kollektief

This isn’t much, but I’ve been feeling like maybe I should post some more to kollektief lately, so there you go.

I’ve had a nice time looking at modern art lately. I’ve been getting a bit into Donald Judd, as it seems to turn out that I too have a thing for boxes. Mmm boxes.

I just found this quiz online: Can you tell Donald Judd furniture from cheap Walmart furniture? I got 75%.

apparently some of the files in my mp3s/assorted directory were more publicly accessible than i intended, so they took down my whole mp3 directory including all of my stuff. just in case i guess?

Hello,

We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific content in question is as follows:

http://www.papercanary.org/mcanulty/mp3s/assorted/Le%20Tigre/ Le Tigre
http://www.papercanary.org/mcanulty/mp3s/assorted/illinois/ Sufjan Stevens

The party making the complaint (Stephanie Elton — copyright@tgrec.com), claims under penalty of perjury to be or represent the copyright owner of this content. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), we have removed access to the content in question.

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html#512

what can I drink when I can no longer drink cow’s milk or soy milk (for that matter any dairy or soy products)? I have tried “hemp milk” — I wouldn’t really call it milk. It’s very nutty and savory and well, it does have some good nutritional values but I sure would not call it milk. Who needs milk anyhow? Babies, I guess.

Dear Internet, why do I want to move to New York?

we’re going down the rabbit hole, alice

this is just to say
transatlantic moves do suck
brainmeats exhausted

current ambition:  giant wall of dentists’ neon teeth.  this must, alas, wait until one of these interviews with harvard labs pans out.

The other day, Richard Buchanan came to risd and gave a mostly rambling talk about design methodology and design frameworks (more on this later), but what he really came to do was pick a fight to see how people responded like that scene in fight club. Here’s what he said.Point one: everyone is a designer. the kid that makes his own blog is a designer and so is his buddy that just laid out the cd booklet that goes with the mixtape he made for his friends. myspace makes everyone a designer and in doing so, the work of real designers is devalued and marginalized.Point two: Furthermore, design is not systematic: it is not a process that is easily articulated, followed, managed, organized or even understood by others. Designers practice their trade and yet appear to have no idea what they are doing oftentimes making their work inconsistent and inefficient.Point three: because of the resistance of designers to overintellectualize, they neglect talking about the design of design itself — the methods we use are inarticulate, spotty, nonexistent, or arbitrary. We do not understand our own process, nor can we easily abstract it towards non-standard problems where form is irrelevant and where instead design becomes a way of attacking, dissecting and understanding a problem.[edit:] Here’s what I’ve noticed after the past semester at risd. [/edit] Graphic designers are touchy: is it art or advertising? how come fine artists call designers sell-outs? what is design? do posters and book covers always exist as second class citizens to the more progressive artistic and architectural establishment? is the purpose of design to obliterate and obsolete prior design, implicitly making design a consumer driven field? all this and more.Perennially the issue of xxxxxx obsoleting the graphic designer comes up: will desktop publishing eliminate the graphic designer? no, it hasn’t. will the web eliminate the need for book designers? doesn’t seem that way. Will blogs end the need for professional web designers? hasn’t happened yet. Perpetually on the attack and on the defensive, designers appear to hold on to the secrets of their craft like ancient masonic guilds.At MIT, i always felt that i was not being trained as a practitioner, but instead as a designer. I am always reminded of hal abelson or erik grimson’s statement that computer science is neither about computers nor science, instead, the focus in 6.001 for example was really just to understand design through abstraction.And all of this is to say that buchanan has a point even if he comes off as a douche: everyone is a designer, finding ways to tackle problems, visually, conceptually or otherwise. Everyone does this already. all people are creative, from people in the moba to kids sharing ipod playlists. For buchanan, what makes up design and what he is interested in is the ability to come up with ways to formalize creative methods used to approach existing problems, which arguably has little to do with graphic design.

Moving is such a love-hate thing for me. I absolutely love the huge change but I absolutely hate the piles of boxes and piles of things to sort into stacks of donations, keep for possible future projects… etc. This all becomes so much harder with an extremely energetic 3 year old jumping and running all day long. I’m moving, again. Packing up the kids and cats and heading to a very isolated place. In this place I will have a new “career” that will be anything but a 9-5… and in a way it’s kind of been shoved at me. I think it’s for the better. I will finally have the space I’ve always wished for; a space that is quiet, a space where I can make an enormous mess in the creative process that may or may not ever turn into art, a space where I can splat my brains out in any way shape or form that I want, a place to nurture and accept my soul and possibly share it in new forms with others. I should be thankful and feel lucky that this has been presented to me. Leap Day sucked ass. It was a horrible terrible day. But so bad in the way that you feel like it’s the worst it can ever get so when it’s done… well, the worst has actually passed and everything is now painted in a new light. It’s near Mt. Shasta. I’m really psyched about Mt. Shasta. There is a monastery there that I am really looking forward to visiting with Diamond. I feel like a new person. I am not a new person. I am the same person. I just feel like I got a new coat of shiny.