where's that train go?

cartolleria:

Stella mixed media/canvas 68”X53”, 2008 (via Erik Gonzales)

(via 7knotwind)

aliciasavage:

Lamp Girl on Flickr.

i notice more and more recently that i am all over the place in quite a literal way and i have learned to trust that more and more — i’ve learned to simply accept the idea that my ideas, my thoughts and my actions are really quite eclectic and don’t seem to be easily collected up into one neat little box that might make it easy for me or for others to understand 

as a designer of primarily onscreen experiential communication over the last 15 or so years i am equally all over the place in quite a literal way — the style of my output is quite chameleon as totally catered to the project, campaign, client and so forth — and just the varied and smattered locations i tend to publish to is equally all over the place, i have a tumblr, a posterous, a few wordpress spots and tons and tons of sites and pages everywhere ‘out there’ on the web, and as much as i don’t know what that was initially all about this potentially perceived lack of focus actually works for me in an interesting way — if you Google my name at night in a desperate attempt to potentially better understand who i am or what my work is about you will get ( at this point ) at least 30 pages of results that are truly links to me directly, to my work, to my websites and blogposts and photos and social web extensions, you get my writing about my work and the works of others and you typically don’t get anybody else’s thoughts or complaints or images or anything else about me, not because i’m not well-known or unloved or something, but because i represent myself — i describe who i am best and most often — i am ( currently ) in control of my own image, my own ‘brand’ if you’re some sort of smarmy marketer or something — i write about my own work with thoughtful self-reflection, research and analysis and i control most of what’s being said about me, about what i’ve done over the last 15 years of my life, and about the kind of community i surround myself with — there’s a certain energy i purposefully and consciously gravitate toward and there’s a certain energy i aspire to put out — it doesn’t always work out for the best because its very much centered on living a passionate, emotional life, a very human life guided by the heart and soul and mind and by the people we love and i choose to put that shit up all over the place

fishmcgill:

“Should I Check Email?” by Wendy MacNaughton

cool collage work from MassArt Fashion Alum Maya Luz — more images from her Artist Book ‘VENT’ up on her Tumblr — really amazing work

i still obsess a bit about my thesis from DMI

i mean, i’m definitely done with ‘confounded’ — the book came out better than i could’ve imagined, actually, considering the strangeness that surrounded the late 2010 to early 2011 timeframe out at MassArt, but i need to articulate in some way the fact that my total immersion in the process of reflection, research, writing, defining and refining the document in Autumn 2011 satisfied the requirements of the program, i think, more than they did my nearly ridiculous need to keep moving with the process — to keep following that stream

by the time i wrapped up all the files and sent them out to Blurb for a little onDemand printing i came to the realization that after all the effort and energy i’d put into writing ‘confounded’ i now knew exactly what i should write as a new reflection of my work and processes — i just felt like i now had the concepts behind my work nicely simmered, like i was finally ready to more beautifully articulate my ideas and describe my projects in a more efficient and clean way

but of course i didn’t actually start to rewrite my book or anything, that would be ridiculous, although i am seriously contemplating a second book — just the outtakes or what i’m thinking of calling ‘deletedStreams’ since my working process, as i discovered along the way, seems to follow these subConscious ideaStreams, these little evolutions of ideas that cybernetically loop and weave and grow like little deranged nerves that have strangely slipped out and escaped from the inner recesses to the external world

the idea, of course, would be to create another artist’s book artifact that captures all the media that didn’t quite make it into ‘confounded’ — although largely consisting of the photovisual remains that right now only reside in virtual file format, this book wouldn’t just be a mindDump of random stuffs, no, not at all, but instead it would richly capture some of the behind-the-scenes writings and photos to further show the lush materiality of my experimentations — seastars and tealights; cookies and trisects; wires and oil paint and bottles and fire; pinecones and sensors; glasses and sundry other items all weave together to further build out the story in its fuller context — and the thought, the evolution of the ideas would accompany each series in a less researched but nicely assembled follow-up to ‘cofounded’ 

in some ways i feel like i need to work on this other book to just promote the work we all do in Gunta’s ‘Design as Experience’ course, which is a little difficult to accurately describe to most people outside of the DMI program — and in other ways i feel like the book would help me preserve the random blogPosts strewn out among various web properties that will one day surely go away — these sometimes silly entries out on the webz simultaneously pay homage to the work we do while also parodying the major themes and cadence of this sort of projectSpace … don’t take it the wrong way, its all out of pure respect and love of the program and its rigorous set of methodologies that i totally fabricate utterly fantastic lies that teeter on the thin edge of reality and fantasy in the online outlets, these little brainstormings

{ more to come … }

happy flying elephant