touch

I just learned a bit of Final Cut Pro and quick time


This is the diffusion test w/o the vellum:
I find this one a bit creepy . . .




Just hands - this was supposed to be about touch but seems to go way beyond
into issues of voyeurism surveillance, eroticism and sexual ambiguity . . .
Let me know what you think. . .

"The Curator" by Miller Williams

it just occurred to me . . .@10:30 pm . . .how much this poem has in common with everything that has been tumbling through my head.

Read it first, mull it over, come back for my reasons why it draws me in.

The Curator

by Miller Williams

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,

were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two,

the youngest assistant curator in the country.

I had some good ideas in those days.

Well, what we did was this. We had boxes

precisely built to every size of canvas.

We put the boxes in the basement and waited.

When word came that the Germans were coming in,

we got each painting put in the proper box

and out of Leningrad in less than a week.

They were stored somewhere in southern Russia.

But what we did, you see, besides the boxes

waiting in the basement, which was fine,

a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art—

but what we did was leave the frames hanging,

so after the war it would be a simple thing

to put the paintings back where they belonged.

Nothing will seem surprised or sad again

compared to those imperious, vacant frames.

Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble

after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream—

You know it lasted nine hundred days.

Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie

sometimes a foot deep on this very floor,

but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell.

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.

Early one day, a dark December morning,

we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,

pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.

They told us this: in three homes far from here

all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad

to see the Hermitage, as they supposed

every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.

Now they had been sent to defend the city,

a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see

but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger

than all of us being here in the first place,

inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms,

what they could take the time for, wall by wall.

Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them

part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.

I told them how those colors would come together,

described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,

mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout

and why this painter got the roses wrong.

The next day a dozen waited for us,

then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.

Each of us took a group in a different direction:

Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cezanne, Matisse,

Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer,

Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.

We pointed to more details about the paintings,

I venture to say, than if we had had them there,

some unexpected use of line or light,

balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces

the same way we’d done it every morning

before the war, but then we didn’t pay

so much attention to what we talked about.

People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact

we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned

out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings.

But now the guide and the listeners paid attention

to everything—the simple differences

between the first and post-impressionists,

romantic and heroic, shade and shadow.

Maybe this was a way to forget the war

a little while. Maybe more than that.

Whatever it was, the people continued to come.

It came to be called The Unseen Collection.

Here. Here is the story I want to tell you.

Slowly, blind people began to come.

A few at first then more of them every morning,

some led and some alone, some swaying a little.

They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces,

they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,

to see better what was being said.

And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention.

After the siege was lifted and the Germans left

and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,

the blind never came again. Not like before.

This seems strange, but what I think it was,

they couldn’t see the paintings anymore.

They could still have listened, but the lectures became

a little matter-of-fact. What can I say?

Confluences come when they will and they go away.

Miller Williams, “The Curator” from Adjusting to the Light. Copyright © 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. www.umsystem.edu/upress.

Here's vellum and video (not my video, just a test)

tangibility

I think I have pinned down what bothers me about technology and this web thing that I'm dumping coded information into.

It's all about the senses and empathy.

• I can sun feel on my skin - but it does not touch me
• I can feel music in my bones - but it does not touch me
• I can smell a storm coming - but it does not touch me ('till it rains)
• I can see colors - but they don't touch me

(Ok . . . scientifically we can argue for radiation, vibration of particles in the air and stuff like that but I'm trying to be poetic here so don't spoil it.)

I can shoot pictures with my digital camera - but the image has never touched the object (it's just a translation, not an imprint)

I can "chat" all I want - without body language, intonation, or sight.

There is distance there that I can't control or overcome.Direct interaction is important to me and now I find myself in a world full of distance and intangible possessions and interactions.
Here's few:

• Diary = blog
• Sketchbook = Photoshop
• Photo Album = Snapfish
• Slide show = Powerpoint
• Books = ebook
• letters = email
• record = Mp3
• Newspaper = MSNBC etc.
  

Crowds of people all in there own little worlds isolated - but not

I can connect myself to the four corners of the earth (funny, it being round and all) and still walk and chew gum at the same time. (or drive and drink a coolatta at the same time:)

I'm not so sure how I feel about this technological omnipresence thing. Suddenly my sense of self is located in all different places.

Here's an old question: Am I my physical body or the sum of all my cognitive connections and mediated translations?

• Do I really need to be connected to everyone and everything? -No
• Does it really matter if I know everything that is going on all over the world? -No
• Do I really need to know who's winning on America Idol? -No
• Will the world still carry on without me if I shut my cell phone off for a day? -Yes

So why do we get so disjointed when we are disconnected?
Maybe it's because we aren't really connected so we keep logging-in, tunning-in, and calling-in hoping for something more tangible but we sign-off, click-off and hang-up feeling unsatisfied by what was received.
Just blatantly mediated and translated brushes with the world.

More later

vague material

In my search for tangibility I found a vellum that feels like human skin.
Sensual and Creepy

So I brought it home and played with it for a bit.
Then I added to it a bit.
Then I played with it a bit more.


This is a vellum backing with maple leaves punched out of vellum and acetate glued to the surface.














This is what happens when it is lit from behind.
















This is what happens when it is lit from behind without the stupid florescent lights that are the bane of my creative existence!



I am really enjoying the translucent nature of the materials and am working on projecting video through the back.


More on that later . . .

flashbacks

Sometimes you just have to play:)

When I was about 5 years old, I lived in an old house with big cast iron radiators.
They would hiss and steam and leak all the time. So one day I made the logical leap that seems so simple for a small child:
the radiator is hot -
heat melts things -
crayons melt-
So . . .
I took an entire box of 64 Crayolas, (the kind with the built in sharpener)
and melted them, one by one, on my radiator, dripping and melting and mixing all the way down to the floor.
I thought it was it was beautiful, my father did not share my concept of artistic genius.

In the dead of winter, he shut off the heat and handed me a bag of steel wool to scrub away my colorful experiment.

If only I had a radiator . . . . until I find one . . .

Lee Walton ICA

http://www.leewalton.com/index.html

I happened across Lee Walton's site by accident and the world got a little smaller.

I signed on to his mailing list and ended up joining in on one of his live performances that was staged at the ICA.

More later . . .