Periscope Radio: Auction and Dreams (28:17) is one of about 2 dozen episodes of the sound-rich story-telling show I produced for KRLX 88.1fm. The show reflects not only on my production abilities (the introductory sound-collage and final piece are mine) but also my training and management abilities (I introduced both of the other producers to audio production).
Add comment June 30th, 2008
Ten dollars at the hardware store and a little jerry-rigging got me a home-made bike mount for our project’s camera. You can see it in action at our up and running site, cityastext.
1 comment August 15th, 2007
Hi friends,
So if you can see the picture you’ll know that I’m sitting here at Blue Mondays in Northfield with a brand new haircut. “The Bad Plus” is playing; they’ll be playing at the concert hall on Friday. (Click above to listen in.) I’m drinking some coffee, sneezing my face off with allergies, and taking a reading/writing break from the house remodeling work that I’ve been doing. As some of you may know, I’m plugging away at some cleaning/painting/repair work on the house Sam, Will, Zach, Liz and I are moving into in the fall.
I’ve been really enjoying being domestic and thinking about painting the walls and furnishing the place. Interior design has seriously awakened my nesting impulses. At night, I find myself drawing interior spaces, using a set of 16 Crayola markers to throw color on walls, sketch in tables and shelfing. I walked into one of the 4 antique stores downtown and lusted over a laquer curio shelf and a glazed black panther lamp for an hour. And this morning I found a solid oak table that we can use as a desk or for meals– it needs refinishing, but its endearing for being so dinged up. Its good utility wood, and it reminds me of one of those round industrial-spool-turned-coffee-table pieces.
Add comment June 20th, 2007
They wanted us to move, and we didn’t. We’d been collecting in the audience for well over an hour, and by the time the organizing committee arrived, a healthy buzz had grown among the half dozen rows of folding chairs. A man with slicked hair in a suit flicks on a microphone: “Pfttt. Can everyone move back exactly two rows?” We stand up and look back, but no one is moving. The answer appears to be no.
Add comment December 5th, 2006
At home, noticing things about how I interact with people, seeing a kind of pattern. Here’s a drawing of it, with the following explanation:
“Social Life: pulsating, spastic, energy and effort condensing into one person over time, a kind of cyclical personal history.”
Add comment November 27th, 2006
Here’s a thesis on my recent personal cartography project. Projection(ist) isn’t yet done but you can see sections of it. My left arm, for example, details some of my current political thoughts in relation to a tattoo I might get. Or how about this image of Europe constructed out of the United States. You could also see the partially completed version one of the map. Without further ado:
Add comment November 13th, 2006
I’m sorry, friends, I owe you a backlog. So many things to write about. Look for… design at “Art+Com”, coliseum futbol, etc. (0) Nov 13, '06
At a friend’s for dinner. She’s the third manager of a commune for refugees in transition, a beautiful person. I sat after dinner and got a central asian history lesson from a man from Azerbajan named Mamet. Through a garbled mixture of dutch, english, and russian I followed as he drew a map on a receipt and shaded circle after circle between the red and black seas untill there was only varying shades of blackness. He picked the receipt up finally and handed it to me: “This is my history. We wash dishes now?”
1 comment October 31st, 2006
Living in the information age it’s easy to think that you know things. With so many facts at our fingertips, binary numbers traveling invisibly through the air, one might in fact mistake this information for knowledge. But knowledge is more than the wikipedia, knowledge is the big picture.
Paul and I set out across the Vondelpark hoping to “read” the city but found that the text we were looking for was not immediately accessible. It seems place has at least 2 layers. The physical location and then somehow a layer of information atop that. This includes the place’s history, its cultural connotations, and sometimes inaccurate memories of those who pass through it.
We chose to read the city at this cultural level. For the assignment we were asked to use walking as our medium and, in the style of the Situationist’s, to let the city pull us in different directions. We imagine that the Flaneurs of the 19th century, however, knew their cities better than we know this one. This knowledge of the place served as a prior text for their wanderings.
In our “walk”, however, we have chosen to de-emphasize the physical place and let the imagined city pull us as it will . Sitting with Emma Cohen, a classmate on an extended stay in Amsterdam, and her Dutch host mother, Stella, we have had a virtual tour of the city. We’ve stopped and recorded interviews about 16 locations in Amsterdam, trying to uncover hidden and alternative meanings. We’re looking for the knowledge that strucutures information.
Our hope is to make a formal statement with this piece as well. The cubes, as you will see, are visual representations of the room in which we spoke. The places themselves are marked on a map that fills the fourth wall of the room. Essentially, we’ve de-emphasized the representational aspect of the cube form. But, in adding the audio interviews, we have introduced a time-based narrative to our mapping of place. While the visuals may offer little insight into our map, we believe that conversations with residents of the city offer a parallel and often more insightful view.
Add comment October 31st, 2006
Check out my new netart piece completed with Paul Caine and Emma Cohen. Virtual cubes with word-to-the-wise commentary in a pretty vector graphics map.
(0) Oct 30, '06
Aspiring storyteller and philosopher. More
