teaganwhite

sorry for being so morbid

2010-04-30T16:40:00.000-05:00

2010-04-20T18:55:00.000-05:00

mildly racist antiques

2010-04-20T18:46:00.003-05:00

the title says it all.

some unrelated gems:

more paintings

2010-04-06T21:50:00.002-05:00

Nicolas Uribe:

Jackie Anderson

Sophie Jodoin

Sangram Majumdar

nietzsche

2010-03-24T21:25:00.004-05:00

I'm reading The Birth of Tragedy.
It's alright so far, though supposedly not Nietzsche's best.
The edition I've got starts with his Attempt At A Self-Criticism, published sixteen years later, in which we find the passage below, which I really like. He's describing his mindset when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, and implies that at least some aspects of his line of thinking at that time were foolish (I'm not familiar with Nietzsche's matured views on the subject, this will be the first work of his I've read), but I still think it's a beautiful and insightful piece of writing. (You might want to skip this post if you're Christian and sensitive about it; it's not my intention to attack or offend anyone here.)

"Perhaps the depth of this antimoral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book--Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected. In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life--a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. Hatred of "the world," condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for "the sabbath of sabbaths"--all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a "will to decline"--at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral--and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself--how now? might not morality be "a will to negate life," a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander--the beginning of the end? Hence, the danger of dangers?"

Christians write some okay things, too, though; I like this bit from Pascal:

"The present usually hurts us. We hide it from sight because it wounds us, and if it is pleasant then we are sorry to see it pass. We try to buttress it with the future, and think of arranging things which are not in our power for a time we cannot be at all sure of attaining . . . Past and present are our means, only the future is our end. And so we never actually live, though we hope to, and in constantly striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never attain it."

things i notice that no one cares about

2010-03-24T21:07:00.001-05:00

kanevsky

2010-03-06T12:59:00.002-06:00

for the past two weeks i've been unhealthily obsessed with alex kanevsky's paintings.
i'm desperate to see his work in person, since websites never do a painting justice. i'm hoping to get out to new york during the summer, when some of his work will be shown at the J Cacciola gallery, along with Sophie Jodoin who i also love.

awful cellphone interstate photos that i love

2010-03-01T17:12:00.002-06:00

!

2010-03-01T16:47:00.001-06:00

( stuck to the wall in a used book store )

i&p 2/27

2010-02-27T13:41:00.001-06:00

MORE KACHINA DOLLS.

i&p 2/14

2010-02-14T14:36:00.002-06:00

indian colors & patterns. scans from books, screengrabs from websites, self-assembled color palettes.

!!!!!seizure warning!!!!!

i&p 2/13

2010-02-13T18:56:00.002-06:00

took a couple of trips to the minneapolis institute of art to see their collection of native american art. it was a bit sparse, but there were a few things i liked a lot:

2/10

2010-02-10T01:33:00.005-06:00

i have this beautiful book that i got from anthropologie called 'etcetera,' by stylist and shop-owner sibella court. every page is hugely inspiring.
i was too lazy to scan the pages myself, but google image search reveals that other people have been kind enough to do a lot of that for me.

so, here's a ton of images from the book.

i&p 2/09

2010-02-10T00:39:00.003-06:00

this post is relevant to all of my kind-of-topics: humans/animals, historic cultures (in this case early 1800s, europe), and my major (illustration).

one of my favorite illustrators, J J Grandville.

i&p 2/03

2010-02-03T09:51:00.002-06:00

since my last post, i've been reconsidering my choice of topic. i'm finding myself as interested in history and culture and antiquated objects as i am in animals.
i'm still definitely interested in exploring human/animal relationships, but i feel that i do that a lot in my work already. and my work has always had an antiquated aesthetic, but i've never really stopped to examine exactly what time period or specific culture informs that choice.
so i'm going to try going more in that direction.. i want to eventually zero in on one specific time/culture, but for now i think i'll keep it open and do a lot of research on different ones.
specifically what interests me at the moment:

-native americans
-indians (india)
-1800s, united states and europe
-early nautical imagery
-early rural imagery

it may just turn into me examining animals once again through the lens of one or more of these cultures. i'm not sure! but i think this will help me either figure out why i do some of the things i do in my art, or maybe inspire me in some new way.

here's some pictures, because i like pictures.

i found out, with the help of my brother, that these guys are called kachina dolls and were (are?) made by the hopi indian tribe. ...my love for them is immense and infinite.

i&p 1/29

2010-01-29T16:36:00.003-06:00

i just realized that i still have photos on my phone that i took at the field museum in chicago over break.
taxidermy, insects, native american things, and other stuff i love.

dead owl

dead bat

fake storefront that looks real

i don't know what these maps were for but i like them.
something to do with rocks maybe.

bean display

adorable educational figurines for kids, of native american gods

my favorite (right), and my brother's favorite (left)

native american textiles are beautiful beautiful beautiful

BEETLES

BUGS. IN AMBER. (probably super old)

taxidermy deer

warthogs are one of my favorite animals.

i&p 1/25

2010-01-26T06:18:00.002-06:00

i just discovered the work of raul teodoro.
i love love love it.
mustaxd.com

i&p 1/24: taxidermy

2010-01-24T13:24:00.002-06:00

when i'm in chicago, i sometimes spend hours in the "nature walk" exhibit at the field museum, which features hundreds upon hundreds of glass cases filled with taxidermy animals in simulated natural environments. it's strange that humans are so cut off from the natural world that we would choose to spend time in an artificial one, ironically located in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country, in order to better understand it (or simply marvel at it).

the very idea of eternally preserving parts of the world around us, whether as trophies or for educational purposes, is unique to humans. it's a practice which sets us apart from animals, but also forces us to think about them.

on a lighter note, my brother showed me this website today, crappytaxidermy.com.
here are some images from the site:

..people are weird.

i&p 1/24

2010-01-24T12:04:00.002-06:00

i&p 1/21: quote day

2010-01-21T20:54:00.004-06:00

i think my topic is going to be (to put it as vaguely as possible): humans & animals.
to be more specific: the way human life effects animal life and vice versa, the way humans view and respond to animals, the struggle as a human of coming to terms with being both an animal and something entirely different, etc.

this may manifest in something that attempts to directly address one or more of these themes in a serious way, or i may end up mostly doodling adorable animals.

anyway.
i obsessively collect quotes, which i feel inform all of my work. due to the openness of this project right now, these quotes are threatening to appear all too often in my posts, which i'd prefer to be more visual, so i think i will instead get them off my chest all at once.
here's everything that i feel even loosely relates to my topic.
(it feels strange to post something this personal. i'm not sure whether it's therapeutic or just a little embarrassing.)

"The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame." jonathan safran foer, everything is illuminated, 11

"You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?" jonathan safran foer, everything is illuminated, 38

"We consider the animals to be lower, and to me, that makes no sense at all. If you look at a tree or a mushroom or a squirrel, it's perfectly in tune with itself. It has no problem being exactly what it is, and it does what it's meant to do without any complaints or problems. Because we create all these problems in being, we think we're somehow higher than the animals. But it's we humans who have a difficult time even caring for our children, or anything."
-jeff mangum

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless--and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." - JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey

"The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on Earth." - JD Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

"there was no such thing as society and even if there was, i most certainly had nothing to do with it." -trainspotting

"Somewhere in the far north of Canada there would be snow, falling soundlessly over the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Arctic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, and how was one to use such information except as proof that the world was too much to bear?" -nicole krauss, man walks into a room

"Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?" - barry lopez, emory bear hands' birds, a convergence of birds, 21

"Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil--only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip." - Jonathan Safran Foer, If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe, a convergence of birds, 217

"Someday you will die somehow and something's gonna steal your carbon." - Modest Mouse, Parting of the Sensory, We were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

"Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?” (78) Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human." - Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

"The person you love is 72.8% water." - Alan Fletcher

"What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself." - the virgin suicides

"An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but no the only one to hold someone's hand."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love: A Novel)

"The breeze is keening in the high trees but this is nothing personal. The time draws close and it's all coming to a head but this is nothing personal." - tMG mini-site

"somehow the blood-rich light has drained away from it and you realize that things don't make bad scenes, people do." -john darnielle

"Don’t eat meat. Be as passionate as you can all the time. Work for social justice. Cuddle your beloved more than seems reasonable. Write. Give money to charity as often as you can, and give a little more than you’re comfortable giving. Remember the homeless always and everywhere. Thank whatever God you worship for your inestimable good luck in being loved, and if you are not loved, love someone as best you can." darnielle

"I had a teacher who said the moment when man wrote things down, life becomes a production instead of pure." - darnielle

"i'm struck with a terrible feeling this morning--terrible! wonderful!--that this is basically as good as it gets. to want anything more is greedy, to buck the fact that orange trees and their ilk are pretty much always going to make me crumble for obtuse poetic reasons is, well, a spit in the face of something much larger, much more inert, and much wiser than me." -ek

"When buck fever struck,
you stood stiff, unable
to pull the trigger while the herd
crashed past you and
into the woods.

Your cousins - who, one night
when you were all boys, scared
you in a pine grove with a candle
in a cow skull - carried
you to a clearing; they loosened
your hunting vest,
gave you a flask of Jack Daniel's,
and you remembered nothing.

* * *

Last night you dreamt of a room -
a room full of fish,
and a swimming pool
where you waded knee-deep
and hauled them all in

except for one, already dead,
a large bluefish wedged
into a corner, its back stiff.

You remember it later: its eye
like a button,
a button on another person's coat."

-- You Don't Know What Happened When You Froze, Talvikki Ansel

"Whales fall slowly to the ocean floor
after dying and feed the vertical nation
for years, Like Christ, who feeds us still
they say, though I don't know.
But imagine it:
fish chasing through the bones
or nibbling what's left, the whale,
when it finally touches bottom,
an empty church.
Forget all that,
it's intended to soften
the skin, like apricot seeds and mud, or boredom.
The drift of worlds in a given day
can turn a telephone to porcelain,
open graves in the sidewalk. So that
who knows why thinking about thinking
leads to new inventions of grace
that never take, never lead to, say, what to do
with Grandmother, who is determined to live
"beyond her usefulness," which is fine,
but why won't she relax and watch the sea with me?
I wish someone would intrude on all this.
People grow tired
explaining themselves to mirrors,
to clerks administering the awful perfume.
I ask a Liberace look-alike,
"Why do you dress that way?"
"What way?" he says,
and he's right.
Who taught us to bow our heads
while waiting for trains? to touch
lumber without regret and sing privately
or not at all? To invest the season
with forgiveness and coax from it
a hopeful omen? Lord knows
the hope would heal this little fear.
But who taught us to fear?
Soon branches crackle in the windy heat
like something cooking too quickly,
dogwood lathering the empty woods
and everyone looking for a commitment
of permanence, from summer, from someone else.
Two deer the color of corn disappear
into an empty field, and I wait beside the road
for them to move. I want to see them again."

-James Harms, The Joy Addict

i&p 1/20

2010-01-20T18:41:00.005-06:00

an image i found today:

an image i found a while ago:

something that makes me happy:
people who cover their mouths when they yawn even if there's no one else around; and people who don't.

a quote i found a while ago:
"In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose." - Oppenheimer, on the physicists responsible for the development of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, 1948

ideation&&&process: go!

2010-01-20T18:29:00.003-06:00

so for my ideation* & process class, we're supposed to keep a sketchbook or some other type of visual log to help us investigate a chosen topic.
i'm making a real sketchbook, but i also don't want to waste ink & paper printing out the dozens of influences i find digitally every day, so those will go in this blog for now.
i'm going to try to update it every day or so, with both new discoveries and old obsessions.
i don't know my topic yet, but knowing me it'll be something along the lines of human/animal relationships, decomposition, old things, or the mountain goats (indirectly).

*(did you know that firefox's spell check doesn't recognize 'ideation' as a word? it doesn't recognize firefox either, though, so i'm not super worried.)

anthropologie

2010-01-06T15:08:00.007-06:00

i forgot i had a blog. mostly because it was ugly. /fixed!

here're some pictures i took recently at Anthropologie, where i will never be able to afford to buy anything ever ever ever but at least i can take pictures.

--

it's "apocalypse week" or something equally lame on the history channel. i was watching one of the programs last night with my family -- basically a mockumentary of life after a pandemic. anyway, all of these self-proclaimed "survival experts" (i assume they're self-proclaimed because i can't deal with the absurdity of someone handing out certificates for the mastery of post-apocalyptic survival techniques) seem to believe that it would take only a few days for the facade of society to crumble under the stress of a national or global disaster. they imagine total anarchy, people shooting each other for a bit of food or water or fuel, people whose desperation completely overrides any morals or ideals they may have once had.

maybe (definitely) i'm just a hopeless idealist, but i would like to think that humans are better than that, and that the morals we follow now could still be applied in less comfortable situations. (otherwise what's the point of having them?) i'd like to think that there will always be selfless acts of kindness, and people willing to die knowing they did what was right, rather than trying to live a little bit longer through selfishness and cruelty.

historically, yes, there are plenty records of people being downright cruel, with or without reason. but there are also records of people risking their lives for others, with or without reason, and i'd like to keep those ones in mind.

i'm reading Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals. the passage below is told to Foer as a child by his grandmother, a holocaust survivor, and i think it's relevant to the topic above on several levels.

"During the war it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.
“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

robert rauschenberg & joseph cornell

2009-06-26T00:56:00.005-05:00

first, just spreading my love for one of my favorite artists, robert rauschenberg.
i learned all about him in phil larson's art history 2 class last semester.

he collected trash, antiques, and things that most people view as worthless, and through a combination of painting and assemblage, created work that both brought his materials into modernity and celebrated their past, giving them a sort of second life. (blather blather, just look at the pictures and enjoy. antiques, typography, taxidermy animals, collage, dripping paint -- what's not to love?)

"Canyon" - 1959 - oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas

"Odalisk" - 1955-1958

"Monogram" - 1955-1959

"Coca Cola Plan" - 1958

"Satellite" - 1955

"Pilgrim" - 1960

"Bed" - 1955

"Contact" - 2003

"Rebus" - 1955

"Coexistence" - 1961

---

and, since he's loosely related stylistically, i'll also show some jospeh cornell.
(if you're a fan, or even if you're not, you should read a convergence of birds: original fiction and poetry inspired by joseph cornell. it's a collection of poems and short stories by quite a few famous writers, all in response to a request by its editor, jonathan safran foer, whose work is also featured in the book [and is naturally the best part].) my literary obsessions aside, please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))) and enjoy the images below.

"Hotel Eden" - 1945

"Habitat" - 1942

"Paul and Virginia" - 1946-1948

"L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode, cours élémentaire d'histoire naturelle" - 1940

"Cockatoo and Corks" - 1946

"Toward the Blue Peninsula" - 1951-1952

"Apollinaris" - 1954

"for Stephanie" - 1945

"Forgotten Game" - 1949

this blog entry makes me want to major in sculpture :[

old things are much better than new things

2009-05-23T21:50:00.009-05:00

i've been to about a million antique shops in the past two days.
it's very sad to think about how decorative and lasting things used to be compared to how they are now. "back in the day" even potato sacks looked nice, with little illustrations and stenciled letters on burlap.... now potatoes come in plastic bags that end up in landfills.

nothing is made to last anymore; the tragedy of this is that so many things grow more beautiful with age.

i bought some fantastic old photographs at one of the shops:

i love the quaintness of the family, and how absolutely absolutely grumpy the little boy by the tree is. also his boots :] unfortunately i have no information about the identities of any of the people, or even the locations or years. if anyone can guess from the clothing, i'd love to know!

this made me remember that i actually scanned a few of my own family's very old photographs a couple months back. here they are:

i really wish that it was socially acceptable to wear fancy old clothes. i mean, there's steampunk and goth and things like that, but they're sort of lame. i really wish i had lived in the 1950s/60s in london... apparently at that time there was a subculture known as "teddy boys" (and "teddy girls"). they were somewhat associated with gangs and whatnot, but their fashion was fantastic. they wore jackets and waistcoats and trousers, all of which needed to be custom made and were paid for in installments. not such a fan of the hair styles... but i guess you can't have it all.
(replace the quiffs with powdered wigs, my other true love, and then you've got something.)

they're all delightfully androgynous. :]

for more teddy boys info, go to the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_boy
(it's enormously hard to find any information about them for some reason.)

(as for powdered wigs....

...amadeus is a fabulous movie, clearly.)

back to my point about old things being superior.
even more recent lovely things are disappearing.
polaroid film, for example, is no longer being made. which is awful, as they're a perfect example of the beauty in imperfection. this is a photo i just adore, of my house that my mom took in 1994:

in contrast, a white-balanced, perfectly in-focus digital photograph is artless to me... and will never become more beautiful with age while stored on a computer (unless you save it as something lossy like a jpeg i guess, but i don't think that's really the same).

what do you think? are you drawn to antiques and things that are falling apart with history, like i am? why or why not?

about the typefaces not used in this edition

2009-03-28T16:53:00.009-05:00

below is a short story written by my favorite author, jonathan safran foer (everything is illuminated, extremely loud and incredibly close). not only is it beautiful and poetic; it's about typography, and also mentions ornithology, and basically is everything i care about rolled into one delightful and subtley comedic piece of prose. also check out his books; they are life changing.

About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition
by Jonathan Safran Foer

ELENA, 10 POINT: This typeface — conceived of by independent typographer Leopold Shunt, as the moon set on the final night of his wife’s life — disintegrates over time. The more a word is used, the more it crumbles and fades — the harder it becomes to see. By the end of this book, utilitarian words like the, a and was would have been lost on the white page. Henry’s recurrent joys and tortures — bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase, bridge — would have been ruins, unintentional monuments to bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase and bridge. And when the life of the book dwindled to a single page, as it now does, when you held your palm against the inside of the back cover, as if it were her damp forehead, as if you could will it to persevere past its end, God would have been nearly illegible, and I completely invisible. Had Elena been used, Henry’s last words would have read:

TACTIL, VARIABLE POINT: “A text should reveal the heart’s emotional condition, as an EKG readout reveals its physical one.” This idea was the inspiration for Basque typographer Clara Sevillo to create Tactil, a good example of the early interface types. The size of a letter corresponds to how hard the key is pressed. Air-conditioning blows its story over the keys, as does the breath of a bird on the sill, as does the moonlight whose infinitesimally small exertion also tells a tale. Even when there is nothing applying pressure to the keys, a text is still being generated — an invisible transcript of the world without witnesses. And if one were to hammer the keyboard with infinite force, an infinitely large nonsense word would be produced.
If this book had been typeset in Tactil, Henry’s various I love yous could have been distinguished between narcissistic love (“I love you”), love of love rather than love of another (“I love you”), and traditional, romantic love (“I love you”). We could have learned where Henry’s heart leaned when on the unsafe wooden bridge he confessed himself to Sophy. And we could have learned if it is true that one can love only one thing at a time, making I love you definitionally impossible.
Tactil was not used because preliminary calculations suggested that the author was striving — intentionally or not — to recreate the physical world. That is, tree was typed with the force to make the word as large as a tree. Pear, cumulus and Band-Aid typed to make the words to the
scale of a pear, a cloud and a Band-Aid. To print the book in this way would have required bringing another world into existence, a twin world composed entirely of words. We finally would have known the sizes of those abstract ideas whose immeasurability makes us, time and time again, lose our bearings. How does existentialism compare to a tree? Orgasm to a pear? A good conversation to a cumulus cloud? The mending of a gnarled heart to a Band-Aid?
But even if logistics had permitted , this typeface still would have been rejected, because as a quantitative, rather than qualitative, measure, it could have been quite misleading, That is, Henry’s love for Sophy may have been the size that it was because of hate, sympathy, jealousy,
neediness or, however unlikely, love. We would never have known, only that there was much of it, which is to know very little.

TRANS-1, 10 POINT: This typeface refreshes itself continuously on the screen, words being replaced by their synonyms. Now autumn begins exists only for long enough to bring present fall commences into existence, which instantly disappears to make room for gift descend embarks, which dies so that talent alight boards ship can live. Trans-1’s creator, IS Bely (1972-), said that he hoped the typeface would illuminate the richness of language, the interconnectedness, the nuance of the web. But instead, Trans-1 reveals language’s poverty, its inadequate approximations, how a web is made of holes, how the river of words flows always away from us.

TRANS-2, 10 POINT: This typeface also refreshes continuously, but unlike Trans-1, words are replaced by their antonyms. Now autumn begins exists only for long enough to bring later spring ceases into existence, which instantly disappears to make room for presently dry riverbed persists, which dies so that never flowing water perishes can live. It was Bely’s intention, with Trans-2, to illuminate the poverty of language, its inadequate approximations, how a web is made of holes. But instead, we see the string connecting those holes, and caught in the net is the shadow of meaning. This typeface frequently freezes in place, fixed on words that cannot be refreshed. What, after all, is the opposite of God? The meaning is liberated from the words by the typeface’s inability to translate them. These nonexistent antonyms are the reflections of the words we are looking for, the non-approximations, like watching a solar eclipse in a puddle. The antonym of God’s non-existent antonym is closer to God than God will ever be. Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

TRANS-3, 10 POINT: This typeface also refreshes continuously, but unlike Trans-1 and -2, words are replaced by themselves. Now autumn begins exists for only long enough to bring now autumn begins into existence, which instantly disappears to make room for now autumn begins which dies so that now autumn begins can live. A word, like a person, exists for exactly one moment in time. After that moment, only the letters — cells — are shared. What autumn meant when uttered by Stephen Wren in Cincinnati at 10:32:34 on April 14, 2000, was quite different from what it meant one second later when he said it again, and was entirely unlike what it meant one hundred years before, or one thousand years before, or at the same moment, when cried by a palsied schoolgirl in Wales. This typeface tries to keep pace with language, to change as the world changes, but like chasing the long black cape of a fleeing dream, it will never catch up. Now autumn begins will never mean what it does, but what it did.

AVIARY, VARIABLE POINT: One of the more unorthodox typefaces of the end of the twentieth century, Aviary relies on the migration of birds. The typesetter, who is preferably an ornithologist, tattoos each word onto the underside of a different bird’s wing, according to its place in the flock. (The first word of this book, Elena, would have been tattooed onto the wing of the natural leader. The last word, free, onto the wing of the bird who carries the rear.) Alexander Dubovich, Aviary’s creator, said his inspiration was a copy of Anna Karenina that fell from the shelf and landed spread, text-down, on the floor.
Among many other reasons, this typeface was not used because the order of birds in a flock shifts regularly. The natural leader never remains the leader, and the bird in the rear always moves forward. Also, Aviary is only coherent when the birds are in flight. When perched in trees, or collecting the thrown scraps from some kind park goer, or sleeping on the sills of high apartment windows, the birds are in disarray, and so would be the book. It could exist only in flight, only between places, only as a way to get from here to there. Or there to here.

ICELAND, 22:13:36. APRIL 11, 2006, VARIABLE POINT: There are 237, 983 words in this book. The same number of people were alive in Iceland at 22:13:36, April 11, 2006. The designer of this typeface, Bjorn Jaagern, devised to give each person a word to memorise, according to age. (The youngest citizen would be given Elena, the oldest free.) In an annual festival, the people of Iceland would line up, youngest to oldest, and recite the story of Henry’s tragic love and loss, from beginning to
end. As citizens died, their roles in the recitation would be given to the youngest Icelander without a word, although the reading would still proceed from youngest to oldest. It was the hope of the citizens of Iceland that the book would cycle smoothly: from order to disorder, and back to order again. That is, Let our fathers and mothers die before their children, the old before the young.
Iceland, 22:13:36, April 11, 2006, was not used because life is full of early death, and fathers and mothers sometimes outlive their children. The editor’s concern was not that the book would become a salad of meaning, but that hearing it once a year would be too painful a reminder that we are twigs alighted on a fence, that each of us is capable of experiencing not only Henry’s great love, but also his loss. Should a child recite a word from the middle — from the scene in which Henry’s brother stuffs up the cracks with wet towels, and loses his lashes in the oven — we would know that he or she replaced someone who died in middle-age, too soon, before making it to the end of the story.

REAL TIME, REAL WORLD, TO SCALE: This typeface began organically, with the popularisation of e-mail. Such symbols as :) came to stand for those things that words couldn’t quite get at. Over time, every idea had a corresponding symbol, not unlike the drawings from the dark caves of early man. These symbols approximated what a word described better than a word ever could. (A picture of a flower is closer to the flower it describes than flower is.) Here, for example, is how the final conversation between Henry and his brother would have read in such symbols:
And here is the scene on the unsafe wooden bridge, when Henry confesses himself to Sophy:
The evolution continued. The typographical symbol for flower () became a sketch of a flower, then an oil painting of a flower, then a photograph of a flower, then a sculpted flower, then a video of a flower, and is, now, a real-time real-world flower. Henry exists: he blinks, he inhales, he tells his older brother, I love you more now than I did before, he stammers, he sways, he begs, Sophy, believe in me, always.
This typeface was not used because of the fear that it would be popularised, that all books would be printed in real-time real-world, making it impossible to know whether we were living as autonomous beings, or characters in a story. When you read these words, for example, you would have to wonder whether you were the real-time real-world incarnation of someone in a story who was reading these words. You would wonder if you were not the you that you thought you were, if you were about to finish this book only because you were written to do so, because you had to.
Or perhaps, you think, it’s otherwise. You approach this final sentence because you are you, your own you, living a life of your own creation. If you are a character, then you are the author. If you are a slave to your own weaknesses, then you are unconstrained. Perhaps you are completely free.

sketchbooks

2009-03-18T18:28:00.007-05:00

sometimes i find myself appreciating an artist's sketchbook pages as much as (or even more than) their finished work. for me there is an inherent beauty in the idea behind a sketch -- to draw without thinking too much about the result; to quickly get an idea down on paper before it is forgotten; to record something for one's own purposes, not necessarily to be seen by anyone else.

below is a small selection of sketchbook pages i have stumbled across recently. they include everything from doodles to concept drawings to works in progress... if you have any links to other sketchbook pages that you'd like to share, please do.

[andrew wyeth]

[lee25]

[joao ruas]

[louis roskosch]

[gleb solntsev]

[coey kuhn]

[james jean]

timothy liu

2009-03-09T19:03:00.003-05:00

Sunday, by Timothy Liu

And when they sat down in the morning
to bowls of cold cereal, each in turn
would notice the blades of a ceiling fan
spinning at the bottom of their spoons,
small enough to swallow, yet no one
ever mentioned it, neither looking up
nor into each other's eyes for fear
of feeding the hunger that held them there.