I had a fun argument the other night with Jay Cousins, from Open Design City. He innocently said, "Everyone is an artist," and I felt compelled to contradict. (Full disclosure: I was a little bit drunk.)
Cultures define for themselves what kinds of stuff they want to call art. Individuals in the culture do the same for themselves. The definitions shift. I think what Jay was really getting at is that we should be more fluid in our perception of art, more accommodating to new ideas of what art is, and more nurturing of creativity in general. This is the mission of the ODC and they do great work.
Definitions of what is art should be elastic--or better yet, abandoned--but the idea that art can come from anywhere does not mean that every person has a dormant artist inside just waiting to blossom.
And thank heavens not.
When people say that everyone is an artist, it's usually a form of anthropological narcissism. Everyone want to be the norm. Humans have been fixated on the idea of human nature at least since culture has existed. Usually, the people who are out to define what it is are doing their damndest to prove that human nature is what they feel is natural themselves. Especially the evolutionary anthropologists.
The human condition is a paradox. On the one hand, humans need connections to other humans. We spend our lives trying to communicate with and understand each other deeply. On the other hand, we can never truly know the mind of anyone else. We can never be really sure that the person in front of us even understands the words we are using in the way we mean them. Do they see the same colors? Do they smell the same smells? Do the smells smell the same?
Our need for connection leads us to want to believe that we are somehow all the same. That there is a human nature common to us all. That there are traits you can find in everyman. I'm starting to think that this is probably not true. Other people are more different from us than we think.
The highlight of the Transmediale opening night on Tuesday was Ei Wada's performance of original music played on old television sets. I would love to see how he composes his music. It's always interesting to see alternative musical notation for unconventional instruments. Actually, it is just as interesting to see alternative musical notation for conventional instruments.
Ars Electronica describes the piece: "Japanese experimental artist Ei Wada breathes new life into old TV picture tubes. He utilizes their ectromagnetic properties to transform light into sound and back again. When he touches the screens, this triggers a fascinating audio & video performance in which his hands and his whole body serve as pseudo-antennas. The old-fashioned picture tube TVs and a video recorder become percussion instruments, light synthesizer and VJ/DJ equipment all rolled into one. Thus, devices that have lost their original function can be used in a new way."
I'm not sure why he is described as a pseudo-antenna. Isn't his body a real antenna? I don't really understand how this works. I am looking forward to getting a very detailed explanation from someone who does.
Here's a video I took from my phone of the first two songs. It's a bit long, but you can get a good idea of what is going on here if you watch the first minute or two.
Ei Wada's blog is mostly in Japanese.
About six months ago, I went to a two-day open design event during Social Media Week. The event's theme was food and it was held at Betahaus, which is a cool workshare/cafe in Kreuzberg.
At this event, I collaborated with a bunch of strangers to build a table for six, where everyone's forks, spoons, and glasses were connected to another diner's fork, spoon, or glass by strings under the table. At the performance/demonstration of the project, you found yourself puzzling over whose what was connected to your which and then how to behave. Cooperate? Overpower? Prank? 
This is a project I am eager to recreate. The prototype was made of cardboard and was discarded at the end of the event, but the proof of concept is solid and survives.
There were a lot of great people at the event and a lot of cool projects. You can see lots of pictures on Flickr as well as an excellent documentary by Gabriel Shalom which he shot and edited during the event and screened at our closing party.
Since that event, several enterprising people, including Jay Cousins, have started a project to build an open makerspace behind Betahaus. The space is called Open Design City and it is a very cool work in progress.
I haven't been able to be as involved as I would have liked, with my new full-time job and my family who wants to see me on evenings at dinnertime, but I did manage to participate at the DMY Maker Lab, which was a really cool event. I still hope to put together a paper documentation for it. Yet another work in progress...
Last weekend I did a little screenprinting workshop at the ODC, based on my Instructable Screenprinting: Cheap, Dirty, and At Home. I almost had to cancel due to lack of sunlight, but we got a lucky break in the thunderstorm and were able to go ahead. I can imagine doing some of this kind of thing regularly. I do love to spread the Word of cheap and awesome printing.
I have an electronics project I hope to get working on at their Monday night open sessions. I need some help and encouragement on that one, and I think the ODC is probably just the place to get it.
My favorite post from the Boston Live Journal haiku Friday thread
This isn't a haiku,
it only looks like one,
I didn't count shit.
On our way home from Vermont recently, at a particularly commodious rest area, a flyer for Spiderwed Farm caught my eye. "Home of the 'original web site'", it boasted. Today I finally got around to checking it out.
"REAL SPIDER WEBS ARE HARVESTED -
collected by Will Knight. The colorless, fragile web of an orb-weaving spider called Araneidae is first brought to light by painting. It is then transferred by hand to a wooden plaque where it is protected with a fine furniture finish to assure a lifetime of enjoyment for all web lovers."
I bet these are kind of amazing in real life, too bad the pictures aren't a little better. I'm sure they don't do the work justice. I bet these are hard to dust.
If you aren't already listening to This American Life and Radio Lab, I highly recommend you check them out. I especially am enjoying Radio Lab these days.
Justine sent me this link to the blog Street Anatomy: Medical Visualization past, Present, and Future.
Amazing.
It's a slow-loading page. The blog authors would be wise to have only a couple of these big images and movies on the front page and put things down in the "read more" section after they've been up a few days. Fascinating images, though. Worth the wait.
Nietsche Family Circus: Connecting randomized Family Circus comic squares and Nietsche quotations since 2005.
Slightly more depressing...Dubya the Menace
via
This morning when I logged on to the office irc channel to start my work day, the title of the channel had been changed to "http://www.73ford.com/ cruisin' the web with sweetness."
Steven Bradford Hulett, aka the sweetest Church of Christ guy, has a great collection of Valentine's cards and an awesome little website navigator.
I can't decide which card is my favorite.
"I wish you could have seen the smile on my face when I caught this turtle"
A list of all my blessings
I love this side of the internet!
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society
Some gems:
Photographing air
Foreign Accent Syndrome
The Blind Photographer
Jim Bumgardner's Time Graphs
Animals in the Womb
Alternate Alphabets
The Automatic Mapper
Gallery of Scale Model cities
The Frog Museum
A Guide to Hyperbolic Space
Publis Aeolian Harps
Wonderfold Squares
Plaster Casts of Harvester Ants
Bigfoot Casts
Frozen Dandelions
Whew. I'm giddy.
Yesterday I discovered that the book Flatland by Edwin Abbot had been made into a movie in 1962. You can see atrailer of it on Google video.
A remake of the movie narrated by Martin Sheen is set to be released this year. There also appears to be a rival remake.
I didn't get a chance to write Wednesday, but I tried to make up for it a little bit tonight. I just finished writing 2,148 words which is more than I wrote all month last year.
My plan this year is not to reread anything. Mostly I am going to tell a string of stories of wild parties. Those are always entertaining. The main character is bored at a wild party and reminisces about wild parties of the past structured around favorite sweaters she has lost while drunk. I will also tell the imaginary lives of the sweaters after their split from the main character.
I may use night clubs with the lights turned on as another device of reminiscence.
I'm about ten days into an experimental 30 days of abstinence from alcohol and cigarettes, which is probably why I am writing my novel completely about smoking, drinking, and taking drugs.
I'm going to let people read the novel as it progresses, not that I think anyone will actually read the whole thing ever. If you'd like to see tonight's big 2,000-word achievement, it is on this Blogger page.
Enjoy some contemporary retro pin-up girls, photographed by Jim Ferreira.
I know most of you all don't like Garfield, but I thought that this was kind of interesting: Garfield is dead
Here it is on the official Garfield website.
Celebrity animal portraits by 14.
This is a genre I know has a nice, long history. Can anyone think of some nice 19th-century examples?
It's amazing what you can do with a laser beam and a watermelon.
500-person synchronized orgy concept porn.
Discovered via Random Good Stuff Who got it from Ethnoerotica who got it mysteriously from this Russian-language live journal.
