London-based designer Kenyon Yeh has developed a wonderful premise for hacking Ikea furniture (one of our favorite past-times): He buys standard Ikea flat-pack furniture and throws away the instruction book; then he assembles it the way he wants, adding new elements like an old English chair leg he cast in resin…It seems to us like their are HUGE possibilities for improvising here. Said Yeh (using some mighty weird language):
“The process is liberating and brings a limitless attitude of possibility creating unique furniture instead of doing such a thing that made by forces”
We were looking for a little gift to leave on the blog this last day of summer and thought The Wilderness Downtown would be just right…It is one of the very best things we’ve seen on the internet: crazy beautiful, imaginative, really surprising and moving…
…click here, have patience while it loads, and watch to the end…
Improv Everywhere is devoted to “causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. Over the years, they have invited anyone-who-wants-to to participate in their missions which have included Cell-Phone Symphonies to No Pants Subway Rides. In the latest, they instructed their agents to appear at Coney Island dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns bought at thrift stores or other cheap venues.
“We covered a mile-long stretch of beach with a diverse group of people of all ages (from babies to sixty-somethings) laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean, all in formal wear.”
We find this video curiously liberating to watch. (It totally changes the look and vibe of black tie in the best, most unexpected way possible..).
We love that a feed store and a graffiti mural co-exist side by side, a swell Reality Sandwich*
*”Reality Sandwich” is from a work by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘a prime example of his use of startling verbal juxtapositions to suggest new ideas and connections.’” -Wikipedia…You can buy Ginsburg’s Reality Sandwiches here.
The Selby has run a really nice story-with-few-words about Andrew Field, chef of Rockaway Taco, in Rockaway Beach, Queens – right by the beach – who loves surfing and keeps bees on his roof (we are always heartened when we discover a New York City beekeeper; it reminds us that nature is here, even in the midst of the city…”build a hive and they will come!…)
We’ve been pondering what makes Todd Selby’s work so compelling. He’s not a great photographer in the usual sense; individual photos are not terribly well-composed or exposed or beautiful. But, man, does that guy have an eye for a story, which he always manages to tell in a compelling way, with lots of photos. He makes sure to choose interesting people in their very personal spaces, honing in on the details and surroundings, so you get a sense of where this person is living and what their life is like, some of what they see when they go about their day. Like this little detail that speaks volumes: read more…
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
One of our favorite early posts was about Andre Michelle’s visual music synthesizer, ToneMatrix which allows you to instantly improvise your own music by selecting any of the small boxes on the grid on his website. We have turned to it many times when we wanted a diversion to shift our mood or view, or to take our focus off an irritating noise. Now, we’re smitten with Michelle’s newest iteration on his make-your-own-music theme: Pulsate.
Click the black square in two are more places to generate pulsating circles and sound. Just four or five clicks make for a relaxing, meditative riff…click lots of circles within circles for elaborate (and energetic) composition.
Part of its beauty is how ephemeral it is; it’s music for the moment.
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.
Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”
I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?
I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls back the flaps…a big surprise!
…a cardboard box + flourescent paper + bookbinding material = a complete change of view.
We’re sending this post to our friend Vicki Lynn who LOVES pink – a sort of virtual gift – until we can give her a real one.
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now:
“…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design…”
Among the many jacket quotes praising the book is one by Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist known for his astonishing improvisational work the Koln Concert. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
“You are called to an important meeting, the subject of which you are not told. It is of utmost importance that you ‘Be Yourself’. The meeting starts immediately and your clothes are in the laundry and you have no time to wash up or shave. Is this a ‘serious’ situation? Then so is improvisation…”
And that is what The Koln Concert was. In the video, Jarrett describes the impossible circumstances that made for a stunning creation.
That’s what Free Play is about.
We view them as an essential part of our toolBox.
(You can listen to samples of The Koln Concert, and/or buy it as an MP3, here.)
Pamela Hovland‘s Comment in response to our recent wallpaper post is an amazing report from MOMA of a wallpaper installation that is so wonderfully described, hilarious and thoughtful, that we had to publish it here. And just as we were despairing of not being able to find any image like it on MOMA’s website, Pamela sent us one by email: blurry but completely expressive…
“I stopped by MoMA today, for a quick dose of inspiration. The Matisse show is on view so it is quite crowded — it takes all one’s attention just to negotiate the hallways. As a result, I don’t think many people stopped to look closely at a wallpaper “installation” between two galleries. The wallpaper is a temporary construction made simply by repeating a photograph numerous times in a grid. The image is a tightly cropped view of a man’s bare bottom (I’m trying to be polite) with his crack (I can’t think of another word here) in the center of the composition. It’s not a particularly photogenic specimen; upon closer analysis you see the dimples and blemishes of some anonymous middle aged guy’s rear end. In this presentation, however, the image takes on a kind of architectural quality – a kind of industrial building block, I guess. The imperfections are lost as the sum of the parts takes precedence.
Makes me want to create wallpaper at home out of some crazy image fragment I have lying around. Not a body part though… it’s been done!
Now that I think about it, this installation is a bit like your Lego post AND the wallpaper post — conflated!” read more…
Half awake this morning, a quote on O’Reilly Radar caught our eye: “Harness the power of being an idiot”. That’s for US, for sure!
So we followed the link to PeteSearch, the blog of Pete Warden. He is a programmer, software engineer (including years at Apple), graphics researcher and serious technology guy (he’s developed an interesting search module for Firefox). He tells the story of running into someone he went to school with at a conference, and remembering his abysmal academic career:
“I learn by trying to build something, there’s no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that’s an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around stepping on every rake in the grass, while the A Students memorize someone else’s route and carefully pick their way across the lawn without incident. My only saving graces are that every now and again I discover a better path, and faced with a completely new lawn I have an instinct for where the rakes are… my successes have all come when I’ve just gone ahead and just did something instead of studying it. It’s the only way to discover something new and unexpected, and even the failures build judgment.”
Boy, do we relate to Warden’s unkempt “try it and see” approach, falling into brambles, getting lost, then found. We love his declaration of POWER inherent in mistakes, which, invariably teach us a lot and often point to an unexpected path.
, is a truly entertaining story of a guy plunging head-long into something he had no idea about, and figuring alot out the hard way, from hurricanes in Brooklyn to what marriage is REALLY about.
. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
.)
