I got a fish tie for fathers day,
Ingredients:
and my kids baked me a cake.
It was delicious.
Ingredients:flour
sugar
salt
coriander
coffee grounds
cheerios
watercolor paint
Fish Tie
Photo from Vega Estates Vega Caucus
Pedometer Interview
Amy Rudberg recently interviewed me as part of her ongoing project:
How I’m trying to help my Facebook friends (33): Interview with artist Cole Pierce and his pedometer.
What is a pedometer?
A pedometer is a step counter. It is a device that counts each step a person takes by detecting the motion of their hips.
How does your pedometer work with your cell phone?
After visiting Wikipedia, I learned that my cell phone uses an “embedded 2 axis MEMS inertial sensors to detect the steps a user takes.” My phone displays my steps on the external display. It counts detected steps during the day, and at midnight it stores the counter in a day-by-day history and resets it to zero. My height and weight are used to estimate the length of my stride.
When did you start using a pedometer?
I have been using a pedometer for about 2 or 3 months. My wife activated it for me without telling me. For a few days I wondered what the random numbers on the screen meant. Mostly out of curiosity, I check my step count a few times a day and before I go to sleep. I don't exercise regularly and feel a little guilty about it. If I walk over 5 miles in one day, my conscious is clear. I also feel physically better. And it’s better than sitting on my ass all day long. Walking 5 miles is not very hard; all and all I have my doubts as to whether or not it constitutes worthy physical activity. It seems very little compared to running, biking or swimming regularly. On a different note, I am amused that my phone tediously records something as banal as walking.
What is your daily goal?
My goal is to be better than average, which is currently 8,043 steps (about 4 miles). That is the distance I walk to and from work if I take the train. I question the accuracy of the average, which I guess is low if you factor in the days my battery is dead or if I don't have my phone in my pocket. On several occasions I've walked more than 10 miles, which feels like a real accomplishment.
What do you do to achieve your goal?
Not much. I just walk. I only drive when I need to haul stuff around or if the weather is bad. I don't take extra walks to try to up my step count, but I do try to keep my phone with me when walking. I am more conscious of the fact that my walking is being recorded and archived. I wish there was a web application that displayed this archive and my step count in real time on my blog.
Check out Amy's project here and here is some other stuff Amy is involved in:
http://www.chicagoarts-lifestyle.com
http://www.amyrud.gather.com
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artstylebloggroup
http://www.ehow.com/members/amyrud.html
How I’m trying to help my Facebook friends (33): Interview with artist Cole Pierce and his pedometer.
What is a pedometer?
A pedometer is a step counter. It is a device that counts each step a person takes by detecting the motion of their hips.
How does your pedometer work with your cell phone?
After visiting Wikipedia, I learned that my cell phone uses an “embedded 2 axis MEMS inertial sensors to detect the steps a user takes.” My phone displays my steps on the external display. It counts detected steps during the day, and at midnight it stores the counter in a day-by-day history and resets it to zero. My height and weight are used to estimate the length of my stride.
When did you start using a pedometer?
I have been using a pedometer for about 2 or 3 months. My wife activated it for me without telling me. For a few days I wondered what the random numbers on the screen meant. Mostly out of curiosity, I check my step count a few times a day and before I go to sleep. I don't exercise regularly and feel a little guilty about it. If I walk over 5 miles in one day, my conscious is clear. I also feel physically better. And it’s better than sitting on my ass all day long. Walking 5 miles is not very hard; all and all I have my doubts as to whether or not it constitutes worthy physical activity. It seems very little compared to running, biking or swimming regularly. On a different note, I am amused that my phone tediously records something as banal as walking.
What is your daily goal?
My goal is to be better than average, which is currently 8,043 steps (about 4 miles). That is the distance I walk to and from work if I take the train. I question the accuracy of the average, which I guess is low if you factor in the days my battery is dead or if I don't have my phone in my pocket. On several occasions I've walked more than 10 miles, which feels like a real accomplishment.
What do you do to achieve your goal?
Not much. I just walk. I only drive when I need to haul stuff around or if the weather is bad. I don't take extra walks to try to up my step count, but I do try to keep my phone with me when walking. I am more conscious of the fact that my walking is being recorded and archived. I wish there was a web application that displayed this archive and my step count in real time on my blog.
Check out Amy's project here and here is some other stuff Amy is involved in:
http://www.chicagoarts-lifestyle.com
http://www.amyrud.gather.com
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artstylebloggroup
http://www.ehow.com/members/amyrud.html
Old Gold Final Reduction Sale
Outside the Polish Falcoln, Milwaukee WI, May 17th 2008
recontextualized
I had work in two shows over the weekend, both of which were 'heavily curated'. Vega Estates kicked off their summer season of monthly exhibitions with an ambitious group show. Their garage vs basement program will start on June 14th. Last Saturday "The Vega Caucus" promised to recontextualize the included work. The results created a vague narrative, or perhaps developed a fictitious character through installation and curaturial decisions. My ongoing free mixed cd project, which is usually an innocuous stack of cds on the outskirts of my exhibition, was much more public and social. At the curators request my role was more performative. I brought a deck of cards and played 21 with people, and later in the night when I left my post I found the table and cards being used to play war. Via teeny boombox, the mixed CDs provided the backdrop to the rainy opening and Lauren Anderson's dead donkey pinata. Tami Lynn's 20 minute heartbreaking soul ballad played during the violent destruction of the pinata, which turned out to be empty.
Earlier that day, I had a painting in a van sale outside of a bowling alley. Old Gold supplied 23 artists with black canvases and the instructions to make a $100 painting. These paintings were sold out of Old Gold curators Caleb and Kathryn van on the patio of the Polish Falcon for the Milwaukee International Art Fair. They called it the Final Reduction Sale. Mine was the shiny sparkly black one with zillions scrawled while the paint was wet.
mix cds for Vega Caucus
silk screen ink and spray paint on paper envelopes, double cd, edition of 50
untitled collage
Limits are Liberating
heavenly screen
autechre show
On recommendation from Tyler I attended an Autechre show at the Abbey Pub last Friday, and true to his words it was a "wall of abstract sound". It was wonderfully perplexing, like dueling schizophrenic robots, or maybe a robot going insane. Layers of pulsating mechanical rhythms shifting and alternating, like machines trying to become human. Battlestar Galactica fans know what I'm talking about. In accordance with concert protocol, Autechre came on after (dj) Rob Hall and Massonix. Rob Hall was fabulous, rocking the scatterbrain idm we all know and love. Massonix, despite his elder status in the electronic music world, was bland and boring. The first two acts tenderized the crowd with deafening idm, which varies in form but maintaings semblance to the beats and rhythms of rave, house, hip hop, dub and blues. This is groove based music that inspires dancing and a basic feeling of social togetherness. But some forms of idm, particularly the downtempo (Boards of Canada) sort are more geared for the heads. To my knowledge the term 'heads' gained popularity from a KRS One song where he askes "how many real hip hop heads are in the house". A "Head" is now used to describe the listener who plays close attention to the structure of of beats, a kind of minimalism. Intelligent Dance Music, despite the pretensive name is an accurate description. It exists somewhere in between the mental rational realm and the physical, emotive and corporeal realm. IDM in the Aphex Twin tradition makes some attempt at song structure, with the hooks and riffs that engages your humanist side while synthetic chattering textures and microprogrammed drums transform you into Galvitron. After a good hour/hour in a half of Rob Halls' survey of contemporary electronic music (the past 20 years), Autechre's set was a complete reversal. I want to say it was void of all aspects that makes music feel like it is complimentary to our daily lives, or what I've been referring to as humanist. But Autechre is not void of humanism, they start from a place that is purely anti-humanist. Repetative, machine-like, an automated factory, this is where Autechre begins, but they end up with Skynet. The gears and precision and machine noises begin to alternate, with a sense of intuitive logic and irrationality. The sound of becoming a humanist. I've been listening to Autechre for several years now, in fact I just checked their discography and I've heard every album they have put out. My experience with Autechre songs is more on the lines of - an attempt to listen - I usually fail. One song at a time is all I can take. Autechre live is radically different, being engulfed by the volume and experiencing the music with your body rather than only your ears. highly recommended.
Read a more informed review on Milk Factory.
Como te va?
A coworker caught me reading Slavoj Žižek during my lunch. Then I was challenged to define parallax and explain the parallax gap. I thought I had done well, she seemed to understand and was intrigued by the concept.
This is the same lady who usually refuses to speak English with me, even though she is bilingual. At first it was fun, forced me to practice my Spanish, which I comprehend but cannot converse with. But now I find it more fun to reply in English to her Spanish.
The day after we talked about Žižek she stopped in, wanting another explanation. I understand the parallax gap as the interstice between juxtaposing systems. Wikipedia describes motion parallax as the change of angular position of two observations of a single object relative to each other as seen by an observer, caused by the motion of the observer. Simply put, it is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. (kinda like a Sunset Rubdown song "Will you live? Will you live in the physical world? With the sun setting low and the shadows unfurled? Will you live with the way they make you look unreal?" - from "the taming of the hands that came back to life"- lyrics as well as delivery, which is confident yet waivering and fragile.)
I used an example of a person moving from a 3rd world country to a developed one. She gave me homework. "You are going on a journey, you don't know how long you will be traveling and you don't know where you are going. Make a list of ten items that fit into a small bag that you would take with you". She is compiling these lists for some sort of immigration project. Here is my list. I wish I would have fit toilet paper and some basic toiletries in the bag, and I'm not sure I made the best choice of food.
First Aid Kit
Tarp
Hammock
Sleeping Bag
Water Bottle
Water Purifier
Cooking Pan
Oatmeal with dried fruit
Instant Ramen Noodle
A ziplock bag of extra undergarments
This is the same lady who usually refuses to speak English with me, even though she is bilingual. At first it was fun, forced me to practice my Spanish, which I comprehend but cannot converse with. But now I find it more fun to reply in English to her Spanish.
The day after we talked about Žižek she stopped in, wanting another explanation. I understand the parallax gap as the interstice between juxtaposing systems. Wikipedia describes motion parallax as the change of angular position of two observations of a single object relative to each other as seen by an observer, caused by the motion of the observer. Simply put, it is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. (kinda like a Sunset Rubdown song "Will you live? Will you live in the physical world? With the sun setting low and the shadows unfurled? Will you live with the way they make you look unreal?" - from "the taming of the hands that came back to life"- lyrics as well as delivery, which is confident yet waivering and fragile.)
I used an example of a person moving from a 3rd world country to a developed one. She gave me homework. "You are going on a journey, you don't know how long you will be traveling and you don't know where you are going. Make a list of ten items that fit into a small bag that you would take with you". She is compiling these lists for some sort of immigration project. Here is my list. I wish I would have fit toilet paper and some basic toiletries in the bag, and I'm not sure I made the best choice of food.
First Aid Kit
Tarp
Hammock
Sleeping Bag
Water Bottle
Water Purifier
Cooking Pan
Oatmeal with dried fruit
Instant Ramen Noodle
A ziplock bag of extra undergarments
Colt Vista !
In other news . . . Aric Naue is playing guitar in a band named Colt Vista. If you've heard any of his self-released cds (On The Verge of a Picnic, Compulsion, Thosepassedoutmissedoutonsecondsminutestoosoon, or Family Chameleon) you are probably very excited by this news. Visit their website www.coltvista.com for more relevant information.
Their next shows:
February 28 at the Know in Portland.
March 13 at High Dive in Seattle.
Tough Subject
Intrigued by the relatively young age of modernism, I decided to delve into some classic 19th century fiction. Beginning with the industrial revolution and then with mechanical reproduction clinching the deal, the modernity that I am aware of is maybe 150 years old, give or take a couple decades. Coincidentally, I recently discovered a genre of music I'm interested in is called 'Modern Classical'. The piano is to music what oil paint is to visual art. What finally turned my awareness of this fact into a curiosity came about when reading Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe. In Beyond Piety he traced the color black as the stardard in fashionable attire to the urbane 19th century, when the soot from coal burning dirtied everything in the outdoors. If your clothes were black it would disguise the layer of soot you carried around. So this is one reason I am reading "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, which is set in England around 1840. I wanted to get a different perspective of modernism, or maybe I just wanted to read a good book. I expected to trudge through purple victorian language and deal with drastic disparities of class. But I did not expect to deal with lawyers in an endless dispute over a will. Thus, the new perspective. Dickens' view of modernism sites relational formalities as a prominent characteristic. The formalities of law in a courtroom, the formalities of speaking to royalty or anyone in a caste/class differing from yourself. Like the time the Japanese principal of Masuho Junior High would not speak to me until I took my hands out of my pockets. Strict structure within interpersonal relationships. The importance of this aspect escaped me, until Mr. Dickens showed me how oppressive the caste system is to the homeless as well as her royal highness. Depressed because you are Jo, the homeless child who somehow earned the nickname Tough Subject, or depressed because you can't disgrace your family name and legacy or acknowledge your illegitimate daughter. Extreme cases, but perhaps the flowery and rigid social guidelines in London, 1840 have been transformed into bureaucratic red tape, order forms, billing departments, online security measures, and what was the name of your first pet? The tedious social norms in drastic 19th century hierarchy are now the delicacies of social networking, mass communication on a grand scale. Not to say that today's class disparities are any better, just expanded and global. BCC me on all emails, BTW. . . . but anyway, what do I know, I still have 153 pages to read.
enhance enigma
links to good music
A great best of 2007 mix from Almost Cool Music Reviews can be downloaded here.
http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007a.m4a
http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007b.m4a
http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007a.m4a
http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007b.m4a
Boguey being a Slyboots
"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house tonight? Is there a a chimney on fire?"
"Chimney on fire!"
"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling, See here, on my arm! See Again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow off - smears, like black fat!"
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back, and says it's all right, and all quiet . . .
The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle, sits so ill upon him to-night, that he abandons that and his whiskers together; and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up, a prey to the horrors again.
from Bleak House by Charles Dickens
upon reviewing my notes from a meeting with Chris Cozier (an artist and writer living in Trinidad), I remembered the interest he expressed about the variety of ways that different cultures react to modernity. Especially the when it resulted in a sinister use of images.
christophercozier.blogspot.com/
"Chimney on fire!"
"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling, See here, on my arm! See Again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow off - smears, like black fat!"
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back, and says it's all right, and all quiet . . .
The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle, sits so ill upon him to-night, that he abandons that and his whiskers together; and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up, a prey to the horrors again.
from Bleak House by Charles Dickens
upon reviewing my notes from a meeting with Chris Cozier (an artist and writer living in Trinidad), I remembered the interest he expressed about the variety of ways that different cultures react to modernity. Especially the when it resulted in a sinister use of images.
christophercozier.blogspot.com/
New Mix for a New Year
click on "Surface Noise" a couple times to download my new music mix, and to gently enter 2008.
tote bags for xmas
Tote bags given away for christmas gifts.
"Face with Hair", screen-printed drawing by Ethan Pierce.
(Opposite side)
"Sock Puppet with Mohawk" drawing by Cain Tillman.
George Steiner, "Tongue of Eros"
There exists a fair number of monographs on sexual terms, lexica of the erotic, glossaries of the pornogaphic. What is lacking is any historical and psychologically responsible phenomenology of the interplay between sexuality and words, between libido and enunciation -- either internalized or vocal. No Aristotle, no Saussure has taken up this pivotal challenge. We have, so far as I am aware, no study, even summary, of how sex is experienced, of how love is made in different languages and different language sets. How does love-making in Basque or Russian differ from that in Flemish or Korean? What privileges or inhibitions arise between lovers with different first languages? No polyglot woman or man, so far as I know, has left a record of her or ehis sexuality within and between languages.
kcurterif
