Thing-a-day.com

pfew!  One last scanner piece.  Happy leap day!!

Working with the idea of scanner art as a performance for a digital observer I decide to play with the moving things over the scanner.  Instead of the performance being an act of arrangement, now it is a present act of motion.  This is a satisfyingly difficult task.  It frustrates your desires enough, and puts enough restrictions on what you can and can’t make happen that I think it offers a lot of stuff to explore.

More scanner art.  I didn’t try to emphasize objectness this time.  i think it came out for the better.

ow.  The folds in my Pajama bottoms, crumpled in a heap on my desk, illuminated from a nearly touching lamp, out of place, useless, hurts my head.

This is drawing of my pajama bottoms crumpled on my desk.  The visual form is molded by two forces, light and gravity.  gravity makes the shape of the fabric, and light makes those shapes visible.   …. cool

I want the scanner to show more depth of the stuff. I guess I need a brighter light. I tried the aluminum foil to see what reflected light would do. I wonder what a mirror would be. I also decided that I’ve got a problem creating big shapes, I thought to make a large shape out of smaller stuff spilled over the scanner bed, hence the coins. I wish I had packing peanuts for this though. These things aren’t full scans. They’re actually the little boxes that the computer picked out guessing that it was what I intended to scan. The computer has a decent sense of composition. I think it adds to the idea that the scanner is the observer, it can judge too.

I really dig this scanner art thing.  You have to mechanically manipulate stuff to get a digital result.  That result is not through digital process, it merely observed digitally.  Instead of things like painting or photoshopping the actions you do are not building the work.  Rather the actions you do build a situation that is then observed by the digital apparatus which creates “the art object.”  In this sense it is really a performance, but a performance that is for a single, objective, technical moment.

I don’t know how lame I think this phrase it.  If it’s too psuedo cryptic without content, or if it has a ring and effect beyond a literal meaning.  Worth a try anyway though. Sorry about the new photobooth pic.

OED say: brachiate = the act of having arms.

What’s more human than that.

(I just want to note that this not my sentence, but I love it anyway.)

If I had a hammer.  I would draw it, and then cut out squares from the paper and turn them around.  Then I would sow some stitches in a box.  Then I would cut up post-it notes and tape them down in a colorful pattern.  … all day long.

I’ll give two Jasper Johns quotes, one of which appears in my thing:

“Do something, Do something to that, and then do something to that.”

“I want people to look at my paintings like the look at a radiator.”

I don’t know what this is.  But it’s colorful. sorry that the image is so bad. It looks kinda cooler not from a scanner bed but still no camera.

This was the fine print from some credit card junk mail.  Now it’s a thing .. with some wire going through it.

In homage to the amazing phenomenon of great ideas happening on the back of envelopes, and the fact that I have a physics midterm on monday, and the fact that it’s late at night and I can’t think of something more interesting.  Igive you, physics with paint and shit

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So this is kinda doubly cheating.  First I already used putting up curtains but that was only on curtain, now I put of a second one.  Second it’s technically feb 16th right now.  But I’m a firm believer that the day ends when you go to sleep and starts when you wake up.  I haven’t been to bed yet so there.

This is a Jones Soda bottle that I drank in a coffee shop today.  I had a wonderful valentines day with good friends in a good coffee shop for several hours.

So this is painfully referential to my geographic location.  but it was what I found in my recycling.  Actually that’s pretty interesting, the way advertising and the din of cultural information you take in all around you serves to locate you.  Everyday I’m told that I am in “Chicago,” several dozen times without realizing it.  I wonder if this “Chicago” that they speak of is real.  All I see are buildings and people.

Making things should always be about playing with things that you already have.  Like your printer!!

I came across today a map from 2004 of what the University of Chicago had as a “Master Plan” for extending into the Neighborhood by 2020. I altered it slightly. The grid of lines is every street extended across the whole page. The wavy lines are drawn on cling-wrap that I put down on under the actual map on the scanner bed.

Here’s a color grid I made on, again something out of my recycling bin. I like this recycling stuff idea, mostly because you get loads more interesting paper in the mail everyday than you buy in packages at Staples.