2008

Congratulations to the very creative Spanish ad company DoubleYou (link to a non-site), who have various nice projects,among them the ingenious DoupleYou Loop.

Jonas Dahlberg - the melancholy of illusion

There is a dark corridor, with just one passage through some light coming from the half-open door to a production room. The corridor is not long, so before I know it, I'm in a black room. There is apparently no light, except for three large, very, very dimly lit images. Actually, they seem more like windows, as what we see on them are interiors - at first glance it is hard to tell whether those are three rooms, or the same one. The rooms have a sensual, soft light, and everything about them seems dream-like.

That is a very comfortable place to be, delightfully melancholy, hidden in the middle, looking out into the private zone, the excessively private zone of what might have been a perfectly regular set of spaces, were they not so hypnotically absent.

If there is something at once appealing and haunting in this triple view, I am reminded that there was a TV set in the entrance. I go back, and the curator Katarzyna Krysiak tells me that although the video is an hour-long loop, it will start again soon and is worth watching at least the first minutes.
So I put myself comfortable. And the same room I saw on one (two?) of the pictures appears. And then, it starts melting. First, the back of the chair thins to nothing, and it falls apart. Then, progressively, the lamp gives way, the bookshelf (how could I have not noticed it before?), the table, the bed... The whole wax model (as it turns out) vanishes bit by bit.
According to the curator, this is the artists reaction to a friend's depression. It is inspired by how a physical space changes in such circumstances.
Johan Dahlberg is a master of disguise. But his masquerades are not about people. Rather, Dahlberg masks space. In his work (check out his site for several other interesting examples), illusion is the basis for questioning our relation with the space we see and feel. It comes as no surprise that among his favorite tools are models of rooms (their doppelgängers) and surveillance equipment. But contrary to many commentators, I have some doubts whether we can define Dahlberg's work through the prism of the "Big Brother" universe. There is so much more in his observing of our observing of an object! Be it with cameras and screens, be it through the nomenclature of surveillance and false spaces. But see, for example, this work from 2000, (Untitled) Billboard,presented in the Swedish town of Uddevalla:



The wonderful quality I find in these works is their capacity to confuse our sense of space, and question the order we assume as self-comprehensive. How mine is this space? Where am I in relation to it? And how sure can I be of it, of what it is?

The exhibition I visited at the Foksal Gallery (on until January 11) is part of an entire cycle called Quiet Home. What is the degree of irony in such a title? That depends on where you find yourself in relation to it, doesn't it?

The pictures from the exhibition courtesy of the Foksal Gallery.
Photos of Untitled (Billboard): copyright Jonas Dahlberg.

I always enjoy looking back at the year and reviewing my knitting projects. My proudest accomplishment is the Glove Knitting booklet. It was such a pain, in fact, that I've promised myself to never do another technique booklet. Or at least not until I forget how much of a pain the Glove Knitting booklet was! Since its publication in April it has sold 210 copies.

My favorite knitting project: the Sea Mineral Mittens. Every now and then all the colors in a project just come together perfectly and they really did for these mittens.

My 2008 Knitting Resolutions:

1. I resolve to knit and design more colorful socks. I already have a zillion gloves and mittens but I always need socks. I want to do a bunch in Cascade 220.

2. I resolve to design a colorwork ski band for DH. He wants something to wear under his Red Sox hat.

3. I resolve to finish the *&^% Great American Afghan at long last. Unfinished projects really weigh on me and this one absolutely needs to get done.

4. I resolve to again donate over $1000 to the Colorado House Rabbit Society from knitting pattern and booklet sales. The CO HRS adopts out hundreds of pet rabbits a year to good homes.

5. I resolve not to buy any more yarn other than my main color lines - Cascade 220, Palette, and Nature Spun. Unless of course someone comes up with a new inexpensive line of wool yarn in a zillion colors.

6. I resolve to continue to try to take better photos of my colorwork projects and to try to get more up-close technique photos.

7. I resolve to always appreciate all the blessings I have in my life including my abundant yarn stash, the free time to knit it up, and all the wonderful people who read my blog and continue to inspire me.

Happy New Year to everyone! I'll be back in 2008. There's a very good chance I'll be showing you a new furry friend and the new blog mascot in my next post.

HDR Photography

On a recent workshop with fellow PPSOP instructor Chris Hurtt, we started to talk about doing more HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, especially when we come across some great landscape candidates. Chris showed me some fantastic software called Photomatix (http://www.hdrsoft.com/).

The software was really quite easy to use, but to get the best results, one needed to get some specifics done right while out capturing the scene. Over the holiday break, I decided to study some more in HDR, so I set out to see what I can find.

While hiking on the trails at Honeymoon Island, Florida, I came across a scene that I have seen a hundred times before, but never attempted to capture it, for I knew the results would not be as good as I saw them. This time however, I met the challenge head-on. Typically, when one tries to photograph a landscape that has a lot of detail, and if the light is not right, the results look like it was taken with a point-n-shoot that we all have seen.

Yuck! This is how the shot looked with just one exposure

One of the tricks to a successful HDR photo, is of course knowing what you need. So, in this case, I had several tools to call upon to get the shot I was looking for. Those tools of course was my camera, wide angle lens, tripod, bubble level and remote release. The next trick is to set your camera at f/22, ISO 100, and once I get everything set up and the lens focused, switch the lens into manual focus so that is won't change the focus point during your captures.

The reason for all this preparation is that you need to take at least 3 different shots, but the more the better. To do this, there are several different ways to accomplish this. The first, and perhaps the easiest, is to us your cameras AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) setting, whereas you will take 3 different exposures. Another way is to use your cameras Exposure Compensation, where when you take each frame, you expose the scene differently. Lastly, you can take the exposures manually. The end result will be one frame -1, the next at 0 and the last at +1 in exposure reading.

Here are all 5 exposures of the scene

Of course, a steady tripod so that each frame is exactly the same, which is also true for the focal length, so one you get everything set up, the only thing you need to do is expose each frame differently. Also, keep in mind the Rule of Thirds for your composition, for without it, the shot will not be as dramatic!

For my shot, I used 5 frames, -2, -1, 0, +1 and +2, for the more frames you have, the more data you have to work with. Once you take all your shots, you are ready to assemble them in Photomatix.

I took all 5 of my frames (which I shot as RAW files), and ran them through Photomatix. Here, you can tweak the settings to get the desired results, which after you play around with them a bit, you can get the hang of just what they do and how they affect the output.

----------
View The Result Of My HDR Photograph Of Honeymoon Island
----------

To learn more about how to use the software, here is a great tutorial on HDR photography that will explain everything. So the next time you want to try something new, give HDR a try, for once you see it's powers, you will be addicted for life!

Robert La Follette
www.robertlafollette.com

I haven't been knitting as much because I've been cleaning the house in preparation for a new bunny friend. These Zilboorg mittens really should be finished by now.



It started snowing early this afternoon so it looks like we're going to have a beautiful white Christmas.



Happy Holidays to Everyone!

La la la

Fragment of Amelia, a film by Edouard Lock and La la la Human Steps.

Another chapter of the film is here.

I am so very grateful to the hundreds of you who have left me emails, comments on the blog, and on Ravelry. Peaches obviously was the celebrity she always thought she was! Having pet rabbits really helps you learn to live fully and enjoy the moment because they don't often live as long as dogs and cats and because they mask illness and can leave you suddenly. Even though her life was too short we both agree that Peaches was lucky to live here with us because we let her be herself and didn't mind that she wasn't as affectionate as other rabbits.

When we first got Peaches I called her the wallflower because she was always on the perimeter of the room and never part of the household action. But she slowly warmed up to us and loved being the center of attention. I was hoping she'd be here for Christmas though. A week ago I was wrapping some presents on the floor and she snuck up behind me and started ripping up some gifts I'd wrapped so I was planning on Christmas Eve to put all the gifts on the floor and let her open some presents.

Right after my wonderful DH got done burying our beautiful brown-eyed Peaches in a big snowstorm, he told me he knows we need to get another rabbit soon because I love them so much. We reacted briefly to the sadness of it all but we are both now looking forward to adopting a new bunny after the holidays. There are always plenty of wonderful rabbits out there who desperately need good homes which I try to remember at times like this.

I have found an unexpected source of healing - power yoga. I've always thought that the yoga idea that you store emotions in your body was malarkey but I'm seeing things differently now. On the new Veria channel I've been working along to Yoga for Life with Kurt Johnsen of American Power Yoga. I normally live in my head so the idea that something really physical can improve me this much mentally is a new one. Learning to deal with life's difficulties without letting it affect my health negatively is really crucial and the instructor talks about that a lot in the classes.

And to try to lighten the mood around here I thought I'd show the photo from the time we mistakenly let Peaches have the newspaper first and the one time Peaches jumped up on the futon with Jack.

The unaccepted body

Three pictures by Anoush Abrar. The first is in co-authroship with Aimée Hoving, and was a co-authorship, a Christmas Cover (!) for Das Magazin. The second comes from a series that answers the theme ""attractive and repulsive images". The second is from the Realdolls series portraying silicone dolls made in California.

Our human selves, as bodies, are shape, are skin, body hair... Manipulating the elements of the definition brings about strange creatures, disgusting and fascinating in their unworldliness. It isn't about the simulacrum, about the virtual dominion over our idea of reality. Rather, it is the exploration of our unrealness, the impossible shape that is human. What are we to do with it? How are we to deal with the body that is never quite what we feel it to be? So the question is not Who am I?, but What am I? How dare I include this and that, and for God's sake where is my perfection?! I deserve it. I deserve corresponding to what I believe in, to what I live as.
But doesn't the language of merit (of deserving) hide our incapacity to cope with the neutrality of what is, or to differentiate between what is and what our concepts allow us to believe?

How small is history?

In a comment in the Portuguese daily newspaper Público, my colleague Tiago Bartolomeu Costa commented on a controversial artistic residency at the Gulbenkian Foundation, which ended in October with a presentation of the works. A number of young visual and performance artists were invited for a 2-month residency in the very space where the Foundation’s collection of contemporary Portuguese art is usually presented. The place was completely transformed into 30 large cubicles or divisions. Visitors to the museum could eavesdrop and discover how each artist develops his work, as the space opened for the general public during several hours in the afternoon. Theoretically, one could accompany the entire process day-by-day (I wonder if anyone tried).
The entire (impressive and extensive) program which incorporated this daring initiative is called The State of the World, and this very title makes me feel somewhat uneasy. But first, let's hear Tiago:

Generally speaking, the protagonists of the arts of the body that were present [during the day of presentation] seem to have wasted an opportunity to reflect about what it means to create today. (...) the propositions (...) had in common what the artist Christian Boltanski called "the small memory" (...), but which to many of the creators became a runaway solution [in Portuguese: escape]: an apology of the idea that a selection of immediate and generational references can substitute, without any loss, History's evolutive processes.

There are several very important statements implied in this short fragment.
1) That there is a History. And not many histories, stories, lines. Indeed, in this perspective it is clear that the artists Tiago speaks of missed the point completely. However, "History" remains to be proven. And although History's end has been suspended, this still does not mean we have but the choice of either facing it or questioning it. But the very fact that the word appears here, in all its capital-letter majesty, is not benign. It has to do with the very opinion that artists should work on something called "The State of the World". What World? What State? What are we to do of the the legacy of the last 40 years of thought (and Boltanski is in the midst of it), with its “shift from history to discourse, from a third- to a second-person address” (Craig Owen, quoted from a famous essay called The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism )?
2) That there is an evolution, and that it can be ceased. This does make sense if we see any change as evolution. And makes a very interesting point: how do we feel evolution today? Beyond terrorism and cell phones, how does our (my) world pulsate? What leaks? What swallows? What itches? What feels good? I quite agree with Tiago that there is a tension that remains to be read, deciphered, discovered. However,
3) Shouldn't we accept this sort of intimate storytelling as an acceptance of one's own limits, an artistic modesty that is praiseworthy? It might go further than the postmodernist paradigm described through Craig Owens’ words. There is a telling slip of the tongue in the comment. If we read it literally, it suggests that the "selection of references" cannot "substitute History". This, however, implies that the artists put the generational references as an ontological substitute for History's processes. Which they don't (nobody declares or implies that the processes are susbsitututed). The problem might be precisely this: in the case of some of the young performers, the artistic discourse doesn't seem to come near the question of histories vs. History. The modesty seems almost unconscious, more like a limitation than a choice or perspective.
So Tiago does raise an important issue: how can art deal with the world and its new type of globality? We are more conscious today of what the world is than ever before. Might that be why we are more reluctant to generalize, or even try and define its processes? But can we just turn away and ignore them? Of course we can. So why would we participate in an event called State of the World? On one hand, this "small talk" of the "small memory" could be saying a lot about the State of the World, seen from here and now. On the other, its difficulty with approaching these Capital-Lettered-Concepts could be a hint that maybe its time to start off without the caps.

Here is a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel-Prize-Winner:

No Title Required

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.

I know, Tiago - the big question remains: is this, can this small memory be enough? Can we spend time watching little branches and the butterflies' wings, and claim to any sort of authority in regards to the State of the World, or the states of the worlds, for that matter?
It's a beautiful poem. One of the things I like most about it, though, is that Szymborska is not sure. There is a hesitation here. While us, poor contemporary creative bastards, often take it for granted. We just move on, as if this was it.

How many capital letters can we keep? How many should we? Is it a question of the times that are a-changin? The closest I ever came to a war was when the tanks appeared on the streets in Poland in 1981. I was 3. My memory of it is fairly clear. But do I need to have this memory to have my sense of what is important? Can’t we define the world as superficially as we feel allowed to? But shouldn’t a good artist be able to overcome the obstacle of taking all the caps off, and find a capital letter after all, say in the “l” that looks so much like a “1”? But then again, should she? Or is she better off in the small narratives?
Does the “I” only stand for “1”?

= =

NB: Notice that Tiago is a performing arts critic. Would he write something of the sort if he were a fine arts critic? It seems unlikely. The modernist paradigm of an artistic soul that needs not the sullied, exterior world to create, is still quite omnipresent in the fine arts. The performing arts, particularly theater, have quite a different point of view, with a tendency to see the work through the prism of its engagement with the public, its dialog with “society”. I feel more affinity with the latter position. But doesn’t it sometimes limit our appreciation of the generous universe of art?

(photo by Juan Rayos)

Peaches my sweet bunny girl died tonight. I can't even believe it. I woke up and it was the first time ever she didn't immediately greet me, waiting for her morning treat of 1/2 tablet of banana acidophilus. She wasn't eating much so I spent the day hand feeding her. My vet was on vacation and so was every other rabbit vet within a 20 mile radius. When DH returned home from work we took her into Albuquerque to an emergency vet where she got fluids and pain meds. When we got back home she was like a limp dishrag and couldn't even walk. Then it got worse but I won't go into it. Suffice it to say she did not go gentle into that good night, Jack the cat was totally freaked out, and DH has said we can never get another rabbit to break our hearts like this again. I swear to God she was perfectly fine yesterday.

She had just turned 5 years old and she only lived with us 3 3/4 years. She adored this house - it was the first house she'd ever lived in and she had pet beds, blankets, and boxes in most every room. I'm pretty sure she had more bunny toys than any other bunny in the world. We adopted her from the Colorado House Rabbit Society which is why I donate money to them from patterns even though I live in NM. The HRS rescuer called her Breezy but DH changed it to Peaches. She was so scared when she moved here that it took her several months to leave the bedroom (the door was always open) and a year before she'd brave the three stairs to come down to the living room.

She really was one of our great joys in life and always made us laugh. Just a few days ago we were giggling because she had wedged her fat self into this tiny box DH used to hold kindling. She loved the woodstove and would spend hours "inspecting" the firewood. Sometimes you'd just see her big ears over the stacks of wood. She had the most beautiful bunny eyelashes and loved to rip apart cardboard boxes loudly in the middle of the night. It is hard to even imagine this house without her.

Now I need to go cry for a few days.

Pug Puppy with big head

lol.. i love this pug ....

Cute Poodle

do you love poodle?

One Shoot again please !

funny pom

Big Nose

Cute puppy with big nose

Gift idea

Meantime.

Technorati: design, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Loops, Video, Time, Loops

1. Time-based art has one crucial characteristic: it is time-based.
Bare with me.
Whether it's Matthew Barney's latest motion picture or a Dan Graham's classic tableau of the spectator, in this universe, the appearance of something is defined by its appearing.
Well, as obvious as it might seem, this idea is often forgotten and disrespected by both artists and curators... A visit to the Museu do Chiado, where a temporary exhibition of the classics of Centro Pompidou is shown until January, makes it pretty clear. But what makes appearing a problem?

2. First, let’s clear some semantic issues.
What is this thing that is sometimes called “video art”, at other times, “video installation”?
For one, let’s distinguish "sculptural installations that include video" (and call them video installations) from "films shown as a work of visual art, either on a TV screen or a projection or the like" (and call them simply video art).
Also, video art can be closed-circuit (with a live - or near-live - image from a camera) or pre-recorded: this last case is basically a film, whether it’s abstract spots, the film of a tree growing or a narrative fiction (and whether it's single- or multi-channel).
It’s the film I’m interested here in.

3. When entering a room with video art, I have a much better chance of appearing at the middle of the film than at the beginning. But is there a beginning? And does it matter? After all, in most cases of showing a finished, pre-recorded video, and not a closed-circuit video where we are seeing live or nearly-live footage, the artist himself suggested or accepted the idea that his work would be shown in a loop. What does it matter that a time-based work starts anywhere?
A valid argument is that this approach can have substantial causes. The starting point can be irrelevant or of little importance (e.g., in the footage of Gordon Matta-Clark's Day's End), or in Douglas Gordon's Foot and Hand:





It can also be an essential element of the work. After all, the loop might just be the closest we can get to eternity.
Yet this is not always the case.
Not in regards to the works I've seen at the Museu do Chiado. Most of them not only acknowledge the existence of a chronological dynamic, but clearly use it in their very structure.
(The curious thing here is that many of the works at the Museu do Chiado focus on the concept of time. There is talk of empty spaces in time, of the slowing down of time, of the feel of time. And yet, the point (of time) when the spectator enters seems to matter little!) It shouldn’t be surprising that film may well have a dramaturgy that develops over time! We may need to see the work from the beginning to the end to feel it. The only problem is - by the time we've seen it all, we've probably seen the end already and it just doesn't feel the same - sort of like having seen a spoiler in a trailer. You can still enjoy the feature film afterwards, but you wish you didn't know so much.
The other argument is a pragmatic one: how are we to show a film from beginning to end to every single visitor? It seems impossible.
But only at first glance. If you look carefully, you see how technology has changed - and the audience, too. Today, we are out of the videotape era, and we can easily go beyond the loop. We can have a PLAY button on every TV set that shows a work, we can have DVD menus, and even (cheap!) infrared sensors that play the video when a new visitor enters.
And if anyone is worried about the overflow of spectators who make it impossible to keep starting at the beginning - unless you are at the Pompidou or at some other big-shot museum, it really isn't a problem. The museums and galleries still have a tendency to remain empty, there is more than enough time, and if there isn't, hardly anyone will mind waiting a minute longer to see the next work. It will only make her stop a few minutes longer by the previous one. Which wouldn’t be that worrying, now, would it?

4. Another issue comes to mind: What sort of aesthetic experience do we have while loopvision is still the spectators default universe? How do I, as a spectator, deal with seeing something “as if” I didn’t know the end/goal/development? It is not quite as if watching something I’ve seen (in its entirety) before. Could I say I am experiencing something, but acting as if I weren’t experiencing it just yet, fooling myself into a “genuine” experience? But is it not an ever more distant one, a bracketed one?
The brackets... of knowledge? The issue of a well-informed spectator. A too-well-informed spectator. Let’s not over-simplify it into the old discussion of an intelligent reading of a work vs. an emotional living of it. There is more to our experience of a work of art, and it seems a fertile ground for further discussion. There is a sense of an incredibly fertile ground in the multiple and complex layers of what is and could be lived through by the spectator. The on-looker. The in-looker.


PS: Here is a video I would love to see looped and looped and looped- Gilbert and George's Ten Commandments For Gilbert and George.
Notice the modesty in the title. The commandments are for them. They do not feel any need to preach them to the world, beyond proclaiming that this is what they choose for themselves.

Algonquin Socks

Here are the Algonquin socks from Folk Style. I made them thicker using worsted weight yarn which is my preference for padding around the house. The color is too dark but it is raining/snowing here so I can't go outside.





In other news... I think Peaches has a new friend.

Author and knitwear designer Kathleen Taylor (grammak on Ravelry) posts a free stranded colorwork pattern on her blog every Friday. Today she posted some cute spiderman mittens for a young boy and I still have my eye on the Picot Hem Snowflake Hat.

The Teaching Company is offering two free lectures by my favorite professor, Dr. Patrick Allitt. Go HERE to listen to or download his lectures on Christmas in Victorian Britain or Christmas in 19th Century America.

I just realized I didn't take a single picture of Peaches in November! No wonder she is so grumpy. Instead here is a photo of Jack - he's not really fat but he has a wide body and short legs.

I love long-hair cats and I called the humane society in Colorado and told them I would help them out if they ever got in a Persian or Himalayan who really needed some grooming. They finally called and said they had a Persian and we went to look and there was Jack as sad as I've ever seen an animal. It was to be his last day at the shelter so perhaps he somehow knew. Of course we had to take him (after explaining to the humane society he wasn't even vaguely a Persian.) Now it is almost 12 years later and Jack's interests include chasing crickets, sleeping on pillows, and "helping" when we play Scrabble. Whenever he hears the sound of the Scrabble tiles in the bag he comes running out to participate.

Santa Fe

The braided fingerless glove pattern (shown in my last blog post) is now available at my Lulu store HERE. I decided to stick with just one size, women's large, because I've already moved on. I'm hard at work on the Algonquin socks from Folk Style and I think I'm going to make the flower hat as well.

For your eye candy today here are some recent photos from the City Different (Santa Fe). There were still flowers blooming in November.


Some pretty adobe buildings


A very old church


The Lensic theater


St. Francis church

I never get sick of looking at New Mexico architecture.