I Am Still Alive

Since moving to San Francisco, I’ve been poring over Bay Area arts resources as informal research for expanded local Artlog coverage and for my own benefit. Receiver Gallery’s Mission Gallery Guide PDF is as pretty a map as I’ve seen anywhere.

In an editorial at Wired Science, Erle Ellis writes about dismissing the term ‘nature’ and understanding that humans have been modifying environmental conditions for a long time.

“And it’s time for a ‘postnatural’ environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?”

I dug the piece. Ellis hits it square here. Sure, we shouldn’t blame the environment for environmental changes for which we are responsible or seek to restore some fantastical idea of a pristine natural world.

“If we want these places to look like they did before us, we will have to constantly recreate them. It will be a huge job for us humans to keep nature “wild.”…We humans can totally trash the planet and still survive. We already have in many ways.

Don’t like it? Stop trashing it!

Use renewable energy. Clean it up. Repair it. Get to work. There is plenty more mileage left in this spaceship Earth. Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.”

I also want to read more about landscape ecology (Via @alexismadrigal)

H, F & J walk us through Unicorn Graphics(!) newly launched Wood Type Museum highlighting type by Hamilton Manufacturing Co, Vanderburgh and Page.

It’s harder to find Page or Vanderburgh type these days (or possibly these manufacturers didn’t label the type – look on the side of the A’s), but you do come across Hamilton cuts often enough.

In addition to being beautifully designed/cut faces, they are impeccably made from good materials (aged, treated end-grain boxwood, cherry, mahogany, or maple). When you buy wood type, you end up paying a premium for Hamilton fonts. I’ve bought and printed with lots of type over the last few years and Hamilton wood type is usually worth the price (though wood type is typically always vastly over-priced on ebay).

I really dig the simplicity of the effects for this video. Just a good idea executed well.

Edgy, monochromatic music video for Friendly Fires, directed by Clemens Habicht. The band [was] transformed into Skeleton Boys as a nod to the track’s title, with the aid of double-sided sticky tape, fans and trillions of bean bag balls.

Torontoist posted a nice article about Wayne Reuben and a man named Douglas (pictured above) – two guys who hand paint the signs at Honest Ed’s department store in Toronto.

There is another gentleman, sitting on a stool, bent over a drafting table, finishing the sentence “As Advertised…” Wayne introduces him as Douglas. He’s been here twelve years and he and Wayne make up the store’s signs department. Each department of the store—menswear, groceries, etc.,—used to have its own team of sign makers, Wayne tells me, but now their ranks have dwindled down to two. It used to be that every sign hanging in every storefront was painted… “It’s a dying practice,” Wayne says. “Honest Ed’s is really the only store that does it anymore.”

via The Ministry of Type. Also, it’s worth having a look at this one up close

I am moving up to San Francisco on Monday and am going to experiment with not getting a television for a bit. I have the suspicion that I can squeeze all the screen-based entertainment I need out the internet. PBS just put streams of a lot of their shows online and it promises to get me most of the way there (along w/Netflix for streaming & DVD and Hulu).

I reckon I’ll watch sports with friends at their places. And even though these services make it easy and I have a really nice monitor there is still considerable rooting around for programming and almost no equivalent to flipping channels to find something new or just interesting enough to waste some time on.

I’ll see how it goes and whether I miss the television “experience.”

Print by Tiina Itkonen found on Scott David Herman’s fantastic art crawl/blog.

I dug this interview with Jason Kottke on CBC Radio.

“It’s people like Jason Kottke that help us decide what is and what isn’t worth reading on the Web.  He’s been publishing his suggested content at Kottke.org  since 1998, and has been doing it professionally, full-time, since 2005.  Since he’s getting pretty good at playing tastemaker for tens of thousands of Internet users, we pulled him into studio to ask him how he feels about playing digital curator.”

I am getting a bit tired of the overuse of the term “curator” to mean any person engaged in presenting/mediating culture and content.

About 11 minutes in Jason talks about “the move from peer-reviewed linking to ‘extreme borrowing.’” I’ve noticed that all over the web and I’ve also found myself checking myself from doing that recently.

On a related, giving ‘credit where credit is due’ note, Laura Miner recently wrote an open letter to tumblr suggesting they allow or rename the caption field for image posts to better credit artists I’ve been thinking about this issue as well as I fine-tune the findings/visual bookmarking system for Arlo.

PokeLondon recently built an arduino-based physical interface for twitter (and a web app) that lets bakers quickly tweet about what’s fresh. It’s a great-looking device and a good idea.

“Everyone knows the best time to get your baked goods is when they’re fresh out the oven. So we figured that this could be a killer use of Twitter. Letting followers know that fresh goodies are ready right now. But bakeries don’t want laptops or phones lying around in the kitchen. Flour, eggs and technology don’t mix so well.

So we built BakerTweet.

It’s a bespoke piece of hardware (with Arduino-based guts) that allows our friends at Albion across the road to select what’s just been baked and ping the relevant Twitter message to local customers. Meaning that you can time your trips to Albion to pick up the freshest freshness. We’re pulling together a ‘how we did it’ post for all you geeky types to check out. Just give us a day or two…”

”$9 freaking creme brulee doughnuts 04-12-09 7:30pm balance: $219 about
17 hours ago from mobile web”

I think I recognize Francis Starlite from my class (2002) at college (Wesleyan), but I am not sure. Starlite runs a band called Francis and the Lights. I first heard of them some months back when they incorporated and took investment from Jake Lodwick

Francis recently set up a twitter account on which he tracks his purchases and bank balance. He even suggests that you “purchase a custom entry (give francis money) at www.francisandthelights.com“

Dave Bias:

“Now I step forward to do my part to try to sell Polaroid film in the worst worldwide economic downturn in living memory, and at a period in time where all things analog are under assault in the name of technological progress, product cycles, and economies of scale.”

“But I need a world where people still need Polaroids. And I’m going to try to do something about it.”

This may be a bit too obvious a screen grab, but I’ve always dug YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ work. I first saw it at a show at the New Museum last year that sort of blew me away and was underwhelming at the same time.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) is a two-artist collective based in Seoul, South Korea. Using Flash animation techniques, they create fast-moving, text-based artworks that are synchronized with original scores. Using a seemingly simple format—texts on monochromatic backgrounds—YHCHI weaves complex and evocative narratives. Invoking the genre of film noir, and the hard-boiled literary styles of Raymond Chandler and Phillip K. Dick, YHCHI’s imaginative, witty and often politically pointed narratives offer layered and compelling stories in which identities are assumed and discarded, and ideologies of all persuasions are held up and questioned.
cf. The New Museum

Speaking of the New Museum, Artlog is running another “Collect LES event” on 18 April and we are pumped to be working with the New Museum and more than a dozen great Lower East Side galleries. Last year’s event drew more than 1500 folks. More info about Collect LES soon – we are going to start promoting in earnest next week. We are also probably launching Arlo next week. Next week is shaping up to be quite busy.

I also really, really like the idea of a ‘two-artist collective.’

I’m in Brooklyn, but were I in Los Angeles this week, I’d definitely go to this event produced by Good at their new project space.

Designers love to claim that good design can solve any problem. Join the brightest minds from the vast and varied Los Angeles design world as they sketch out better solutions to some of LA’s most pressing issues. With Frances Anderton, Barbara Bestor, Stefan Bucher, Artecnica, Space Collective, Astrid Diehl from Materials & Applications, and more.

Thursday, December 18, 2008 from 7-10pm @GOOD Space
6824 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Is design really about problem-solving? And if so, how often are those problems really serious? An event in Los Angeles this coming Thursday aims to tackle some really weighty challenges, such as ‘isolation’, ‘traffic’ and ‘earthquakes’. (via Eye blog)

This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I’m stoked that museums like the Whitney and the Guggenheim are consistently putting together videos to support shows. I also dig that they tend to be interview-based and let the artists themselves speak for their own work.

One measure of the absurdity of the system: Every year you, the American taxpayer, send me a check for $588 in exchange for me not growing crops on timberland I own in Oregon (I forward the money to a charity). That’s right. The Agriculture Department pays a New York journalist not to grow crops in a forest in Oregon…

The most powerful signal Mr. Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed “the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry.” And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, “Department of Food and Agriculture.” I’d prefer to see simply “Department of Food,” giving primacy to America’s 300 million eaters.

As Mr. Pollan told me: “Even if you don’t think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we’re not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on — health care, climate change and energy independence — unless we reform agriculture.”