I’ve mentioned that I decided it’s about time I set up an artist’s site, and I’ll try to do better than most artists, who in my opinion very often don’t take that very seriously. But I doubt it will end up as ambitious as Wim Delvoye’s site, with a whole little pixel town to explore. At least not until I have studio emplyees to delegate that to. And a studio to keep them in….
Or at least someone with a year of fine art education behind them, and another year at the same school coming up. It’s somthing I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but for various reasons I’ve felt that I couldn’t make the best of the sort of resource art school is. But better late than never, as the saying goes. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m intent on keeping on this path as far as it goes – hopefully by getting accepted to a bachelor program after this coming year (and with most schools here in Sweden that pretty much guarantees a place in the masters program as well unless you screw up totally).
I’ll have plenty of time this summer, and unless I get too bogged down with attention defiency and house moving I’m going to get a portfolio site up during the summer. Until then, I might post something here while I consolidate my work.
Blu animates walls in Buenos Aires with about seven minutes of awesomeness:
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
By Oscar Guzmán, a series of 16 photos that “constitute a document of a place that exists at some level of Reality”. (flash link)
By the way, I’m interested in finding good blogs about what’s going on in the art world, so feel free to drop a comment with any links you might think of.
I only have a quite moderate interest in sports, but I still find the Olympics to be a nice break from regular routine. Maybe it’s because I sort of fill up most of my sports qouta during those two week events.
I don’t really like the fact that it is in Europe, though. I’ve always thought there is a certain something about staying up at odd hours, and maybe pay extra attention to some sport I’ve never bothered about while waiting for something else to start. That’s how I discovered curling, for example. That’s a typical olympic sport for me, not something that concerns me otherwise. And at times I’ve also found speed skating strangely mesmerizing, especially the longer distances. Probably something with the steady sching…sching…sching of the skates. And the female competitors, athletes with physiques that make you believe they can crack walnuts with their… sorry, I got a bit carried away.
Otherwise, I’d say the hockey is the main event for me. And this time there’s no risk that we’ll lose to Belarus… If I was asked to list most memorable sporting moments I would probably I would probably put the 1994 final against Canada as number one. That was one intense game. The cat behaved nervously for days after seeing me and mom jumping and screaming like crazy when Forsberg nailed that last shot.
I’ve also always had some fascination with the opening ceremonies. Probably my mother’s fault, she used to make a bit of an event out of that. And there’s nothing like a ridicilously extravagant display of pseudo-cultural kitsch once in while, is there? I actually think the whole concept is quite silly, but silly can be entertaining in itself. The displays have become somewhat more tasteful lately, though. The Greeks put up a quite appealing show in the last summer games, though. And I think the people who created the Torino opening did a good job as well. I think they finally have come to the conclusion that you only can have so many stiltwalkers, acrobats on strings and 15-person parade float-costumes before it goes over the top. Having had a bit of an interest in the movement I specifically liked the Futurism-inspired bit, with the dancer Bolle (dressed in the Futurists’ idea of a suit) performing against Umberto Boccione’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The decision to include something as un-olympic (to me, at least) as a Formula 1 car burning donuts felt like a nice touch, and I guess it was a good representation for the love of speed shared by both the Futurists and later generations of Italians. But overall, I guess the aesthetics of the whole thing had the tradional gaudyness of “culture for the masses”.
Oh, and there’s one thing that puzzles me. The olympic games always comes with the message of peace, and all that, but still the flag was raised by some special Alpine soldiers. I know flag-handling has always been a military thing, but isn’t it at least a bit contradictory?
I just opened a new pack of coffee. I like that – that first whiff of fresh coffee when you open, and then the first few extra fresh cups. One of those things that are, when you think of it, quite nice. But I guess that from a more practical viewpoint it means that I should get that coffee grinder I’ve been thinking about, so I can get my brew as fresh as possible all the time.
Another nice thing is new CDs, especially if they are not only really good, but also just what you’re in the mood for. I wrote about Ane Brun in an earlier entry, and I got the new release Duets in the mail yesterday. I’ll return with a review in a couple of days.
Oh, and relating to the fever dreams I mentioned in the last post, check out Dreamlines. Enter a few keywords, and see the web dream about it. Here’s the “flesh and blog” dream. The creator, Leonardo Solaas, explains the work:
“Who is dreaming? The user, or the Internet itself? In a certain way, both. The program generates a personal moving picture, unique, unpredictable, and forever gone when it is finished, just like dreams. But that dream is made out of pieces taken form the subconscious of the whole net, gathered by some words of the user and the obscure logic of searching algorithms.”
The abstract image is a snapshot of a dream (click for full view, I didn’t want to lose detail by resizing it)
This is one of my favorite pieces of software, it was only a short while since I discovered it, but it’s one of those interface additions that I got used to immediately:
FoxyTunes for Firefox is just one of those indespensable things you can’t do without once you’ve started using them. When looking for skins for a mediaplayer I’ve always wanted them to be compact and functional, but now I don’t think there’s any better way to save desktop space than having the controls right there on the browser.
Something you maybe can do without is Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca machines (I suggest to unblock the pop-up on the first page).
What Cloaca does is to artificially digest food and produce the closest possible analogue to human feces. I didn’t learn about this work of art until recently, and I’m not going to present any sort of thorough analysis of it here (analysises by people much better at such things than I am can be found in the essays section of the Cloaca site). I just wanted to mention it because I find the whole concept intriguing. I mean, what else can you think about a big, expensive machine whose only purpose is to produce shit? Maybe the only useful aspect of it is to be a an example of near-complete uselessness.
…and there was blog.
Well, that was a lame opening for a first post, wasn’t it? But it poses an interesting question; “why is there blog?” I realize that some people actually have an idea about it before they create the blog, while what I had was an unused domain on a host that I’ve mostly used for feeding Thunderbird’s junkmail filter. So, this weekend the rare combination of boredom (of which I have plenty) and initiative (usually elusive) made me decide to do something about that empty space. I guess I have to find some purposes for the site along the way.
I guess one of the first things on the agenda (after making the sidebar sections less empty) is some kind of art section. It’s mostly on a wannabe basis, but art is one of the things I enjoy dabbling with when inspiration hits. More about that later.
Other than that I guess it will the usual personal blog material: things I have thought about, books I have read, records I have listened to. We’ll see about that.
