Rise Industries

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 5

Above is the result of an experiment we carried out at ICI today. We made 3d sterographic portraits! This is one of a sculpture in the garden at ICI.

Jeremy named The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco as a book that is influential to the ideas we will work with during the residency. I read the book years ago, and decided to re-read it, beginning on my journey from Boston to LA. I’m struck by the richness of the text, and have been marking passages I plan to excerpt for work at ICI.  The humor, and ideas of parallel experience emerge as I read. Jeremy, Michele and I are busy with the work of collaborating, unearthing an archive, making interdisciplinary work, and planning an exhibition,  simultaneously, and I can’t speak for them, but I am glad to have this text at my side to ground my thoughts and ideas.

We’ve received virtual visitation in the form of art work from fellow Risers Nicole Jaquis and Tim Devin today! Nicole sent two very striking documentary photos of her father visiting Hardiwar India, where Nicole lives. We plan to pair a print of one of the photos, (a shot of Marty, Nicole and Michele’s father,  jet-lagged and asleep ) with an excerpt from The Island of the Day Before.

Tim Devin’s work arrived in the mail this morning. It’s a project called BBC Broadsides. These are  posters that represent statistical maps with information about Los Angeles demographics and water supply. They will be posted throughout the city. Photos of the posters in the city will be exhibited at the 10/10∆8 Exhibition. More on Tim’s project, another version of which he completed in Boston, can be found here.

This morning at ICI we looked at grammar school film strips on a Dukane film strip projector and decided on a particularly apt frame to include in the exhibition. The film strip, entitled Space Travel A.D. 2000, includes a frame that shows a drawing of a boy on the beach and the caption reads “We know that the world is round, but we seldom sense that it really is.” Michele looks through the film strip titles in their cases below.

Hot Town at 323 Projects

And now for something ALL of our readers can check out, no matter where you are located. I have a few experimental audio tracks in this great audio art show at 323 Projects, which is a phone number gallery hosting audio art, created and run by Tucker Neel. So all you have to do to listen, is dial (323) 843-4652!

(323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!! (323) 843-4652!!!!

Call now! Call later! Call sixteen times a day! Serious, do that, because you will get a different artist every 15 minutes so there will be a new piece to listen to each time you call. There is also a schedule posted, if you want to try and hit a specific artist.

Here is a link to the schedule.

Check out 323 Projects’ web site for a list of all the artists involved, and links to their own websites.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 4

Today Sarah Rushford arrived and moved in to the Lab with us. Getting cozy in there. She and Michele did a tour of the facilities, and then hunted around the physical archive for some optical toys to play around with. They pulled some opaque projectors, a Super 8 Cartridge Projector (!), and some stereoscope viewers and slides. They started working on stereoscopic video… hope to get some of that working tomorrow.
I stopped by the art supply store to get a big beam compass so I could complete my Graticule drawing – the arc centers were going way beyond any tool I had around and the string trick wasn’t so precise. I also picked up some copper leaf. Will see where that ends up. Ran into some problems while drawing latitude – apparently you cant divide an arc into 9 segments using geometry. I spend a while stuck on that and did some research, then resorted to measuring the arc with a string, pulling the string straight to get a line, and dividing that line. Then I used that spacing to divide up the arc (transferred by divider). Whew. Drawing the latitude arcs is turning out to be slow, so I hope to finish that tomorrow.

Last night, after getting home from ICI, I started messing around with Quartz Composer and a plug-in for it called Rutt Etra 2.0.1, which is a digital version of the video synthesizer of the same name from the 1970s. It will basically create 3D scan-line renderings of images, with the Z-axis heights based on how bright parts of the image are. Took me a long time to figure out the simple syntax for Composer, and get anything to come out of it – but then, it was super easy to manipulate once running. Not sure yet what I will do with this effect, but I like it.
That last image there is based on the video I posted yesterday, of shadows on the fountain sculpture.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 3

Michele and I spent most of the day working in the lab at ICI today, and doing a bit of research. I pulled a few books about longitude, mapping and a great science text called The Study of The Physical World that had some explanations of the different map projections of the world. I decided to try drawing one of these, using only a compass, divider and straightedge (no measuring). Actually, I wanted to draw only the graticule – the grid of latitude and longitude. Naturally, I started with the easiest to construct by hand – The Globular Projection. It’s basically two hemisphere views (as seen in old Atlases and earth science texts) laid out in circles tangent to each other. All was going great, until I had to figure out how to find the centers of the lines of longitude. Took me a bit to learn how to construct an arc that will pass through three given points, but once I had that down, it was on with the repetition. I still have the latitude lines to lay out tomorrow. I am hoping my precision gets better as this goes on – my lines were pretty fuzzy, and I had to improvise a couple of long compasses for the center points that went way off the page. String worked best.

Around late afternoon I noticed the light coming in through the trees was pretty amazing, so I went around the place shooting short videos wherever the shadows landed. Will work them into something else down the road I am sure.

Michele spent the day editing video that was shot over ten years ago on two different cross country trips (flying W->E in July 1999 and driving E->W in June 2000). She also remade the timecards to include a column for John Kim’s Metric Standard Time. We’ll have to wait for John to arrive to figure out the conversion.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 1-2

I spent the afternoon at The ICI making our timecards and researching timezones.

Apparently The ICI is in its own timezone and calendar (note the Feb 24 stamp), while Rise Industries members are in Pacific Standard Time, Indian Standard Time, and Eastern Standard Time.

Rise Industries at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry – Day 1

Over the next few weeks the whole crew at Rise Industries will be participating in a residency (some in person, some via mail/skype/phone/email) and show over at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in west Los Angeles. We will be tracking the development of our various projects and excursions here of course.
Michele and I will start inhabiting their lab and gallery spaces this week, and get down to doing some research and interventions. Later this week Sarah Rushford will join us there, and we will be organizing information flows to and from the rest of our membership in order to get them involved. This whole undertaking will be experimental in a few different ways, especially as an experiment in modes of collaboration and attempts at cross-pollination of ideas. We shall see how it goes.

In the meantime, I have been tossing together some ideas and images related to our vague research directions of time and distance.

Since the Earth rotates at a steady rate of 360° per day, or 15° per hour, there is a direct relationship between time and longitude.

The vernal equinox itself precesses very slowly in a westward direction relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution every 26,000 years approximately.

During the time needed by the Earth to complete a rotation around its axis (a sidereal day), the Earth moves a short distance (approximately 1°) along its orbit around the sun.

Therefore, after a sidereal day, the Earth still needs to rotate a small additional angular distance before the sun reaches its highest point. A solar day is, therefore, nearly 4 minutes longer than a sidereal day.

Locations (to date):

Munich, Germany

WGS84 48° 8′ 0″ N, 11° 34′ 0″ E
48.133333, 11.566667

Los Angeles, CA, USA

WGS84 34° 3′ 0″ N, 118° 15′ 0″ W
34.05, -118.25

Somerville, MA, USA

WGS84 42° 23′ 15″ N, 71° 6′ 0″ W
42.3875, -71.1

Boston, MA, USA
WGS84 42° 21′ 28″ N, 71° 3′ 42″ W
42.357778, -71.061667

Haridwar, India

WGS84 29° 57′ 36″ N, 78° 9′ 36″ E
29.96, 78.16

Play-Jurisms is this weekend!

Curious about how copyright and alternatives impact your creative work? Wondering how other creatives are using or misusing copyright? Want to know how to protect your work from being stolen– or how much of other people’s works you can include in your own? Play-Jurisms is a 2-day series geared towards creatives. Over the weekend of May 21 and 22, 2011, we’ll have a number of events that address these important, and often confusing issues. Saturday, May 21: -130pm. Miguel Danielson, “Copyright Offense and Defense for Artists” (lecture) -3pm. Sheri Mason, “Recent Trends in Artists Rights” (lecture) -430pm. Massachusetts Pirate Party, “Culture Should be Shared, Not Monopolized” (lecture) -(Break) -7pm. “Sonic Outlaws” (documentary film) Sunday, May 22: -2pm. Don Schaefer. “Create, Don’t Appropriate: The Dangers of Misplaced Anger in the War on Corporate Mass Media Culture” -315pm. “Panel Discussion: Artists Who Appropriate and the Art That They Make” (Alana Kumbier; Danny Mekonnen; Dirk Adams; Vela Phelan) -430pm. Boston Radical Reference Collective “Workshop”/ “Show-And-Tell Discussion” (open to everyone who wants to talk) -(break) -7pm. Gang Clan Mafia (multimedia performance) -8pm. Factory Seconds (music performance) Play-Jurisms is organized by David Taber and Tim Devin, and will be held at the Democracy Center near Harvard Square. All events are FREE! See our website for a full description of events, etc.: http://playjurisms.wordpress.com/ We love getting emails. We’re at: play.jurisms@gmail.comSee More

Preparations for Rise Industries Residency at Institute of Cultural Inquiry

Here are some photos from our first day preparing for the upcoming Rise Industries residency at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. We will be part 8 of the 100/10 (100 Days, 10 Visions) project series and plan to collaborate across time and space with our fellow Rise Industries members from around the globe.

Thank you Anna and Elaina for a great day today! Jeremy and I are so inspired that we haven’t left the studio since we got home.

Wabi Savvy at Jaus

Before I get into this post for real, let me just say I have a backlog of photos from many great art shows and other events from the past year – and for whatever reason (something to do with either managing an apartment building project, or working on a play or two, or getting some installations done or some other such nonsense) I have not gotten around to posting anything about them at all. So, I am going to try and get this archive of stuff out into teh interwebs where people can actually see it. Since its been awhile for many of these, I may just put up my photos, or try and write some brief things about them. Either way, if you want more info on any, post in the comments and I will get to it.

With that out of the way, this one is more recent than some: the Wabi Savvy group show at Jaus gallery in West LA – Ichiro Irie’s fantastic little space on a suburban street across from the rock climbing gym. Wabi Savvy is a satellite exhibition of Gateway Japan Organized by Torrance Art Museum, and features over a dozen contemporary Japanese artists with the tag line “The image you already have of the warped Japanese sensibilities are probably all true”. The show opened right after the recent earthquake, then tsunami, then nuclear disaster in Japan – so Japan’s plight was already on everyone’s mind at the show which may have colored our perception of the works presented. The show ran from March 18 to May 1, 2011.

A very coherent show across many media, I found several standout works among the small collection.

Landscape Paintings at the de Young

I spent some time in the de Young museum up in San Francisco earlier this month, and was pretty impressed with their collection of landscape paintings. Here is a selection that caught my eye: