patriot act, the blind ideologies and imperial fantasies, with blatant propaganda thrown in to the mix - and recycled, puked out. Back to fantasy – numbed by everything we are numbed by here - fantasy offers us an escape. The further we slip into fantasy, the less physical reality we have. This most likely contributes to the resurgence of conservativism in America (did it ever subside?) "What is now called conservatism in America just refers to the control of women's reproductive rights and the right to consume gasoline without noting that greenhouse gasses are a form of global terrorism." (quote from an anonymous emailer) Well, our fantasy economy will someday crumble when we come to a time when we need to care about reality. On the other hand, desire is a growing and never ending fantasy. (Interesting philosophy that should be explored further…) We underestimated the role of religious issues in the rallying of the faithful in the reelection of Bush, and the role of the dreams and imaginaries that his administration and the media provide. Are we ready to confront THE DEATH OF REASON in America? A colonial imagination of a (sick) global fantasy. Now I will go to a bar and verbally communicate with some local friends and strangers, but am open for verbal communication on any of these things.

10.16.04

This is a loose timeline for the videos that I have been constructing:

1- Borders go from virtual to fiction. Places produce and trade at a rapid pace for one another. Language collides into one system, time-recording collides into one system.
2- The industries such as food, news, entertainment, etc. are owned by blanket-company, Bechtel (http://www.bechtel.com/). Delicate balance is lost.
3- Homeless utilize wearable-homes, and shopping-cart museum-machines.
4- Mass amounts of architecture look the same. People can not find their homes.
5- “Everymapspectus” becomes essential.
6- The substantial climate shift. Random storms and disasters result. They build personal-islands, walls around land, pockets of underground museums to the past.
7- Naturally their skin-color is homogenized. They become asexual, while reverting to primal creatures.
8- Naturally the wearable-homes take on human function. People have sex with reacher/receivers and breathe through the homes.
9- They begin “The New Way” via GPMcommunicatorsystem.
10- They make nonsensical machines for familiarity and to busy themselves. They do not know how to build anymore.

10.14.04

I made dinner for Libia and Oliver the other night. Kadar came as well. It was the night after a Kerry/Bush debate and the couple (currently from Holland) was shocked to say the least. Well, what is not shocking about it, of course? Kerry's insistence on "Killing the Terrorists" and Bush's ignorance, or a debate full of soundbites geared to an audience of idiots. Kadar and I agreed. In the Victorian era, people would cover table legs with covers, so as to remain pure and prudish. We still today try to break away from it, with dress, with personality, but the prude conservativism is making a beautiful comeback these days, with all of the protectionisms, nationality, praying on the tele, blaming the bad. Obsolete meets advertising. It can make anything valid again. Reminds me of The Man Behind the Curtain in Wizard of Oz. They also remarked on the insane amount of painting here as opposed to Europe, which I knew would come up and met the challenge, we got into a good debate one night in front of the mermaids at Coral Room after witnessing a wonderfully acceptable show by E.Benson, which left me on the losing side of the debate. Two against one. I tried to get Matt Jones in on the discussion, the amazing creator of paintings he is, but unfortunately he was distracted, so we ended up coming to a resolution without him.

Today is close to Oct 14, but not really. The time is 5:15 in this part of the world and the sun is magnificent on the buildings outside of the studio. I have streaks of pink nail polish on my hand as a result of making some art here, and there are parts of an old door knob on the floor given to me by David from Robert Mann who so thoughtfully saved them from the trash for me. They are shiny, and they are there. On the floor. Along with some old Christoper Pike books - why? Maybe the cover art. I'll go to Portland soon. A few weeks. Mike Nirenberg had an open studio in Williamsburg, where he showed a loop of his horror film. I saw 4 who used to go to PNCA, all now living here, and it was very enjoyable. There was also this brilliant performance by these two with German accents who broke out into this rap about prejudices against Germans, and being a minority. I liked it so much because it was hilariously entertaining, and at that moment I just wanted to be entertained. Also Anu was here from Norway with two Icelandic friends, and they are quite critical of art but wanted to laugh a bit too. Spencer and I went to Maine. He took the bus from New Orleans during the hurricane, arrived simultaneously with Clinton, and we had a busy weekend, a long drive to Maine for Jessica's wedding on this island on Moosehead Lake. The car (Sarah's) had a problem on the drive back, we stopped in Portland, ME to reminisce and to have the car looked at. We made it back to brooklyn around 2am, and Spencer left the next morning. He was sick -and sort of annoyed that I was busier than I thought I would be. But now it is alright. (?) The sculpture, "Pirate Utopic Command Center 69' Chevy Chevy Bang Bang" was brought up to Peekskill by the HVCCA for their Peekskill Projects, and nineteeneighty had an exhibit on Crystals there as well. It seemed to have gone well but I was in Maine so have no first-hand knowledge. Meanwhile, Disjecta participates in Jupiter Art Fair in Oregon with some photos, as well as Lyons Wier with some photos at Photo New York. Kadar went with me to the opening of "Tomorrow" at the Science Museum. We went to a strange diner out in queens first. It reminded me of something out of East Windsor, CT. Sort of depressing but it was a beautiful Sunday so there was no need for it to be. Then we went for a bike ride in the country. Well Prospect park isn't the country. Alas...

Recently survivors comes up a great deal. The nomads who live out on the street below my apartment, with the shopping carts full of modern collections. Sometimes I feel like a synthetic "survivor". Since Holland when I finally got away from NY and being engulfed in a stream of fast moving fashion, technology, pop, etc. and had to do everything with nothing, started to find very interesting items discarded, began to see what I could make with cardboard, with motherboards, with bicycle parts, I have been addicted to these discarded treasures, adopt them and turn them into past-future homing devices and other important entities.

08.29.04

So, we have moved. Sarah, Stephanie and I secured a nice place on the 6th floor of our apartment building. We decided to get a couch. We drove to New Hampshire to get this fine babe, yep, the 2 gals and I. You may ask, why not try the local craigs-list, or Housing Works?? The couch is a depression era, re-upholstered sitter complete with an off-white pastoral scene. It will provide gentle contrast with the craps games and incessant traffic on the street below it/us. But, on the other hand, it will blend seamlessly with the pink marble kitchen table, the light pink chairs with black accents. How prevalent eBay has become in the lives of young city people…how it surpasses the glitz of craigs-list and the treasures on the side of the road. No, this is not true. It just happened we all liked this one and had to go to New Hapmshire anyways, because Sarah and Stephanie had never seen it up there. Now I’m ridin north, the Unknown Soldier by The Doors is playing full blast, so we can hear it above the plastic blowing in the wind, the plastic that is covering the depression-era couch that is atop Stephanie’s car. It is dark. We are passing silos in northern Massachusetts, heading to CT. I look forward to my next visit up here – a few weeks away -when Spencer and I drive up to Jess’s wedding on an island in Moosehead Lake, ME. I love this girl, and can’t wait to see Spencer.
Well, I wrote that in the car, on the laptop. Today, Sunday, I asked Stephanie to go with me to the Billionaires for Bush rally as the RNC begins here tomorrow. She knew she wanted to go to one of the marches – there are quite a few – but not to which one. So we dressed up today in our finest pearls and dresses (after getting the couch into the apartment at approximately 530 this morning), brought some champagne flutes, someone in the march gave us a sign that read Still Loyal to Big Oil – Bush/Cheney 04… I was glad we were a part of that. Satire and humor are still the best medicine in my opinion. And getting a double take is a hard thing to pull off midst half a million people marching to get the bush out of our city/out of office. Zander and Kate were arrested.

07.31.04

La Guardia had been a brilliant morning. It began - dark at 5am 125th and Park Ave. waiting for the bus, carrying a good amount of camera equipment, sufficient amount of clothing, and more books than I would ever read in a month, never mind five days. I used to carry with me three books a day because I never knew which I would be in the mood to ride on the train, or wherever. Of course that was when I lived in Boston. That was necessary -it is a damn boring town.
Here. At La Guardia. It was early morning and a week gone by, I remember it like it was This morning – the scent of the Coffee Beanerie, the initial sip of overpriced coffee with half and half, the casino song emitting from the McDonalds cash register as it started up, gate still down. The people coming out of the walls into an empty eatery as soon as the gate rose. I thought I was almost alone in there - except for the couple who looked like they stepped out of The Great Gastby and the prominent voice of the woman talking at the man about his new shoes. It appeared that they might have been going to a wedding. They also did not care about the Morning Opening of McDonalds. I began to feel exhausted which possessed me to write an immense amount of letters in a rather short block of time (if time can be blocks) – multitasking with my coffee and the apple Sarah gave to me before I left.
The day before we went to visit Granny in CT at Foxwoods casino. This is sad for me to write, we were supposed to go to the beach, but it was raining. She has cancer and is not doing well at all. She wanted to go to the casino because she thinks it is fun. I think anywhere with my family is fun, aside from the times…nevermind. Haha - a joke. Anyways, it was pretty fun. Sarah and I went to a buffet and took some fruit for the road. My aunt thought it was funny and used the phrase “starving artist”, which was really the case a couple of months ago – before credit became an option again. Europeans don’t really believe in trading a card swipe for whatever you want (yet).
So the serenity of the airport and its faceless participants (described well by Spencer when he said – if we were walking on those rolling floor mats and someone just went “blip” and disappeared, no one would notice) made for a perfect morning (perfection not being that difficult to find). When I arrived in New Orleans I noticed that the goa trance in La Guardia had been replaced with some cheap rendition of New Orleans/bebop jazz. Where the hell was I? It struck me that this may be a bit like Disney world. (My god… when I typed Disney into word, the auto-correct capitalized it for me. Well, he is important in the way that Hollywood erects statues of actors in prominent poses from prominent movies - which feels wrong because pop is in theory much more transient than centuries of a language - but of course that is not reality, they are both as liquid as the Hudson). Then I saw Spencer’s smile and we kissed in an uncomfortable, first kiss sort of way. Spencer is amazing. New Orleans is a weird, poverty stricken, below sea level, dangerous yet beautiful place.
New York, the greatest show on earth. Greeted by incessant laughter. The gap that existed between black and white in New Orleans was not in the least bit there at La Guardia. Everyone talking. Everyone is really alive. The only place in America where we are all bonded by a few common enemies – Bush. The patriot act. Etcetera. In New Orleans, a few people cared. Here it appears that everyone cares. We are not shy. I think it was James Brown who said, we’re loud and we’re proud. Well, not exactly.
Besides all of this, Nineteeneighty as a group has a show up at Rare Gallery. It is great. Here, a few small images but it really needs to be seen in person.

07.10.04

So it goes, we meet at Grassroots for a good time. Most of the guys played magic and the rest of us talk about politics and art. This time there were more girls around. Tara was there – we have been trying to go to BAM together for the Fassbinder retrospective. We talked about (mentioned) how great Fassbinder was – I just recommended to her “Beware of the Holy Whore,” which she found more cultish, and less humanistic, and I strongly had to disagree. If I can discuss “Beware…” for a minute, I would have to say that it is magnificently humanistic, maybe in a way we don’t want to admit that people are. But Beware is about the breakdown of these people, fighting for the spotlight, sexual frustration, masochism, people slowly trying to destroy each other, unresponsiveness and obsessive love interests. It is backhandedly political – I am apparently a giant fan of this film - but I really want to see his film I think called, Germany in Autumn. This is maybe more traditional to Fassbinder’s humanism and really supposed to be a film that is about him, fighting with his mother, supposedly one of cinemas most revealing and open moments about a filmmaker. He also did a movie after Genets novel Querelle. I would like to see that one and Chinese Roulette with Godard’s wife, Anna Karenina in it.

07.02.04

Being away but hearing about everything that is going on in America from afar – of course it was pretty scary and unreal - especially in such a relatively liberal environment. Maybe, had I been here, my anger about having rights and privacy taken away would have been softened by a bombardment of warning emails to the effect of: “Bloomberg has ordered 12,000 extra body bags…and this Friday 6/11 don’t ride the subways” which have been arriving my inbox since I have been back to NY. That is one of the strangest things – why have I been receiving these random, basically anonymous emails only since I have been back?? Anyways, the power of instilling fear is one of the greatest powers over people in fairly comfortable situations. In Holland as well, people are of course conscious of terrorism, but also of dikes breaking and flooding. In politics there is an expression “a polder society” meaning a society of consensus – polder is used in making dikes, insinuating that there is a consensus within Holland that people all need to protect from flooding, so now polder = consensus. While I was there and of course now, I am very much questioning general differences I see in American vs. European art, asking myself – what makes art effective? Coming to one conclusion – when art is implemented in other facets of life it becomes more effective.
When I walked into Exit Art I was prepared to support Elena and knew little about the exhibition. I immediately believed the performance of security at the door, preparing myself to go back to a police state when I entered NYC. When leaving Rotterdam, the government had just begun implementing random searches on the subway – to deter crime. Similar to what will happen here! But it surprised me that this searching was taking place in a gallery, but who knows, it is a big building, just moved, whatever. I thought it was weird that at least to myself, I associate security with more public places. A gallery is pretty public, open to the public, yet the public doesn’t really go there. Art as I usually view it is in a pretty insular context. Does exit art expect it to get rowdy? yea, kind of looks like a nightclub, anyways, with my confusion about the performance I came away thinking, yes, that was very effective for me, an artist, to see. And I hope as well for many other artists to see. Public art and art in general is strongest in public. Bringing it inside to exit art was a strange line – it was entertaining but at the same time very emotional and eye-opening to these issues – I guess if I was defining “what makes a good show” then something like this show would be my definition.
Chris Cunningham is creating things I completely love. One reason I think art is not taken seriously is not because people are creating dreamy, lofty things but just because art is insular, and on top of that always referring to itself – which is boring and outsiders don’t understand. Art is still effective when it leaves its sphere – when artists work with architecture, when they work in public spaces, work with a history other than art. And the reverse is true, art is usually very strong when say, a scientist makes something and puts it into an art context. On another note – I liked the exit art show for re-exposing these ideas to artists, although it took what is great about public art (being in public) and contained it inside the gallery.
What I do want is to make a story where people don’t live in traditional houses anymore, where they carry everything they need on them, in a way that is futuristic but also about a time where we didn’t need any of the crap that we have now, in a way a traditional Inuit lifestyle, however - we don’t have friends, we don’t know how to interact, we don’t know how to have sex, our suits take over as extensions for ourselves. We need to interact only for reasons like saving our land (the man in the aquarium is the man fixing the wall and the man who talks to the woman is first talking to his boss about going to build a sea wall) This is when a new community is formed and it starts with the man and woman having sex. They were speaking some form of Esperanto - I took the 4 most spoken languages in the western world and used the word from that language that closely fit the description of what I wanted – this also used by google and other online translators I liked the dialogue in the Esperanto part.
I want to show a time where we have melded together, become homogeneous but still there are small differences – the same way the corporate marketing game tricks consumers into thinking that they are buying the newer better thing but they are all just the same. I want to talk about the end of time or a deadening of time – according to some prophecys we are already in this 7 yr. Period before the end of the world, and this begins with everything the beginning began with. It has to do with American power, 1984, new ways to survive. In the end they find a fucked up happiness.

06.15.04

Tarkovsky said “cinema is not a new art it's just a new form of presentation'.

"His using of classical music and showing and quoting of old
paintings is meant to give the cinema the deep roots
that it hasn't aquired yet by itself)(another typical
quote: 'movies shouldn't be entertaining, that is
debasing for both the maker and the audience'). " Gert
The movie was unbelievably good. Next to Kirosawa’s “Dreams”

Later in the week I decide I have been hearing a lot of conversations I would describe as well-versed, tired, unexcited, moving on. Glossed over, maybe a false understanding… My problem is I haven’t been seeing enough of my friends, and instead just taking in the environments around me.

06.09.04

Hello from land of art, sex, money, media, overabundance...god it is shocking and exciting to be back! at first I was so repulsed, but once you are used to it, it becomes reality and the great outweighs the negative. Last night I find myself having dinner with a writer from the Economist who was stationed in Kuwait for the beginning of the war, and during the day working on a shoot for hanes underware – what??? It – the city - is a constant propelling force, this person wants to be prettier, skinnier, more successful, a better actor, more personable, funnier. No one can just be. That isn't (surface) interesting enough. I was sitting on the train thismorning to go to the gallery. I have 4 bags because afterward stephanie and I are driving to meet my family in CT, and then the next day to Mass Moca. I have my camera, clothes, things to bring back to them that they mailed to me while I was in Holland - ie:sweaters, etc. and I have a book and papers. The girl sitting across from me I noticed had many things as well. Every second she checked one of the things out. At first she looked at me reading. Then she took out her palm and started to analyze it, she had her ipod walkman on, and a hiking backpack under one arm, a bag/purse on her lap. out of the side pouch of her hiking backpack she pulled out her poland springs water bottle and quickly took a small sip. She put it back. She looked at her spywatch/bracelet and adjusted her bags. She turned up or down her ipod. She put away her palm and took another sip of her water. OK you know where I am going with this. I am a like, so much better than that with my books and clothes and all... I have to get re-adjusted to the city.

spylink

06.04.04

Back in Holland for the show. Elena brings up the idea of mental garbage – how we write something down to expel it from our short-term memory. We talk about the statistic – a person only uses ten percent of his or her brainpower. Then about the idea that there are no real advances in technology, we are stagnant, advancing only with production. I have been thinking about the amount of artwork I have seen in the trash lately, and personally throwing away a good amount of artwork that I could not take with me to NY– It is easy to imagine enormous amounts of truly interesting unfinished sculptures, drawings, etc. that were for one reason or another disposed of. In Holland, artists have an enormous amount of space to house and file away old artwork; mental garbage. Failed works, works that did not fulfill our expectations; these works barely see day. So what does fill our landscape? A proliferation of advertisements and images used to stimulate commerce or to create fear in the cultures, an overproduction of clothing, beauty aids, home aids, electronics, bottles, plastic utensils, comfort aids. We downsize our products with new products, the small replaces the large as people flock to cities. Graffiti is covered over the next day. We spend desperate time and dollars trying to reclaim nostalgic feelings about a culture we have never experienced while widening the current culture. We continuously create the present, and recreate an idea and feeling of the past. In turn an idea of progress becomes distorted and the future promises improvements on the technology of the present.

05.04.04

Part from an interview I still like: Uniforms and tools are definitely products of my waking dreams. I imagine this is a future that is not far off – we could easily see uniforms in our lifetime. It really comes from many things that I think about regularly that frustrate me in politics and big business. Being an American, this is the prevailing thought. I think about that on a large scale and then on a small scale, growing up in American high schools with brand names always being the uniform, this college I went to in Portland, near the end of my time there enacted a rule that required all students to wear name tags with our photograph on them. At that point I began to wear a uniform of grey every day to school. But a very scary thing to me is uniform thought, which falls into a dialogue about watching constant advertisements, television as a passive medium and one where your brain constantly accepts data without really conscious questioning. It has happened already. A few clothing brands are umbrella brands to the thousands underneath. They produce variations of their creations or styles – to give the buyer a false choice. Soon enough, as we slowly forget, our choices will be whittled down to none. When this happens and we are all wearing the same uniform, they will need to have more functions than they do now. There is a lot of textile design study on futuristic elements of comfort added to clothing. This is nice, but when we consider all that is going on in the world right now, the ease of travel, the awkwardness of having a home, the distinction of a sense of roots we have to a culture, to tradition, etc. we need to live in what we wear.. When we give up stationary homes, this is when we will really start living. Or not. We will travel the earth, but at the same time we will remain very separate from one another. Like now in our window sills we display kitsch objects, and reminders of home and happiness, in the future we may hold onto some of these objects – or – like with the rostafform that you mention – people create their own objects that establish place, or that help them adapt. This object I gave to someone with a missionary position. Maybe a leader of a new project like an apostrupture in that area or part of “The New Way” an online community based on new age religions. If science-fiction is closer to reality, I believe that is a better description of what I am trying to make. I take off on the fantasy part, but it always fits into this scary vision that I have." The interview went on and I told him I was pretty emotionally unavailable (like us all), and then proceeded to tell him much more than he wanted to know about Catholicism and suppression, and how it is a generalization, but most generalizations are results of good reason.

So, I was reading today. One interesting thing, the Japanese cell phone market. Women can use cellphones to track their ovulation. After logging their vitals into a database provided by the service, an animated koala bear depicts their cycle. (If the bear climbs up the tree, the woman's temperature is rising and she may be ovulating. If the bear climbs down, conception is unlikely.) Guys can date a virtual girlfriend supplied by their cell phone - they can make advances, and the virtual girl will either respond in a positive or negative way. We have online dating services in the states, in Japan they have cellular dating services. If a woman finds herself in Roppongi Hills with no one to buy her a drink, she can access the service to look for a suitable companion. If someone in the vicinity responds positively, global positioning systems, using ringtones, direct the two to each other for an "offkai" (Japanese slang for a meeting off-line). What else? Friendster is second only to orchid.com. haha... Today I was thinking about this time at this really hyped-up club, Crowbar in Miami. Kadar Brock and I were dancing to techno. We lost the art crowd momentarily and went back to our roots. There were fire dancers. The rest of the night was crazy and Dave Hunt was trying to get me to drink gallons of water so I would not get sick. That was a nice meeting/interrogation. I like his brazen, opinionated nature (we need more people with opinions these days), and some may say he is smart. Miami is such a place of excess. Everything had a false/real intensity - brought on by a culture prospering on a steady flow of drugs and silicon. (I figure I may slowly start revealing more detrimental evidence on this site. I very much like the fact that when someone like Kadar googles his own name, he will read about that fine time dancin.)

05.02.04

A rainy Sunday morning May 2, before (yes) church. Queen’s Day we talked about the best things…we sat there in a restaurant serving pizza. Chandeliers, candles, dark wood, blue Romanesque high-modern design, really bordering kitsch. I’m told that this restaurant’s purpose is money laundering. We talked about aliens while it was storming out. (It turns out the south of Holland actually flooded from this storm.) Before that, spent an afternoon sitting on the terrace drinking coffee and wine. Horrible. I gave myself a break. Really, Jan said if I worked at all today he would scream at me. So I held my tongue and participated in the Dutch holiday. Queen’s Day in Rotterdam. Everybody sells the things they would have otherwise thrown away – It is a very good thing. People exchange their old things amongst each other for next to nothing. Anyone can set up a blanket and table and sell. I bought (with the help of Jan) a pair of snakeskin boots for e2.
Church alone is very nice. There is a good-looking tall Dutch fellow who sits next to me - he greets me in Dutch and I greet him back in English. That is sweet. (I counteract my newfound purity by spending a lot of time with Jan.) Today I had the times mixed up (I had been trying all of these different churches here so it was inevitable). But I went to a café (where I am writing this in between reading Spencer’s recommendation: In The Absence of the Sacred. When Gert saw me reading this the other day he recommended I should really read Marshall McLuhan’s book on or titled “The Global Village”. I have never read any McLuhan’s books. [The thinking behind this simply being – right now, hey, I’m converted.] I like Noam Chomsky anyways.)
The pizza dinner – Janco concludes we have really made no technological advances presently. We are selling and re-selling the same things with slight changes (Think of Mac G5, 6, 7 to GX, or keeping things from being sold that will eliminate the need for new things. Think of Ikea making furniture that is not supposed to last over 5 years. Think of a cell phone that takes pictures, a newer one that takes video, c’mon, how slow and boring.) He is correct of course. We talked – the problem is, advancement is not about selling, therefore we need to change our ideas. Our ideas about time from linearity to non-linearity and this will put us on the right path to get us closer to time and dimension travel - and THEN we can say that we are REALLY GETTING SOMEWHERE. I think some sectors of science are on the right track. The VA glass is a device that is off to the right start. It will really start to become something when if It (as an object) is eliminated, but as a result, adopted. Also cloning, living forever, new habitats – these somewhat “taboo” topics. These things need to be our future if we care about surviving as a race. Frankly, I don’t think that we care. Governments certainly do not. We need to be basic again, to live with the land, to forget about comfort and embrace adventure. We need to really live.

04.04.04

Went to the house of Daphne and Marcel. They are amazing, both of them. Daphne is sometimes almost unreal in her mysticism and lyricism. Her thoughtfulness is unbelievable - not a conversation goes by where she does not astound you with one of her points - her ways of viewing the relationships between things (http://home.wanadoo.nl/daphne35/) - the world - and of course her husband Marcel is equally as charming - knows everyone in the room - brilliant, really. So I always have an amazing time in their presence. Sunday was spent in Dizzy's (after Gillespie) listening to live jazz - a sunny day - I did not make it to church even though it was my plan to. The night before I met with Jan. Jan was the man giving me a hard time at the opening. A challenge I thought. And wanted to know what he really thought. So I meet him at some bar - the first thing I notice is his shirt. It is a gridded collage of girls’ faces in midst orgasm - heidi fleiss was the recognizable one - really I was shocked. At the opening we were watching part of the video he did not like - the wearable home is mirrored against itself- the movement implies intercourse but is not at all clear - his comment to that was - take it all of the way - don't stay in-between. Myself, I enjoy complexity. So anyways, the shirt was - I'll say shocking. But he turns out to be great to talk to and we throw ideas back and forth for hours, between dinner and bars, and by the end of the night he makes his point with the shirt and we plan another meeting for later in the week. So during dinner and bars I drink an amazing amount of coffee to keep up with his speed and energy - and its not until I am in bed that I realize I will not be falling asleep. So I stay up trying to fall asleep, dreaming but still awake, passing in and out of sleep before shutting off the alarm (I set to make it to church) going downstairs to the library. I go on the computer. There is a mouse moving around in the recycling bin. Its cold down there. I decide to go back upstairs around 6am and finally fall asleep. I miss church and the day begins. Went to the house of Daphne and Marcel. They are amazing, both of them. Daphne is sometimes almost unreal in her mysticism and lyricism. Her thoughtfulness is unbelievable. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, there is a dinner party at Noelle's home. It completes a great day.

04.03.04

with a little time to reflect - I started being more critical. a lot of things will be re-evaluated before our next show in may. I’m seeing the art I'm making in categories and, really, these categories are never desirable and always need to be transcended. of course on the other hand the more categories you can involve yourself in - the better too, because we really always categorize everything. it is the way we think today with so much information available to us. on another note, Michael has many things going on for me when I arrive in NY, one of them being the dog-sitting of Diva - I stay in his wonderful Chelsea abode - which works out perfectly for me as it is at the time I arrive in NY - and I will not have my apartment back from the two guys staying there at the moment until the end of May. Mira Burke is the first buyer of a wearable home. A photograph of mine is on the cover of Photography Quarterly Magazine this quarter - and the show here has lead to some gallery and exhibition space interest in the Netherlands. I look forward to returning to NY. Nineteeneighty has a few things planned and I have a big plan for the group in The Armory next year. Jessica and I are exchanging emails to do with Wisconsin/Rotterdam. Our lives. Our expectations, our disappointments. Overall, we are happy, and we realize we have a lot of work to do.

03.27.04

dedes/mattingly in Holland opened yesterday. the opening went well. friends and strangers came - people liked what they saw and in general comments were flattering. I was intrigued by one guy whom I overheard talking very loudly about how the work was shit "not good art" etc. etc. I began talking to him and asking some questions. it was interesting because he thought overall it needed to really say something and it (the art) had things to say but was not clear about one thing or the other. he said the one thing he liked was a timepiece I made - it is really kitsch and bubbly like a swatch watch but in degrees - a day broken into 360 degrees. The New Way has devised a calendar. Everyone in the world can be on the same calendar. Our days begin and end at the same time - so we can better communicate with different places in the world. this may mean some places a common bedtime is 90 degrees where another it is 240 degrees - its just a way to have smoother transactions throughout the world. So anyways, we get to talking, he doesn't believe in subtlety apparently and I explain why I think sometimes subtlety is necessary and mystery is much more desirable. Anyhow, this was one of my more interesting conversations of the evening.

02.14.04

st. valentines day, rotterdam.

along with our many other talents, Stephanie and I have become experts on bicycles.

02.02.04

the day before we leave for iceland. Our first official studio visit today. snapshots of rotterdam

02.01.04

Dre Wappenaar - the first subject of The New Breed. Dre is an artist living at Duende. He is doing incredible work. Presented is a small sample I borrowed from the design institute's website, however we can see his work at Mass Mocha later this spring in what will be an outstanding show with Lucy Orta.

01.30.04

We are about ready to leave for Iceland, Stephanie and I. Thinking about the subways in NYC and how great they are. Well the subway is really too expensive now, so I will probably start biking when I return, however, where else can you get stolen batteries 6 for a dollar, "Duracellllll"? Where else can you hear the most insanely loud stories from some of the most over-the-top characters you will ever not want to meet? Not in the Netherlands where PJ described it pretty well...Dutch - aren't they just boring Germans? He can say that because he is German and I can laugh because I am Dutch. No I am not, actually, but I can laugh because I have a sense of humor and Dutch people are really great and not the basis for that many caricatures or cartoons (unlike the usual breed of New Yorkers.) Two days ago I visited a post office here to mail an application to the United States. Stephanie had mailed an almost identical package the day before for the price of about e2. My price the next day was e4.20. I waited while the woman behind the counter took my money and put my package, unstamped, onto the counter with a priority mail sticker and void of postage. I told her, I will wait until she posts it and drop it in the box for her (as politely as possible). She muttered something and said she would do it after this line passed. So I left, all the while feeling very uneasy. I meet up with Stephanie about 10 minutes later and tell her the story. We deduce that her package was in fact heavier than mine because of the cardboard envelopes she used. So I decide to go back and ask for my package back to drop it at the main post office (so I can be sure it makes it to the US on time.) So they reach into the box to fish out my envelope - to my surprise there is only e1.80 in stamps on the package! The woman takes the package, peels off the postage, and returns my e4.20 to me. I leave not knowing how to handle this...should I fight? Should I take the box of Valentines Day cards on the counter and deposit them into the trash can and walk out? I decide I will go back the next day with Stephanie's ski mask and demand all of their money - because they owe it to me and all the others they ripped off. In the meantime, I take my package to the main post office, where the correct? price comes to e2.20. I am really angered then that my package probably would never have arrived had I not went back to rescue it. That is all. Expect to hear my name in the local news soon for robbing a post office. Besides that, a very small town on the river in Holland was flooding, their dike was very old. It turns out it was a water pipe, and the town was evacuated, everyone was very on edge...

01.22.04

Stephanie and I have just completed the first Dedes/Mattingly Talk/Interview. You can follow the link through here.

– to just have to make art every day, a great change from how crazy New York is. I have time to read books write letters and think about everything I have been putting off. It is of course hard to ask yourself the questions like why? And can I be doing More? All of the time…but that gets exhausting quickly…so then you are exhausted so you just make because that is what you do. I have been making wearable sculptures and other sculptures to used in the film. Am finishing a script and taking pictures – I should be ready to shoot the video at the end of January. The sculptures that are not wearable are what people would make (out of discarded mechanical objects) to help them do things – it is as if technology has gone so far that some things are just accepted as a part of your life – like VA glasses that you put on and they direct you – the same way that digital car maps work – but they also remind you of meeting someone in the past and explain things to you. But people have forgotten practical things like shovels so they build big contraptions to help them shovel dirt.

01.13.04

Some photographs by Stephanie Dedes - Amsterdam is one of the most gorgeous cities I have ever seen. We went to some openings there for some new friends and headed back to Rotterdam playing Marienbad on the train - yea i found this game - its called marienbad after the film Last Year at Marienbad...

The New Way

01.04.04

The new year has passed, I am in Rotterdam at an artist residency. Stephanie cut my hair. Been reading tons of Parkett - one of the only magazines here in English. Been reading "The Life of Saint Faustina". Being allowed to make art like this is such a special thing. I don’t want to rush into it but I have a vision that I would like to explore. I think if everyone were to push their minds to its outermost limit we would perhaps get to experience something never created before (an important goal for an artist in my opinion.) There is so much to be explored and translated into art. I've compiled a top ten list this morning for 2003 (it is pretty rough right now):

Mary’s Top Ten
1. Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim – Although we all contemplate his stardom – did he really make something so great so he is justified a show at the Guggenheim at what, age 36? He really has done some great things, his photographs are just about the best I have seen this year, and films a great balance of ambiguous and based in some sort of concrete (as in documented) mysticism that vaguely peaks even the most closed-minded persons interest.
2. Tom Friedman at the New Museum – After I read an interview he did with John Waters, I trusted his titles – 1,000 Hours of Staring – and I think of him with a romance I don’t think of most artists having – a white studio with no windows that he went to like clockwork – making beautiful objects out of common things. I think he does harmoniously what so many other artists do clumsily – or have the same idea about using common objects to make art – even Duchamp’s Urinal seems so much less thought through(wait...was that this year?)ha!
3. Thomas Demand had many European shows in 2003, some of which I saw online. He makes sculptures, very detailed and usually out of paper of some architectural structure he remembers from his childhood – they are very stiff and German of office spaces or middle schools – and then he photographs them. I went to a lecture he did at the Guggenheim where he quickly flipped through some slides of these new pictures he had taken of him laying in the grass shooting the sun through trees. He said this went against everything he was taught in photography, flare on the lens, etc. It was refreshing. The shows he had in Europe this year were little constructions of trees and he probably flooded a bright light through – they looked like the slides he flipped through at the lecture but they were constructions.
4. Fred Tomaselli at James Cohan – Yea, this guy is awesome. He kind of has that same feel as Tom Friedman for his small details in the work but it is so fun and the overall end work is something so beautiful and allows you to look at it for a long time and question – what kind of drugs was he on? But then you can just go to his early works for the answer.
5. Thomas Hirschorn at Barbara Gladstone – OK this was great. The first word that comes to mind – Crafty. Then I think of Guy Debord, Noam Chomsky, the Unibomber. This deserved to be somewhere else – not enough people saw it at Barbara Gladstone. Maybe riverside park would have been better.
6. Charlie White at Andrea Rosen (Andrea Rosen and people with the name Tom are winning for sure) – His photography is great – one of my 3 favorites. This show was much better than the last one with the alien creature at the cocktail party. That little deer was my favorite.
7. Julian Schnabel at Pace Wildenstein – Matt Jones really turned me on to his paintings. And what a guy.
8. Moma Queens “Drawing Now” Paul Nobel drawings, John Currin, Julie Mehrute, some of the most interesting drawing of the past few years was here.
9. John Currin at the Whitney. I believe it. His drawings and paintings are great – he is a great painter and approaches his subject (his wife) with great humor and so much love.
10. Las Vegas – The greatest show on earth! Ar har har har…A major difference between European and American artists – they think of a new “project” we think of ourselves and the “body of work” we want to accumulate and grow through.
My Favorite artists this year:
Chris Larson
Thomas Hirschorn
Martin Kippenberger
Mark Lombardi
My Favorite artists as of last night when I read way too much:
John Bock
Fred Tomasali
Tom Friedman
Best Books I read this year:
Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis
Rule By Secrecy by Jim Marrs
Im listening to:
Peaches
Outkast
Lansing-Dreiden – who also had a really good show at the New Museum
Things that I have re-discovered or never forgot and continue to listen to a lot:
Talking Heads
REM
Velvet Underground
Kruder and Dorfmeister
Plaid
Best Video:
Aphex Twin, hands down.
Best Film:
Lord of the Rings
Things I noticed this year that I did not really like, no that I loved:
Mobile post office stations, weird…
Reality tv shows – of course we all noticed these
Resurgence in video games, don’t know how I feel about this
The fact that MS Word corrects your spelling – allows you to not capitalize I’s or think about spelling - therefore typing faster. (I have built this computer here that only has 24 keys. That is what it will come to)

Other things going on - I have had the most vivid dreams since I have been here. The first really real dream I caught 5 thieves - one right after another. (I'll keep the descriptions limited to none - but it was cool.) The next night I was peeling layers of skin off of my legs - they were like clay casts peeling off. Last night I had a dream that Jason Chan was married to this pretty but possessive woman - who I met in the dream and was very cordial - Jason had two children. I have not seen him in a while - a couple of years ago in Portland. In reality I have a piece in a museum show in Tampa, FL. and Final Fantasy is in the London Photographic Awards this January. It is very cold in Duende. New years eve I had a great conversation with a revolutionary - Ill call him that because he is definitely leaning that way. Looking forward to meeting other great conversationalists. Wearing the same things everyday just about.

Text from my old site I just came across:

How do people function in a not-so-far-off future? When they are technologically removed from their neighbor, and places all mimic each other? Wearable homes extend the body into his or her immediate environment. Parts of their homes serve different functions.
They act as reminders of memories, museums to the person and his or her family or friends. The wearers are forced to divorce themselves from collection and internalize due to necessity; space restrictions, element restrictions, navigational restrictions. Taking a tour of a personal museum enlightens the viewer to subtle aspects of the wearers overall self, his culture, his heritage, his memory. In many cases these museums house relics of ideas and notions that no longer have a place in society.
There are elements of protection in the home – protection from man-made harmful elements, and from other people (the spikes on its back, the padding on its front, the long arms, the cancer-protective-shield above its ear). The home is meant to extend the senses of touch and hearing. In a state where individuality is lacking, it becomes hard to tell one place from another by just sight. These sense-extenders make it easier for the wearer to function in space.
The houses allude to a new mysticism that is forming – away from cultural mysticism and towards a global mysticism. The homes also partake in new kitsch displays to make the wearer feel at home.
James's Day

No, she did not like this room, she did not acknowledge it. Maybe she was too distracted by something else and missed it, I thought. I pointed out the dark wood cubist shelf that created a boundary between the front of the room and the back. She liked it. She motioned her head, nodding her approval. I felt better. We walked on. The next room fit the description of a child. Colorful, small, plastic. Not really cheap, as I would have expected (My father used to live off of Flatbush Avenue – the area between ( and ) . At the time it was littered with these places like “Toys 4 Kids” and “99 cent outlets”, and he did tell me about places like that. We weren’t kids, so this room she ignored. No reason to dwell on the past. I agreed completely, myself. I’m a big proponent of the future. I’ll be the first human to voluntarily go through with the thought scan. While I don’t know if this is really forward thinking or not, it is resisted and I have always liked to be part of the opposition, and of the future. There was probably a time in my life when I chose to oppose technology, and really took great care in making sure my peers knew my Luddite stance, but, frankly, I don’t care to remember. I don’t think I would mind being completely unemotional. I was telling her the other day that the only time I really feel emotional is during a song or a film that moves me. Both are of course secondary experiences, but I become so emotional watching people channel their emotions into song aimed at an abstracted salvation. Or maybe I become emotional for myself, and my own guilt for my lack of roots, history, and beliefs, for knowing that my father may have had these things. There is a part of me that understands that if I let enough of my liberties be taken from me, that there will be a point where I will revolt from myself, from all of the constraints placed on me, by me and by others. I like the fiction of the intense explosion I think it would cause, something better than any of those old Patrick Swartzenegger films. I move her reacher out of the way with my arm and pull her close to me to see if she feels anything, to see if she is warm, or if I am alone. She comes for a second and tells me about a box that just caught her eye. Maybe it was the way it was lit or the perfectly mitered edges, the space for an object inside. She probably thought, “I have some objects to house, and could make use of something like this.” We are lucky to be together I told myself. I thought about objects, about museums. This is not the object of an old museum. Museums are specialized in all different areas now though. This museum of housewear I recall from my father telling me stories about it just being called IKEA. Today MUSEUMIKEA draws wanderers with time to waste, people who may remember or have a vague idea about home, about a house. The guests of this museum will most likely be single. My mate and I met because one day I was feeling particularly obtuse and like a liar. I was sitting on the side of the shore and she was passing me, traveling from Canada. I asked her if we had met before. She said, no we did not, but I kept persisting. I wonder if the process of going to a place like this helps us digest our experiences, and put an image or an object with stories we have been told, things passed down, and all of that.
THE LIBERATION OF LIVING INSIDE OF THE MARKET gridThe religion of the network today.Colorado Springs; the city of moral fabulousness. The place where Pastor Ted Haggard began the New Life Congregation. Under his umbrella are the following movements; Young Life, Navigators, Compassion International, Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze), and Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” which provides the national scold we require. Currently, the church is housed inside an old strip mall – the only businesses remaining are a bar and a massage parlor, and then of course there is The New Life Church. During a mass, the congregation spills out blocking the other businesses.
Taken from Harpers August 2005Today’s successful business model mimics that of many religions’ models’, specifically of the 12-step program, and of the Tree of Life. The successful business will convince its employees that it is ejecting meaning into his or her life, a meaning that will finally be found by following a step-by-step program towards enlightenment. In order to retain employee satisfaction, the employee needs to think of his or her business journey as a path that brings him closer and closer to reaching the phenomenology of the spirit.The 12 steps for today’s successful business:
1. As employers, we admit that we are powerless without our employees.
2. We must believe a collective mind (rather than just our own) can improve our brand
3. As an employee, you must make a decision to turn your creative will over to the brand
4. In order to break new grounds within the business and capitalize on ideas, everyone - the employees and the employer must work together to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and our collective goal.
5. As a business, we must openly admit to the public the exact nature or our wrongs, when and if we make them.
6. We then must eagerly accept and change all these defects of the brand
7. We must humbly ask the consumer to forgive our previous shortcomings
8 and 9. Make list of all we have harmed, and try to make amends
Make amends
Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong admit it
Through meditation improve our conscious contact with the boss praying for knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out
Then you reach the spiritual awakening and carry message to others
(In order to learn the secrets to the last three [and respectively, most important] steps to business success, please contact me at mary_pnca@hotmail.com, and we’ll see what we can do.)
The Future of Religion. As religion and business merge, there are several social and network evolutions that will take place. The Orgy of Communal Spending is one of them.THE ORGY OF COMMUNAL SPENDING
Finally, as a society, we are looking for love in all the right places. On weekends employees will find themselves online, blogging on product sites about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a passion equivalent to the feeling of good drugs. Or they will find themselves on an adventure, trekking to the malls to view and participate in the S&M (standing and modeling) part of communal spending.
The mall as a community paralleled to religion – shows its shiny, peppy face. As today’s shopper, one thing that we expect is to be confronted with another reality upon entrance of a new store. That said, the stores are also organized by districts, to help corral like-minded shoppers. Look at 28th street in Manhattan for example of how mall adapts natural city-village models. The mall as suburban babysitter. Park your loved one at one of the many human parking lots that line the aisles, or drop them off at an entertainment Mecca usually situated near the center or on one of the upper floors. The mall as happiness – look at the Japanese chain “Three Minute Happiness”. The sign on the outside of the store reads “Just three minutes / Enjoy Shopping/ A Happy Feeling. The Mall of America has more visitors than Disney World, Graceland, and the Grand Canyon combined.Hyper-Capitalism
Our desires are filled by the inventorying, quantifying and exploiting of the need to create a homogenous mass culture of production and consumption of corporate signs. This cycle of production permeates all aspects of society from the cradle to the grave to the orgy in between.
These, and teledildonics, are some things that really excite me.
It was 5:30 am and the late bus from Philly, PA finally arrived at Port Authority. The year is an historic five years earlier than now. Brewing coffee from Stop and Go fragrances the entire floor, and we wait for our transfer up to Bangor, ME. There is a man in a fine tan suit, fitted head to toe. His hat is a darker shade of brown to match his shoes, briefcase and duffel bag. He stands impatiently. He paces nervously. He holds the NY Times in his hand, but it is not today's. We know this soon enough. He turns to his audience; kids sitting on the stone floor, business people gathering their bags, loiterers, solicitors, standers. He announces in a boisterous, commanding tone that Clinton is calling back troops. "Clinton announces 911 Emergency!" the man yells. He spreads the paper and begins reading the story. He reads to us about the new, global war, about Kuwait. He opens the brown duffel bag and sets a tan rotary phone on the floor. He picks up the receiver and dials. He screams into the phone - "911 Emergency! Come in Bill Clinton! Emergency! Over, over and out!" and then continues to read segments of old news. He picks up the receiver and yells, " 911 Emergency! Come in Bill Clinton! Emergency! Over!"It was glorious, the underground room kept by The Survivors. This section depicted the cellular phone as it stood from the earliest 1985 model, the size of baby's head, to the 2004 model, the one right before technology could ftp 65mb files or live-stream video (Yes, it is still hard for The Survivors to find this model, in working form at least...but those days are numbered...) It proved to be a simple task -keeping the museum somewhat up to date. It was a true collector’s collection, based on collections of collectors, from promotional gifts that cost more to manufacture than a meal at Blue Ribbon, to genuine knockoffs, to the real thing – what isn’t the real thing? They beg this question. In its own room was an immaculate assortment of eating utensils. Red and white ceramic plates circa 1998, stacked with gold-trimmed shallow soup bowls, purple pottery barn discarded saucers, some urban outfitter standard blue/green. The most beautiful rainbow one could imagine, its brilliance was in places blinding. There were glass jars, from large to small. Clear to frosted, to color, each filled with discarded photographs. The photos were the most profound in what they told. The details of clothes, armatures, props, landscapes, cars, everything was in the photograph. Sex is depicted, surgeries, holidays, pets, vacations. They began neatly arranged in glass jars, but from there, spilled carefully onto the floor, their order still apparent in the piles, veins and walkways that the finders had formed. She engulfs one Sun Chip upon another, not taking her eyes off of her copy of “The Hot Zone.” The group of men next to her talks riotously about “all the blood Everywhere!” and a guy getting caught in an alley. Suddenly a man, in his late 20’s, heavyset, in full garb known to the Hasidic Jewish religion, stands up from his seat and moves to the middle of the car. He lifts his arms up to the pole and the men stop their wild hand motions for a second to see what this one is doing. He begins a series of half finished pull-ups on the bar, his ropes slowly make their way out of their sacred hiding spots, and the car passengers can see them around his middle. He walks through the group of men, policing their conversation. The Hot Zone girl gets off. We follow her through the crowd. She discards the bag of Sun Chips in front of the receptacle not inside of it. Its contents are 1/4 full. She is lost in the crowd and it doesn’t take more than five minutes before the sun chips are passed along, to the tribe of Survivors. Survivor #2 takes the bag from #1 and places it inside a sack. The three Survivors exit the subway and are met with #4, who guards the four shopping carts attached to the backs of the four hybrid bikes. The contents of the carts much outsize the carts themselves, and are contained by ropes, netting, and cloth. Inside these new museums, objects are housed from decades passed. These warriors for the salvation of nostalgia take with them the singularly most beautiful, trite and forgotten objects, discarded by the dozens onto the streets from Manhattan apartments. These are the warriors against a crippling collective memory, the creators of a collective soul, of a unified history. They re-fuel with the Vitamin-D provided by the Sun Chips and begin their journey south from 90th Street in the Upper East Side to The Survivor Museum in the lower third quadrant.
Mary:22:0Soul Surfing in Liquid Crystal City.DL. likes her temporary settlement. The old ShopRite sign still glows, and reminds her of the idea of a hustling commerce that probably once took place across the road. The recognition-lights remain on of course, even with only the occasional wanderer navigating through. It has to be safe, it has to look like day. We have to be able to see the shapes of these old structures. We have to be continuously reminded of the cumbersome past.
She had been following murkey river for what felt like an eternal day, through swamp and flood before finding contentment and oneness here, for a time-segment at least. She seemed to think that people were attracted to her aura that was constantly leaking through her GPD. Pulled into her magnetic field, they were forced to pass through Crystal City (the name she gave her alcove in her mind) giving her food in exchange for her objects of synergy.
Why was she making these things, she wondered, not stopping to really search. This is necessary, she kept repeating. These are the essential objects. Some object-lovers tell her that they are programmable, like a computer, if one was to concentrate hard enough. The shape of these crystals is dependent on the types of molecular bonds between the atoms to determine the structure, as well as on the conditions under which they formed. God, it has been so long since she has known what to do with her hands.
Crystals are the hypocrisy of grand sentimentality, overstatement and manipulation, the qualitative compromise for the approaching golden age.

The River of Life
22:1 Then the angel [1] showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life [2] with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants [3] will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Back
Here machine.
I am losing these thoughts as I lose the image. Which do I initially forget, the story or the image of its presence? When I first enlisted in your services, you were just an embryo, in your producers mind. Now look at you, you are real, just like me, and we traverse this tundra together, like comrades. I, for three days, sit here and repeat the same motion until the sun dies behind the horizon, while you, whenever I want, you tell me a life-lesson, or let me make up a story for you. You are what we would call a friend. Like always, I will tell you this story if you will then give me a piece of advice…
The scene is set on a floatown, with a village of free-floating subdivisions. Think of that old metropolis Dubai. Malls, casinos, parks, homes, luxury travelspaces. Man had just eaten his usual dish of pastalliadas at Bechtel Garden (BG) and went from island to island in World Island, until he had seen 87 homes identical to his. About every four islands he noticed the BG - was it a different one? Was he floating circles? He looked for signs and clues of his existence on a certain island - his smell, his doggie's sound? The materials were plastic, foam, and unknown. The crystal he hung in the dash of his floatorcade? What was wrong with him? He thought back to his meal. Same as always. Same brogue behind the bar, food spicy enough...The sun was bright. His GPS was solar powered, he thought. These things rarely malfunction before their Perceived Time Usage expires, and it was not their third quarter holiday yet. He thought of the trick he read about online (and implemented) years ago regarding rigging your electronic devices so they will outlast PTU. Was that a hoax? Were they tracing those people? Maybe breaking the International Trade Law doomed you. He was always coming up with outlandish doomsday scenarios, he told himself.
This was how it began, the last of family in a traditional sense. A Decoalesco society. The great, great grandfather to man was the son of a Survivor. They wore flags. They were still territorial. While survivor was collecting physical objects, a cousin survivor, whom man was fond of, was over in Old Kuwait, by the title of engineer, and (intelligently - man might add) retired on Island Dubai.
Man borrowed a Motorfloat sans alarm and began to speedily cover causeway after causeway, calling for his pup. He covered 18 zones before nightfall, before the motorfloat halted. Its remote control took over and began homing. He jumped off onto the first lot and started to tinker with his computer. He was ordering a new GPS. Trying to find his house online. Spectquest VV1 located it within seconds. Now where was he? He looked for lots, he looked for the top of his head at the corner of a lot. Man locates his dog. He reserves to never do things the hard way again, but he has so many degrees of free time, he must sometimes fill it by wandering, he reassured himself. He types in his destination and floats to his block. He passes other floaters homing in on their homes. The silent ripple caused by the sway of his suit, ballooned out, eased his mind. His legs are wet; the water has seeped into his boots around the edges. It feels to him like crawling lines of moist sweat and he doesn’t feel it bothering his tranquility. However, that was the day that he lost his mind, like all of the other navigators who left World Island to find peace or to run from It. He returned to his home and fed yapping doggie. The walls were transparent. Man paid attention to the bivotrans movements outside, inside, outside, inside. He saw them all in wearable homes from the comfort of his translucent house, he was being watched, and his will was being recorded. The alarms were armed. The weapons were at alert. The doggie nuzzled his legs. He remembered the memories. He wet them, sucked them, and compressed them into a sticky ball, until they slowly became the consistency of maraschino. He moved them to the vile on shelf 3. He watched more navigators float by; no person communicated with another. Do they sleep in these floating homes? Where do they go? What is out there that makes them crave this life? Sometimes he would hear language – shouts directed at no one. Man basically is like them. Their sound was swift and slow, their look was like everything else. How was it he even noticed them, he wondered? Man has a keen sense about him. His commissioned electronics and occupiers ceased to keep his continuous interest. His 45 and 90-degree dreams were a reflection of the fiction around him. He went down a level to Storage. He took in the memory of storage.
The old machine with which to make cloth coverings. Man could construct a useful device to navigate on his own with, this current structure was his torment, his encasement and the window for escape was narrower by the second. Eternal day. Man stared at the exterior, the crystal blue of salty wet outside. The world colors in the sky, the hazy fog of the distant horizon. Reds, the deepest reds and sexiest golds'. Man was seduced by it. What did this inside have to offer him anymore? A trap. Man understood. What was out there? There were no metal noises. He knew it only from the Infranet and the foamlands.
Sometimes man questions even the faithful pup. The doggie does not love him, why did he get it? The mobile pound was an exciting temptation that day, like a porn hollowgram, man joked to himself. (Methods for the augmentation of maximum sensory awareness.) The man does not spend more than ten degrees at a time with doggie, how can he love doggie, and vice versa? He spent more time with titillating occupiers than this storybook sentiment.
Friend: “Is boredom a figment of the imagination along with its cousin eternity? Was there a time when things did not seem to change? What did we do before machines? We used to think that the diversity of breeds was imperative for a cultural and world-wide survival.” Friend pulls up the thought. It is really unlike anything else, the sound was hot and raw, the smell was Reoility: “’The push to mechanize, modernize, avoid trauma, confrontation, and the physical world at any cost can only serve to push us down a path of evolution which will weaken the race.’ This notion was then implemented with the onset of gene therapy and genetic modification, and it was indeed discovered that individually perfecting ourselves can function, with stellar performance.”
Man: You and I, we go round and round in the night, and every day that we die is a reaffirmation or our life. A single flotorcade appeared on the horizon and walked slowly forth. Large sails propelled it forward. A complex mechanism allowed its legs to lift and twist. It was a memory that had slipped from its container. A person aboard looked at him, tormented him with a sound. He peered from behind the bar, looked over but would not go. That was the similarity between man and everyone on the world islands. There was something ancient holding them back. Something lingered from the television era, a regularity. Things had to be planned out because they weren’t always acceptable. Funniest home videos, reality TV, half-life, Panopticon - turn it on and watch your neighbor…
Man agreed to connect himself to the satellites with the others; man began to roam the globe. The secret is to respect the rhythms. The hope is that these voices will speak. They will find a forgotten land, they will find Atlantis, they will have an idea. They will be one with water and discover its deep laws. They will create winds. Discovering the laws of time, of communication, of the electromagnetic flux, of the navigation of other creatures; whales, birds and other man. They will measure and calculate the dynamics of thunder and cells. They will equate and understand. They will sail far away. They will travel in circles. What do you think, friend?
Life in World Islands at some point became subversive living. To outsiders it gives off the impression of an old community. Human’s new age religion is his old drug habit. People needed something to believe in. With their free time, they needed to be useful, to reach towards a goal. They could not feel bad or responsible for the imbalance of their comrades across the still-existing borders. As secularization completely replaced religion in the 2030’s, mass-conflicts subsided. They realized that it did not matter, as man moved around so often and infiltrated pockets of resistance naturally, the methods softened, the polarized groups blended. You concentrated more on survival of the individual than you forced your beliefs onto another. The seed that made you the grandson of a man 1000,000.03 degrees older than yourself made your grandfather the opportunist that had visions of a global order with Infranet God. He called this “The New Way” and wanderers did not need it. Word spread slowly through the decimals, and as it caught on, romanticism was revived. These souls forgot what they needed; now they knew. It was a reason. It began on this island.
That is how you see it. I could not keep up, so you let me go. I remember this, it was acceptable. I did not love you less. Often times, machine has the ability to surpass man, even though man has set an expiration date on machine. This date can be renewed of course, while man has no expiration date. We are insular, but it is our nature to continuously explore. This is one lesson man doesn’t take for granted, and has only began to comprehend its depth. We have in the past built giant cities to inhabit communally. This was a temporary objective in the scope of history. Present day triumphs the historic success of the triad – the three companies that prospered during the peak of world’s capitalist state, the current result taking the state of Globality. As the world became automated, we had less and less work to do. Fictional enterprises began to form so the richest areas could do the least. They became the laziest, with the poorest catering to the richest in exchange for a meager sustenance. The disparity increased. People everywhere followed a scripted protocol set in place by such mechanisms as advertising, organized religion, discrimination, minimum wages, school systems, organized crime, money laundering, world bank, credit, debt on scales encompassing many borders, from yourself to the world to continents.
When the triad finally finished the game, turned the resources into products, when man went bankrupt from buying the latest in bivotrans, the fullest in wearable home, the safest in celcerform, there was a void. When sex changed from desire to frightening to unnecessary, when attraction was replaced by safety of the self, when companies slowly merged together, when finally it was one product sold in many slight variations, when our garbages' became just swapping spaces, when the need for the newest tore people apart from one another, when personal soundtracks became our mediators…
We go round and round in the night.
The following is an excerpt from the updated lexiconical free press:1. Utilize working communication systems, like the infranet, as well as systems that are not working - the letter, written words, face to face communication.
2. Language should be an environment of tidal accessibility. There are two main lists - past and present.
3. The author is a word of the past. Book, to author, to authoritative text, to book market, to library - all became something else. Configurations of communication change this apparatus over from distribution to communication.
4. Foreseeable results - post language - no need for witness or explanation - Internalness. New Words:
Aegitecture – (eng. root; architecture. prefix; aegis) (ee-ji-tek-tur) n. elements worn to protect humans from their inability to discern one space from the next. These elements recall generic architectural formations in order to comfort the wearer through the idea that he is home. He wore all types of aegitecture, as he planned to spend the day in the airport.
Bivotrans - (eng. root; bivouac) (bI-vO-trAns) adj. A living being’s relation, reaction, and interaction with glass or mirrored/laminant-film architectural structures. Forty birds died each day at the World Trade Center in Manhattan because of the obvious conflictual bivotrans relationship carried out between the birds and the reflectant sky-like surface of the building.
Cealamony – (eng. root; ceremony. prefix; conceal) (seel-a-mOnee) v. A ritualistic veiling of one’s identity. In Kobo Abe’s novelette, "The Box Man", the characters participate in the cealamony of the cardboard city.
Celcerform - (root; cellular) n. Device used to shrink cancerous growths. His celcerform is above his right ear, blocking his cell-phones cancerous rays.
Decoalesco – (lat. root; coalesco) (dee-kO-les-kO) adj. 1. A rootless background. 2. A plastic sensibility. Their untraditional activities are the result of a whole culture of decoalesco thought.
Inform – n. A wearable object that reminds of internal bliss so as to distract from external confusion. Muself – n. People who carry incidents of past and present along with ideas of future, in a physical or mental state. As signified in the popular story, Fahrenheit 451, muselfs roamed the forests as living documents to culture. The isolation of insulation. This home allows man’s freedom in a straightjacket. Man wraps himself in a survival cocoon.
Museum – n. A place of enlightenment where the viewer regards overall self in the form of other places and memories. The museum houses ideas and notions that are recognized from a distance.Plastic Gardens – n. Generic sculpture parks set up usually at four points in sub/urban planned spaces. They tend to represent a preservation of the past and an accepted growth towards the future.
Resimulo - (latin. root; res; real, adsimulo; simulate) (rE-sim-U-lO) adj. The experience that takes place when altered nature skews perception of reality. "1984", by George Orwell, alluded to resimulo conditions through the theory of "doublespeak".
Spectime – (lat. root; spectum) adj. Unable to discern time. He has a spectime relationship with his grandfather and their past.Spectumform – (lat. root; spectum) n. Sense-expansion device. The navigator bought new ear spectumforms so as to increase his hearing and make up for a loss of spatial perception.Spectus – (lat. root; spectum) (spek-tus) n. 1. Map designed to discern similar space. 2. Map that can be used anywhere in the world as one place invariably invokes the next. The spectus has revolutionized the map, now only one is needed.
Specolumn – (lat. prefix; spectum, eng. root; column) n Locators placed throughout structures to be used as reference for passers-by. They regard the specolumn when it was obvious that they were lost.
Survivor – Exerpt from story on survivors: Survivor #2 takes the bag from #1 and places it inside a sack. The three Survivors exit the subway and are met with #4, who guards the four shopping carts – for the mall we call Main Street - attached to the backs of the four hybrid bikes. The contents of the carts much outsize the carts themselves, and are contained by ropes, netting, and cloth. Inside these new museums, objects are housed from decades passed. These warriors for the salvation of nostalgia take with them the singularly most beautiful, trite and forgotten objects, discarded by the dozens onto the streets from Manhattan apartments. These are the warriors against a crippling collective memory, the creators of a collective soul, of a unified history. They re-fuel with the Vitamin-D provided by the Sun Chips and begin their journey south from 90th Street in the Upper East Side to The Survivor Museum in the lower third quadrant.Time – n . When the word time is uttered it refers to a space relative to the subject in a horizontal manner. Time can be the space between one moment and another, or that moment. We call this conversion Time, time is no longer of essence as decoalesco societies use space as a determinate for change. Time refers to a visual space change. Place relates more clearly to a station – an avoidance or a wander.Uniscape – (eng. Root; landscape, prefix; uni) (unE-skApe) n. Mimicry landscaping. The cell triad pattern was the inspiration for the uniscape of bushes.Universal oxiform – n . Breathing device. Universal oxiforms have become a commodity second only to water.

11.04.03

It is election day, 2003. I have been working 6 days a week since September 2, 2003, and will be doing this through the end of December. Needless to say, as much as I think I can take on anything I’m thrown, things are slipping. Relationships are suffering – the relationship I have been having with Jona since the beginning of this summer, the relationship I have with my friends here in the city, not the same amount of time to practice art, and not the same amount of time to think clearly about things that are of interest to me – culture, art, history, etc.

On the other hand, at Fotocare I have been studying technology for the past couple of months. Jona bought me a CD Walkman and I’ve been listening to Finest Hour by Nina Simone about once a day. Its been that and OUTKAST lately. I have been learning everything about Macs and high-end digital photography with a Nina Simone soundtrack in the recesses of my mind. Kind of weird. The last fight I had with Jona was this week, the one before was probably the day before but now, a week later, it is less clear. We usually fight because I don’t make enough time to give to him – however much or little I see him. It is one of those doomed relationships – all of my life I have only really dated writers or men that spend 6 hours a day practicing the banjo or kung-fu - for this very reason. Last week in Union Square we were fighting on our cell phones on opposite sides of the park (a two block difference) and I knew then that, God, we are a mediated culture. It was like some New Yorker cartoon but really sadder, because it was real. I was yelling into a phone and people were staring at me. One of those obnoxious users. Honestly, I suppose if we had been right next to each other yelling, it would have been just as obnoxious.

03.25.03

Land – Like Peter Land

In the Grand Central Terminal dining concourse.
Jim Watkinson walks by, says hi as I stuff my mouth with a wedge of grapefruit. It is weird – you are at home and you think you are invisible when your home is this city – yet, you never are. You run into people you know more frequently than in the town you grew up in – better yet, you are being monitored from more angles than you knew you had. You one day wrote "instructions on how to take over the world" in your hotmail subject heading and since then your email is being monitored by dull eyes in some unseen hub of the network. A man – a fat middle aged man runs by yelling loudly under his breath "little shit" as if to explain his hasty running to us – the two of us sitting in the fiberglass red chairs modeled after some kind of cross between 20’s and 40’s movie decor. I ate a grapefruit. I have 15 minutes and $6 burning in my pocket, will I be hungry on the train? Should I get a bottled water? Five minutes ago I was remembering the days before bottled water – Evian was something in a small corner of the drugstore (I don’t even think we had chains back then, yea, it was the mom–and-pop drugstore, and the Evian was surface mailed in from Paris) – Evian was only a reality as pictured in Cosmo. Now the controversy is, am I just getting bottled tap water??? WHO CARES, really? For so many reasons…but we just buy water when we are thirsty and there is no free or safe water available – the free water is no doubt worse than the bottled in most cases. The fact is, either way we are putting it into our bodies, whatever its source, and we are paying for the convenience, for the container. I will not buy a water, I decide, I will become dehydrated, I have too many bottles. It is the way I was brought up.

In Florida.
My hotel room is minimal, clean and light colored. My laptop perched on the table, a nice view of their front door at least. I’m on the second floor. A straw sun hat on the bed. I’m updating my digital diary. Just bought this website (marymattingly.com) don’t know how I feel about the absurdity of commodifying my name like that to a . com reality. Or, its pretty exciting in a perfect way, depending on how I look at it, depending on how seriously I take myself. A digital diary is pretty strange as well.

En Route.
The car trip predicated with remarks like – I’ve been here before, yea, we have all been here before – or – we should stop here. Why? Well…when there is a sign for a pizza hut, you can usually assume that there will be a supermarket near.

The Lands both leave together this morning, is this normal? Peter Land kind of pauses – it is weird to know that you are being watched, scrutinized by someone so close by. He most likely feels me watching. It’s weird for me to know that I could digitally alter any photographs so easily – hence negatives are necessary here for court – but really I could completely destroy someone’s life, or someone’s sense of mistrust and hope. By creating your own truth you play god and a series of dramas stem from what never physically happened in the 3rd dimension (or second as some would argue).

We decided a Cracker Barrel sign usually denotes grocery store nearby. Thunderbird Inn, Hampton Inn, Comfort Inn, Best Western, Quality Inn, Long Horn Buffet, Shoneys, McDonalds, KFC, Ramada, Ruby Tuesday, Econo Lodge, all on the same block. Impressive.

Our meeting with Madeline was put at ease when she asked us to join her at Ruby Tuesday’s – That is our favorite restaurant, we have them in Connecticut – was my fathers reply (When I was growing up we used to save used tea bags for 2-3 re-uses. My mother was raised with a very Victorian sense of morals, which, when reflected upon her children, means we literally cannot wear anything cut (too low) (too short) (god forbid a two-piece bathing suit) those ideas also I imagine are steeped in a cultural heritage and proper etiquette unique to southern types – but results in unnecessary judgment as well as an unhealthy conservative-ness, not to mention extreme self-awareness and guilt.)

The wild wild wild is playing off a boat. I am on the balcony writing – sometimes I forget how important it is to relax, its so important. I was talking to Dave Lech last night, he asked me if I wanted to get married. I said yes after a dumb preface, I asked him, he says yes, definitely, I want to fall in love again, it is the only think in life worth anything. This is somewhat true I say, I feel like it is one of the most important things in life, it is harder and harder the more times you feel you’ve been in and out of love, to let yourself go in again. But you usually do and your standards get higher and higher, or just more custom-fit to the person you are becoming. I feel one problem with a lot of marriages stems from just not knowing yourself that well before getting married.

03.09.03

nineteeneighty

02.09.03

my show

01.09.03

Hello congregation, I am so honored to be speaking to you this morning. Let me begin to enlighten you. Today you woke up, not knowing it was your lucky day, the day you would unlock the secrets of time. I used to think today would be perfect (Sunday morning) if I spent it leisurely waking up in my white bathrobe, took a shower, went onto my balcony on 85th st with a cappuccino in a glass and the ny times and spent the first few hours of my day like this as the sun came up. 3 days ago, I decided that this was not the answer because it is not reasonable right now. The revised and possibly better way to spend the first few hours of Sunday morning has resolved itself to the following experience: Riding a bike or walking to the park near my house with a blanket, the ny times, an Americano (which I like better than cappuccino anyways) and a warm sweater, this works well especially in the fall. So today we unlock the secrets of the world. We will start with the 10 base system. Why the switch from the original 12 base system to an easier-to-understand 10 base system? A question answered with a question. The 10 digits on our hands made the leap an obvious one…
If the earth’s time is based on cycles and geometry, and we can assume according to historic documents and predictions that the middle of the earth’s time is the switch from BCE to AD, and the recorded date for the beginning of the earth’s time – or the beginning of life on earth is roughly 5508 BCE, I’ll get back to you on my point on this…
Lets continue with the 12 base system. The yearly calendar used to begin on March 1, therefore making the spring, symbolic of new beginning, the literal beginning. This agreeing with OCTober being the 8th month, NOVember being the 9th, DECember, the 10th…, the spring solstice being the new year. Every season being in months of 3’s, 6 being the center. This is referenced with traditional clocks and how humans gauge the sun, as well as the degrees of a circle, 360 going into 120 degrees, and 6 x 60 giving us the 360 degrees. With a 12 base system we are much closer to following the earths geometries of time, however not perfect. Say if each 12 months were broken up into 30 days, we would be 5 days off of 365, which is in close approximation with the sun and solstices, and to be more exact we would have 3 leap days every year and they would rotate at the beginnings of seasons, skipping one every year. The variable would be closer, however not exact.
A movable base system would be the most exact because it would represent the circularity of time:
1, 2, 10 (in a traditional 10 base system we would represent those #’s with 1, 2, 3)
11, 12, 20 (4, 5, 6)
21, 22, 30 (7, 8, 9)
31, 32, 100 (10, 11, 12) [end of 3 base system]
101, 102, 110
111, 112, 120
121, 122, 130
131, 132, 200 (200=24 i.e.: movable base system still coincides with 12 base system)
201, 202, 210
211, 212, 220
221, 222, 230
231, 232, 300 (300=36)
301, 302, 310
311, 312, 320
321, 322, 330
331, 332, 400
401, 402, 410
411, 412, 420
421, 422, 430
431, 432, 1000 [end of 4 base system]…

12.17.02

Back from Miami, I met Matt at the Half King, he bought me a Dewars scotch and he had some dark beer that he said was great. We talked about Miami and this gallery that is interested in him that he is not going for, and then met up later at artist space for their drawing benefit, after matt went to marks studio to see new drawings of waves mark has been doing that matt says are REALLY GOOD, I’m sure because mark did them they are REALLY GOOD. I thought some of the paintings at artist space were pretty good but matt assured me that the ones I liked were just fractals done in Photoshop and printed onto canvas, which shouldn’t really matter but I admired the details and it completely changed the meaning to the magic of pixels and computer auto-creation(ismJ) and that is magic but I would have bought that poster at “Deck the Walls” in my hometown mall in the eighties (and there is probably still a back-supply) Sooo, it would be something different to see a handmade trippy fractal painting done by a young hipster or perhaps a thirty-something studious black rimmed glasses wearing thinker, I imagine he is male and maybe I can fantasize about my ideas of this unknown rising star from my living-room as I gaze at the work…But…the drawings were kind of typical of-the-moment like is everything…

12.15.02

hey mary sorry yr florida was sickness-inducing. i am going to babble
because i am bored. the ex is around and it is intolerable. i hate her so
much even though such hatred is irrational it must be a typically natural
reaction of the spurned or something. i am so tired of this fucking farce.
it is really humiliating. fuck! everything else is fucking fine i suppose.
i had an article published in our union newsletter which everyone
including me throws away without perusing when it arrives in our mailboxes
every month. i have been collecting notes for a political zine to never be
published called COMBAT!: a polemical journal of the resistance and it is
to include editorials and reviews of books of political import and media
critiques. i was going to call it ONE BULLET after the remark that Bush's
media spokesman Ari Fliecher made about how all it would take was one
bullet for someone, anyone to enact instant regime change in iraq thus
giving official u.s. sanction to anyone that felt like riddling saddam
husseins body with buckshot and so i was going to print a list of
prominent americans with images of bullets next to them in case anyone
felt like assassinating prominent american politicos they would know that
it was ok by me but then i figured i'd probably wind up with john ashcroft
approved wire taps in my apartment and c.i.a. guys in white vans and
binoculars spying on me as i dried off from showers and shit so i changed
the name to COMBAT! which was the name of Camus' newspaper during the nazi
occupation and i have a ton of ideas for it and several articles already
written that i could use for it but the whole process of printing it and
such is so inappetizing and expensive and fact-checking and editing such a
pain in the ass without the internet or a computer that it will probably
remain a handwritten manuscript and nothing more to be pored over by
future biographers at the jason chan archives at the framingham state
college library or some shit. ... jason.

11.02

November I was working a lot. I was working at Robert Mann, the New Museum, for Linda, trying to work for Jason but never having time and working in Connecticut with my father. It was filled with a lot of meetings with artpeople and making work for Michael and for the art fair, not a lot of time for me to do my own work. I was hanging out with this guy who is really cool but it was a bad idea. ..he is a good artist. The most amazing part was that we are both making things that have to do with the fact that in 50 years NY will be under water. It frustrates me that there are so many undeniable truths that people just avoid thinking about – like the fact that cell phones give you cancer – things that are right at peoples fingertips – that are so ripe for change…
Also sarah and richel came to visit from Portland, and later in the month Adrian came. Adrian and I had a lot of fun when we hung out. Sarah and I were supposed to start shooting for citiesinprocess, and we basically did our best work one night in Connecticut when we decided to build a robot, not just any robot, but the one you built when you were six and wanted a cool Halloween costume. So we took Robby to exotic locations in Connecticut and photographed him with skaters, girls at the local tavern who wanted to dance close to robby, in the bushes at the mall…he had the night of his life…now he just stands in the corner of my apartment guarding the computer. But that’s fine, he is excited still about the experience of being in a bona-fide Brooklyn apartment with hardwood floors and stucco walls…

10.02

I sold my eggs this month for science and money.

09.26.02

August 28, 1:30 PM New Museum, SOHO
#of people in group/what they are wearing

1-all orange
2-green tee-shirts
2-white shirts, jeans
2-black shirts, jeans
1- jeans, button down, manhattan portage
1-jeans, and blue top
1-jeans, white ribbed shirt
2-khakis, button down/tee shirt
2-all black
2-khakis and blue, 1 w/orange highlights
2-blue jeans and khakis
1-white pants, khaki shirt
6-1 all black, 3 khakis, 1 green, 1 grey
- 2-jeans, black leather jacket/all khaki
1-jean hacket, grey pants, black shirt
1-orange shirt, khaki shorts
3-blackand jeans/white and khaki/red dress w/white trim
1-black and khaki, greay sweater
2-white shirts
2-khaki shirt and jeans/black and jeans
2-blue shirts, 1 in jeans 1 in khakis 2-1 khaki and blue/1 orange and greay
3-all grey
1-khakis
4-blacks blues, and greens
1-all black
1-blue dress
1-khaki and black
1-black and brown
4-all black/1 blue sweater
1 light grey suit, white bag
3black jeans black pants, blue jeans, 3 tee shirts
1-khakis and blue button down
2-black skirt, white shirt/khakis and white shirt
2-jeans and red/black and white
1-all black
1-all black
1-khaki and light blue shirt
1-jeans, black tank top
1-black and blue
4-jeans, khakis, black, colored
1- balck and khaki
1-khaki and greay
2-1 black/1 kahki, both green
1-khaki and white
1-red and blue
1-jeans and green
1-kahaks and brown
1-jeans and khaki shirt
1-black andkhaki
1-jeans and red and white shirt
1-green pants, colored shirt
1-red skirt, white tee
1-white shirt, khaki and grey
1-grey
3-white and jeans/jeans and blue/khakis and blue
1-all grey, red tee shirt
1-black and white
2-khaki and blue/white and khaki
1-red and white/army bag
2-all black
2-black and white/black and jeans
1-jeans and green
1-jeans and khaki
3-all black/brown, grey, green/jeans and white
1-all green
1-jeans and white
1-khaki and blue
2-jeans/grey and green tops
1-jeans and blue
1-brey and blue
1-jeans and black
2-l black, 1 khaki/blue shirts
1-jeans, red shirt
2-jeans, white shirt/all black
Noon in August
2-backpacks
2-red pants/skirt
1-black pants
2-dresses
1-black shorts, grey shirt
2-khaki and brown
2-black running suit/khaki shorts
2-tan shorts, white skirt
2-white/safari
2-black and color skirts
2-jeans
4-khakis
1-black
1-black and khaki
2-black/jeans and tee shirt
2-black/black pants, khaki shorts
1-indian skirt.khaki shirt
2-black pants light tops
1-khaki suit
1-white
1-khaki army shorts
1-black
1-blue dress
1-jeans (2pm)
2-khakis/black
1-khaki
1-kahki and black
1-khaki and green
1-khaki and black
1-black
2-khaki/black
1-khaki all
1-khaki
2-khaki and black/all khaki
2-black sportswear/purple
1-khaki and white
1-kahki and yellow
1-black
1-black
1-black and jeans, grey
1-black and khaki
1-khaki and green
2-khaki and white/red
2-khaki/black and white
2-black/black and white
2-black with button ups
1-black and jeans
2-khakis, 1 orange top
4-black and white and grey pants
1-black
1-blue and purple (3pm)
1-black
3-khaki/black/jeans
1-black
1-khaki,jeans,sweater around neck
2-blues, skirt/white shorts
2-tees and jeans
1-black
1-jeans
1-khaki
1-dress
4-2 khaki/2 black, 1 blue top
1-black and brown
September 16, 2002 1:45-2:45pm
3-navy tops, black pants
1-jeans, black shirt
1-green khaki, checkered shirt
1-red tee, navy pants
1-red shirt, black pants
1-white tee, jeans
2-khakis and lilac/jeans and black
1-khaki and blue
3-jeans and mustard tee shirt/red/black
1-jeans and khaki tee
1-black pants, white cardigan
2-all black/jeans and black blazer
1-khaki pants, black shirt
1-khaki and lilac
1-all black
2-khaki and grey/black and white
1-black, light green
1-army pants, white tee
2-jeans, grey/khakis grey
3-all jeans, patterned tee shirts
2-khakis and blue/khakis and green
1-white tee, red pants
2-jeans, khaki/jeans, orange
4-jeans/khakis/sblack shorts
September 17, 2002 noon
3-grey/khaki/white
1-dark grey shirt, jeans
1-khakis, green tank
3-grey and black.navy/jeans
2-orange and black.navy/jeans and black
2-orange and black/navy jeans and black
1-grey and brown
2-white, black/jeans, blue
1-all black
1-all black, blue light tee
1-blue, light blue
1-black and grey
2-black/red and white striped/red skirt
1-khaki and white tee
1-black and white
1-all blue
1-khaki and blue
1-khaki and blue
1-khaki and blue
1-khaki and black
1-khaki and jeans
1-jean and black
1-khaki and light jean
1-jeans, blue shirt
1-black shorts, white tee
1-black pants, white tank
1-khaki and grey
2-black pants, white tank
1-khaki and grey
2-black pants, white tee/black pants, purple top
1-white and red stripe
2-jeans, blue top/black top
1-black pants white tee
3-khaki/black and jeans/blue and black
1-khaki and blue
1-brown and black
10khaki and white
10 black and green
1-khaki and white
1-jeans and blue
1-khaki/plack tank
2-black and white/white and black

08.03.02

Returning from Badlands in Oregon. A trip Joel and I had been preparing for since the spring. I tested some WPS and lasted for a few weeks. The nature is spectacular.

06.07.02

Interview with Jesse McKay July 4, 2002

Who are your favorite artists, past or present?
Charles Ray
Peter Halle
Robert Smithson
Peter Halle because I like people who can write well more so than paint. Geometry as systems that function in culture - his represent a dystopia.
Is that what you think about?
No, I don’t know what I think about.
But idea takes precedence for you?
No, I’m more interested in people that can do that because I can’t. I don’t want to inject my paintings with ideas. I would like to have a better idea…
You mentioned you talked about Proust during your artist talk in the spring, what does Proust have to do with your paintings?
Something to do with reliving moments. I am reliving moments in my paintings.
Are you referring to universal or personal moments?
I don’t know about that. What is this interview for? I think my paintings are just eye-candy. They are all about style and being attractive.
Back to Peter Halle, what do you think of Duchamp?
I think I like him. I think he was a prankster. I like what I know about him…
Well he definitely changed art, now we have had to consider concept in art - do you think that was good, do you think that was progress?
Yes now there can’t be a dogmatic rule to art, something’s quality, or right to exist…
(Argument about the extent of Duchamp’s importance follows – but we come to a mutual agreement)
My question about Duchamp a prelude to: does contemporary art have to be conceptual?
What is concept? I think it’s pretty blurry, pure conceptual art – Sol Lewitt - or when art is made only to facilitate the idea. The idea encapsulates the actual piece. Art is no longer that, I don’t think it works. It is not necessarily profound anymore.
(We are in agreement here) Is anything?
I don’t know if I would be able to tell.
If I had to gauge the level of profoundness in a piece of artwork I think the amount of time you put into it could be a gauge to its importance if there is to be a scale at all.
Yes, it takes a personal sacrifice or a time sacrifice to discover something or to realize anything (no matter what your reasoning for doing something).
Do you think its about time to make eye-candy paintings for the satisfaction of others alone?
Yea, I don’t think that can purely be done because that idea of what is beautiful is always changing, and is different for every person. What is fashionable, stylish and beautiful.
Yes, obviously you can’t appease everyone but that doesn’t mean your sole reason for creation can’t be for the enjoyment of others. Don’t you think there are things that never go out of style?
Yes, I suppose its tactile presence analogous to control of nature. That stuff is not fashionable.
What is your favorite book?
Watt. That was a fucking great book. (I even used the word fucking. I don’t swear that much...)
What upsets you most in current events?
How Bush seems to be steering the US into becoming a religious power rather than a democracy, and that New York is no longer recycling and the toxic waste situation in Nevada.

06.01.02

matthew jones has demanded i update my digital diary. matthew also tried to throw darts at my feet last night, but later outside i beat him up with "Contemporary" magazine. Its fun to talk about art

Last night was terry and alizabeth towery's wedding. it was completely beautiful, held atop the SOHO Grand as the sun set. stunning how every night this week has been thunderstorming aside from last night. the previous night mark d. and i were going to take his scooter to the moma opening just as it started to thunder. that would have been so awful, like that time Adrian fell off his scooter in Oregon - well surprising enough it wasn't raining then, he fell off because he is an idiot and thats about why...or when my old roommate from hell aly brenneman was riding on adrians scooter and when he came to a stop she pretended to fall off the back in traffic. im sure that looked pretty funny. she would also fake-fall getting onto city busses. she had sort of an attention defficiency. but the wedding. the music was good and everyone was sweet and the liquor was nice and they got married. well they had been married a week before ... but WE dont count that... so then it is late and i go over to grassroots to meet matt and joe and mark and brian. they have been drinking some of them since 7...about the same time i had, but i was not sitting in a dark bar all night so it is very different.

and at the moma opening i talked with jason robert bell. local hero of art.

Wirtz and i are planning on leaving for Ohio tomorrow. Tonight i will finish making these huge floating house balls to bring with us...I also bought a used 4x5 field camera from adorama but cannot figure out how to open the freaking thing now...i cant believe this mess. everything like that is going wrong. i shipped my artwork home from my show in oregon, and have been tracking it with fed-ex tracking automated voice service, and find out this person, i have no idea who, signed for my package! my package is nowhere to be found, so i am annoyed about this. when i do spy work i like to be getting paid for it. i just want to collect insurance money from fed-ex at this point. but anyways jen and i are planning on leaving tomorrow, she is trying to convince her boyfriend to let us borrow his car, that would be just splendid. matt is a splendid boy. jen told me this funny story today when we met at farmers market thismorning about her roommate, also named jen. Jen1 was re-caulking her tub as the old caulk was falling off and was starting to mold. she tells Jen2 not to take a shower for 24 hrs and jen2 says ok. the next day jen2 asks jen1 if she can take a shower now. jen1 examines the tub and a small part is still wet. she tells jen2 a couple more hours. she hears jen2 go into the shower and take a shower. jen1 doesnt understand why. needless to say jen1 and jen2 get into a big fight and jen2 says she cant live with jen 1 because jen1 is too clean and she feels like she cant be herself living there. jen1 asks jen2 if being herself is being a slob and they fought for a while longer before jen2 left and came back with a carnation for jen1

...and i really wanted and felt like i needed to write ben grant a letter. preview.

05.10.02

The conceptual standard

by Jen Wirtz and Mary Mattingly

Hey Jen, I want to start it off with this, i think it will be easier to begin.
Sol Lewitt from paragraphs on conceptual art 1967

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a
conceptual form of art it means that all of the planning and decisioins are made before hand and the execution
is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or
illustrative of theories, it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental process and is purposless.
It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the
artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and
therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally (null.) I am very interested in this paragraph, i think it sums purely conceptual art up well. It is a lot to talk about and argue through. I wonder if it would be possible to compare it to this paragraph by Baudrillard, that
has pretty much no connection unless you replace Baudrillards idea of society with the artist who influences
society to the conceptual artist. or pick either paragraph to talk about seperately. You are fascinated by something else (but this is no longer seduction): technical perfection, high fidelity, which is just as obsessive and puritanical as the perfection of matrimony, but this time one no longer knows to which object an attempt at fidelity should be made, as no-one can say where reality begins and ends, and thus
no-one can say where the intoxication of perfection, which wants to use all possible means to reproduce reality,
begins and ends either. In this respect technology is digging its own grave, as it is simultaneously refining
the criteria of analysis and definition by perfecting the mans of synthesis, so that toal fidelity, integrity
within the sphere of reality, is eternally frustrated. Reality becomes a vertiginous fantasy of percision which
loses itself in the infinitesimal.

-Every Subway in the World-

-The Perfect Subway for the World (an overlapping)-

in response to the email i sent to kenny schachter: in earlier digital diaries i had outlined plans to begin the "people i admire and stalking art hero" series. there are two people so far that i have determined need to be on the list. Kenny Schachter and Richard Tuttle. This is just the beginning my friends. mary_pnca@hotmail.com
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why thank you very much. believe me, to know me is to know im not all that
interesting!! stop by and see new space!

((ooh ill be by)) :)ok. i am mostly kidding. im not really this person...

05.03.02

05.03.02 leads to an entire other (earlier) diary (note: many of these links are broken, pictures gone, etc. but some of the text is hysterical! If you have ventured this far, I'm impressed.)

04.22.02

Memory as necessity-
Video camcorder is a weapon of choice for methodical derives of tourism, constructing precise narrative of events so salutation “wish you were here” replaced by “you are here” reified tourist relentlessly collects images texts, guides, maps in an attempt to sustain memory and relivanceto ocurances postcards transfer and revive experience. Today tourist plan like molitary for the best view, finest meal, to beat the crowds, to consume, become familiar while remaining a stranger.

04.15.02

On Films.

What would be the combination of manifestos from dogma 95, futurists on film, cahiers du cinema, and Fellini's writings on film? If one was to arrive home from work every day to sit in his minimal living room in his one chair next to his plant and turn on his screen to relax, what would happen? Would he see images or be stimulated by touch or sound? What images would appear and would they have to be different for every person for every day?

Architecture and memory. Can architecture be used as a technique to eradicate memory? What are the pros and cons to long-term memory in the form of nostolgia? I think these are completely necessary and wonderful pictures that make a person who he or she is. What would a person be without nostolgia, or any memories of his own? Is it possible to eliminate parts of our culture, cultural signifiers, from the realm of memory?

2002

04.08.02

I deleted the crap before this because this is really the only interesting thing i have to propose right now: what tests can we put ourselves through to attain sublime?

Machine. Vs Extremely emotional human being.

it is actually saturday right now. The Pills, my friend Corin Ashley's band from boston are playing at Acme Underground tonight. Corin is a funny, wonderful boy. He, like I, has a digital diary.(http://www.monolyth.com/pills/diaries.html)

03.25.02

Wednesday I had the pleasure of seeing Erin Brockovich on the Greyhound bus line on my way to Connecticut. I have to admit, I don't know if Julia Roberts really does it for me anymore...

I am sometimes sensitive and I received a sort-of mean email from David Hilliard, aparently he took offense to the one I wrote first(which was sent in jest-which I suppose is hard to determine in the written form), but I think the stress of being a teacher is getting to him.

i have mapped lower manhattan a thousand times now and have yet to get beyond 24th street, but parts of 86th look amazingly promising.

it was stephanies birthday the other night. among other things we set a paper bag on fire and played hot potatoe in the livingroom, then really regressed (is anything further imaginable?) and darkened the place to play hide and seek in the dark, which lasted until joe thought he should hide behind my shelf structure that keeps breaking...god, sometimes that kid makes me so mad,

on monday april 1 i begin a garden. I really need to have some sort of steady income soon, im almost considering marriage so as to uphold my current state of blissful european-style living in perhaps the most expensive metropolis in the united states.

I came home to find a new large screen television and a photo of george bush on the refridgerator. Kafka. Jazz.Proust. Huxley. Veblen. Bach...prisms

03.18.02

03.11.03

Digital Diary. Right now i am extremely annoyed at not knowing exactly why my web page is not uploading properly. Right now I am going to go home and dig up dirt in the backyard and weeds from the backyard to take photographs tomorrow. This weekend I saw the Whitney Biennial with Joe. The closet I made attatched to the shelf fell this weekend too. I knew it was a precarious situation ever since bringing back the cloth ikea shelves from portland and installing them on the rack. precarious. yes. a little too daring. I am working on a project that allows me to walk down every street on the island of Manhattan and map out certain building types. Categories range from glass facades to national chain stores to machine/nature architecture (think of trump towers)...The WTC architecture design show utilized the idea of a building with a verticle garden. beautiful as bunnies, peeps...I still have not seen the Richter show. Thursday. I pack the throw away camera. Jen and I went to mary boone uptown thursday for the opening of Mr. Grahm Gilmore. This is worth seeing. Joe never went to see my show and he wants to be my boyfriend. He also makes very strong judgements on my work without fully investigating (without fully knowing what he is talking about) I dont know how i feel about this. So regardless, there are many projects I'm formulating right now.

Mark Gibson Catching a Butterfly, 2002

02.18.02

ah can i just say how working on this websight is one of the most frusturating things in the entire world right now? can i just mention how i have been in the computer lab since 9am and it is now 655pm? i am also working on this book for steve nelson on sicilian easter which is much harder and much more time consuming than i had anticipated...so the only break i took was to go to adorama with mae to get more ink jet paper and take advantage of (barnes and noble) cafe for a second or two to enjoy the aura of literacy and then mae got more contact solution. last night was valentines day. i was very uninterested. i had a date but im becoming such a romantic bore or everything is a bore to me, im not sure which, probably a little of both in my quest to become the epitome of robotics.(This is really not my fate)

Foam Guns, 2002

02.11.02

Bertolt Brecht

Walter Benjamin

Theodore Adorno

02.04.02

hello. this is february 4. the beginning of digital diary.