02.20.08
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 10:05 pm by ducky
BTW, one of the things that I love about Green College is that there is always someone around who knows the answer. Over the weekend, I got fixated on a big empty wall at our host’s place, and decided that it needed a huge forgery of a medieval map. But it needed to be BIG to fit the wall.
Medieval maps tend to be about the size of a sheepskin because, well, vellum was made from sheepskins. They just didn’t have six foot sheep.
I started wondering what kind of story you could make up about how it was so big. Elephant parchment? And this got me to wondering how big a piece of leather you could get from an African elephant… so this morning I asked Jake at breakfast. Jake tracks elephants in Kenya, of course. (Don’t you routinely have breakfast with elephant trackers?)
Based on his estimates, I could get a rectangular piece around six feet by twelve feet.
Jake also told me that they make paper out of elephant dung. Elephants, not being ruminants, pass fiber through undigested and in great form for making paper. Even better for my medieval map forgery!
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01.17.08
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 10:08 pm by ducky
A friend of mine from high school, cartoonist Nina Paley, has finished an animated feature film called Sita Sings The Blues. It’s a retelling of a classic Indian myth called the Ramayana, but with a few Western twists.
For those of you who have never met me, I am not exactly voluptuous. Most of my life, “string bean” was accurate. Now I’m kind of a string bean with a pot belly. Sita, on the other hand, is one voluptuous babe, see image at right.
Sita has been accepted by a Berlin film festival, which is good news. However, the Berlinale only accepts films that are on celluloid, and it costs a pile of money to make such a physical artifact. So Nina is soliciting donations/loans in order to make a print.
(Why does the Berlinale require celluloid when DVDs are higher quality? My guess is either that theatres don’t have the equipment to display DVDs or that they use the financial barrier to weed out the entrants who aren’t really serious.)
Nina is in my tribe, so I’m lending her some money. As a perk to people who loan her money, she’s giving them each a credit in the film — you know, the names that scroll by at the end. She said she would let me have whatever credit I wanted. (I presume there are some limits in taste, decency, and common sense. For example, it would be really insensitive of me if I asked for the credit of “Mohammed”, and stupid of her if she complied.)
“Snake wrangler” was one credit idea she came up with. Jim and I had fun thinking up possible credits: “Best Boy”, “Head Gripper”, “Pixel Casting Director”, “Fire Control Technician”, “Assistant to Sita’s Assistant”, and so on.
The credit that we finally came up with? “Sita Body Double”.
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07.18.07
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 1:03 pm by ducky
I ran into a posting that theorized about why we like rounded corners. Basically, it said that we are drawn to organic, natural-looking forms.
I think it’s much simpler than that: we are drawn to things that look expensive, and rounded corners look expensive. Rounded corners are expensive in this day and age. They are harder to design and harder to manufacture.
I remember being struck by the ceilings at the Uffizi — the designs on the ceilings of the corridors were all very regular and precise. To my eyes, they looked kind of boring. Well, back when the Uffizi was built, it was very difficult (i.e. expensive) to make things that were very regular and precise. Machines are really good at that, but people less so.
In the Renaissance, great effort was made to make paintings look extremely realistic. Then, in the late 19th century, impressionism — which was not particularly realistic — was born. I don’t think it is a coincidence that daguerrotypes were invented in the mid-19th century. Extreme realism was no longer particularly difficult/expensive.
(The impressionists also profited greatly from the being able to buy pre-made tubes of paint, instead of being shackled to a studio with a bunch of apprentices running around literally creating the paints. But that’s a different story.)
Bottom line: we are attracted to rounded corners because they look expensive.
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06.20.07
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 9:22 pm by ducky
You are reading my blog, so you probably do enough web surfing to have seen the meme/joke/fad called LOLcats. (Unless you’re my mom. Hi, Mom! In the LOLcat genre, people put captions with a particular patois onto pictures of cats. Note that the language used for the captions is “bad” — incorrect by the standard rules of English — but relatively consistent.)
Why are they funny? Why are they popular? I think LOLcats are the new ethnic joke.
First, the cats are stupid, in much the way that the butts of old ethnic jokes were stupid. Having stupid protagonists makes it easier to set the audience up to form an expectation of “reasonable” behaviour, and then deliver a completely different behaviour. That’s funny.
Consider:
Q: Why did the blonde scale the chain-link fence?
A: To see what was on the other side.
The joke is only funny because “to see what was on the other side” is not reasonable behaviour.
In a similar manner, the LOLcats can be stupid. Consider this one. There are lots of reasonable reasons why the cat’s leg is shaved, yet the cat comes up with a preposterous one.
Second, a lot of the appeal in both jokes comes from shared context. Recognizing shared context feels intimate, and that makes it easier for us to laugh. Consider:
Two black guys are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, when they realize they both have to take a leak. There’s no place else to go, so they just take a whiz off the side of the bridge. While they are taking their leaks, one says to the other, “Dang! That water’s cold!” The other one says, “Yeah, and deep, too!”
This joke depends upon the audience knowing that there is a stereotype of black men having really long penises. Blonde jokes depend upon the stereotype of blondes being stupid; many also depend upon a stereotype of blondes being promiscuous and/or pretty; some also depend on a stereotype of brunettes being intelligent yet unattractive.
A lot of the LOLcats jokes are also only funny if you have shared content. We sometimes share recognition of the recurring form of the speech: “I’m in ur X Y-ing ur Z“, “Do not want“, or “Oh hai“. We sometimes share recognition of the recurring content of invisible objects, buckets, and cheeseburgers.
Why are buckets funny? Only because they are shared context. It doesn’t matter what the running jokes are, only that they are understood by everybody. (Why was JJ Walker’s “Dy-no-mite!” funny in the 1970s? Why was “NOT!” at the end of sentences funny in the late 1980s? Why was “Don’t have a cow!” funny in the 1990s? Because they were shared context that bound us together.)
Ethnic jokes could be really funny, but it is also clear just how damaging they can be. (I’m ashamed to say that when I first met a Polish boy in my youth, I was surprised that he wasn’t stupid.) I am glad that I don’t hear/read nearly as many ethnic jokes as I did thirty years ago.
LOLcats are a perfect substitute for ethnic jokes. The cats won’t get their feelings hurt if your jokes make them look stupid. No cat will mind if a shared understanding develops among us humans that all cats like cheeseburgers or like to play with invisible toys. We can make as much fun of cats as we want, and the jokes will be funny.
And that’s a good thing.
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06.09.07
Posted in Art, Hacking, Random thoughts at 11:44 pm by ducky
I stumbled across this old post by Anil Dash where he mentioned that almost all of his geeky friends have at some point made an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of something really obsessive:
Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of dorkiness is the fact that almost every one of my friends has, at one point or another, made at least one Excel spreadsheet to document some arcane aspect of their lives. The number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss’s mood. There’s no end to the ways one can misuse desktop applications in one’s personal life.
I read that and thought, “Huh. I certainly haven’t done anything like that.”
Um. But then I remembered that I had generated a list of the world’s writing systems, with the likeliest start/stop usage dates, the lat/long of where it was first used, how many people currently use it, who created it (if known), and samples of characters in that system (if I could find them, and I usually could). Oh.
And then my husband pointed out that I also have enumerated various California prisons, their lat/long, the type of facility (state pen, federal pen, county jail, etc.), and how many inmates it has. Oh.
But I can honestly say that I have never used Excel to keep track of these obsessions.
I used gnumeric and oocalc.
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01.08.07
Posted in Art at 9:04 pm by ducky
I made a shirt for Yeshe for Christmas. He’s been working in construction for six months, so…
All the tools are actual size. The nice people at Coe Lumber (3485 W. Broadway, Vancouver - (604) 731-6178) bemusedly allowed me to trace their tools onto vellum, and then I used white transfer paper (like carbon paper, but white) to transfer them to the shirt. Then it was merely a small matter of staying inside the lines.
I had fun at Coe Lumber. I was particularly pleased at finding the humongous adjustable crescent wrench. I bumped into one of the staff as I was taking it over to where my tracing paper was. My eyes were big as I said, “Look what I found! Isn’t it beautiful?!?!” The staff member had this look of, “uh, yeeeeeeeah, sure, lady”, but he laughed, too. 
I wanted to make one for Tristan as well, but I wasn’t sure quite how to show his obsession: girls. I thought of painting silhouettes of girls’ arms embrassing him, with an abundance of kissmarks all over. I wasn’t sure, though, if it would be really really cool, really really embarassing, or both.
Instead, I made a promisorry note for him, with some examples of what kinds of things I could do. He was really taken with the idea of a tshirt that had a photo of a person printed on the chest, with filmstrip tracks (the things that look like ladders, that have holes for the sprockets of the film driver) on the sides of the photo, and cartoon versions of the photo below it.
If we do it right, we should be able to line up the neck of the tshirt with the neck of the person. The top frame would have a real person;. The next frame down would have a photo of a person (maybe Tristan?), and the next frame down would have a cartoon version of a person. Then, on the back, we could have upside-down versions of the same. (Or maybe images of the back of the head?)
That tshirt will be really really cool — assuming I can pull it off — but will also take a ton of work. I’m hoping that I can have it done by next Christmas!
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11.07.06
Posted in Art, Random thoughts at 3:53 pm by ducky
Merilyn Simonds, a cool (and fun!) Canadian author who is living in my dorm, has been hosting “salons”. Every week, about ten or fifteen of us sit around in front of the fire and discuss something.
Last week, Merilyn put forth that people believe fiction more than they believe non-fiction. She was channeling Janet Malcolm, who postulated that fiction is believed more wholeheartedly because a fictional world is the result of one person’s imagination. Malcolm supposes that because no other perspectives are possible except the one we are reading, we either fall for it or we don’t. When we read a nonfiction story, however, we know that there are undoubtedly many other perspectives, hence we suspend only part of our belief.
I was startled, but think that it is true in a sense: people certainly do have a more visceral reaction to stories than to facts — even if the stories are fiction. You can quote statistics about a disease until you are blue in the face, but that doesn’t have the same impact as a story about someone living with that disease.
Politicians know this. They trot out “real people” to convince the public of that the politician’s position is the right one. Companies know that. They make up compelling stories and feed them as advertisements to consumers. Even user interface designers know this: they make up fictional people and describe how they interact with the product.
Why does this work? Why are stories so compelling? I wasn’t sure that I bought Janet Malcolm’s idea; when I get lost in text — fiction or non-fiction — I don’t think I really think about the existence of other points of view. I’m too busy reading.
What made sense to me is that when we hear a story, we have to imagine it in our minds. I am guessing that the imagination of a story doesn’t fundamentally appear to our minds to be all that different from the memory of a story. I surmise that we are wired to believe our own memories over what other people tell us. (This is good! This is what keeps me from sending all my money to Nigeria!)
Well, yesterday, I happened across a Scientific American. It turns out that when you see somebody do an action, the same neurons fire as when you do that action yourself! Not only that, but the same neurons fire when you hear somebody perform an action with a distinctive sound (like ripping paper) as when you rip the paper yourself.
I speculate that when we hear a story of someone performing an action, the same neurons fire as if we did the action ourselves, thus getting inside our head in a very literal way. It wouldn’t be a surprise that stories seem very real to us. It would feel a lot like we were there.
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10.27.06
Posted in Art, Married life at 10:02 pm by ducky
Six-word stories? Here is mine:
I met Lennart’s loser friend. Wow!
(It is a highly personal story.)
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10.15.06
Posted in Art at 10:01 pm by ducky
I am working on the “beta” version of a glyph-covered jacket (The tshirt I did this summer was a side effect; both the shirt and the jacket are lineal descendants of the glyph shirt that I made for my husband a few years ago.)
I’ve been nervous about the Mayan glyph. On both the tshirt and an earlier painting I did, I used the Mayan glyph for fire, which is handsome enough, but I was kind of bored with it. Also, it didn’t really feel representative of Mayan glyphs.
Unfortunately, the glyphs that looked representative also looked hard. Mayan glyphs are very intricate, with lots of relatively thin lines. They are more like drawings than most writing systems.
I had visions of all kinds of ways that I could screw up. I print the design on paper, then use carbon paper to transfer it to the jacket; if there are lumps (i.e. seams) then it gets hard to transfer the design cleanly, so I can’t always see where the lines are. If I don’t have good light and/or my eyes are tired, I can’t always see the lines well even when they are clean. If the paint is too thin, it is hard to keep it between the lines. If the paint is too thick, it spreads unevenly. If I don’t pay close attention, I lose track of what side of the line I’m supposed to paint on. If I’m tired or distracted, I am prone to wavering and/or dropping my paintbrush (aauuugh!). If I am concentrating too hard on glyph A, I sometimes put my fingers in the wet paint of glyph B. If people walk past heavily, or if I get startled, then all bets are off.
Despite being excited about getting the Mayan glyph down (because it does look cool), it was with trepidation that I took my paints down to the Green College common kitchen, where I paint.
And it worked! I did it! It came out beautifully!
(The black smudges are from the carbon paper; it will wash out.)
Now, I know that in the grand scheme of things, this is NOT a big deal. It isn’t going to save any starving children. But it was important to me precisely because it was scary, because I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. It’s like if you do well on an exam or manage to jump from a great height — it might not matter to the rest of the world that you got through it, but it might matter a lot to you. That’s how I feel right now, and boy am I chuffed!
NB: I don’t actually know what the glyph represents. It was in a font made by Klaus Johansen.
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09.21.06
Posted in Art at 10:51 am by ducky
I am working on painting a jacket; I painted several tshirts along the way this summer. Mostly they were just vehicles for me to experiment on, but I gave one to a friend:
The picture above is of the front. It looks slightly odd because the shoulder is flattened so you can see the two glyphs on the top of the shoulder.
Reading left-to-right, top to bottom, the shirt has Mayan, Dulkw’ahke (southwestern Canadian First Nations), Latin, Arabic, Cuneiform (Akkadian, IIRC). At the bottom is a symbol that might mean “sheep” in what might have been the precursor to writing.
On the back, you can see Cyrillic, a tiny little Vai (Liberian) symbol, Telugu or Kannada (Indian scripts), Mongolian, and Chinese.
NB: Updated on 15 Oct 2006, on request, to note the characters. If you are interested in writing systems, I highly recomment omniglot.com and ancientscripts.com.
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