The Adafruit kit included a protoshield which needs soldering, so I busted out a soldering iron for the first time since I was in grade school.  I put one of the capacitors in the shield upside-down, so it looks a little funny, but it all works.  :)

I managed to find a 4051 multiplexer on my trip to Fry’s (no shift registers, sadly) and I built this to experiment with it:

The Arduino cycles through the 4051, powering up and down each LED in turn.  The potentiometer (dial) controls the rate at which the Arduino cycles through the LEDs.

If you’ve got sharp ears you might notice my studio mate blasting Sinead O’Conner.

I feel a wee bit guilty spending so much time this week screwing around with electonics and the Arduino instead of printing or working on my video game stuff, but I’m enjoying it and I’m sure it’ll bear some fruit in some project or another.

Here are some recent sketches and in-progress proofs of prints:

A tree on 22nd Street

Ceci n'est pas une pressure washer drawing

Sketch for an in-progress etching

Bay Landscape - Atmospheric Perspective

Aaron taught one of my classes last year, when I was a post-bac, called Art of the Street.  It was a political/postering/propaganda class, half art history and half print studio.  The Halo/Wikileaks (also on Boing Boing and Kotaku)  and Assange/Biggie work I did last year was either an assignment for his class or in response to issues brought up in his class.

The semester after I studied with Aaron, I worked with some modernist painter types who had a huge aversion to propaganda or anything political.  They wanted to look at work from a purely formal perspective, even if that ended up destroying the framework that would allow someone to understand a reference to, for example, the Halo heads-up-display.  This feedback, while frustrating at first, ended up pushing me into some new territory in which I made some great work that I’m still very invested in and very proud of.

So it was great to circle back with Aaron and see what he thought of the work I’d done in the time since our class together.  He was very sympathetic to the roadblocks I’d run into, and he encouraged me to always have side projects like political or propaganda work to noodle around on.

In response to my new work, Aaron thought I should look at Tauba Aurbach, which was great because that was someone who Eamon Ore-Giron suggested I look at when he visited my studio a few weeks ago.  Aaron also thought I should spend some time getting to know the work of Olafur Eliasson.  I stumbled across Eliasson recently while reading Lawrence Weschler’s great book on Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.  It was excellent to have that feedback re-iterated.

Aaron also encouraged me to spend some time reading up on the history of conceptual art.  While he was an MFA student he’d taken a class in conceptual art history.  He hadn’t necessarily liked everything he came across, and he didn’t see himself as a “conceptual artist” in the 80s sense of the term, but he did find the experience to be valuable to his own work.

Perhaps the most useful feedback I got from Aaron was to try to focus on the effect that my work has on viewers.  I’ve struggled to explain the relationship between the images in my work, the process that I’ve used to develop of the work, and the concept that I want to bring across.  Often, my concepts are intertwined with process explorations, just figuring out new was of doing shit.  Printmaking is a very process-driven artform.  I feel like there’s a very natural affinity between printmaking process and technological development, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I gravitate towards technological explorations in printmaking.  It’s exciting work, like writing code to get my laptop to do something that it’s never done before.  But then I run into the problem of what to depict in the imagery of my work.  I’ve done a series of portraits of loved ones, trying to deflect interpretation by invoking Chuck Close.  I’ve also tried to experiment with abstraction and landscape.  None of these feel very natural to me, and I continue to have to fight off attacks from profs and other students who want me to justify my work in terms of portraiture or whatever.

Aaron suggested that rather than continuing to search for a good set of image vocabulary to express my ideas, instead that I should consider focussing on what feeling or effect I want to have on viewers.  He suggested I visit the Audium and experience how they modulate space with sound, and that I think about making a site-specific piece that tries to respond to a particular location, even a particular room.

We started by winding back through some of the financial implications of blogging on those trying to make a living by writing. Having worked for Getty Images a long time ago, I was interested in the comparison between the changes in the writing industry that are happening now and the way that the professional stock photography industry changed in the last 10 years. Geoff brought up the interesting concept of content rebar. When generic work done in content farms becomes good enough to generate advertising clickthroughs or sell widgets, why does anyone produce anything better? But of course, blogging (and photography for that matter) is just a format for content production. You can produce anything you want with it.  It no more enforces content quality (or the lack thereof) than a particular style of notebook or brand of camera.

We also spent some time talking about using a blog as part of a general platform for your ideas.  Geoff was recently asked to curate an exhibition on Landscape Futures at the Nevada Museum of Art.  Geoff encouraged us to think about things like hosting events, exhibitions or even a lecture series based on the ideas in our blogs. Your meet your readers, your readers meet each other, and your ideas bridge out from the internet and into meatspace.

Our guest blogger today was David Gissen, an associate professor of architecture at CCA. Using his now mostly defunct blog, HTC Experiments, he’s approached blogging with more of an academic perspective than Geoff has.  Several years ago, David saw blogging as a way of publishing the kind of work that would never see the light of day in traditional academic outlets. More recently, he’s treated his blog as a way to cross-post work that was also being published in other formats. Towards the end of the discussion, David mentioned that he was thinking about using blogging to tackle a current problem of his: how to teach the canon in an Architecture 101 class in more novel and meaningful ways.

Due to the Blue Angels, Fleet Week and the Columbus Day Parade, David couldn’t find a parking space.  In a surreal twist, we had the second half of our discussion in the SFAI faculty parking lot where he could keep an eye on his car while the Blue Angels screamed overhead.

Books that came up this weekend:

• The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D by JG Ballard, inspired by San Francisco’s Fleet Week Blue Angel acrobatics and cloud formation
• Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño, also inspired by Blue Angels
• Subnature by David Gissen
• The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh
• I also spent a good part of the weekend thinking about Yochai Benkler, commons-based peer production, and The Wealth of Networks (which for the record I haven’t read)

Other topics of discussion:

• Geoff’s Feral City talk(s)
• Justin Bieber came up a lot
• 750 Words, an online tool for writing your morning pages
• Animal Superpowers, part of the Geoff’s Landscape Futures exhibit mentioned above. Absolutely stunningly cool use of technology to transform sensory input. Transformative, rather than augmented, reality.

Nevertheless, I think it raises an interesting question: to what degree do bloggers need to be concerned with staying “on message” or “on brand,” and to what degree do they see their identities wrapped up with the online personas they present in their blogs?  Even when bloggers aren’t consciously engaging with the identity component of social media, are they still concerned about consistency of message and the branding of their blog itself?

I see branding as an odious development in the history of human communication.  I’m not interested in creating a constructed or targeted identity. How can I build a blog in a way that stays honest to these concerns?

Also, is this even a real problem to tackle?  Or am I just coming at this with a knee-jerk grad school “critical” perspective?

Today’s session started with some history of BLDGBLOG, then Geoff offered a compelling perspective on the tradition that blogging falls into: zines, religious and political printmakers and rabble rousers, prophesies, samizdat, and other forms of self publishing.  Next we covered some formal practicalities surrounding blogging: server platforms, commenting, images, revenue, schedules, etc.  Finally, we got to the meat of the matter and spent some time talking about content and audience.  Hopefully tomorrow we’ll continue talking about writing and content creation.

In the spirit of the workshop I’ve decided to resurrect this old URL and put a blog on it.  I’m going to kill off my tumblr when I get some time and move the content over here.  I’ve become convinced that tumblr is one of the deserts of the Internet: a wasteland of reblogs and links. It’s not surprising that Google rarely seems to index it: is there much of actual value there? That’s a rhetorical question, I know that there is plenty of awesome on tumblr (like 9eyes). I’m just not sure that this awesome isn’t in spite of the platform architecture.

]]> http://meatfreezer.com/2011/10/clot-1/feed/ 0 http://meatfreezer.com/2011/09/atmosphere-2/ http://meatfreezer.com/2011/09/atmosphere-2/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 04:00:29 +0000 Alex Shepard http://meatfreezer.com/?p=328