Graffiti pieces focus on form, colour, technique; it is art, it is shape and message. The scribbles or stencilwork uses words and rarely seems to bother with the finer parts of typography or texture. It is interesting how something scribbled on a wall somewhere gets photographed and acquires yet another level of texture and meaning, in that it is yet again removed from context.

I suspect that a good deal of the ones I like the best are not written by people with deep philosophical or poetic insight (though it seems that way), but possibly by dopeheads or drunks with a pen. I will never know, and the statement can mean whatever I want it to, coloured by the grungy photograph; someone took a pic with their mobile, and for some reason uploaded it.

It is communication in a wonderfully abstract way. Sometimes funny, sometimes political, sometimes absurd. Guerrilla communication.

Huffington post Uplifting vandalism
Pictures of walls
Confessions of the university of Chicago Crescat Graffiti

Photos are not always meant to show something. Sometimes they are only there to contain shapes and colours. Sometimes, it is not a magic moment, but a play of light and an interesting composition. Could it surprise you?

(by Lars)

We have this medium: it is free, it is flexible, it is far reaching. It is relatively new.
We should play with it. We should make things that are broken, we should break things that works. And then fix them. And then develop them. Then throw them in the bin, and go play with something else. Then build something out of broken parts and see what happens. Duct tape and superglue.

Soon, I will have finished my bachelor in digital media production. At this point, in the last semester, I am working on information architecture, information design, interaction design. Important stuff, absolutely. Very interesting. But after these three years, I feel restless and unfulfilled. Yes, you need to know the rules to be able to break them intelligently, but I was hoping for more play. More silliness in the name of education.

Myself and two guys are at the moment working on our bachelor thesis. The amount of project-controlling tools are distracting. There is a forest of tools and requirements, supposedly helpful, to get us to where we want to go. But the process of administrating these tools, setting them up, using them regularly, recording time sheets, short term goals, long term goals, documentation, deadlines, tracking documents, personal diaries, group diary, exchanging ideas, recording ideas, classifying ideas, meta, meta, meta…
This is supposedly the world of sensible engineers and how they work. But it is not. Out there in the real world, things work in mysterious, accidental and random ways. Sometimes dictated by company history and culture, sometimes dictated by what would be the most efficient here and now. Sometimes it is dictated by one wacky individual.

The world – and the internet – is full of information. Pin-point information and accuracy. Minuscule details.
Maybe this is because computers works on 0 and 1; count, for each, or, this, and, else, if. Precision. Computers are not canvasses; there are no buckets of paint, no waking up to files stored randomly, no organic parts, no decay, no stacks of papers falling down, requiring re-sorting and re-thinking. Computers are stupid. They do as they are told. It is difficult to see with new eyes; especially if your brain is trained in programming. This, and, or, else, if.

Maybe we should stop taking it so seriously. We don’t really need all this accuracy, all this information that tells me exactly, precisely some tiny detail, that I do not have the knowledge or wisdom to put into context. Fragments that do not make up a whole, tiny pieces of information, numbers, simplistic headlines.

We should make web pages with less information. Content, yes. Intelligently, certainly.
Transient, changeable, nomadic. Spanning aeons, making up connections. Compare, discard, ditch. Deliberate misalignment. Play. Arse around.

I have grown to care less and less for the technology as such, and I yearn more for what would push my imagination, make my brain hurt from thinking. Design is where science and art break even. Of course it hurts.

“If you’re looking for a daily dose of anything, boblet’s wonderful blog isn’t for you.  This woman gives warning at the very top of her homepage: “If I have nothing to say, I won’t say it.”  And sometimes she doesn’t say anything, for weeks at a time.  But I check regularly to see if there might be something new, because the new invariably is quirky, fun, dense with meaning, and absolutely guaranteed to keep me thinking, until the next post.  She has written my single favorite blog entry of the last year, and when I get around to writing my response to her post, you’ll know which one it is.  In the meantime, where else can you find the adventures of Zapf Dingbats?”

Ah, Linda, the adventures of Zapf Dingbats and Comic Sans have been widely distributed – among the probably narrow bunch of font-freaks…

But she is right, I don’t write for the sake of hits, I write for… well. Myself, some people I wish read my stuff (maybe they do), and the few that I know do. This blog is a little like firing pottery: the end result will last for longer than I care to think about, and to publish should not be a race (nothing should be a race, come to think of it). There is no winning on the net. I like to think of the award as an award for silence. The rubbish I have not posted hopefully places the few things I have written in a better light.

Linda herself writes some of the best stuff I have come across; she writes beautiful prose, intelligently on anything you care to think of, and then some. Part of the award is to nominate another five blogs of outstanding quality, and I can only say it is a shame it would be bad form to give the award back to her. The world if full of so much rubbish, it is balm to find coherence, intelligence, sense and acute observation.

And that brings me over to the reason why it has taken me so long to publish this piece. I am not really a blogger, I am not a blog-reader, so to find five recipients was not such a simple task, yet one that deserved careful consideration. I have not been able to come up with five, so the magic number is three, and I shall count on being forgiven. Rather three excellent ones, than five not so. I shall maybe go a little outside the Arte Y Picos scope, but I will argue that writing is art, observation is true talent. To Linda, and to you three: thank you. Don’t stop.

Here you go – my three thinkers. In no particular order. I leave it to you to explore.

Drink design

Stonehead

Illusive joy

As exam dates starts to show up on the best-before-dates on the perishables, the educational pressure cooker is heating up. Some are dropping out of some courses, some hang in there by the skin of their teeth, some stay under the comfy duvet. The wheat from the chaff, possibly, or maybe just bad judgement under strain. Doing things in media courses can be pretty stressful – there is a lot of lugging heavy equipment around, and with no hierarchy democracy is prevalent in every bit of production. Design by committee. And we all know that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Useful for certain places and certain tasks, but not a versatile, esthetically pleasing object.
And of course: we are equals in our amateurishness, and stumble over the same cords, fiddle with the same buttons and mess up the same technology. An uphill struggle and a strain on relationships, it can sometimes be hard to judge what really matters (and what is it that really matters? friendship? love? art? the universe? tiny things by the side of the road? inner peace?).

I haven’t touched a pencil or a brush in years. Not properly, not committedly. But in this situation of pressure, essays to write, video to edit, processes to define, compose, structure, books to read, technology to decipher, articles to consume – here, now, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep melancholy need to find out – do I still have it? Is it really part of me?
Once it is established that so-and-so is good at this-or-that, it is hard to rock those perceptions, and I was always defined as “good at drawing”. A blessing and a curse.
But drawing is about practice, a collaboration between hand, heart and head, it is about proportions, about light. It is about shapes and negative space and intuition, but most of all it is about shadows.

(“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow”).

Most books that teach drawing start out with sketches of The Whole. I have always started in one corner and worked my way around haphazardly. A dangerous strategy, as it might not add up, when you connect lines at the other end of the page. The secret lies in those tiny shadows and getting them right. Then it will add up, and I will have finished a drawing of a whole I haven’t really looked at until it is finished. It is a little magic, it is deep meditation, but I doubt it is art.
Tricky things to draw: glass, water, hands. I always come back to hands. They never look right, but sometimes they are. Look at your own, see the fingers foreshortened, twist a little, and you’ll realise that good old Michelangelo was not far off.

But do I still have it?
I fumbled a little. It got better. I did a few hands, and the last ones had that familiar quality. Recognisably my hand, nicks and scars included; familiar handiwork. Drawing a beat-up transparent plastic bottle at an angle was a tad early, it seems a little practice will do it.
I am comforted; I am relieved. I am also hooked again.
It is not great art, but it is solid craft, decent draftsmanship.

Good enough for me.
_____________________

as a ps. A current work in progress. I’ll leave portraits for a bit, methinks.

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The kiln fires the gooey, soft, sensual clay into stone; it is a non-reversible process, and the object dies a little for me – I tend to lose interest in the finished product. It is the clay part of the process, and firing kilns that attracts me. The transformation is total, the pot will never leave earth, it cannot be broken down to the original materials. Ages hence, my pottery shards will still be around. Longevity. Infinity. A mindblowing thought – and one that (should) keeps potters constantly reminded to not fire substandard pots in the first place. We won’t get rid of them.

The few pots that lives for me, have that magic all potters hunt for: that perfect, perfect balance of shape, texture and colour.

It sounds simple. It is impossible. It is chasing stars and fog. It is processes with so many uncontrollable variables you cannot do anything else but expect the unexpected. To make it really easy for myself, I fell in love with the microcrystalline glazes. The initiated will laugh at this. Microcrystallines will keep you pulling out your hair for the rest of your life. It will ruin the kiln shelves, it will stick, run, be too thin, too thick; the pot too high, thick, thin, small. The kiln fires too evenly, not evenly enough, there will be tiny variations in the core temperature, there will be a draught. When they work, they are gorgeous, though. From a full kiln, I’d be extraordinary happy to get one single pot that lives.

There is a virtue in it too, to control what you can, and then be able to leave yourself at the mercy of chance. Passing that point, imposing will is not so important anymore.

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There is not a lot of photos from this period in my life. Fine electronics do not go well with clay, dust, glazes and blazing kilns.
But memories are good too.

microcrystalline green tea bowl

microcrystalline blue glaze – “purple perhaps”

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newly thrown plates, before turning

the dead fish is my stamp, id and trademark

I was never big on moulding and modelling, but Gregory is always nearby

googly espresso mugs

I was never a fan of symmetry. Throwing wobbly pots is in fact incredibly difficult

bucket

bark

roof

wall

house

table

concrete

door

This blog was initially ment as a school related project, but I am a fickle person, it seems. There are so many other things that interests me, and expanding connections, ideas and thoughts simply seems more fitting to the blog format instead of a record of day-to-day minutiae.
Besides, I also use it as an experiment in how the Great Web works. They say “build it, and they will come” – meaning that likeminded people will eventually find my words and interesting things will happen. This is partly true, as I have done absolutely nothing to spread the word of my words, so to speak. And some good people have stopped by.

But back to school – I am now deeply in the clutches of the System, and it feels weird.
I have never been one for working in, or working well within large Systems. By systems I mean an organization, company or group consisting of more than ten people. That is when you begin to need serious administration, and that is when things gets bureaucratic, sticky and slow-moving. Creativity is lost, stifled or ignored by systems, and it is generally not an environment for spontaneity – the spice of life.
And larger systems seems to generate, spawn or hatch a certain type of system-person…

I did the mistake of volunteering for a job as a (computer) lab assistant for the new students. It has been four weeks of frustrations and thank god it’s over soon.
There are lots of reasons it is being frustrating of course, but I suspect that it is mainly for the system-generated-persons. I am a rebel at heart, and conforming to rules without reason doesn’t sit well with me. My instinct is to question why, and not given a satisfactory answer, I get frustrated and annoyed. I want reason. I want to know things are grounded on sensible thought processes. I don’t have to agree to the method, but I will not accept mindless conformity or faulty reasoning. The System Person is well fitted to the system, and have the abillity to talk gibberish and accepting and repeating all sorts of nonsense without missing a beat.
The world is dumb enough as it is. Establishments of higher education should not add to it.

And then, curiously, I was asked by my previous professor to assist in his course, and I accepted. This is a diffrent thing alltoghether, and even though I probably shouldn’t have accepted, as I have a large pile of books to read and understand, I think it will be fun. At least it is guaranteed to be the opposite of those first weeks. So I am actually looking forward to it. It will be as system-free as anything can be in an institution like this.
And that is what I have been looking for from the start.

‘…qualities like quiveriness and vulnerability come to mind when I think of creativity… creativity requires a sense of smell, a palate to taste the scents that make brilliance. All life feeds upon the random. Creativity is the haute cuisine.’

-Douglas Hofstadter-

What on earth is it? No one can give a vaguely sensible answer to what goes on in my brain. It is non-stop, it goes on every waking hour, and, I suspect, when I sleep as well. It is a constant rattling, a background noise in my head: constantly having new ideas, judging colours, angles, texture, making connections, soaking up words or phrases in any situation. Connecting bizarre things together; finding some hue, taste or sound that bring unrelated things together in my head, spanning languages, centuries, words, colours, poetry, sounds, materials, buildings, life forms; from teaspoons to magma. It is exhausting, in a way, but it’s been going on my whole life, so I have no idea what it would be like without it.
It makes me able to make metaphors no one understands. How admirable.

Bits of paper, books with notes in the margins, or the last blank pages missing to some long forgotten desperate need for scribbling something. Piles of notebooks half filled out with unidentifiable ideas, but sometimes, sometimes a notebook contains a tiny little doodle that have it. Some magic little quality.

And there it is – a perfect little doodle or a surprising combination of letters or words. Something that it would be impossible to improve on. Adding something would ruin it. A doodle; born perfect. An interaction of letterforms in perfect balance and meaning. Trying to do it again would not work.
Magic.

I can track a meeting through the doodles I make. I remember what was said from little squiggles. People who have not seen my meeting-doodles show me endless post-its with circles repeated endlessly and say, I do it too! No you don’t. Because my doodles – unconsciously – covers and span universes. They are bizarre, funny, sometimes scary, sometimes awful. often abstract. I am sure a psychologist would have a field day, but at least it keeps me awake through boring meetings. The doodles are an illustration of the noise that goes on in my head – forced to sit still and listen to some boring twat go on about strategies for the future and how to fix something that is not broken – the endless connecting process bursts out on paper.

And I am beginning slowly to realise that not everybody have this racket going on. In fact, very few people have the faintest idea what I am talking about.
So I wonder what goes in their heads.