Well – as the name suggests, the author of this blog is always happy to catch something out of the corner of her eye. Even better when I am there to capture something first hand. Fortunately, or unfortunately I wasn’t present at the time.
It was April 1983 and the Royal Agricultural Society stand at the Royal Easter Show was looking splendid – beyond splendid this particular year as the Barrington Tops District display had completely outdone itself. All of a sudden, much to the horror of a number of onlookers, 10,000 melons exquisitely fashioned into a Rainbow Trout display unexpectedly exploded, and it was on a cold day… Theories abound as to why or even how, this extraordinary event could occur (NOTE: the Paw Paw Pyramid was fine…)
I stumbled upon this image and had no idea what it was – I felt simultaneously repelled and awestruck.
It is in fact nuclear fission at 3 nanoseconds. I have been reflecting upon the awful beauty of these images and am reminded that these forms are the manifestation of a deathly design. Nuclear fission was tested abundantly and energetically, guided by one simple aim – to destroy everything.
Another example of turning annoying spam mail into diverting visuals with which you can refresh your desktop instead of sending an irate response to NO-ONE. Like many a 21stC energy company facing the future of trading in ever dwindling non-renewable resources, and trying to keep a lid on carbon emissions – German company Energie Baden-Württemberg (EnBW) is a producer of conventional ie: coal-powered energy, along with renewables such as hydro, wind, solar and geothermal. In an inventive piece of marketing (a couple of years ago), they created the Spam Recycler “the world’s first recycling scheme for waste data” One sends one’s unwanted spam to their “machine” which “shreds” one’s spam mail and re-generates lovely visuals for one – with which one can then adorn one’s desktop or whatever. Sadly (or not), one’s spam filter is working so well, one hasn’t had any junk mail for ages.
Not sure about reducing CO2 emissions but it is creative marketing.
This time it’s Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu – a researcher in the Social Media Group at the MITMedia Lab (prior to that Experimental Game Lab + Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego). Dragulescu produces visualisations from “databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets”. It is the beauty of his spam “architecture” which really strikes me though. Turning email spam into something more useful, nay, lovely for humankind is an endeavour in which quite a few folk are engaged – and we thank them for it. Dragulescu’s architecture is really lovely though – in a minimalist, transcendent kind of way.
"What to look for when buying a repl1ka watch" Linzie Hunter
"no girls laugh at me now HA-HA I laugh at them" Linzie Hunter
"This Secret Weapon will give more POWER to your little soldier"
Typographer and illustrator Linzie Hunter’s work is apparently “influenced by her love of all things vintage.” Thankyou, for making the world a more liveable place.
I Love infographics – as much as the next person, especially good ones BUT in an age awash with information vs knowledge, and a depressingly low signal to noise ratio – I really REALLY like these…
My favourite work is where sweetness and light flips the bird to a dark and bitter place – ie: the slick, lying face of the modern world. In the grand tradition of culture-jamming, agit-pop and sub-vertising, Ron English delivers it all, including over 1000 billboard “improvements.” Here is a sweet treat posted by Ron English in response to the 28 million box Kellogg’s Cereal Recall. You will probably have seen his work via Morgan Spurlock’sSuper Size Mewith an evilly cute take on Ronald McDonald.
Last year in a UK exhibition around the theme of Resurrection, he included a series of canvasses which re-cast Picasso’s “Guernica” in a 21st century light.
He has also released a book (with a forward by Morgan Spurlock) “Abject Expressionism” which includes 20 years of his work including billboard “improvements”.
Ron English’s work subverts, trips-up, provokes, confronts, condemns and ultimately triumphs in the the most delightful way. To me, his work is evidence of Christopher Fry’s assertion “Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair…”
MUTO Blu, music: Andrea Martignoni, produced by Mercurio Film
Apparently not much is known about the street artist Blu, apart from the fact that he is Italian, likes to keep his identity a secret and lives in Bologna. His work started to appear all over Bologna in 1999 and he began to collaborate with other artists including Ericailcane. He has also worked with London collective “Santa’s Ghetto” and participated in a West Bank street art festival which raised around 1 million USD to help send kids from the poor neighbourhoods in Palestine to the only dedicated Art school in the Middle East.
Over the years, his work evolved from “still” images on the sides of buildings to “animated” stop-motion art on any kind of surface, indoor and outdoor. He paints the forms, then scrubs or paints over them step-by-step to achieve incredible movement across all available surfaces. This work Muto, from 2008 is a massively ambitious work which has a narrative arc like a leary-esque acid trip – maybe proof positive indeed that “The universe is an intelligence test”.
I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase Feeney’s beautifully crafted article – you can read the full thing here. What struck me, apart from the candour of the earlier work and the slabs of memoir Ginsberg attached to many of the frames (really long sentence here), was the notion of “family”. I spent this last rainy saturday reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” – a recollection and ultimately an elegy to a man who was one the great loves and muses of her life – Robert Mapplethorpe. Ginsberg’s collection and Patti Smith’s memoirs are inspiring and heartbreaking in turn. Both offer us a portrait of the family we make as we emerge into adulthood, sometimes leaving behind and sometimes augmenting the family we inherited.
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso - Tangiers
Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cot, "The Letter – Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with The Subterraneans, pencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan."
Peter Orlovsky at James Joyce's grave, Zurich Switzerland December 1980, we climbed up the cemetery and found Joyce's statue snowcovered, brushed it off his head.
I’m not sure whether it’s me or the zeitgeist but I am noticing a proliferation of tiny worlds. Keith Loutit is a Sydney-based photographer and filmmaker who creates tiny worlds through a combination of camera angles and time-lapse. Unlike his contemporaries Slinkachu of London and Filipe Pinto Soares of Portugal who create worlds which are literally tiny, Keith creates tiny worlds from big, real ones ie: he trains his camera on the everyday and appears to shrink it.
In a world which is simultaneously a warm global village and an unfeeling, cold machine, these little little places are a sweet, palm sized comfort – with all their joy and pain.
