Thursday, January 27, 2011

Escaping From Flatland

I had a great time in class Tuesday night with everybody's art. Will post bits of mine soon.

I'm getting along better with my words ("elevated" "awareness" and "lost youth") after the 2D projects. For a l'il while there "lost youth" was working me over like a couple of two-bit thugs in a dark alley.

Not sure what the 3D phase will look like, but I got some inspiration last week visiting SFMOMA. My favorite piece was there was "Agave" by Elliot Hundley.

It's about 8 feet high and maybe 20 feet long. There is a flat layer of photos and printed paper. Many thousands of smaller images are pinned onto the surface.

I found some pictures here on rocor's flickr photostream:



In 2D it looks like a bit of a hot mess, but in person it's very elegant and in a continual state of becoming. Every time you move it's something new. The pins you see head on are invisible, all others are at an angle...the continual refocusing made me feel like I was walking on the surface of a small globe, not lookin' at flat art on a wall. This thing's alive, I tell you, and 100% in the analog domain. Remarkable!

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Hello World!

Hi everybuggy!

My cat Sushi told me he was about to start a blog so I figured I'd beat him to it.
Plus I'm required to blog for my groovy Intermedia Class at JFK University in Berkeley.
Take that, kitty! 2 legs faster than 4! Merowwll!!!

Ermm...Why "Looking For A Certain Ratio"? It's a line from a Brian Eno song called "The True Wheel" that  has always resonated with me.



This phrase inspired me to make a little pastel drawing for my Art & Symbolic Process class last spring:


Searching for balance and proportion.

And...recently I've been exploring the ancient system of musical tuning known as Just Intonation. This is based on small whole-number ratios (eg 2:1, 3:2, 11:7) and follows the natural harmonic series. The result is sweet sounding intervals, noticeably different from the sound of Equal Temperament. This latter tuning system was adopted in the West roughly around the time of Bach in order to standardize keyboard instruments and allow for easy key changes. Equal Temperament is based on "irrational numbers" derived from the 12th root of 2. Long story short, none of the intervals it uses correspond to the natural ones. It's an abstraction much like the Gregorian calendar. But I digress...

Blah blah blah
Blog blog blog

More to follow!