trivial pursuit
Found by Lisa: rhopography – drawing the trivial. What a wonderful word, and how wonderful that someone should have thought it worthwhile to create. Joachim Froese has created some beautiful silver gelatin prints of his still life studies of trivial objects.
Far more moving, however, is his 29 metre long (yes, 29 metres) portrait of his mother, a set of 93 images of his mother’s books, photographed while she was dying of cancer. Touchingly, the final frame contains her glasses.
portfolio
I’ve been tweaking the design of my online portfolio - you can see the prototype so far. The thumbnails need to be created specifically for that size, as they’re currently being squeezed down on the fly, but it’s getting there.
It’s valid XHTML 1.0 Strict code and CSS level 2.1. The site is designed for use by prospective employers, so I’m assuming that they have screen resolutions of at least 1024 by 768, and that they understand what’s meant by ‘flash’ and ‘html/css’.
Once I’ve finished tweaking, I will create some more sites to include in it.
waste not
I’ve been thinking about creating something based directly on my recent illness. For a couple of months I had to inject myself four times a day, and until recently I was drinking four or five nutritional drinks every day and feeding myself overnight by pump through a nasal tube. For hygiene, I had to use a fresh set of everything each time, so it generated a lot of rubbish to be thrown away, such as empty syringes, needle caps, tubes, packaging, straws and bottles.
I can’t remember quite why, but I decided to collect some of the smaller, brightly coloured plastic pieces from this rubbish. I must have had a vague idea that I could do something interesting with it. This has built up into quite a pile now, so I’ve started to think about how I could use it.
The image above shows just some of the bits I’ve accumulated. My first idea was a sculpture – arrange the pieces into knobbly projections from a sphere, as though they were greatly magnified organisms or chemicals. The title was going to be ‘For Professional Administration Only’, which is the instruction on the prescribed injections I was giving myself, and I’m certainly not a ‘healthcare’ professional.
I may still create something along those lines, but I suspect that if I do, it will lie around for a long time and eventually get thrown out. Instead, or perhaps merely before that, I’ve started to think about how I could photograph the pieces. I don’t want merely to concentrate on the number of pieces, firstly because I haven’t collected every single one, so there’s nothing significant about the precise number and secondly because I’ve only had to do these things for a few months, whereas some people, for example those with diabetes, have to inject themselves every day for the rest of their lives.
I suspect that I will arrange the pieces to emphasise the repetitive patterns, use a telephoto lens to flatten the image, and use selective focus to imply infinite repetition. That’s all pretty obvious, so I need to make sure I try other ways of looking at them as well.
first task
In the words of Gordon Ramsey, “blog styling - done!”.
Ticking completed tasks off a to-do list is so satisfying. I enjoyed tinkering with the styles - I used CSSEdit from MacRabbit, where you can override the style sheet of any web page, amend it and preview the changes instantly. This means you can keep tinkering until happy without repeatedly having to upload a revised style sheet, thus revealing the changes mid-tinker to anyone visiting the site. CSSEdit even identifies which styles apply to which elements of the page. Brilliant!
The only thing it can’t do, obviously, is alter the graphics used as background images. I did that in Fireworks.
are you getting on the bus?
Perhaps yesterday’s post about new activities and new ways of working was a bit of a tease, hinting without revealing. What did I mean by those provocative phrases?
Being more disciplined in my use of time, for a start. It’s been all too easy to fritter it away, with little to show for my efforts. It would help if I concentrated on one, or possibly two, activities at a time, and make some real progress with them.
I need to feel I’m achieving things in two areas: personal creativity and preparations in case my contract isn’t renewed. To those ends, I’m going to concentrate initially, and respectively, on photographing some plastic bits and pieces (more will be revealed in a future post) and on reworking the style of this blog as a practice run for some more ambitious website styling. After that, I’ll start revamping my portfolio website.
(For those who don’t understand the title of today’s post - which will be just about everyone - the bus was a metaphor used by a previous Chief Executive of the local authority I work for, in a particularly hectoring style, of encouraging people to join in his attempts to improve the organisation. I said he was ‘previous’ - he has, of course, moved on to a new job elsewhere, as they all do, despite protestations at the time of commitment to the task.)
don’t look back in anger
I’ve started writing this blog post several times. Each time I end up writing a lengthy description of my year, and that’s not what I want to post, although it’s been helpful to remember some of the details that aren’t relevant when I summarise the development of my illness for various professionals.
If anything represents 2008 for me, it’s ‘Mercy’ by Duffy. It seemed to be on the radio every day throughout February, March and April, and again every night as I lay awake through the small hours. It was playing in supermarkets in May and June when Lisa took me on unofficial expeditions to escape from the ward, and the album was advertised on television when I was at home during August and September. I heard it less frequently during the autumn, but it was on the radio again yesterday evening as Duffy performed in a live concert, a coda for her year and mine. I don’t hate the track, but I will forever associate it with illness and sleepless nights.
Perhaps the oddest thing about 2008 is not being at work. I’ve been off sick since the start of February, so one of the biggest elements of normal life has been missing for almost the entire year. The return to work will be strange for all sorts of reasons, and the current doubt about funding to renew my contract at the end of March is adding to the strangeness.
I generally make a point of not making New Year resolutions, but this year it’s important to make a clear break from last year. I’m not completely well yet, but I’m definitely recovering, and I need to escape from the ways of illness. New activities and new ways of operating will help with that.
looking at data
I’ve come across some unusual examples of employing Processing to portray data in visually interesting ways.
The overall approach is called ‘visualization’, a horrible word, but the technique is useful and can achieve beautiful results. Ben Fry, one of the people who created the Processing language, has written a book called ‘Visualizing Data‘. Lee Byron has used Processing to visualize patterns of his music listening over time, and explains how he achieved it. Steven Bulhoes used Processing to create a 3D representation of Facebook, as did cannasugar.
It’s not visualization of data, but Jack Kern used Processing to control the Christmas lights on his house.
Back to visualization, though not using Processing: Staphanie Posavec has analysed Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and created visual representations of literary technique.
learning processing
Create Digital Motion suggests that 2009 might be the year that you learn Processing. Sounds good to me - I’ve already left a comment suggesting that they tackle the rotation that I’ve been struggling to get my head round.
In the meantime, you could follow the idea of learning by tinkering with existing code and try breaking Breakout into art. Attempts by non-programmers show that lack of familiarity with the language isn’t a restriction - some of the mods they created are amazing.
If you want to, you can download the mods from the same page as the original game code to find out how they achieved those effects. The only problem is that all of the variable names are in Spanish, so it’s harder to follow the code.
Here are screenshots of my first attempts:
generative art
I’m still looking around for examples of generative art. Zenbullets has tried to answer the question, “What is generative art?”, and is creating one piece each week as part of his abandoned art project.
the remains of the day
Of course, when I say I’m still working on ‘Office Hours’, what I mean is that I’m still thinking about it and making notes on how it might fit together. I haven’t started writing any code for it, and certainly won’t for a while yet. I want to work it out as much as possible first, so I can then organise the code and not have to go back and add extra sections or variables.
That’s the plan, anyway. I’m sure there will have to be some amendment, but I’d like to keep it to a minimum.
In the meantime, I’m still trying to be open to other types of creative impulse. Last night, down at the allotments, as Lisa and I stood listening to Pete the Chickens’ tale of Christmas flu, I saw an interesting shot: a silhouetted skyline of chimney pots and sloping roofs lit from behind by the remaining pale light of the setting sun. Above, the sky ranged quickly from blue into black. It’s a familiar sight, but still poignant, and (to me) always suggests ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro.
In a photograph, the skyline, as the area of highest contrast, would be arranged at the bottom of the image, then nothing but smoothly changing tone filling the rest of the shot. It could have been a vector illustration:
