NOVEL DESIGNS

well, what you do best is the way you use your time

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:38:00 +0000

also dug into a lot of Baldessari post MOCA visit this weekend. The novelty of word/image play conceptual artists (LeWitt, Weiner, Ruscha) really fails to wear off.

"I would drive around National City where I was living and randomly shoot out of the window with the camera without even looking and drive with the other hand. Wherever I shot, I would note down the location. In another series, I matched random photographs with statements. For instance, there'd be a statement about photography - about how the eye depicted, how the picture frame shouldn't be divided in half - and then I'd have a photograph with maybe a post right down the middle, and I'd match those two. Or in another one, I'm standing in front of a palm tree - you're not supposed to stand in front of trees because they look like they're growing out of your head - with an inscription that came from a book on composition about the right way and the wrong way. 8 You'd have the right image and the wrong image. I loved that there'd be wrong things, so that's why I titled it Wrong."

the man himself... in venice, no less.

a glowing, white rectangle

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:53:00 +0000

this is really one of the coolest things i've ever encountered. it's a perfect intersection of cinema, photography and architecture. three of these photos were at the Geffen MOCA this weekend. more info in detail below, but basically since the 70s Hiroshi Sugimoto has been going to movie theaters all over the world and exposing single frames for the exact runtime of the feature films that play in them. the result is spectacular.

Since the 1970s, Sugimoto has worked on his photo-series entitled «Theaters,» in which he photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of as a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.

"One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

"I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

I'm sure this may come as a shock...

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:48:00 +0000

why don't we grab some real estate? maybe pull up a tabe?

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:22:00 +0000

sweet dove
sweet dove
never to return again

...keats

where you learned to make the others look good so you looked good

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:48:00 +0000

must read

mister lister

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:00:00 +0000

unquestionably the greatest production company logo known to mankind. thanks to D. Wein for putting this masterpiece up on the utube. i could watch it on loop.

be sure to check out breaking upwards in spring '09

rainbow apocalypse album artwork

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:02:00 +0000

ELP (sister of ASP and of neon gold fame) has a new visual blog, byzantium, featuring her own patterned artwork.

About: Database of Color

Newest Series: Database of Color

This series was directly inspired from Victoria Vesna’s book “Database Aesthetics; Art in the Age of Information Overflow”.

“Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art…the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.” (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/vesna_database.html)

People use data as a way of trying to ultimately understand and control an environment of information. Vesna provokes artists to explore projects that represent different modes of databasing the self . How does one compile small and seemingly unrelated pieces of information to present a new form of a whole and a new way of relating all the parts? This new series of artwork “Database of Color” explores these questions by creating a database of the self and mind through my personal interpretation and relationship to color. The various geometric patterns represent visual databases of color (a network of relationships) within a pre-constructed host site (the pre-registered lines/boundaries) which ultimately serve as a synthesis of my personal history, experiences and influences of color that have shaped my relationship to art.

These designs thus represent my own relationship and categorization of information. They become an individualized web of identity, history and creation. Within the boundaries of the interface I organize a new way of clarifying the information. Vesna claims that the primary components of a database are navigation, organization and retrieval. My designs, though seemingly random, are in fact composed of several webs of patterns that are echoed somewhere else in the overall makeup. As a result, to navigate through the image one must find the ways in which design and color are repeated through mathematical equation or to try and follow my own personal logic. In this way organization and navigation seem inextricably tied and retrieval becomes personalized. Vesna asks, “how do you represent information without dehumanizing it?” I believe this can be answered by how the information is constructed and through the process by which it is organized. In this case using color as information and using information as a way to communicate a relationship to the self, a database of the self through color.

yo la tengo murders the classics

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:39:00 +0000

this (brilliant) album name back story almost tops the band name backstory:

re: i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass
"The title of the album is rumored to be a (paraphrased) quote by NBA player, Tim Thomas. Sitting on the bench together during a game, Thomas was caught on tape by the MSG Network in a profane exchange with fellow Knick, point guard Stephon Marbury. Thomas yelled at Marbury, "Everyone in this organization is afraid of you, but I’m not, and I will beat your ass."

also alternate track titles for yo la tengo's electr-o-pura:

"A Rehearsal"
"Sound Is Music And Quick Lights And The People Who Make Our Sound Their Own. That's When We're Really Turned On."
"It's The Start Of A Musical Dialogue"
"A Group Is Like A Jig-Saw Puzzle-Everything Must Fit Into The Groove"
"A Few More Beats-And Maybe, A New Sound"
"The Music Can Really Drag It Out Of You-If It Says Something"
"Waiting For A Break"
"Sometimes, Not Often, You Start A Number And Something Miraculous Happens, And Then The Scene Is Beautiful."
"The Sound Of A Guitar Is With Me All The Time-Or Am I With It?"
"A Break Like This Is Worth Its Weight In Publicity"
"By Now The Music Becomes A Little Like A Perpetual Diary"
"Play It Soft And Easy, Play It Hard-The Beat Still Comes Thourgh"
"One Of My Favorite Instruments-The Electronic Flute"
"Patterns Of Sound Are My Bag Right Now"

my alphabet is illusive

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:54:00 +0000

------------

well my kind's your kind

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:36:00 +0000

check out this link for some info on the map art below. some innovative cartographic stuff going on out there. thanks to ELP for sharing.

thats just the way it is

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:52:00 +0000

more sabia

raise high the roof beam carpenters

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:20:00 +0000

a while back, ND posted a few pics from the inaugural issue of uk-based imaginary zine. we knew they had good taste, and they proved it again today by naming longtime ND pal adrien debontin a featured photographer on the site. a few of our personal faves from adi's flickr:

i'm looking for the goddess. are you the goddess?

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:56:00 +0000

Dating Montage
Uploaded by smithy00101. - Independent web videos.

while you wait for the others (bradley)

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:56:00 +0000

if robin hadn't de-activated his twitter account due to overuse, we might have caught wind of this earlier....grizzly bear / sean pecknold collab:

hell of a lot of truth in it in my opinion...yeah, a hell of a lot of truth

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:03:00 +0000

and now i must own this

just come up with an idea and make it

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:02:00 +0000

cover article this coming sunday

supply and demand

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:36:00 +0000

this is on ebay right now. starting bid is $1,000. which seems about right.

athletics not aesthetics.

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:02:00 +0000

about a third of the way through herzog on herzog and there's a solid post coming somewhere down the line just listing the various gems of wisdom the man drops within. concurrent with reading i'm watching all his films that can be streamed on netflix. i'd never heard of the great ectasy of woodcarver steiner but it became an immediate favorite. a quintessential herzog film about an unsung hero/rebel. now trying to find a copy of the fantastic score by popol vuh. might have to make a homemade mp3 using garageband, a reminder of younger days spent recording tapes off the radio...check out some ski-flying.

the strangest little bird I'd ever seen

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:59:00 +0000

a day late to this party. a pleasingly perfunctory post.

the last thing hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:17:00 +0000

this video, just posted yesterday, was put together for John Hughes when he received the showest producer of the year award in 1991. a fitting tribute for a man who was rarely seen since. (gems at 3:24 and 5:48)

some knowledge

sunshine or noir

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 02:17:00 +0000

william t. vollmann's epic new book IMPERIAL beats out infinite jest by a solid 200 pages or so. given that it took me an entire summer in college to tackle the latter, i have no idea when i'll find time to read the former. but sam anderson's review in nymag intrigues:

"I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)"

the nytimes offers a more informative, if less flavorful, synopsis: "The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost."

powerhouse books (a small publishing co. with an awesome storefront/gallery space in their DUMBO office) will release a companion set of vollmann photographs taken during his 12 years of research

(vollman's tome coincides with a new pynchon release (INHERENT VICE) partially set in recent ND haunt, topanga canyon. check out wired magazine's "unofficial thomas pynchon guide to LA")

have wild imaginings, transformative dreams, and perfect calm

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:13:00 +0000

aaron rose's in-croy-able roadtrip photographs take the lomo aesthetic to a whole new level. i am dying to know what camera and film he is using to create these.

the artist himself. the only thing that could make this series cooler would be if that were actually barry o.

bold visionaries knew this

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:12:00 +0000

in june, dave eggers offered to personally email anyone who feared that print was dead. now he's announced that the 23rd mcsweeney's quarterly will be a:
"one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over--sign up now to ensure you see it."

it sounds like mcsweeney's will also publish the business model behind the paper in an (admittedly quixotic) attempt to resurrect a dying breed of dailies like the recently retired rocky mountain times. check out the rumpus interview with eggers here.

in other mcsweeney's news, ND pal lucas k. published a parody of palin's resignation speech on the website yesterday. if you haven't read the full text of her speech yet, i highly recommend doing that first here. the overblown rhetoric about providence is marginally less depressing if you imagine her composing the speech in the setting below (that crab does not look like it would just "go with the flow"):

GOD'S RESIGNATION SPEECH.

BY LUCAS KAVNER

- - - -

Dear World,

I appreciate speaking directly to you, the people I live above, as your God. People who know me know that besides faith and family, nothing's more important to me than the world I created in seven days. Serving her people is the greatest honor I could imagine in the world. The one that I created, I mean, as God.

Earth's mission? − to contribute to the Universe. It's really strategic IN the universe as the air crossroads OF the universe, as a gatekeeper of the universe. Bold visionaries knew this: Earth is a really important planet. This planet, blessed with air, water, wildlife, minerals, New Jersey, AND oil and gas. It's energy, you know what I mean? EN-ER-GY. I gave you energy.

So to serve the Earth is a really intense responsibility, because I know in my soul that Earth is of such import in our very volatile universe. And you know me by now, I promised a couple thousand years ago to show MY independence...that's why I rested on the seventh day. That was foreshadowing.

All in all, I think pretty much everyone can agree that I did my job to the best of abilities. My Earth accomplishments speak for themselves. I worked tirelessly for the Earth. Think of all the great stuff I've made in my time as God:

− Fire

− The Renaissance

− Mario Batali

− the iPhone

People rag on me a lot. I mean a lot of people love me, but generally I get a lot of flak. It's pretty insane − my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with other people's PETTY grievances instead of progressing our planet now. I know I promised no more "lording as usual," but THIS isn't what anyone had in mind for EARTH.

Generally, I now think I can do more for the planet as just a guy who used to be God instead of the guy who currently is God, you know what I mean by this? Life is too short to compromise time and resources...it may be tempting and more comfortable to keep your God-head down, plod along, and appease those who demand, "Sit down and shut up," but that's the worthless, easy path − that's a quitter's way out. You can't sit down and shut up when you're God, which is why when I'm not God anymore, I can stand up and do other stuff, like not doing stuff, which is also important, yes?

You betcha.

And besides, a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic for me to just hunker down and "go with the flow." So by stepping down as God I'm avoiding the flow, which makes me a better God. This makes sense for a lot of reasons, reasons of which I will not go into now for fear of giving in to pressure. And I am not one to "give in to pressure from other people."

I'm not really a "person" anyway.

So, as of tomorrow, my assistant Ashley will step in as God. I think it is obvious she will carry out my duties admirably and goodly. And it is my promise to you that I will always be standing by, ready to assist. We have a good, positive agenda for Earth.

In closing I'd simply like to repeat the words of General MacArthur, a great, big General of the United States Army many years ago. He said, "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."

And that's exactly what I am doing here today.

you'll come to know this about me

noreply@blogger.com (ASP CAP) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:45:00 +0000

UPDATE: AP didn't see CP's post below. doubles deleted.

some new flickr photos documenting time spent in venice, martha's vineyard and topanga at el ranchito de los pintos. i think an album of topanga photos will be in the works soon...

i will hold my house in the high wood

noreply@blogger.com (CAP ASP) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:44:00 +0000

recent additions to ND flickr gallery:
the 4th at obed dagget, MV

sequoia camping trip