The 25th anniversary of Mixit Print Studio is coming up, and we’re having a show at the Boston Public Library in April. As part of the show, we’re putting together a print portfolio from a group of printmakers that spans the whole of Mixit’s history. I printed my edition for this portfolio today:
Category Archives: Shapes
Longo Zenith
I remembered these last night, and decided I would post them as a gallery. These are pictures of people staring down at my camera from above, which splays their hair out in interesting and flowing shapes. I used Illustrator to vectorize the silhouettes so they would become crisp and I could isolate and interpret the interplay of individual strands of hair. I rotated them so they emerge from the top of the frame rather than the bottom so that it is harder to read them as human heads, which helps focus your attention on the shapes and forms. The white sun-circle on the gray background provides a very simple spatial cue and locates the “zenith” of the title.
The name of the series is an homage to Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities images. My process is markedly different, but both series are stylizing the human form into a graphic shape using photography and unusual poses.
Another Set of Wild QR Codes
I went on the T yesterday, and for some reason discovered a bonanza of QR codes. Marketing people are loving QR codes to death, which I find highly amusing. They’re not terribly easy to deal with in the wild, as I’ve discovered, and sometimes it takes two or three takes to get them captured. However, I got 29 more, although one of them was rendered unusable by overzealous design interference, and two others encoded the same web address, in different form. This was an interesting discovery–there’s alternate paths to the same place in the QR data space. An even more interesting discovery came when I decoded the QRs I found and then re-generated them to get clean images. The barcodes I generated were not the same as the barcodes I photographed. Ooooh! Aaaaah!
So, the generated composite is not exactly a direct representation of the photographed composite. There are differences in the codes, which make for subtle changes in the composite. Here are the results from the last batch. First, the photographed codes:
Then the generated codes:
Finally, the black and white version of the generated codes:
And since I now have over 60 codes captured, I need to generate composites of all 60:
Just for funsies, here’s the QR that some boutique on Newberry Street though would be totally chic if the pixels were sexed up a bit and a bunch of random artwork was included in the barcode:
Nothing I have can decipher this monstrosity.
Random Walks in Vermont
In March of 2010 I did a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and during that residency I drew random walks across the landscape, using my hiking GPS to record my path. It took me a while, but I finally got those random walks saved as image files to post here.
For this particular piece, I started with a full mile, headed in a random direction. I then grafted that mile in Google Earth, placing it so that it would be easily accessible to the VCS. After that, I created nine more walks each a mile long, each broken up into an increasing number of segments. Each segment would head off from the previous segment at a random angle, creating a random pathway across the landscape.
Once these paths were created in Google Earth, I downloaded them into my GPS. I then proceeded to walk those paths, or at least as close as one can when one has to contend with hills, roads, rotten snow, logs, trees, and early-spring college-age disc golfers. Because each walked path meandered back and forth across the “perfect” path, each walked path was longer than the perfect path by up to ten percent. You can see the fractal nature of the walks I took in each image. The perfect path is white, and the walked path is green.
The first few paths had very long segments, so their thumbnails will display at a smaller scale than the later paths. The tenth path actually stayed pretty much within bounds of the Johnson State College campus, while the first path headed out northeast across the snowy forest.
QR Codes in the Wild
Over the past few months, I’ve been collecting QR codes I find in my travels, “in the wild” so to speak. As mentioned before, I find that QR codes are a solution in search of a problem, and don’t work terribly well anyway, but marketers and advertisers love them. So I figured I’d explore what QR codes managed to make their way through the process and impinge themselves on my universe. Of course, once I’d collected enough, I would have to make a composite of them.
So, Round One, coming up! Since starting this, I photographed 32 codes, but three were duplicates, so Round One contains 29 codes.
Composite of QR Codes as-shot by my cellphone camera.
I then took those raw photos and generated clean QR PNGs from the web addresses they encoded. This is the composite of those.
And this is that generated composite rendered in black-and-white, suitable for decoding as a QR itself. Alas, this QR does not code for anything, which is expected, but still disappointing.
Roadbed Palimpsests
I’ve been interested in the tar marks the city crews make on the cracks in asphalt roadbeds when they repair them, there’s a nice script-like gesture to the best of them. I’ve done some recording of the shapes and lines using multiple digital photos to create hi-res montages of shapes I’ve found in parking lots and city streets. While I was in Austin I did some waaaaay low-budget photo montaging with a digital camera that could only record 15 seconds of video, pointing it down from my driver’s-side window as I went down the road. I then stitched the video frames together to make a “manuscript” of the scribblings. Here’s an example of such:
All this was fine, and I had some of the more photographic montages in a show, but about a week ago I had an interesting idea: why take it a little further than just recording these, and actually create a collaborative art piece out of these marks? Thus, my roadbed palimpsests, a collaboration between myself and the Cambridge Public Works Department:
Ultramarine 01 • acrylic and tar on asphalt • 2011
Phthalocyanine Blue 01 • acrylic and tar on asphalt • 2011
Permanent Light Green 01 • acrylic and tar on asphalt • 2011
Permanent Light Green 02 • acrylic and tar on asphalt • 2011
These pieces can be seen on Russell, Milton and Chester Streets in Cambridge, MA, just off of Massachusetts Avenue.
8 Physical Pixel Circles
Wooden Random Walks
And my obsession with random processes continues. Using basswood strips, dice, glue and five colors of wood stain, I’m playing around with randomness again, but trying, this time, to create an aesthetic sensibility with the process. I’m hoping that the natural material and earth colors will soften the hard edges of the concept and create little lyrical creations. I don’t know, but I’m pretty happy with these so far:
They’re anywhere from 5″ to 14″ wide. The fewer segments, the shorter, of course.
To create these, I roll three dice: one eight-sided, one six-sided and one ten-sided. The eight-sided die tells me how long the segment is in inches, the six-sided die tells me the color of the segment, and the ten-sided die tells me if I should stop, if the die shows “0″. I cut out the series of segments, stain them the correct colors, then construct the random path by spinning the segment and using the resulting alignment. The three completely natural paths were done before I decided to stain the pieces.
I might change the die I use to choose the length, just for funsies, but lengths from 1″ to 8″ work well for these. The stains I’m using are Ebony, English Chestnut, Provincial, Early American and Colonial Maple, with #6 reserved for natural wood. The whole piece is then coated in tung oil for protection. The craftsmanship is a little off, but these are basically maquettes. There’s plenty of time for hardcore joinery as they progress.
Keyboard Trace
Here’s a photo of the piece I put together for the Chain Letter Show at Samsøn Project a couple weeks ago. It kinda got lost in the crowd, but I needed a reason to put it together.
This is what I’m calling a “Keyboard Trace”, which is a full-scale model of my aluminum Apple keyboard with the path traced by the letters of a word as they are typed. The wooden shape extending into space is the trace itself. Underneath the trace the locations of the letters are embossed into the wood:
In this case, the word is “JUXTAPOSE”. This is a modification of an idea I had a couple years back, which I called “Keyboard Skeins”. Those word paths were traced out with string using nails at the locations of the keys. Here is “GENUFLECT”:
I liked this concept, but I wasn’t sure the string-and-nail idea was the proper way to embody it. So I tried again with the dowels. I still haven’t made up my mind, and I might try another take on it soon.