muppet in a cage

The only two things that can slay the horrors of the 40-hour work week are:

1. nothing

ste-stencil

I used template from an erotica cut-out that I liked just for the pose (and the confidence, duh):

 

Then I found a headshot of Elmo and stuck it on top of the body. :)

I have muppet qualities. I'm goofy. But I'm also a woman and I'm powerful and have a great mean mug...so beware.

I wanted to paste this all over SoHo, but I think that's vandalism right?

adjust your tracking

Adjust Your Tracking (2013) is a documentary about people obsessed with collecting VHS tapes. We have an extra room in house full of tapes...some are worth between $50-$100. The last tape I bought was a Christmas gift: Michael Jackson's Making of Thriller. It was a huge part of my childhood; I remember being absolutely terrified of the music video, to the point that I thought the tape it was recorded on was possessed. A possessed DVD is not as threatening as an analog anomaly, right?

Nostalgia sells.

holly herndon, boards of canada and sun kil moon

Sun Kil Moon - Garden of Lavender

I see the big orange tabby cat
Getting warm on the cover of the laptop
He turns over on his back
Looking for a belly rub
I see the deer trap
And the snow on the end of the path
That leads into my backyard
I hear the sound of my girlfriend's car
Coming up the driveway and it fills my heart
With joy
Though I know it'll all end someday

Sun Kil Moon combines melody with casual stream-of-consciousness rambles and deeply personal anecdotes to make music that celebrates the mundane. His openness reminds me of how social media has transformed our modes of communication (and art.) We share openly, often without thought. He's the David Foster Wallace of folk.  

I love Boards of Canada because their songs always strike a chord. Often, I feel like an alien visiting earth, stranded and alone. Their music sounds like a field recording an alien may create if it visited this planet. A capsule of what it means to be human - artificial, but still an embodiment. Music of the future and now.

My boyfriend introduced me to Holly Herndon. She's a doctoral student at Stanford who studies composition. Her music is out of this world, and incredibly forward-facing. Her relationship with technology is both conflicted yet dependent, and it's reflected beautifully in her latest album Platform. Platform was the first album to include a track (Lonely at the Top) intended to trigger Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). 

a little faith

Takashi Ito is a Japanese experimental filmmaker. A quote by the man himself:

  "Film is capable of presenting unrealistic world as a vivid reality and creating a strange space peculiar to the media. My major intention is to change the ordinary every day life scenes and draw the audience (myself) into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of films." - (Takashi Ito, in Image Forum, Oct. 1984)

I think this quote represents how even the mundane has a fantastical potential, all thanks to technology. Film as a medium can serve as a literal gateway to unexplored worlds...or it can make ours a little bit more interesting. Depends on your perspective.

A music video directed by David Dean Burkhart, using Andy Stott's "Faith in Strangers" and clips from Ito's Grim, Ghost and Hunger captures his unique vision in mystical ways...haven't been this enchanted in awhile.

vienesse actionism, fluxus, and John Duncan

My boyfriend has a very expensive (and rare) text about Viennese Actionism that currently serves as our coffee table book. When I think of Vienna, I think of royalty and delicate pastries. Before informing myself of the movement, I thought nothing of what it actually entails.

The four artists who made up the core of the movement — Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler — witnessed the ravages of World War II and its aftermath, though only one of them, Muehl, was old enough to fight, entering the Wehrmacht in 1943 at the age of 18.

The movement faced the horrors of fascism and war head on, with an unapologetic brutality. By involving every taboo and bodily fluid imaginable, the artists used violence to awaken a largely complacent (and manipulated) society.

In a 2010 interview with Jonas Vogt for the online magazine, VICE, Nitsch, who continued to stage performances of his Orgien Mysterien Theater (Orgies Mysteries Theater) into the late 1990s, states that his intention was “to deal with immediate color, real flesh, real entrails, the human body. In addition, my work is also more or less a psychoanalytic realization of subconscious associations. I am a great admirer of Freud and Jung. Myths of all times play an important role in my work.”

As a person very interested in the limitations and vast potential of the human body (I have Yukio Mishima and Kafka to thank), the movement interested me the most.  Its embrace of the grotesque is beautiful.

Noise artist John Duncan is largely influenced by the principles and qualities of the movement:

http://www.tokafi.com/15questions/15-questions-to-john-duncan/

Fluxus was a movement based in the 1960s influenced largely by John Cage, who idealized the process behind making art. To Cage, the process of creating was paramount to anything else. Another main influence was Marcel Duchamp, of toilet-in-a-museum fame. It's all about potential. Yet with potential, you let yourself be vulnerable to the flame. See Yoko Ono's Cut Piece:

bored at the office job, made a grid.

Thanks to some unused office supplies, I was able to finish my grid project with relative ease. I ordered too many paper clips, binder clips, all the clips...I also had an excess of sticky pads, so I used that as a base to attach all this metal and plastic. I didn't want to use food or anything too messy, and as a plus, this little...hot mess still serves a practical use. Just dissemble and you're set.

flip it good

I've always drew. It just made sense; a lot of people joked that I had a sketchbook and pencil in hand when I came out of the womb.

I stopped when I entered college (the first time) due to depression. That sucked.

But I've picked it up, slowly, and it still brings me happiness...unfortunately, this time it also comes with a great deal of frustration.

Here's my flipbook. I wanted to do something simple; I always go way beyond my means when it comes to illustrative projects. I felt like ripping up the book several times during my process, and there's a lot of measly scribbles in there. Yikes.

I plan to redo this by the end of the semester.

ALL I POST ARE MUSIC VIDEOS