Rafael GomezBarros and the ANT FRAMES

When I was a graduate student, ants framed many of my household decisions, responding so quickly and vigorously to my summoning (the first time unintentionally) them with sticky rewards of my messy handling of watermelon on the table and the kitchen floor. Not all ants are sweet monsters, of course, but the sweet spill attracted those that are. Not that other than a sweet mess, there were no other food scraps, including coffee stains that were actually a design improvement for the vinyl flooring.

I admit to fear when I saw their thick invasion that could extend to me if I had any parts as sweet. Though I love ants, and wrote in that loving state, a poem called Ant Farm, I still kill ads that gather around my kitchen sink, perhaps attracted to the grapefruit dishwashing liquid. I used to dream about being eaten by a group of Army Ants, my body is a forest somewhere, but definitely not buried. Perhaps stretched out on a wall of one of Rafael Gomez-Barros's fabulous depictions. Somewhere that ants (or other insects could definitely get me). I am aware that the ground under my feet has been burial location for many living things now nameless. Everything can have a chance to be food --that's great and so useful to the eaters!

Please Take a look at this in one of my other blogs.

REFRAMING ESTABLISHED and/or TRUSTED PERCEPTUAL FRAMES

IT JUST MAKES SENSE TO TRUST SOME FRAMING SYSTEMS even without absolute certainty; go ahead and trust that the sky is above although that above can be a little bit tricky, a little bit peculiar, as it is an above that applies all around our spherical planet —wherever we are, the sky is in a location that may be called above.

We are immersed in the atmosphere that rings the planet (as shown in this image from Nasa). In this continuous curve, the sky is always above every location. This status of sphere and sky can tell us something about space and some of what it means to inhabit the ups and downs of space.

I am very interested in a common depiction of a relationship between earth (ground) and sky in drawings of children. There is often a fascinating space in which there is nothing between them, No direct tether between the earth and its atmosphere. In the drawing from Doodle Boat by a 10-year-old boy from Panama, I'm fascinated by the short arc of a sky, like a blue ribbon, a prize —I guess I do consider the atmosphere a form of prize, a gift. And the arc is right, a piece of atmospheric ring is captured, an independent ring that is a part of the community rather than something that embraces the whole surface of the earth. I did draw trees that linked both sky and earth, but admittedly, these were very strange trees, much taller than any terrestrial trees now growing. Of course living trees and prehistoric trees both routinely touch sky and earth with branches and roots. There is no gap between the atmospheric skirt and the earth (land and water) that the hem of atmospheric skirt touches. Indeed; branches may be understood as a root system feeding from atmosphere just as a root system takes food from dirt. The bifurcating system of branches resembles the bifurcating bronchial subsystem of the human respiratory system (as shown in the image from Bailey Bio), and performs a related function, delivering oxygen into the atmosphere whereas our breathing delivers CO₂. A bifurcating pattern repeats in a leaf's signature veins (as shown here in a hydrangea leaf from Webster's online dictionary, illustrating an anastomosis: a network of streams that both branch out and reconnect, such as blood vessels or leaf veins, a feather, such as the one pictured here found by a patio grill. In the palm of the hand that picked up the feather is a forking pattern that reveals details about my life when the forking leads to the enterprise of fortune tellers and/or to various forms of traditional medicine. Though I may have felt something electrical stimulating never in my hand when holding hands with lovers, the lines did not glow; I lack some of the bioluminescence of fireflies and deep sea fishes, but the feeling did seem to bifurcate or radiate; to move in forks of passion.

With a feather, we fly into an opportunity to reframe an understanding of birds and dinosaurs, yielding when constructed with researchers' more informed understanding, a more domesticated T-rex, one that was feathered, a nesting ancestor of chickens who protected the eggs. Perhaps it's time for a remake of Jurassic Park, one in which T-rex might cluck. Watch an excerpt below, and below that excerpt, you can watch another excerpt (from Dinosaurs: Return to Life? a Science Channel [where I saw it] documentary) in which researchers successfully activate in a chicken embryo deeply embedded genetic memory of a distant past as a dinosaur. At particular stages in embryonic development, genetic information that would produce a dinosaur tail and dinosaur teeth are switched off, allowing the chicken to develop without dinosaur attributes that evolution has suppressed, but has not erased so that the chicken remains connected to dinosaur ancestry. Perhaps there is even more evolutionary marking than anyone can demonstrate at this moment, or that, in some configuration of ethics, should not be explored, especially regarding possible genetic memory in human embryos.


(Click here to watch the entire documentary)


FreeVideoCoding.com

This link takes you to Veoh where you may watch the entire documentary
—by the way, iPhone, iPod, iPad users; it's a link to a flash video

I wave my hands and bat about the air, so it's not as if I play no sports at all. I open a path in air, parting a sea of it, as I walk, disturbing molecules, ripping the air that closes around me —I like think of the temporary displacement as a form of fizzing in a little local frenzy of temporary disturbance. Is this a useful frame of an interaction with air beyond breathing? Is it practical? Useless or impractical for others framing what I've framed, it remains, for now, a personalization of what happened between me and some molecules that were mine to displace in the displacement. Something may happen to cause me to reconfigure what I've said, no matter how pleasing the poetry of it (to me). I can picture this displacement as fizz all around me, even under my feet as each foot lifts in a walk through displacement. I would think that fizz might offer an interesting model for a reframing of halo, one more dynamic, one that could approximate externally a configuration of what happens internally when an idea buzzes electrically in the mind, as if made of a swarm of the tiniest fireflies. This is a partial accuracy of how something was experienced, not of how something was observed, though metaphor may be used to help enhance the accuracy of observation, to help someone see what is being described or explained in a more particular way, closer to what the metaphor attempts to depict, the design of the metaphor meant to frame information in a way that excludes other configurations while the metaphor is being navigated. Sometimes facts and numbers alone do not create a picture that might be filed in the mind in a more complex manner, reframing a concept as a landscape or environment to inhabit and/or experience sensually. Metaphor [re]frames through what may be understood as attempts to clarify what is being experienced, extending aspects of something already understood to include, transforming both itself and what is being embraced, something momentarily outside of either understanding or, in its apparent newness, a way to reference it other than by linking it to similarities which can provide some confidence to continue.

I hope to find at least a smidgen of likeness on some scale for some duration of time everywhere —here a fork, there a fork, everywhere a forking frame. Smidgen after smidgen with their invitation to connect their dots into ever lengthening tines (the image of dots of stars connected into perceptual [only] configurations of astrological fortune and misfortune, big and little dippers emptying and filling with dreams and wishes, patterns we find again and again, hoping for a stability seldom pinned on more variable and more reachable clouds; these dots of stars are from physics.csbsju.edu)=)

SHADOW FRAMING: a collaborative installation

We've just mapped our interacting shadows with chalk frames on the sidewalks of Bonisteel outside the Art & Architecture Building. Our framing projects were also represented on the sidewalk with chalk frames interacting with chalk outlines of branch shadows. Obstructions to light, objects that block light, objects that block light that are opaque, are not conduits through which light passes, and so forth, can cast shadows, flat silhouettes of the light-stopping object system. Shadows are outcomes of interactions involving opaque objects and light. The shadow seen is the two-dimensional of obstruction, the flat architecture of blockage.

These chalk frames of shadows mark where shadows were. Where light was blocked.

They also mark time as shadow length changes throughout the day; every moment has its own set of shadows. The same shadow is not moving; instead, the shadow clock is moving, each moment projecting its own time signature with a silhouette wherever an object blocks the projection.

We produced chalk memories of interactions with light.

Short-lived chalk memories prepared to fade in a number of interactions with shoes, bicycle tires, rain, perhaps even some late March and/or early April snow. A fading away or washing away eventually to nothing? to forms of residue so diluted, the residue will be like nothing, yet not quite nothing in an infinite dissipation or will there ultimately be absolute erasure? no lasting remnant (on even the tiniest scale), no successful modification of even the most insignificant component of a molecule, an atom, a subatomic particle? Did not chalk dust become part of air, will not something of that dust settle somewhere that won't be exactly where the chalk dust was launched? (an idea of it obviously is landing in my brain, chalk dust spores that perhaps will be fertilized by something in my mind, then will sprout, grow, drive me into chalk frenzy and [further] obsession)

—the bonding of chalk and sidewalk has been superficial: the bottom surface of the chalk line in direct contact with the top surface of concrete, the line perhaps thicker when there's imperfection in the concrete, little dips and cracks that the chalk fills. Occasionally, chalk misses concrete altogether as the bottom surface of the chalk line makes direct contact with a leaf or other debris whose bottom surface is in contact with the top uneven surface of concrete. There is no unassisted observable evidence that chalk penetrates the surfaces on which mark-making occurs. There is discoloration of the chalk as it's used; something of the surface being marked alters the color; some particles evidently adhere to the stick of chalk. The chalk visibly dwindles. It shrinks as it's used. Each mark is subtracted from the stick of chalk. Not all of the chalk reduction goes to mark-making on uneven concrete surfaces; some of the chalk marks the fingers holding it in the act of mark-making on uneven concrete surfaces on Bonisteel. And it appears that something of Bonisteel is transferred to the chalk; the tip becomes sooty-looking in the exchange, but the sidewalk does not seem to dwindle.

We've made temporary documentation only. Left on Bonisteels's sidewalk for a few days was acknowledgment of purpose other than a lasting mark. As if we're being respectful of other marking that will happen, is happening behind me, right outside six connected windows looking out on Bonisteel.

With a lamppost near the chalk frames of the shadows of five female artists, I'm attempting documentation of a shadow array, progression of the shadow projection over time, using five colors of chalk to mark shadow progression time lines; four such time lines represent some of the progression of the lamppost shadow during forty-five minutes of chalk mapping.

I further framed what we accomplished with a couple of geotagging apps on my phone, while delighting in the way shadows of branches filled the outlines of our shadows (five female artists) with a capillary system.

Our efforts today may not qualify us for the pavement art competition, pictured here, on Bold street in Liverpool, but we join others in finding pleasure, purpose, and necessity in temporary mark making, perhaps some of which was occurring elsewhere as we made chalk marks here on Bonisteel.

While we have no proof of art, we do have proof of having made chalk marks that approximated locations of shadows, approximated because the outlines drawn deviated in varying degrees from tracing the outlines of the shadows exactly. The shadow tracing was imprecise yet provided the only temporary documentation of silhouette shape and size at a particular time on a particular day.



The shadow collection mentioned here is no longer available for visitation on the Bonisteel sidewalk. Installed on a Monday, updated on the following Tuesday and Wednesday, gone during the transition from Friday twilight to Monday daybreak, erased by rain. I'd hoped to capture this erasure on film, but I was not present. The shadow marking project will continue, with black chalk, at least until I am able to capture erasure by rain. I also plan some moonlit capture and moonlit marking.

In the recent past I've captured shadows resulting from obstructions of interactions of moonlight and of artificial light from other lampposts on Bonisteel, across the street from my current lamppost preference: forking silhouettes of Duderstadt Center trees, as shown on the left. Though at that time, I felt compelled to capture, I was not then primed to mark and map beyond marking and mapping the image into multiple systems of memory: an SD card, an external hard drive that warehouses 407GB of images I've captured, and my limited forked mind.



Ellis G is a Brooklyn-based street artist specializing in drawing shadows. In the following video, he discusses process and permits a glimpse into his practice:




Our shadow project collaboration with time certainly is an experiment, but an experiment of mostly, it must seem, an aesthetic nature though the project offers commentary on brevity and acknowledges that humanity is an obstruction to light: we cast dark shadows. We block illumination. Ellis G also is a chalk artist whose work, like ours, is on the furthest fringe of social intervention at best. Perhaps in some almost incidental way (at least at first), our tracing impermanent shadows calls to attention the power required to create permanent shadows, situations where the source of the shadow perishes, but the shadow, like those above from pegasus.phys.saga, formed under tremendous and unusual circumstances persists, burned into the host of the shadow, for instance, during atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These shadows do not mark passage of time, but lock into one moment, extends that moment where light, heat are of such magnitude to burn a silhouette into surfaces in a three-dimensional photographic album of nuclear disaster and nuclear power when the power of a sun comes close enough to embrace us, life depends on thermonuclear star engines at just the right distance, to warm and illuminate, without burning.

TED Talks

I thought this video was interesting and related to what Professor Thylias and I were talking about the other week. It lets me question what the boundaries are of human curiousness and how do we frame these new types of beings being created.

UMMA explorations & project info

After exploring the UMMA, I came out of the museum realizing the many frames of presentation I was in under while looking at the art work. Visually, the architectural framing of the building and the frames of its interior contribute a lot to the influence of the artwork for the viewers. For example, the newer section is surrounded by glassy walls and quite modern-looking architecture that peppered in, at least to me, a contemporary feeling towards the presented art even if they're not supposed to be contemporary art. Inside the building, the walls were plain & blank and didn't try to communicate too much to the viewers, as if to block an interaction between the actual interior space and the art objects. The museum tried to give a respectable section of space frame for every work because I felt like they believed that each art and idea is uniquely their own and should not blend together with any other object in and at the museum, and the only framing and grouping the museum allows for the art pieces are the different collection sections they're placed under. It's under this kind of notion of respecting something and its space that art museum goers tend to be quiet and silent.

For my project, I'm interested in how garments frame the body and what kind of impression they leave for an individual. I'm going to find a old-fashioned garment or a very specific event garment (such as a wedding dress) and alter it using only the materials provided by the garment into something that tells a completely different impression or culture from its original form. I plan to find a way to use every piece of material on the original garment to create the new form.

UMMA, hidden patterns

I was happy that my photos fit right in line with what we talked about last class. Art museums really should have other ways of organizing pieces. Personally, I try to organize things in my mind in other ways automatically. In this case, I was drawn to work with zig zag patterns. What if a museum organized the work by pattern? Or color? Please excuse the pixelated quality of the pictures. I had to photograph them with my phone, and then take pictures of those with a point and shoot...Enjoy!

Eliana

The video contains pieces of what I have been filming throughout the semester. My purpose is to capture (frame) certain objects, people, and whatever I feel like! Originally I wanted to frame innocence and reality, by filming random things and people I come in contact with. When you watch a movie, usually you have an idea of what you will be watching, and the plot. I think it is more interesting when you have no idea what you are watching, but can create a scenario of your own instead. I'm not sure that this is very conceptual yet, but i've changed my idea many times.

I may change my focus to what we discussed in class on Monday. I was very interested in how artwork can be framed differently, and "taking it off the walls."

Apparently the video is too large to upload or something....

I will just show it tomorrow in class!!!!