ste!!a gassaway: unpredictable thoughts

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

I love letters. I love lettering. Watching the making of artful letters is so much fun.

It has become a science fiction dream to me. I cannot say I ever thought I would see and feel these temperatures. These temperatures are those of my visits to the desert and hiking the canyons of New Mexico. I imagine the scrub bushes and the dry runoff streams. I taste the red dust on my lips. Then I am jolted back to reality. My sense of place is askew. Our planet is so confused. It’s 104°.

A special gift for my dad.

From outside the color draws me like a beacon. When inside color washes over my body and it changes as I move from one place to another. I’m orange. I’m blue. When I chase the light and it chases me. That experience is the Montreal Convention Center.

When I hear the words convention center I cringe. I have experienced many a convention center and they are uninspired spaces. They have very little if any energy of their own. Visitors come and go but the buildings and spaces created inside are dead except for the mechanical drone of HVAC or escalators. Some of the buildings focus are industrial, some monumental, others overgrown shopping malls.

Why is it that our government buildings are so uninspiring? Is it our culture? Is it because we somehow think that our tax dollars and neighborhoods don’t deserve beauty? I think it is the process that we have for creating public buildings. The process is without inspiration or vision.

Montreal on the other hand had a marvelous vision and they have shared it with all of us.

—
The Pennsylvania Convention Center is one of the worse inside and out. I don’t want to go on about it check it out yourself here : http://www.paconvention.com

This is one of the images I’ve taken of our boxes which were piled quite high. The line, color, typography and grid are surprisingly fun. Just had to snap the composition.

This vid is bouncing around on tumblr. It’s a look at how interaction can be so intuitive, and feel so real that other beings interact and experience something very real. Watching this “smart cat” play with an iPad just like it would with a string or a keyboard tells us how far our interfaces have come. How rich a good touch interface can be is very exciting.

Enjoy.

This is what it looked like in our courtyard yesterday. Over night the wind was blowing so hard that all the windows were covered in snow and we couldn’t see outside. I found this little gap and shot the neighbors doing some shoveling. Of course after they had spent an hour doing this the snow removal firm showed up and plowed. Silly people.

We usually are parked out there. But with the help of our pals David and E we put our car in a garage for friday, sturday, and Sunday. We’ll shovel a bit and get it back in place. Thing is we are expecting snow again on tuesday and wednesday.

This is our second huge storm since moving downtown.

We have lost Howard Zinn. Luckily he spoke his mind and it was captured in video and in print. This is just one of many enlightening lectures he gave not that long ago – 2008.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
– Noam Chomsky

A sad day for Gumby and Pokey. Art Clokey, the animator who created the lovable, bendable clay creation Gumby over a half-century ago, died. Many a saturday morning was spent cereal bowl in hand watching the green guy and his orange pony pal.

It was Eddie Murphy’s SNL Gumby sketch 40 years after the birth of Gumby that finally created some financial reward to Art. The cultural icon is still popular today and has even moved into the new world of social media — Gumby has over 134,000 fans on Facebook.

hulu.com currently has some Gumby available for viewing.

It’s hard not

to jump out

instead of

waiting to be

found. It’s

hard to be

alone so long

and then hear

someone come

around. It’s

like some form

of skin’s developed

in the air

that, rather

than have torn,

you tear.

(“Hide and Seek” was originally published in “The Niagara River” by Kay Ryan, Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005.)

A new movement. Think global. Act local.

Small banks actually have an interest in your community. Return the favor.

Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.

This is a capture from my first tweet in Following Piece 2.0, a global collaborative art project as part of @Platea. I’ve written a recap of my experience participating in the project. and you can find it at : the @Platea blog.

I have been working on an online book of the project and expect to add more thoughts here and at my ARTlog. I hope you’ll check back on the project and leave your thoughts about the work. It was an exciting experience.

Are you following me?

About the project from @Plateau:

Following Piece 1.0
Forty years ago, in October 1969, artist Vito Acconci performed Following Piece. A study in the public spaces we occupy and assumptions around privacy, Acconci followed random people in Manhattan during the month and reported on their activities until they entered a private area such as an apartment or car.

Following Piece 2.0
And so, with that in mind, I thought it might be fun to do a cover of Following Piece, but to look at it specifically in the contemporary context of Twitter, a world where public/private boundaries are shifting and eroding, as once-private activities are broadcast into online public space. In the world of Twitter, the idea of following has taken on a new meaning: once an uncomfortable thought, it’s now regularly seen as a good thing to have one’s private actions followed by many strangers.