monday, march 05, 2007
Pictures unreasonably tinted yellow
I miss San Francisco, with its good food and public transportation and excellent people. Instead, I have Santa Barbara and a gigantic line of eucalyptus trees planted a long time ago to defy the wind. If you look into the distance, you see the ocean.
I also have my desk, chosen and arranged like everything else. Each object has an origin story: the IKEA in Irvine, Los Angeles’ Chinatown, San Francisco garage sales, the pirate store, New Orleans, sisters.
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tuesday, february 27, 2007
What is this trolley? An internal joke.
In the Proustian scheme of things, a work of art is an object that implies something that it cannot directly represent. The thing in question is the associative network that guides the stream of thought of the artist. This network of relationships cannot be experienced directly, but it does control the entry of sensory representations into the focus of consciousness. By presenting us with an ordered set of sensory surfaces, the artist implies the structure of the mind that ordered them, and thus conveys an essential aspect of experience that would be otherwise inexpressible.
From “Consciousness, art, and the brain: Lessons from Marcel Proust”, by Russell Epstein (PDF).
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monday, february 26, 2007
Dandelions, daisies, buttercups
A survey of common weedflowers in Isla Vista, California:
None of them are native plants. (More about buttercups.)
What are the weedflowers in your area? Show me! You have an exception from this assignment if you live here too.
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sunday, february 25, 2007
A taxonomic litany of trivial obsession
I have an innocent-looking folder that holds 77.5 megabytes of tiny OS X icons, carefully sorted into 20 top-level folders and a zillion sub-folders. In each folder, the icons are visually organized by subject, and I’ve renamed most of the icons to make more sense. Here are screenshots of two folders, “clothes” and “furniture”:
Two of the other folders are organized as follows:
- food (16 icons, plus the ones in the following sub-folders)
- meals (26)
- breakfast (20)
- sushi (11)
- drinks (28)
- fast food (7)
- fruit (29)
- café (26)
- dessert (39)
- hot topic (72)
- alien faces (8)
- bloody (14)
- dust (8)
- gargoyles (16)
- gas masks (4)
- ghosts (9)
- medieval (9)
- mutant heads (5)
- sea monsters (13)
- wild things (7)
I don’t remember where I got most of my icons. They are stripped of copyright information and recontextualized into arrangements of associations, etc. Here are some of my favorite icon-makers, though:
- Marmalade Moon — flowers, bird eggs
- I Heart New York — Magnetic Fields songs, mutant faces, domo-kuns
- Pixel Press Icons — pirates, moleskines, canoe paddles, feng shui, instruments
- Afterglow — New Zealand stuff, brains on carts
InterfaceLIFT is the best place to find many more, if you would like to fall into this hole of low-level insanity with me.
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monday, february 19, 2007
Britta smells
Note: A guest post by my little sister.
Structures by Britta and Douglas. Pictures by Lizzy.
“I AM A LEGO STATUE OF NEON TRANSLUCENT DOOM”
“MY NAME IS PAPA FROG THE SKELETON. I’M GOING TO EAT YOUR HAT AND FEED IT TO MY FAT BABIES”
