Elaine Fox’s Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain (2012)

A cognitive psychologist looks at optimism and pessimism.

This is an enjoyable new mass-market book revealing the neurological centers of approach and avoidance instincts. Fox’s voice is a welcome addition to my understanding of the field of positive psychology. After just the first chapter, I recast my personal setbacks in running with a more positive perspective on my progress. Just as pleasure is fleeting, my ability to stay optimistic can waver over time. Books such as this are like nutrients that remind me to activate the skills of optimism.

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick Emery Robinson’s The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (1990)

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Constructing personal devil and angel archetypes

Actor Henry Winkler Plays “Not My Job,” and “Fabulous” New Yorkers

I was tired and lost on the Van Wyck Expressway when I heard a seven-minute interview with Henry Winkler that snapped me outside of my miserable, inward perspective. Winkler seems irrepressibly happy, with no complaints or regrets. The interview reminded me that you find what you look for in daily life, whether conflicts or beauty, complaints or humor.

I have been thinking a lot about how being in New York is changing me for the better and worse, illustrated by extreme New Yorker archetypes. The first is the stereotypical obnoxious, complaining, defensive New Yorker. (This is mostly caricature, though the city’s density can breed impatience for social niceties.) The other archetype is the one that Winkler seems to exemplify: the live-and-let-live New Yorker, who is constantly finding things “fabulous” and appreciates life in all its manifestations. Winkler would make a great happiness role model.

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Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley

GGSC’s blog features short, practical articles written by positive psychologists. The advice for improving subjective well-being is straightforward and, crucially, rooted in empirical studies (unlike self-help). Recommended for those with interest in‚ but not much time for‚ applying positive psychology in their lives.

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Simon and Tom Bloor

Fraternal artists based in Birmingham and London, UK.

The Bloors make drawings, paintings, wall texts, sculptures, and public projects around play, public space, and modernist forms. Their latest projects, including schoolyard commissions, attempt to inspire informal interactions. I find that their works balance a cheery, earnest tone with formal and typographic sophistication and an open-endedness that invites intellectual engagement.

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Michael Jones McKean’s The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms

Ambitious site-specific weather project at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE

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McMaster-Carr’s website

I wish every website I use for procurement was as clean, informative, and easy to navigate as this.

The speed and ease of the virtual world can create false expectations, making manipulating the material world seem frustrating and slow. McMaster-Carr’s site provides generous access to material information, dimensions, and technical illustrations, exemplifying how material problem-solving can be facilitated with elegantly-dense interaction design.

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Hida Tool

Though I use common materials in my work, I love fine tools. One of the great tragedies of our generation is the rarity of our encounters with objects that will last a lifetime, and further, specialists with wells of knowledge and enthusiasm for particular materials or tools. Hida is one such loci of connoisseurship. Based in Berkeley, this mom-and-pop shop sells Japanese hand tools, specializing in kitchen knives, gardening implements, and woodworking tools. I purchased wood-carving gouges from Hida 15 years ago, and they are holding up promisingly well. Hida’s specialness was recently brought to the fore again, when I decided to buy a Japanese saw, and could find no suitable counterpart in New York City.

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TPG’s Links:

Christine’s work is influenced by the field of Positive Psychology.

This is a field concerned with why minds function well rather than the opposite… A brief primer can be found

courtesy of Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

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Thrive! – The Living Well Show

Online radio webcasting about positive psychology.

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Flow, the Secret to Happiness

Christine references the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In this TED talk he discusses the creative ‘flow’ state.
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How That Sausage of Happiness Is Made

Stefan Sagmeister is another artist who investigates notions of happiness. This article describes a recent show of his and an upcoming movie project. Both are concerned with what constitutes happiness and how it may be achieved.

Dard Hunter collection: Dard Hunter was responsible for a renaissance in hand papermaking and printing. From 1923 to 1950, his Mountain Home Press produced eight limited-edition books that stand as testaments to his devotion and perseverance. Today, most of the historians and artisans interested in papermaking and printing were directly inspired by Hunter.

Dieu Donne: a non-profit organization dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of new contemporary art utilizing the hand papermaking process.  I did a residency here.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds : Seed bank…where i get the seeds for the beet i grew…I didn’t grow nearly all of them…but some

Paper Project Scanning Electron Microscope Images of Paper: I love these magnified images…I used some in a talk I gave last week to show the difference between paper and papyrus

and…Oregon Caves National Monument

and Lava Beds National Monument

Other Links:

Examples of other types of fruit and vegetable papyrus

Artists working with food/food concepts/growing things:

Open Restaurant: OPENrestaurant is the project of a collective of restaurant professionals who moved their environment to an art space as a way to experiment with the language of their daily activities. This displacement turns the restaurant, its codes and architecture, into a medium for artistic expression which is made available to cooks, farmers, artists, educators and activists as a way to explore issues around food and society.

Pietopia:  This is a once a year event where participants submit any pie recipe and 300 word written explanation about how your life tastes, in a pie. The entries go through a judging process of nationally recognized food writers and bakers. Over the course of several weeks, pies are judged upon the creativity and innovation in ideas reflecting the ingredients used in the recipe by a group of nationally recognized food-writers and chefs. run by Tricia Martin, eating is art

Conflict Kitchen: a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The food is served out of a take-out-style storefront that rotates identities every six months to highlight another country.  Each iteration of the project is augmented by events, performances, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country.

Artists working with paper:

Jen Stark

Lori B. Goodman

LISTENING:

Artists using Sound:

Ubu Web:  Ubu Web is an amazing reference for both recorded sound and film/video.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller use sound to make their work.  One of my favorites was a project they did in Berlin

Writers Reading their own work:

T.S. Eliot reads the wasteland.

John Giorno: I love the way Giorno uses his whole body when reciting his work.

Audio Archives:

Stanford University’s Archive of Recorded Sound has a very nice list of links to archives all around the internet – many of which allow streaming and/or downloads.

I had fun going to Michigan State’s Vincent Voice Archive and searching by year.

Don’t miss the Library of Congress’s audio site either.

The Internet Archive’s Audio Archive:  A plethora of stuff here too – check out their collection of 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings.

Radio Diet:

Most nights I fall asleep listening to Coast to Coast Radio:  Find it on your am dial.

Vinyl Lovers:

Mississippi Records: These people love vinyl and release amazing records.  I don’t know where they find some of this stuff, but I’m really glad they do.

LOOKING:

Russian Prison Tattoos:  Lots of really difficult and disturbing images.  Particularly fascinating to me are the translations of the texts that appear in the tattoos.

Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise:  My original idea for TPG was a kind of audio riff on Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise -  revisiting early works to create something new.

A Mornings Work:  I was introduced to this book of medical images from 1843 – 1939 about fifteen years ago and it has continued to fascinate and haunt me ever since.

Artists Using Text:  So many great artists have used text in interesting and important ways.  A few of my favorites are:

On Kawara
Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings:
Ed Ruscha
Kay Rosen

Philip Lorca diCorcia:  I saw a show of diCorcia’s work while I lived in Chicago.  The mystery, tension, beauty, and narrative quality in these photographs have been an influence on the way I think about making images.

Casper David Friedrich:  The way I approach landscape in my text drawings has been shaped by Casper David Friedrich’s stubbornly romantic and utopian vision.

READING:

Independent People:

Halldor Laxness   I had already made more that one drawing with shepherds in it when I read Halldor Laxness’s Independent People – he creates visceral images that are both heartbreaking and mind blowing.

Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan:  I recently reread this and couldn’t help but feeling like it must have had an impact on the way I use text to create images.  I wish I could do it half as good as Brautigan.

TPG’s Links:

A brief history of Conceptual Art on Records: “Basically, any work in which the process of creation or the intention motivating the artist is obviously more important (to the artist and the listener) than the results it created belongs to conceptual art. One good example is DJ Christian Marclay’s Record Without Grooves (Ecart Editions, 1987), a virgin LP. The same artist also released Footsteps (Rec Rec, 1990), a one-sided LP of recorded footsteps.”

The Sound of Art edited by Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City: The Sound of Art is a limited edition vinyl LP composed of sounds heard in New York galleries, museums, and project spaces over the last five years. Inspired by classic DJ battle records, it features forty tracks of diverse sounds culled from art video, performance footage, and kinetic sculptures. This is not an easy listening record. It’s an audio document and a tool to create new sounds and new work.

The Thing Quarterly Issue 13 – Matthew Higgs & Martin Creed:  Issue 13 is by visual artist, writer and curator Matthew Higgs and visual artist Martin Creed. The issue consists of a 12 inch vinyl 120 gram picture disk with Mathew Higgs on one side and Martin Creed on the other. The record contains one track by Martin Creed entitled ‘My Advice’ with words and music by Martin Creed.

People don’t like to read art  a show at Western Exhibitions in Chicago Il

“The Storyteller” Curated by Claire Gilman, Margaret Sundell at ICI: “an exhibition that focuses on artists who use the story form in contemporary art as a means of comprehending and conveying political and social events. Significantly, unlike their postmodern predecessors, the artists in The Storyteller neither take the idea of documentary truth as an object of their critique nor do they abandon fact for fabulation. Rather, they enable individuals (whether themselves, their subjects or their audience) to construct the story of their unique participation in historical processes, thereby presenting these events in a new and unexpected light.”

Bodies of Work by Seth S. Ellis: Ellis wrote a series of four fictional versions of the art he didn’t make in 2011. Each story was sold in the gallery as a chapbook, for a quarter apiece.

Molly Springfield: “recent and ongoing projects explore the invention of calotype photography in the 1830′s, conceptual art of the 1960′s and ’70′s, the proto-history of the Internet, Google’s book-scanning patents, the history of how drawing is taught, and the ways that marginalia reveals relationships between readers and texts. All of these efforts explore, to varying degrees, reproduction versus originality, seeing versus reading, and technology versus labor.

Authentic Movement is an expressive improvisational movement practice that allows a group of participants a type of free association of the body. It was started by Mary Starks Whitehouse in the 1950s as “movement in depth”.

An introduction to Performance Art

A discussion of Action Art:  “The purpose of this text is to discuss the phenomena of actions, especially the type of action that is found in what is known as the “art world”. (1) In the following text this special kind of action is named action art. Central questions to this discussion are: 1. How should action art be categorized? Is it a special kind of theatre or dance? 2. Are there similarities between action art and other forms of human activities? 3. And finally, what is the intention of the use of action art as expression?”

Tom Marioni – A conceptual action artist, who has created a large body of work in drawing and printmaking. He is very influenced by simplicity and many of his prints are created through repetitive activity with a Zen-like concentration on the mark-making.

David Ireland – Conceptual sculpture artist who is most well known for creating site-specific installation pieces where much of his work is guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics. Here is an interview with Ireland in Art Practical. Ireland has shown in many great museums, this is an exhibition Ireland had at the Oakland Museum of California.

Jason Rhoades – Conceptual installation artist well known for his colorful energetic installations. Here is an article about him in the Guardian newspaper.

Will Rogan – Mixed media artist who works with photographs, video, sculpture and installation. His use of material examines the potential for beauty, manipulation and function in art making.

Tom Friedman – Conceptual sculpture who works with everyday material and found objects such as toothpicks, sugar cubes, fishing line, playdoh and much more. Here is good article about Friedman in Arts Editor.

A 2006 interview with comedian Jimmy Carr and Amy Sedaris on PRI’s The Sound of Young America:  The Jimmy Carr interview is interesting in it’s own right and I have referred to points he made in there often. But Amy Sedaris mentions hosting a “indoor garage sale” at her parties around this time and that idea was seeded in my mind.

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston: This is a book I found in a house while on vacation in 2003 (i think). I read it all in an afternoon and then started finding ways of getting rid of stuff. Some of it is a little wild even for me, but I can fairly say, this book changed my life.

Jack Kornfield on Generosity:  I’m not sure where I originally heard this, and I don’t think this is the recording, but what I took away from it was the most cynical part – that there were different kinds of generosity and even the most begrudged, reluctant, or accidental generosity was considered on the same level as the most selfless kind.

Art and Activism, Generosity:

Aaron Gach and The Center For Tactical Magic: The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.

Amy Balkin: an artist pursuing “speculative counter-spaces”, her work includes Public Smog, where she created clean air public parks by purchasing pollution credits on the open market and reserved them from use, and This is a Public Domain, where she purchased land and attempted to designate it as a global commons

Packard Jennings: “I make work that delves into the realm of activism, not only to connect with individuals in provocative and meaningful ways, but also to recast my role in the system. I often put my work out into the world for chance interactions with people; this involves ad hoc installations and subversive infiltration of public and semi-public spaces, where the pieces are left to their own fate. I employ humor as a device for lowering a viewer’s guard to the reception of difficult content.”

Red76: Red 76′s work centers on the practice of grassroots publishing (both zines small newspapers, and online), conversation, and alternative economies which center around a larger theme of the American Revolution (the 76 in their name references 1776, the year the US independence) and a general revolutionary spirit.  Projects like Ghosttown and Taking Place sought to charge space and create an atmosphere wherein the public may become highly aware of their immediate surroundings, and their day to day activities, is an often recurring element within many of the groups activities.

The Yes Men: The Yes Men are a group who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business.  Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment.  They’ve got a movie.

REBAR is an interdisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of art, design and activism.  Their work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, temporary performance installation, digital media and print design.
Rebar remixes the ordinary, repurposes the ubiquitous and restructures the fabric of the urban environment by exposing hidden assumptions and shared meanings embedded in the everyday experience of the built world.

On The Bro’d “Every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road,  retold for bros.” – A humorous update of On The Road that is surprisingly true to the spirit of the original.

My day-job at this interdisciplinary design studio greatly influenced the way that I thought about architecture, art and creating experiences for an audience/viewer.

McSweeney’s publishes a variety of things that use text in interesting and innovative ways, and have certainly added to the ways that I think about narrative.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and Superworse – The Novel: A Remix of Superbad: Stories and Pieces by Ben Greenman – Two books that play with text and storytelling in ways that I found particularly compelling.

Rebecca Campbell’s work helped to mold the way that I think about beauty in art.

Marina Abromovic’s work made an indelible impression on me as the first performance/interactive art that captivated my imagination.

Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life – A friend loaned me this book and urged me to read it.  Although I am very wary of self help books generally, and particularly skeptical of ones published in the seventies, this book undeniably influenced my thinking while writing the text to intertwine with On The Road.

Book Interventions and Responses:

Relationships with Library Books by Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Sullivan: “We attempted to explore our physical relationships to library books. We then documented that experience and returned the books, with documentation, to the library.”

After Nature Catalogue for the New Museum: Conceived as an homage to W.G. Sebald, the catalogue re-purposes existing copies of his literary work After Nature by wrapping the original book with the “After Nature” exhibition catalogue, which acts as a book jacket. Twenty-five full-color images of the exhibit are also hand placed throughout the original text. The catalogue features an essay by Massimiliano Gioni and a checklist of works in the exhibition, along with the image plates throughout the book.

Jean Lowe creates sculptural (re)creations of books with subversive titles and imagery

Each of Anton Ginzberg‘s bronze cast post it note sets respond to a different book in the Saint Germaine series.  Seen at NADA at Moscow’s GMG gallery.

Nava’s successful proposal for the TPG15 subscriber’s choice edition.

Art Seen Asheville – Nava Lubelski – a video interview with Nava from 2008

Nava’s Book – The Starving Artist’s Way “Make it yourself. Make it cool. Make it cheap.”

Aleatoric Art:

Aleatoricism/ Aleatoric Art – Composition depending upon chance, random accident

“I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident.”- Pollack

“the prototypically “male” arts of paint-splashing and canvas-pierced fused to “female” fabric-staining and needlework.” – Karen Rosenberg

Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance)

Jean (Hans) Arp (French, born Germany (Alsace). 1886-1966)

Arp challenged existing notions of art and experimented with spontaneous and seemingly irrational methods of artistic creation. This work is one of several collages he made by scattering torn rectangular pieces of paper onto a paper support. He and other Dada artists embraced the notion of chance as a way of relinquishing control—a kind of depersonalization of the creative process that would influence many subsequent generations of artists.

Artists “Painting with thread”

Cayce Zavaglia: realistic, densely embroidered portraits

Ghada Amer: sexual female line portraits, patterns and repeats

Michael Raedecker: dream-ish still lifes and landscapes, acrylic and thread

Tucker Schwarz: landscapes of buildings and power lines, threads revealed

Steven MacDonald: “A variety of imagery act out fantastical narratives, where tigers, rainbows, cityscapes, skulls and shipping containers are juxtaposed against the backdrop of a traditional Japanese print form.”

Artists playing with chaos and control

Heidi Trepanier:  a drip painter similar to Nava, in the way that she outlines her drips and controls them so that they look almost cartoon-y.  A subscriber sent us this link, calling her work “Dr. Seuss meets Jackson Pollock”

Ross Campbell – pixelated ceremonial masks, bit type, and digital flora.  I think he and Matt might be art cousins.

Andrew Venell – an artist working with the chaos of information, social anxieties, and the digitally mediated world we live in

Takashi Murakami -  video games, boy culture, super flat, and tons of color:

Murakami’s style, called Superflat, is characterized by flat planes of color and graphic images involving a character style derived from anime and manga. Superflat is an artistic style that comments on otaku lifestyle and subculture, as well as consumerism and sexual fetishism.

Tony Bechara – abstract, almost color-field paintings all done in small pixels.  They vibrate your eyeballs.

Colin Henderson – clearly influenced by the 8 bit aesthetic, this UK designer creates patterns and illustrations/collages

Cory Arcangel – a artist/programmer who performs actions and interventions in photoshop, in video games, on websites, and within the art context in a playful manner

Pixel,  is an insightful short documentary by Simon Cottee that explores the world of pixel art, animation and chiptune music.

The Emotion Lab‘s prototype for a MoonWatch reminded me so much of Helena Keeffe‘s Moon Phase Lapel Pins (TPG11)  that I had to post them.  It appears that this is just a design project at this time, not an actual product. It would be really neat.
Found via dvdp

However, the Citizen Astrodea Moon Age Watch is actually in production and is limited to 300 pieces a year. It’s a serious astrological device.

Real-time measurements makes it possible to tell sidereal time, current time, and position as well as the outline of the sun on the earth. Once mastered, you can know where and when the sun and moon will rise and set, in addition to a seemingly endless list of functions.

http://www.subwaycrush.com/ -Public transit specific Missed Connections site

http://www.theworkoffice.com/ -This was an artist team’s project that gave me the first opportunity to explore Missed Connections research, and has been certainly influential in the development of the CMC.

Missed Connections as inspiration for Artwork:

Missed Connection Intervention: Barnes and Noble 2 of 3, 2008
Craigslist Missed Connection ad taken from online and written on letters that where slipped randomly into books.

Paul Short’s Missed Connection Interventions. He goes back to the places of the missed connection and inserts the message in place.

I Saw You.. A Comic Book Anthology of comics by over 100 artists with the subject of missed connections.

Missed Connections Live: A video web series by actress Melissa Center and produced by LBM Productions.  Each episode is centered around one Missed Connection post. They act out both the actual missed connection post and sometimes the aftermath.

Sophie Blackall: a New York Illustrator working with Missed Connections

Greenpoint Laundromat, Sophie Blackall. 2010 Prints available on etsy

Cartoonist Adrian Tomine has his own take on Missed Connections, produced through OMG Posters!

A Musical: http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=16665

Steve Lambert interviews a variety of people who have used Missed Connections

“Status Update”: a show of art that has come out of social networking. Curated by Debbie Hesse with the support the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, the show was displayed at  Haskins Laboratories, a private nonprofit group affiliated with Yale and the University of Connecticut that specializes in communication: mainly speech, language and reading research.

Artists as Think Tanks, Organizations, and Companies:

Dominic Willsdon describes an unrealized project by Jon Rubin to create “The Bastard Academy” a mock think-tank intended to be built on the Standford campus between the art department and the Hoover Institute.  Courtesy of the Anecdote Archive.

Interview with Jeannene Przyblyski, founder of The San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets.

The Ghana Think Tank:  In 2006, John Ewing, Christopher Robbins and Matey Odonkor formed the Ghana Think Tank in response to their experiences working in international development. We sent a set of US community development briefs to ad-hoc think tanks formed in Ghana, Cuba and El Salvador. The problems addressed in these briefs ranged from broad, societal issues (Homelessness and Obesity) to more personal, light-hearted quandaries (Bo Can’t Dance and Powerpoint). After receiving the think tanks’ solutions, we set about formulating specific plans of actions based on these responses, and began to enact them.

Death and Taxes: a year-long performance project by Isabel Reichert and Sean Fletcher involving a subchapter S-Corporation called Death & Taxes, Inc.  This corporation, run by a professional board of directors, took charge of our family’s personal finances in an effort to make our artist lives more profitable.  In essence, they privatized their lives.

#class: Jenifer Dalton and William Powhida turn Edward Winkleman Gallery into a ‘think tank’, where they will work with guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors and anyone else who would like to participate to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system.