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…
Wishing you a wonderful Labor Day!
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.
Whatever you do will be a surprise, and a shift.
via Kottke
Related post: Make Your Own Music
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…
We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last jump onto the laptop, we found this amazing video on our friend Peggy Markel‘s Facebook page. She travels the world leading culinary adventures and has an eye for wild beauty of all sorts…like this…
…which became the perfect Friday post. TGIF….GIFT…
That is the improvised life!
Thanks, Peggy!
A couple of years ago, we started a file called “bad ideas”. These are ideas featured in shelter/style magazines that look really good, but practically speaking, are really bad. They’d come back to haunt you in no time. Stacked magazines seem like a perfect, charming solution for a table leg, but have you ever TRIED to stack magazines more than a foot high, which, with their glossy paper, are nearly impossible to keep from sliding around, much less as a 2 1/2 foot support for a slab of glass? (Unless, maybe, you bore a hole through them and put a pipe through the center to secretly hold them together).
We’re got nothing against cool-for-the-sake-of-cool design. But we really mind design that masquerades as a practical idea and has a lot of back-end problems. read more…
Brasilian musician Hermeto Pascoal is famous for making music with unconventional objects. (Miles Davis called him “the most impressive musician in the world.” ) Here’s Pascoals astonishing Musica de Lagoa, made in a lagoon…the lagoon made into a instrument…
According to his bio, Pascoal is self-taught:
“Fascinated by the sounds of nature since he was a little boy, from a pumpkin mammon pipe he made a fife with which he used to play for the birds. He liked to spend hours in the lake playing sounds with the water, and also to pick every piece of scrap metal in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop to hang them in a rope to take sound of them. When he reached the age of 7-8 years old, he decided to try his father’s 8-bass accordion, and never stopped.”
Of course, it got us thinking about making our own music, somehow, and then we opened up a favorite book (that’s worth a post unto itself) to this: read more…
In the vast Times Square subway station in New York City, there are always lots of musicians busking for money, many of them pretty great. (We love the old guy who plays a saw; it echoes through the tunnels to sound like a high soprano…). Everybody is in such a hurry getting where they need to go down there, it isn’t easy for the best of musicians to get a lot of people to stop and listen. When that does happen, it almost always takes the form of spectators silently watching the act, at a safe distance. So we’d love to know how this extraordinary event came about: a circle of strangers in the subway singing “Hey Jude” full out.
Life is SO amazing!
The video was made by by 39forks “artist in ny” on Vimeo.
Via BoingBoing, via Making Light…
OK Go is the band that made that hilarious treadmill video a few years ago. Their frontman Damian Kulash has issued tiny mission statements here and there: “We’re trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” …and the essential: “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.”
Their new video is nothing but brilliant and silly ideas, one after another, so good, I wish I could watch it in slow motion (watching it without any sound is a whole other experience). It was designed and built by Syyn Labs who describe the amazing constraints they had to work under on their website. They call it “Rube Goldberg Machine”. It’s an homage to the work of Rube Goldberg, after whom an adjective was named; he was a cartoonist known for his wildly-elaborate inventions designed to accomplish some simple task, like this “Simplified Pencil Sharpener”: read more…
Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day – all 24 hours of it – will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th in San Francisco; you’ll be able to move at will from one screen (or life) to another to get a unique view of what’s going on in daily lives all over the world. All are part of the Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, architects, designers, programmers, photographers, and artists working to document the diversity of human life experience around the planet. They are building, and inviting others to contribute to, a video library of individual “twenty-four hours”. Much of it will be available online, with subtitles in a host of languages.
“There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.
By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own…
…This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress.We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive – fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation. “
There’s been an immense amount of effort, and enthusiasm and money put into this project, as well as sponsorship, and media coverage. We have some questions: read more…
Pamela Hovland, who teaches design at Yale, emailed us about Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica, a riveting film about a font). It’s about what REALLY goes into designing the things we take for granted around us, from toothbrushes to chairs to cars, and the ways design – both good and bad – impacts our lives. Objectified moves fast, is totally entertaining and has great music; it will change the way you look at even the most ordinary pack of gum.
Pamela also included this great quote by Rob Walker, New York Times columnist, speaking in Objectified:
“If I had a billion dollars to fund a marketing campaign, I would launch a campaign on behalf of things you already own. Why not enjoy them today? Because we all have so many things that are just around – they’re in the closet, they’re in the attic, whatever… read more…
Ely Kim‘s video BOOMBOX was his response to an assignment in a graduate level design workshop at Yale: document something for one hundred days. All he used was a video camera and his ability to dance to create his brilliant, funny, totally original film with high levels of uninhibited joy, which is what you will feel as you watch it.
If you want to speed things up, you can use the horizontal control to “scroll through” Kim’s amazing dance forms (after the video has loaded); my favorite is #80, like a disco Dance of the Seven Veils. The video’s Vimeo page also includes a playlist in case you want to track down the music.
Thanks, Pamela!
At ‘the improvised life’ we are big on signs; they make up many of the posts in the Surprise Box and I’ve written about how helpful it can be to tape a sign up on the wall of your office or bedroom to remind you of what’s really important (that we so easily forget), like Holton Rower’s great “Apologize Every Day”.
So, I was happy to stumble on “Biscoito da Sorte” in a curious blog written in Portuguese called Don’t Touch My Moleskin. “Lucky biscuit” is about the charming photos Rebecca Gagnon made of the papers found in fortune cookies, which she’d been collecting for years. read more…
This clip of the the comedian Louis C.K. riffing on Conan O’Brien’s show is a rare combination of REALLY funny and totally wise/smart/true. It is about looking around at what we have, recognizing miracles, counting blessings…
Time-lapse videos allow us to see processes too subtle for the human eye, like flowers blooming and clouds moving across the sky. They are great for instant perspective: a reminder that the world is going on around us, doing its own creative thing, that the constant is change. One of my favorites is Eirik Solheim’s One Year in Two Minutes which you can use as a sort of video meditation. (If you don’t have much time, his One Year in 40 Seconds is pretty great, too, though the transitions aren’t quite as subtle or alive.)
Chad Richard’s site Time Traveler, has lots of cool time-lapse videos, including a nice, rather boisterous compilation. It will make you hurry up, while Solheim’s calm you down…
Which do you like best?
