kollektief

we summoned the chandelier in a square of blood scrawled on the ceiling

i was visiting the labs of a pharma company in berlin the other day, and stood there staring at man become the extension of machines, and not the other way ’round. machines sucking in glassware and chemicals and electricity and our own fucking blood and lymph and spitting out Results which, in the pharma world, translates to Cash, which is naturally the only thing of value. but we’re not just talking black boxes here: machines holding flasks to the light to examine the contents. gripping hands and electronic eyes. far more threatening in their alien thoroughness than their anthropoid counterparts, which’re often enough still stuttering their way across flat ground. and then, almost as a side effect, artists and chemists become programmers and commodities. the idea scares me: i’ve never known what the hell i’m doing, and the mechanization of creation is as alien a thing as i’ve ever encountered.

see, i like art. i like getting my hands dirty. i sketch things and smudge the pencil and when my fingers are covered in a sheen of graphite (pure Kohlenstoff, one hopes, and not the oldschool lead) i lick my hand (mmmmm, C) and wipe it on my arm, and yeah, i’ve got dirty hands and my clothes have little holes from welding and paint smudges from god knows how many paintings and little bleach stains (anti-stains?) from being careless in the lab because science is art and it’s ok: proof that i’ve been doing something real, i guess. and seeing other people make things is an inspiration and a goad (come, now, how many of you learned what an elephant goad was from the jungle book?) and a necessity. and if it were all as simple as the making, well then, motherfuckers, i’d have it made, as it were.

of course, it’s not so simple: i’m in stockdorf and there ain’t no kunst kollektiv here. white carpets and a room full of echoes are my unwanted roommates. and of course art is made by people, and people are – this is a shocker, kids – complicated. but i have these things in my head, sounds and images, and they need OUT. like yesterday. death is a rabbit, and people with an X for a face should have wings and top hats, and just how can i deconstruct that traditional fiddle tune so that it falls measure by measure into something else entirely, and what about those striking yellow half-railroad tracks in that dream the other day? and maybe you are all thinking things that themselves will feed off of those ideas, and, well then. so i’ll toss some incoherence up and maybe something will come of it. and for now i will finish my beer and stop lying to myself that i’ll go to bed early because pi o’clock has long passed.

uh, hi. wanna sell T shirts on the internet to fund the possible physical kollektief? [reaches into trenchcoat] i’ve got just the thing for you…

Also, every time i see a news article that uses a stock photo of something, like for instance this article on why it feels good to scratch I think, I could do that. Anyway, one proposal for how to use a largish space is that a certain area could be set up for a photography studio. We could work on commission and we could work on stock photo projects, and just generally we could do a large amount of what a professional photography studio does with a very small outlay of cash. I know danny benitez is a good photographer, I’m fair to middling, and there are others. We could make that part of the way that people could pay off their contribution for using the space.

anyway, just a thought. I’m sure there are more ideas, that one just occurred to me and seemed practical. We could do a screening thing, we could get our friends to submit designs and we could set up a web page. although competition for that is fierce i imagine. But I guess, in other words we could try to make the organization a distribution and marketing tool for a variety of pet projects that we can get people serious about. If we didn’t do the screening in house we could even set up a project like that without a big space. I guess the key would be constantly brainstorming new ideas for shirts and designs and trying to get people to design them.

So apparently the bombay bottles from the Towers window are being removed but are up for grabs if anyone wants them. Can anyone think of a project that should be done with them? Think of all the emotional potential that they’ve built up over the years. think of the tar and the cat hair.

also, I’ve been a little pressed lately, but I’m hoping to add more people to the posting list tonight or tomorrow and so maybe we’ll get some fresh faces.

ps a copy of Reason 4 arrived today, I am in the process of setting up one of my keyboards so that I can play with it. I’m so out of practice with piano. i thought i might try to spend some cycles on computer music again.

     There is a web site up about the space at 19 Blackstone St.  It’s URL is:   http://www.papercanary.org/blake/discounthappyfunland    I’m getting really excited about that space.  Of course, I’m convinced that we can get it for $20/sf/yr, which may be completely delusional.   I just think it’s so great that it’s got a little bit of everything.  Lab space, office space, and that sort of undefinable open work space.  

would anyone be interested in creating a submission for this competition? totally conceptual no need to work with actual politicians should one win (whew ;)

could be sort of fun i figure – i think there are two ways to approach it

    1. inflammatory response to current events: given that the storefront for architecture which is under the vito acconci umbrella i believe there will be many many entries of this type and likely one of them will win. it will be entirely current and quickly dated as a document.

    2. serious re-approach to the original 1792 design brief bringing with it the grown and developed modern program that the house now serves. i doubt a submission like this would win – perhaps they will give 2nd or 3rd or hon.mention to it, but i think with regards to personal satisfaction and portfolios it would be a more classic and lasting document that we could continue to present.

http://www.whitehouseredux.org/

–I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof. -John Adams’s benediction in a letter to Abigail Adams, November 2, 1800

… doh

I have this pain in my face. I can’t quite place it. I can’t find the source of it. It feels like sinus pressure but not really. It feels like a faceache inside of the bones of my cheeks. It feels like a fishing hooks have gone into my forehead (as if there was a mouth on my forehead) and they’ve traveled down into my cheeks and some giant uhm Dinosaur is yanking on them like it was their last meal they were trying to catch. I would say a carnivore like Mr. T-Rex is probably a good description. It hurts and it makes me sad. Crying makes it so much worse.

can i just express how much i would like to own one of these and be lying in it right now in a soft sweater with a gin and tonic? also available with Marimekko fabrics.

… or the more ecologically responsible and far more macho Spanish version for poor Dan who is still not a woman…

http://www.waste-bcn.com

This is amazing, apparently in the communist east when seeking an available medium to distribute pirated music on, somebody happened on the idea of using their wax record cutters on discarded x-ray plates.

taken from the comments section of this post:

“…3,000,000 of these highly illegal records were distributed underground in the USSR in 1958 (with no artist name or song title on the record, just a scratched in number) before the KGB realized what they were. The young men in Leningrad who were arrested for making them, were sent to the Gulag for seven years. One must understand that rock music was considered a great threat to the KGB. Rock music was banned in the USSR, the Russian work `Rok’ was banned from all media and press until 1986, singing in English was against the law, radios were jammed, and electric guitars could not be found in the USSR, until they were illegally invented/gerryrigged from a smuggled in photo of a Fender guitar, crudely manufactured underground and distributed. It took months for the teenage inventors (led by Valery Saifudinov, now owner of Flight 19 Recording Studios in San Deigo) to empirically discover that the wires and magnets in the municipal pay phones could work as electric pick-ups for the guitar strings. By 1969, no pay phones in the capital of Moscow were functioning because all the innards had been removed to make underground guitars.”

The research lab building across the street from Brambleberry has vacant spaces.  Bluefin is moving out.  I think the whole building might be empty now.  Sherri called the real estate agency and apparently you can get a floor for the low low price of $25k a year.  I’m not sure exactly how big that is in terms of square footage, but looking at the building from the outside, it seems like a lot of space.  $25k a year translates to less than $2.1k a month.  If we got ten people together it would totally be reasonable to rent it out as a collective work space (fuck this live/work space idea). I don’t know about anyone else, but I totally feel like I don’t have enough space to do all the crazy things I want to do, like giant electronics projects, painting, breeding clownfish, and growing giant hydroponic tomatoes.   A couple of other people at Brambleberry have expressed interest in going in on this.  Anyone else out there want to form a research collective? Also, what would a good name for such an organization be?  Something along the lines of Squid Labs, Giant Robot, or Creature Shop.  I can’t seem to come up with anything good at the moment.    

Update:  I’m arranging to go see the space on Thursday morning.  Anyone who’d like to join me please let me know.   More info slowly drizzling in:  6000 square feet available in the basement, which I’m pretty sure is currently set up as a wet lab.  With no build out I’m anticipating we can get it for around $20 per square foot per year, meaning 10 people paying $250 a month each could have a space the size of a floor of Brambleberry (1500ft^2), or a little bit smaller than all of Dangerhouse.   

You know, after at first being kind of more turned off than I expected to be, I have slowly come round to really liking Regina Spektor’s album Begin To Hope.

i wish i could play piano. i wish i had a piano here. but after working all day yesterday cleaning, my kitchen is finally clean! yay. so i now have a presentable house if anybody ever wants to come record music. but, no piano yet.

I may not be able to make it up to Boston this weekend due to complications in my January. but my fall back plan is the middle of February.

My brother was pointing out to me the other day that for some reasons the romans were really keen on naming months until they got to September at which point they seemed to become terribly lazy and just called them by number. I had never noticed that.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for Classical Music that is worth listening too and perhaps even worth purchasing?  I’ve got some fairly poor quality mp3’s (poor quality I think largely due the original recording medium) of Bach’s 6 cello suites which I’m fond of, and some Bach violin concertos that are pretty good (iTunes says it is Bach: Violin Concertos (With Bonus Track), byAkiko Suwanai & Chamber Orchestra Of Europe) but I’m growing a bit tired of these.  Extra points for things that are easy to get off of iTunes or Amazon. 

I need to update the fish page on my portfolio.  I was thinking of turning it into some kind of Inter-Web-Log (IWL as the kids say) with updates as I venture into the deep dark land of breeding Clownfish.

Orange Crush (the little male) and Willie Nelson (the larger female)  laid eggs again last Friday.  I had people over and was telling them about my failure to raise the babies from the first batch of eggs (it’s true, they all died on the second day) and I said, “but supposedly these two guys are going to start laying eggs every couple of weeks now” and I looked over a the aquarium and caught them in the act!  Many more eggs this time.  Two or three times as many.  They were so frisky about it that they even laid some on a snail who had the misfortune of being a little too close to the nest site.

So!  What did I learn from last time?

1) Baby clownfish only hatch when it is very dark.  I think that  part of the problem last time is that the eggs didn’t hatch when they should have (they hatched 10 days after being laid, when they should only take 7-9 days) because the ambient light in the Brambleberry Bar at night is too strong.  Plus, there are “moon light” LEDs over the tank all night.  The eggs hatched on the night that I turned off the LEDs and all the lights in the area.

2) Collecting newly hatched baby clownfish with a turkey baster is not the best idea.  I’m pretty sure I damaged some of them getting them out of the tank.  They are very small and fragile, about 3mm long and pretty much transparent except for their eyes.  They are phototropic when  they hatch, meaning they are attracted to light.  My plan this time is to turn off all the pumps in the tank when they hatch and then turn on the lights over half the tank, the babies should swim towards the surface where I should be able to just scoop them out with a plastic cup.

3) Feeding baby clownfish is harder than just ordering the right food off the Inter-Net.  They pretty much only eat really tiny zooplankton.  The preferred food for clownfish fry is a type of zooplankton called rotifers.  I think that is pronounced roe-ti-fur, but Sherri and Krevice have been saying rot-ih-fes.  (just looked it up on dictionary.com, the “correct” pronunciation is  roh-tuh-fer)  So last time I just ordered a bag of live rotifers off the Inter-Net and added a few milliliters of the green solution that I received to the nursery tank a couple of times a day.  This time I am attempting to culture my own rotifers.  This in itself turns out to be quite an ordeal.  In order to feed the rotifers you need to have phytoplankton.  So, the process is like this:  you culture phytoplankton (I’ve got a bottle of Nannochloropsis oculata I’m going to try using as starter) by growing it in small aerated container (like a 2-liter soda bottle) of salt water and nutriment (I’m going to try using hydroponic fertilizer), after about seven days you end up with a bottle of green water which you can then either add to a tank of rotifers, or you can add a few rotifers to the bottle, after a few days the rotifers turn the green water into clear water, indicating that the little guys have eaten up all the phytoplankton, and then you feed your rotifers to your baby clownfish.

So anyway, I’m expecting the eggs to hatch tonight.  I have a tank of rotifers that seems to be doing ok, but I don’t really have any idea because they are so small they just look like tiny, slightly vibrating dust motes.  I don’t have a very clear plan for culturing green water, but hopefully my bottle of starter can get me through the next week.  The funny thing is the biggest problem I see in all of this is that I don’t know where I can find used 2-liter soda bottles.  I’m considering just going to the store and buying some Shasta or something and just pouring it down the sink, except I’d feel like a mild eco-terrorist by doing so.

PS!  Liam I bought your comic!

I have not been fantastic about having coherent verbal thoughts lately but I started my stab at a playstructure for Cambridge Public Library today and pulled some precedents of trees and secrets and distorted scales and curtains to get started and thought these were some nice images or thoughts: 

Very old painted Spanish theater curtain – you could get lost in a curtain like that - 

Poor Gulliver is lost in a field of grass. 

Oooh the ways plant cells grow – oh man…I call the exterior room. 

I would like to be inside a tree… 

or a secret garden – i think we need more secret interstitial spaces in our world. places that show up gray on maps that no one knows where the key is for.. 

 okay – well…. hopefully this will all upload and you’ll think they’re cozy ideas. and as long as people are sharing about their other sites i guess mine’s at www.papercanary.org/irony/ and something is corrupt about the styles because the font has reverted to times and the background and button colors aren’t matching… i’ll deal with that someday i suppose. like next time i need a job.

it would be neat if the people who are getting removed from the pokernight list somehow ended up in a kind of pokerless purgatory.  or maybe if somehow all along there had been a way to include some sort of addiction forming element to the weekly pokernight email, so that there would be severe withdrawal symptoms.  not so much to discourage people from taking themselves off the list, but to make it a more significant undertaking.

i guess really what i’m wondering is if this cascade effect of removal emails is precipitated by the ever increasing pile of guilt that not attending the advertised event involves, or whether there’s just an innate desire to not be made to think about things that are unrelated to one’s own chosen world sphere. or maybe there’s some kind of sudden panic attack and people are trying to scale back on the elements that are encroaching upon their lives.

in fact… i have a store on there

wormulus.etsy.com

you all should go buy my newest mini comic. [does the convincing mind control dance]