Tribesmen in the Amazon react to images of our world /
strange days /
There is a word that we really like.. it is the word strange and weird. We apply this word to a variety of things. At the same time we occupy our little caves and in these caves we store things. We accumulate useful items and carefully crate them in the corner of our cave. To make space for more things we carefully arrange the things we already have.
Weirdly enough we miss the obvious fact that we are on top of a round sphere hurling through space.
Weirdly enough the question we usually preoccupy ourselves with is - did we ever store enough in our caves? We never seem to be satisfied with the amounts accumulated and always come out to look for more and store more.
The bigger the pile of things the happier we usually are.
It seems to me that, weirdly enough, our religions have been an attempt by perhaps an enlightened source to tell us that, ahem, we shouldn’t really busy ourselves that much with the stuff in the caves. We should perhaps look into building qualities in ourselves that will allow us to work better together and develop for a world beyond that round ball.
Image that it took several billion years of evolution to create ambitious and talented creatures so they can gather things in caves. I doubt that was our purpose, we are incredible problem solvers and abstract thinkers. We now communicate with each other via space. A signal goes up and then down, we managed in a short amount of time to do that.
It is weird that we like our caves with all the stuff in them. That we rarely look into the sky wishing to be there or to do something about it. I look around and i see piles of things, many not even digestible. What is even more weird, between digesting or accumulating more piles, we manage to sneak in a destruction or two. And this happens on a mass scale and is done by seemingly decent people.
Oh, well, well obviously without carefully scheduled destruction we'd soon run out of space wouldn't we? That's why we like to put nice people in charge to encourage both gathering and destruction at the same time. It is a win win situation.
I often have a hard time distinguishing between all the weirds, between the commonplace weird and the really off weird. The fact is the true reality of our situation perched on top of a round ball is more weird than any other actual weird I can come up with.
Messages written during Today London - The Flip Side Performance on Leicester Square in London /
Drawing and Painting /
Working on Automatic Red - Acrylic and Oil on canvas.
the story of the red i have been looking for is a long one - I once set out to find a perfect red and experimented in various reds. the red i liked turned out to be a never drying printers ink red. Six months out it was still wet to the touch. So i ended up photographing the resulting test and making an animation ( Winter Diagrams ) with it. later, after the fact, i found a corresponding fabric red in a store in the garment district in Manhattan, on 38th street. They had the most amazing collection of textiles in an enormous warehouse. i remember getting a roll of this beautiful red silk like fabric and hauling it back to Chelsea. And after came the acrylic paint i found.. a winsor and newton. and after that came vermillion and some cadmiums in oil. It's kinda the reverse of what you'd expect but these are the best kind of stories.
HOW TO FIX IT IN 10 EASY STEPS /
I have identified 10 easy steps that we, together, can fix this country. And number three is…
3. Eliminate the lawn...
Imagine the entirety of this nation gets busy cutting useless weeds for a couple of hours every weekend - we can figure out practical fusion propulsion if the same amount of resources was applied to doing science.
The solution - either plant something useful like fruits or vegetables and take care of them instead, get a robot ( pictured below) or get goats ( the African kind ).
Paints & Pigments & The Sun /
https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM
Follow the link to read more.
"............To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color. The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry.
......."
Ingredients of a Subway Car /
Hands are stirred by the gentle breeze of the Subway. .
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Happy Bright Friday - have your Memory Replaced with cats. /
Have your Memory Replaced with cats. This pic was indeed taken on Union Square so these aren't ordinary cats - they are freedom loving, new yorker, union square cats. Will explain the leashes later.
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Pics from my Memory Replacement performance.
it doesn't take too long before people grab the paints and the brushes. It is a beautiful thing to paint. And what brings people together is doing an entirely odd thing for an entirely odd reason.
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Thank you, London ! And Happy Thanksgiving. /
Thank you, London, and Happy Thanksgiving. The Left and Right Wings of the same Memory Angel. We have the two sides of the Pond, together. Without the human in it it is a bit like some strange animal has left its tattooed skin on the road.
I literally flipped the Memory Replacement NYC piece and had Londoners of all walks of life write me a message.
#today #London was a blast - Thank you, London ! /
But first #letmetakeaselfie 📸@mirenarhee wearing #blankcanvas asking people to draw on her🖍...so obviously I did!#london #lifestyle #wcw pic.twitter.com/AEOoeq98W9
— She and the City (@sheandthecity) November 23, 2016
Today London - The Flip Side ! It was a blast.. also thanks to London Police and the two nice cops in a cruiser on The Mall - Thank you ! /
Ingredients of a Subway Car, pen and ink drawings installation, dimensions variable, 2016 /
Ingredients of a Subway Car, pen and ink drawings installation, dimensions variable, 2016
Ingredients of a subway car at Hudson Yards. I love this station and it is a nice home for animated hands and other objects and villains. .. I like setting up my installation in a porous and transient spaces.. with the station attendants pushing trash cans around it. Too bad my plans for Kings Cross in London din't materialize because I came down with the most unpleasant cold.. and wet. ..
Funny - as in the Inception Bucket the Inception Box and a Canadian shoveling snow /
This is not a random gif - I love Rémi Gaillard and often think he is the odd hybrid between Andy Kaufman, Woody Allen and Salvador Dali in bed with Jackass, Monty Python, South Park and South Jersey.
Michelangelo's David /
Photographed him awhile ago and still marvel at the ability of the italian people to be so talented in so many different arts, from music to painting to sculpture. They are not merely talented, they are magnificent in so many directions.. i sometimes think the Italians were the chosen peoples. Although of course we shouldn't forget that the aesthetic was invented and handed down by the Greeks. It really is difficult to make beautiful things, it is much easier to do nothing or to make half things and half baked artworks, it is much easier to destroy or to simply deflect and pass the time anonymously and with no blame or judgement.
Messages written during my Memory Replacement – Election Day performance on Union Square. The wing of a public opinion airplane shot down over election day on Union Square /
Messages written during my Memory Replacement – Election Day performance on Union Square /
One of the aims of the work is honesty via immediacy, unexpected interaction, friendly confrontation on the street and eliciting the same in people I met. Because I was not protected or tasked by an institution and there was no institutional context to my work - myself, the work and the result were entirely at the mercy of complete and unbridled honesty. .
I surely relied on everyone being at least a bit nonplussed and curious and to have no time to feel self-conscious or deliberate.
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And thirdly ( something imagesurgeon correctly noted ) I was a living sounding board placed on one hand between a guy who was shining shoes and on the other a couple of masked guys who were selling bricks (yeah, the real kind). With the understanding that Union Square has always been a place of gathering and dissent.
via imagesurgeon: . The People have the power! ( if they did but realise it?) Iconoclasm is a way of intelligently re establishing that power. . .
