The Other Night At Barbès

Barbes
The other night I was home alone and bored with drawing on the computer and bored with all manner of other digital media distractions and most importantly, bored with being alone. I became nostalgic for Paris. So inspired by the recent and past collabs with UU, I decided to grab the old Montmartre valise of magic (drawing supplies and paper scraps,etc.) and head out to a local spot I haven’t haunted in a while, Barbes. There to make a mess with ink and paper and people and the ultimate solvent: alcohol. Tango music filled the air as I made some scribbles. It was a nice time and today I am playing with the drawings and thinking about how mixing up video images and digital drawing for Willoughby could be as fun and sort of familiar as making Café Collages, or whatever you call those things I’ve been doing on books and maps and scraps since at least Paris and then Galapagos back in ’97 or 8 I think? Still, it seems important to keep people and place and paper involved at least on a conceptual level.

In other news, it seems official that I will be doing a residency at 17 Frost from November 3 Through the end of the Year! This will be a multimedia installation for the project we’ve been collaborating on since last summer, CAGE.
barbes2

Arch

Celebratearches

I recall reading someone’s speculation on the orgin of arches in architecture. They seemed to think it arouse in a Kubrckian manner from a confrontation with death. Specifically, they thought it grew from men seeing ribs and jaw bones on the battlefield. While I suppose there is a certain poetic lovliness to this idea, it occurred to me that the same discovery could be more easily traced back to coming upon a fallen tree as much as a fallen man. Something tells me lean tos predate stone arches. I was thinking about arches because of the Geodesic dome IN UU’s collage… and also the arch of the girl’s back as she put her ass in the air. The other thing that sort of fell into my head was how Buckminster Fuller always went back to stacking as the origin of all his work. As if perhaps it all really came from an engineering question that came up when trying to move stacks of cans, or more likely ammunition in the most efficient manner. I thought a nice monument to him would be to stack a pile of geodisc domes under the arch of a tree…. but in real life it should be huge and maybe bucky balls not domes…. or microscopic nanocarbon would be fun too: visible only by scanning elctron microscope installed in the gallery.
arc

NOSTYLGIA

Things keep getting codified into the opposite of what I wanted from blogging and e publishing in general…. well I’ll have to get over it and see if I can still make some IT IN posts. Right now I have Nostylgia…. which is some sort of graffiti nothingness about dischord as far as I can tell. The video here i just a haze of moments form the year wrapped up to suggest a way of editing a longer movie that seems to have stalled. But we are caged so how do we break out? I don’t know, but, I’m thinkg I finished a short (three month) animation tonight… so life moves on.

This Land Is My Land


Some drawings towards an animation using the Woody Gutherie song interpreted Donald Johnson. Wait for it.