Tag: art

Machine of Death

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It's a world where everyone knows how they're going to die

Machine of Death is an upcoming published anthology of short stories edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki !, inspired by this episode of Ryan’s Dinosaur Comics.

All the stories will be about a world where a machine can tell people how they will die.

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN”.

At a recent art opening, I pulled exactly such a slip of paper from an art installation by Hank Pine, and the mix of deadly predictions was very similar. A good variety of glamorous or outlandish ways to die (decapitation, dusting accident, lead pipe…), with the occasional realistic downer (I myself got “leukemia”).

Small talk around the death oracle was exactly as described in that call for submissions. “It said ‘lead pipe’… but I don’t know if I’ll be hit with a pipe or poisoned by lead plumbing.”

“OLD AGE”, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death— you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

I think part of the reason the diseases managed to be shocking was that there were fewer loopholes. “Hey, I… I can’t think of an ironic way to die of AIDS.”

A death oracle might be a good format for my long standing intention to find out, statistically, how I’m likely to die. Filling a hat with 45% “heart attack” would be several levels more morbid, somehow. Not as personalized as the Machine of Death, but just as accurate, in its way. A Pie Chart of Death is within the reach of current technology.

Guy Maddin is my muse of the week

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Interview with Guy Maddin, one of my favourite directors, from October 2006:

GM: I’m also kind of pleased with what I came up with. It was such short notice that I didn’t have time to make anything up, I had to just be very honest. So much so that I can’t really show it to my family. I’d be disinherited, things like that.

TB: It’s kind of funny to hear you say that about a film that involves organ harvesting in a lighthouse.

GM: Yeah, I sort of promised myself I’d never talk about that part of growing up. It’s all there now! But sometimes you can hide things in plain sight.

I watched The Saddest Music in the World three times over the weekend, with and without commentary, and now I find myself hanging on every word out of Guy Maddin’s mouth.

His comments about expressionism in the Saddest Music are helping me with my mission to draw. He did things like shoot the actors making assorted facial expressions against a black backdrop so he could stick them in whenever he needed a shot, figuring that nobody really cares whether the backgrounds are consistent or accurate: the characters are in the movie, that’s enough context. I like that specific tactic, to just stick everything in together and nevermind the accuracy. It’s helping me draw, and design websites. I’m good at thinking up parts; less good at accurately proportioning them.

This other comment is helping me think about giant projects that involve a lot of research:

I know the Japanese had a different way of presenting silent film altogether, with a benshi narrator who would get in to characters or supply their own narratives that ran athwart the text unfolding on screen and that sounds really elaborate. The most I wanted my interlocutor to do was sort of season up, spice up, the proceedings a little bit and, truthfully, clarify some spots where I may not have shot things clearly enough. The benshi thing I found out about just a bit too late to figure out how to work with it and incorporate it myself.

That happens to me a lot, getting into a project and then finding really inspirational ideas right at the end. I have to insist that it’s ok, a good sign even, to be spotting neat ideas all the way through a project instead of having a complete and perfect idea right from the beginning.

And of course I’m looking forward to sometime seeing the organ harvesting movie, The Brand Upon The Brain.

Research on defanging

sarah

I’m a little bit fascinated with the idea of going over to hipsters’ houses when they aren’t around, and rifling through their pop culture possessions.

It seems like if you read all a hipster’s books, watched all her movies, listened to all her music, played with all her toys, and looked at all her web bookmarks, she’d have no way to show off her cultivated taste and connections. I think of this as a defanging. “I’m not much for using media consumption for cool points” is how I characterized this fascination over on MOG.

I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of this defanging fantasy yet, but this CPU post about creating The Nod has at least given me a solid idea about a website I could make to express my troubles.

Sit in a cafe with a Mac PowerBook, and chances are you’ll get The Nod… Display GNOME on your ThinkPad and you’ll get The Nod. But run Windows on your Dell and you won’t.

Why do some things get The Nod but not others? And isn’t it really the user that gets The Nod, and not the product?…

The Nod is a way for one user to tell another:

“We’re smarter.”

Or

“We’re risk-takers.”

Or

“We’re more indie.”

Or

“We’ve been at this from the beginning (unlike these clueless newbies).”

Or…

Gross! I do love that this article was written for marketers, and I think that’s what unlocked my articulation on this issue. It sounds catty and obvious to declare that it’s shallow and maybe vain to use commercial products to proove your identity, but somehow hearing marketers make up catchphrases about it (“The Nod”?) gives me the necessary boost up onto my high horse.

So this defanging website, to express my troubles. I tried out several previous possibilities on Galen, but they all seemed doomed to hypocrisy.

My latest version is this: it would be fun to interview people about what they like to do and how they spend their time, and simply refuse to print any anecdote containing a brand name, a catchphrase, a club affiliation, or the like. Basically anything you could get A Nod about would be blanked out. Maybe even retroactively, if something you mentioned was easily imitated and sparked a trend. It could be sort of a Last Person Standing competition in inimitability.

It ties a little into this quote I read in the beginning of an Ansel Adams photography textbook. I think it was originally about Mozart, and it said something to the effect that “It’s no great accomplishment to be the first to do something. What we should aim for is to be the last; to do something so extraordinary that it can never be repeated.”

Color This Book

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Galen got me a present in Anacortes. Best present ever! I didn’t know I would be so excited about an indie colouring book, but it’s really blowing my mind. This is the first time I’ve done any colouring since I’ve been obsessed with colour schemes and combinations. Playing with colour schemes is a lot more fun when you’re starting from a picture of say, a pensive rhinoceros writing its memoirs, or a knitting squirrel!

I just mailed this one to my parents (for the fridge). It’s red and blue, and coming to getcha.

Monsters for Peace colouring page

Watching people sketch

sarah

We ran into Erik and Leni at the show last night and shared their table. I got distracted, watching Erik draw on the back of a poster he ripped down from the bar window. He’s fast, and starts right in on the details without blocking anything in. I took a dark picture of the poster after he taped it up backwards on the window again, but I forgot to look at it from outside when we left.

After that, and spending a lot of time scribbling on our bar table as a group, I was excited to see a little ““watch people sketch online”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/watch_and_rate_peopl.html” game posted on BoingBoing this morning. But it turns out to not be that interesting. Maybe it has to do with texture? Maybe I only like watching people I know.

Galen is still considering starting some kind of one-thing-every-day blog. Maybe he should post a little video of himself drawing a picture. Like that landscape painter with the happy little trees, but not educational. Spectator art!

How are we going to get all these bears back in?

sarah

Orca In The City

Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.

Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.

Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.

I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.

Enter Spirit Bears

Spirit Bear featuring a funky neighbourhood scene

Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.

Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?

Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.

I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.

Today

sarah

I started my weekend on Friday, and spent all of today goofing around with Rock Club, and Zoe is coming to visit tomorrow so I know that will be a write-off. I can’t separate my slacking from my fever-induced laziness. I want to be so productive, and not get stuck on predictable tasks, like whenever I have to do the part of design that involves making something pretty, or presentable. I rock the functional part, but the decorating is really hard. Yes I know they work together. I’m stuck on visual stuff on two different projects right now. Three, really. It’s painful. I’m so full of ideas, honest. I can work so hard. Honest. I don’t know how to make the pretty things come out of my head.

This has to be the year that I learn to draw. Studying colours and type and alignment helped, but if I’m aspiring to something other than boxes, I need to have less clumsy hands.

Commies commies commies!

sarah

Milton Glaser in The Believer : I think the worst scam that was ever performed on the innocent American people is this idea that retirement is desirable. It’s only desirable for people who really hate what they do.

Oh, that makes me happy. I get so tired of people who don’t do work that they love. I sympathize when my friends are trying to figure out what they want to do, but I have a lot more fun when somebody is actually excited about a plan.

I remember a class debate in about grade 10 social studies, a typical assignment to argue the merits of capitalism versus communism. The argument that, as I remember it, won the debate for the commies was that money is not a failsafe motivator for work, or everyone would want to be a highly paid doctor or lawyer. People do work for love too, in greater or lesser ways. Some work is so well-loved that nobody can get paid to do it (e.g., most art, parenting).

I go through phases of being frustrated by that, that a lot of great work gets done without pay, and some people can’t afford to do the great work they’re capable of. But right now, I’m just glad for the parade of free work that constitutes the bulk of the internet. Just people making stuff out of love. Bunch of commies!

(Sometimes it is really obvious that I have a tendency to take each new idea that I like and make it the symbol of my life philosophy for a week, until it has been processed and integrated throughout my entire brain. I don’t think a grade 10 class debate really resonated with me as the height of political discourse; it just stuck as the identifiable moment when this particular idea took root with me. Mr. Hansen and his rumoured hippie butterfly tattoo awarding the day to the communists.)