So what is happening on the southern shores of the worlds largest source of fresh water?
From the NWI Times:
Former Portage Mayor Doug Olson and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Superintendent Costa
This from I think I can do that. [ JB Daniel ]
It’s the first time I noticed that the waves come and go at the same time.
Jackson Park Beach: 01.27.09 2 pm
Jackson Park Beach: 01.27.09 2 pm
Jackson Park Beach: 01.27.09 2 pm
From my car on the way to the galleries.
This is from a $250 million U.S. Army Corp project in East Chicago that I oversaw for a short period of time on behalf of the local community. Those are hundreds of petroleum pipes siting underground at the site of a defunct oil refinery. In an attempt to contain some of the underground contamination from spreading, these men are tasked to cut the pipes out to make room for a slurry wall of clay. The wall will go down below the the water table and tie into clay. Notice the fire extinguisher? - I really don’t think it help in the event they spark any product left in those pipes.
Curated by Nato Thompson from Creative Time
Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism. This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide, and possibly make a new field altogether.
Also at the New Museum on Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 3:00 PM there will be a panel discussion: Experimental Geography Panel Discussion: An Aesthetic Investigation of Space
This sounds like something I would like. I will have to check it out.
Case Studies, Design, Information Graphics, What I am Looking at
Peter Miller introduces me to these animated graphics from Maps of War.
History of Religion:
And the Imperial History of the Middle East:
This is fantastic and worth checking out. Something we could use in East Chicago. Maybe we could have live 24/7 streams to the public access channel.
Since coming to this area, I have wanted to develop a live picture - or Vital Signs - of the health and welfare of East Chicago. I wanted to take into account the social, economic, and environmental conditions, similar to the Quality of Life Councils: Indicators Report
In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.
It is an interactive time-lapse tool to view pollution levels through out the day.
The Gospel Spectrum computational media applied to narratives. using data visualization of the story of Jesus as presented in the Bible.
Bible Diagrams graphically presents the Bible, what fundamentalists believe, and how historians and scholars view the scriptures.
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The Universal Mechanics of Biblical Charting.
Clarence Larkin is a 20th century example of this tradition with his book “Dispensational Truth or God’s Plan and Purpose in the Ages.” You can only imagine what he could do with a powerpoint presentation.
This is a introduction to the genre of universal mechanical charts of the universe in its totality and humanity by extension. It is an extension of the cartographers trade into aspirational realms and belief in a universal mechanism. Today, the fact that such claims on knowledge can be charted in their entirety, is reason enough to excuse them. Yet we have continued this tradition and are charting everything. Think of big bang theories, the of string theory, think of anything that looks to explain everything. Then ask does a chart of everything include itself in the chart?
the tradition of charting how things work goes back thousands of years. The Biblical tradition has many examples.
In my mind, one of the most important example comes from Thomas Hobbes in his book The Leviathan. Titled after the Biblical Leviathan.
This exert from a wikipedia article does a fine job outlining Hobbes’ mechanistic reliance.
In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments - based onsocial contract theories. Much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.
Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This inevitably leads to conflict, a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes), and thus lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (xiii).
To escape this state of war, men in the state of nature accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede their natural rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted as the price of peace. However, he also states that in severe cases of abuse, rebellion is expected. In particular, the doctrine of separation of powers is rejected:[10] the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.
From Financialgraphart.com via Brad Delong.
Although this graph has been swirling around the internet and it is well conceived, it is very difficult to view online.
The graph above tracks the Dow Jones. There is nothing unusual about that. We have become accustomed to equating the health of our economy with this index. But is a good indicator? Matt Igelesias has second thoughts.
Not only is it obviously stupid for political commentators to be assessing the quality of economic policy by tracking the ups-and-downs of the stock market but the fact that the commentators who want to do this keep wanting to specifically use the Dow Jones Industrial Average just highlights their ignorance. Not only is there no particular significance to the stock market as such, but there’s no particular significance to this index. It just happens to be the thing that cable networks have chosen to highlight most prominently in their on-screen data. But it’s only 30 companies! Admittedly, they’re large and widely held companies.
But why not use the S&P 500? Or the Wilshire 5000?
To be clear, that wouldn’t make this idea any less dumb on the merits. But if we’re going to have stock-based punditry then it could at least be informed stock-based punditry. Back in the real world, the key issues are the trajectory of employment and income. Right now, they’re heading down. The hope is for that trend to turn around. First, employment starts trending up. Then incomes start treading up. And with incomes and employment moving upward, asset prices increase. But to expect the White House to pull a stock boom out of its ass in the midst of falling employment doesn’t even begin to make sense.
I particularly like the “stock-based punditry” line. Doesn’t wall street refer to Maria Bartiromo as a money bunny? I wonder, with the the recession, Is Maria Bartiromo and her husband Jonathan Stienberg still worth >$1 billion?
This from Information Aesthetics
US Trade Deficit [brightpointinc.com] is an interactive graph that depicts the U.S. annual trade surplus/deficit information for each of the top 10 countries for each category (surplus/deficit).
Cool Infographics does some investigating and points me in a cool direction - the European Space Agency.
Nice graphical animation depicting how we have cluttered the space around earth in the last 50 years. To often we speak of space debris antidotally.
Strategy of brinksmanship overtakes free-market ideologues in the Republican party resulting in a massive anti-intellectual backlash. In the stimulus debate republicans relegated themselves to opposing the President at the expense of the health and welfare of the nation. With these tactics there is no way to policy. Just saying….
Boehner, House Republican Leaders Call for Federal Spending Freeze to Address Growing Budget Deficit
Born: July 15, 1606, Leiden, Netherlands
1631: Moves to Amsterdam
1634: Marries Saskia
Children:
1642: Saskia Dies
1642: Begins relationship with Geertje Dircks
1647: Hendrickje Stoffels joins household as maidservant
1650: Rembrandt has Dircks detained in the Gouda house of correction
1654: Hendrickje Stoffels gives birth to Cornelia
1662: Hendrickje Stoffels dies
1664: The painter Christiaen Dusart is appointed guardian of Cornelia van Rijn
1668: Rembrandt moves in with Cornelia
Dies: Oct. 4, 1669, Amsterdam
Why Rembrandt? Didn’t he lose all relevance by the end of the 1990’s? - Yes but…
<<<tangent>non-sequitur>childish garble>I recently spent a week in community organizing and leadership training. The program was set up in the usual Saul Alinsky tradition (negotiating self-interested power). At the end of the first day everyone was asked to name a hero or mentor. I really did not mean to answer incorrectly - when it was my turn I named Rembrandt because he was one of my first inspirations when I was a teen. They just thought I was playing with them. They expectied something like Martin Luther King, a politician or union leader, but not an artist. I felt a bit obligated to attempt to defended my choice by saying that I choose Rembrandt because he changed the western worlds way of seeing, and if you change the way people see, you change a culture of behavior. It didn’t go over well. They were serious and the discussion was about power v power and I chose Rembrandt. <<</tangent>/non-sequitur>childish garble>
Anyhow, Rembrandt opened and closed an era. You might even say he closed the market on the individual. And the marks he left on his late canvases opened new eras for others to explore. His pursuit of a persons persona was engulfed in his materials and his process. Carravagio may have conveyed the sense of “touch” through the image, but Rembrandt conveyed it through the paint.
Despite his official portraits of prominent figures and guild work which I have no affinity for, or his allegorical work which I think are atrocious, his self-portraits and the work he did of those he had an intimate relationship (Saskia, Hendrickje, and Titus) are another thing altogether.
When looking at the arc of Rembrandt’s career you can see how he moved with extraordinary confidence from rendering a persons image and likeness with amazing luminosity, to rendering marks, left by his touch, as the carrier of identity in his later work. In the arc of the progressive tradition Rembrandt changed where we are likely to find the “first principle” expressed. Prior to Rembrandt, Martin Luther advanced the progressive interest by challenging the papacy’s power to broker the relationship between an individual and God (the first principle). Martin Luther empowered individuals to negotiate their own relationship to the first principle. This empowerment of the individual, along with economic and technological forces, gave rise of a merchant class in the Netherlands. Rembrandt began his career during this rise and produced a body of work focused on sublimating the image and likeness of those individuals. But by the end of his career Rembrandt had decouple that identity from the image and placed it in his touch. Now the mark - the touch of the artist, was the carrier of the first principle.
Walking Directions from Leiden to Amsterdam via google maps.
Unfortunately, we had a disaster at the house. During a cold winter while we were renovating, I stored my books and work in a room where a radiator eventually burst. It took a few days before I noticed the frozen steam on the windows. The steam destroyed many of the drawings. What I could rescue I did. I had a few behind glass that I need to photograph.
The drawings are very light to begin with, still I need to do better than point-and-shoot.
The Incredulity of Thomas :: 1601
Caravaggio fascinated me throughout my student years. Not only for his heightened representation and pushing the forms out into the viewers personal space, but also the way he pushed a censored spirit into that space. Despite the grandeur of light and form, his works are very intimate. The image of Thomas poking around in the wound of Jesus reveals, only to Thomas’ touch, some sort of mystery beneath the fold of Jesus’ skin. This image has always been a startling image for me. The encounter between Jesus and Thomas is a physical encounter. Thomas seems almost like a blind man focused on the tactile touch at the end of his finger along with Jesus’ restraining grip around his wrist. Thomas is orientated to be from the viewers space. He is our entry into the painting. By probing jesus’ wound he is modeling how we are to poke into the painting - we doubters.
It’s all visual, but I am left with a tremendous tactile sensation on the tip of my index finger.
And it is very sexual. From the mid 1980’s to the mid 1990’s there were many artist exploring this very orientation of the roles of the sexes.
I just realized we haven’t heard much about Caravagio lately.
It was a strong influence on the blue draped elephant (the top image) in the previous post.
Untitled :: Pastel :: 1983 :: 32" x 48"
I have been going through some old work that recently came back in my possession when my parents moved. Many pieces have since disappeared which were never documented. When I find more I will post them. This series is from 1983 - 84. Some are pastels and others oil on canvas.
I spent about two years doing these very shallow spaced still-lives using my mothers collection of elephants to make my way through the christian tradition in art. I started them when on a leave from college, after my second year at Kansas University. there is something to be said about doing work in your home surroundings with access to all the stuff of your surrounding life, as opposed to being away. Then again there is something to be said about being away from all that stuff. Just saying…
For me their is a clinical and an immediacy in locality in these paintings.
I have always liked the “study” aspect of still-lives. It is an orientation to my work that I have carried with me throughout my career. Everything I do is a studied observation.
