Biorhythm

When I was growing up, my dad and I sometimes went on road trips. To visit family mostly, which meant going to or through New Jersey. And there was one rest stop we would always brake for. This rest stop had a machine that read your Biorhythms! You would put in a quarter or 50 cents, enter your information, and you would get a printout like the one above. The science of Biorhythms actually goes back to the turn of the 20th century, and was of great interest to Freud while he was developing his psychoanalytic concepts. The back of the card explained how to read your Bio-chart. I wish I could find a snapshot of the machine itself. When it was calculationg your Bio-chart it made this great bleepy calculate-y noise. Sometime in my late teens, maybe when we were visiting colleges, the machine was no longer at our regular pit stop. I found this Biorhythm while I was cleaning out my closet to bring out the winter clothes....

There's a beautiful book explaining Biorhythms here:



Or you can get your own Biorythm readout by downloading a program for your PC (note: it's Windows only so I haven't tried it and I can't vouch for it's worth or if it even works at all). You can also try entering your data on this one for a quick readout.

Jack Spade's fashion show

Kottke explains:

Jack Spade held an impromptu fashion show in Bryant Park outside the giant tent where Fashion Week was happening, enlisting passersby to carry Jack Spade bags up and back on the sidewalk.

See it here. Brilliant!

The saddest objects

A Mental Floss post mentioned the book Owl at Home, by Arnold Lobel who:

sets out to brew a pot of “tear-water tea”–and, naturally, in order to do so he must imagine and then dwell upon the saddest objects possible

This reminded me of a game Justin & I sometimes play with his brother Cory, called the "Sad Game". It started out one night before Thanksgiving when we were all driving up to a cabin in the mountains for a long weekend with family and, as we were zooming down the highway, we all caught a glimpse of a man sitting alone in a fast food restaurant. Justin said he bet the man was divorced, and I followed he probably wasn't allowed to spend time with his kids unsupervised. Cory quietly added that he was also an only child whose adoptive parents had passed away in a car accident. When he was a teenager, Justin finished. And so the "Sad Game" was born. Sad theories grow and grow until the listeners can't bear it anymore and beg for the game to end. I don't think any of have even read Owl at Home.

Living in a mall

Secret apartment in a mall in Providence RI.
CNN gives the mainstream view.
Kind of the total opposite of Monday's post.

Jolie laide?

Sydney, a design production associate for Blueprint magazine posted on the mag's blog about a brilliant portrait she had commissioned. She says in part:

Throughout history, portraiture has typically aimed to make the sitter look his or her best (if not drastically, unrecognizably better). But I'm tired of the same old 'smile and look pretty' shtick. It's time to get ugly.

She hired Reverend Aitor, a Toronto-based artist and member of art collective Misanthrope Specialty Co. whose "Unflattering Portraits" series is just that. In the best way of course. You can see all of them here.

Simple ideas

I love projects that are based on a simple idea, like this one by Steve Lambert:



Ronald's Crisis
[via]

Body Language Book

One of my favorite books is by Marianne Wex. She photographed men's and women's body language and posture. She wrote about the differences between them as well as posed them in reversed poses (men doing feminine postures and vice versa). In many ways it is a very 70s type of feminist book, but for me it is also a book that grants importance to human physicality in a way that's more intellectual than I'd ever encountered before.

The book is called Let's Take Back Our Space: on "Female" and "Male" Body Language and I can find very little information about it online. I've found a bunch articles that reference the work that are good, but don't really talk about it in the way I've found it interesting (in terms of thinking about clothing). Here are a few good links in English (there are loads more in German):

Jo Freeman
Dr. Allen Farber
This one's a bit of a mystery, you have to click through an agreement form....
Daniel Chandler

I believe this is the biblio info from the book I used at the CSM libraries:

Wex, Marianne (1979): ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’: "Female" and "Male" Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (trans. Johanna Albert). Berlin: Frauenliteraturverlag Hermine Fees

I didn't write down any of this information myself so I'm not really sure this is correct, but as far as I can tell this is her only book. The pictures on this page are all scans from my photocopies and unfortunately the only pictorial evidence I could find of the Wex's work online or off. If anyone has more information about Marianne Wex and her work I'd love to hear about it!


Woman and man in masculine poses



Woman and man in feminine poses



Woman in masculine poses



Man and two women in feminine poses

oldies

Not to repost the same question all over the place already, but I recently saw this post on Mental Floss about what the oldest thing you own is. Liza, who posed the question originally, listed her page from an illuminated manuscript c. 1450. Chris Higgins, who posed the question again on the Mental Floss blog, noted the oldest thing he owned was a wprint probably from the 1950s....but even more he realized most of his belongings were no older than the 90s. This is the part that I think is most interesting. He also questions what is the oldest thing you own that you use regularly! I think a lot of people have old stuff chucked somewhere, but not really in use. He thought probably his apartment was truly the oldest thing he used regularly (1917).

The one thing I don't think either of them have touched on that interests me is how have the old things you own and use changed since you got them? I wonder if the more they change the more attached you become to them. See also Khoi Vinh and my post on patina.

I think the oldest things I own must be a children's book (Wizard of Oz or Waterbabies perhaps) or a piece of furniture, but I don't have dates on any of that stuff handy, or at all on furniture, and I've never been really bothered to find out. Definitely no books from 1450 in my collection!

we feel fine

Via PSFK I have been looking at We Feel Fine a website that I can only describe by copying and pasting a blurb from their website (much as PSFK has done) and slap up a few screenshots. It's impossible not to spend hours on this site once you start to dig around.....

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)....The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

So fun to get caught up in sorting and searching for where feelings happen and when. It feels like such a well of delicious raw data. I hope swimming around in it will be inspirational.

The mess of feelings:


The top three feelings are 1. Better, 2. Bad, and 3. Good!


A few about feelings and clothing came up while I was on:


I've also been on the Learning to Love You More website today, which is another sort of repository of raw emotion. The project is all assignments for other people to complete and the results are displayed on the website. The assignments are still listed on the website and you can still participate. Some of my favorites:

I wish I had the guts to do this one!


I would love to do a whole collection like this...


I wonder what my family's responses to this one would be...ha ha!

Audience participation

Photo by J.J. Tiziou

In art magazine Esopus I read about a dance performance called CELL put on by the Headlong Dance Theater. It attempts to create a performance for one audience member at a time. The piece asks some really interesting questions like 'Who is part of the performance? Why is everyone always on their phone? Am I being watched?' The performance culminates with the audience member engulfed in a private dance that is all their own. The piece premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2006. There were 200 audience members overall (which means the piece was performed 200 times!).

I think there are a lot more interesting questions that this piece addresses like: Why is the connection between maker and audience so important?
Why is this group trying to heighten or change that connection?
Where is the line between performer and voyeur (presumably the audience of one is still watching to some degree although s/he is also participating)?

quickie!

Boing Boing post about a furor over unlucky numbers among cabbies in San Francisco! Link

I like the juxtaposition of these two artists

Nostalgic Technology
by Svetlana Boym
Her website was a little difficult for me to navigate and make sense of at first, but as I poked around I became more and more enamored with the way Boym approaches technology/machines.

******



Volksboutique
We make Money Not Art presents an interview with Christine Hill. While Hill's aesthetic is lovely, I enjoy more her writing and turn of mind.

P.S. I don't even know why I use these tags. I hope they turn out more helpful than they feel right now. hmm.

Emotion—why did I title it this?

Last week I mentioned this article about the divide between science and art. And how "I'd like to write a bit more about this one...." so I'm trying to be inspired to write a bit about some pages I think are related. ahem:

Basically the Boing Boing post reviews an article in the Guardian that talks about the division between science and the humanities and whether there is a "third culture" that bridges this divide. They review a website, two books, and a writer. Natalie Angier's comment "Science is rather a state of mind" reminded me of this article I wrote about before. But it makes me look at that article from Business week in a different way. Nussbaum talks about "Design Thinking" (his caps, not mine), in a way that makes me wonder what is 'humanities thinking'? Is there such a thing? Or is it the same as "design thinking" and those are the two sides being talked about in the Guardian article? Maybe "design thinking" is the third culture referred to in the article? Sorry for all the quote marks....

Boing Boing also recently linked to a Douglas Adams lecture titled "Is there an artificial god?" that made my head spin (in a nice way) similar to the article above. It feels like such a lovely way to consider ideas about god and consciousness and humanity. Sadly, perhaps, it makes me want to totally live in my head and stop making things. Funny how doing a lot of in-depth reading can put me off of physical objects....it's almost like there iis a real divide between intellectual thought and physical action (hey.....) that happens so very naturally that its unstoppable. Good thing I have studio space this month or I could feel myself heading into a downward spiral of creation (or is that anti-creation?)

Moving on....a nice pair of articles that I really enjoyed finding together:

From Boing Boing, "Love, Internet Style" Clay Shirky's keynote speech from the Supernova conference in San Francisco that posits love as a predictor of technological success.

Usman Haque's own keynote speech titled "I Hate Technology" reported on We Make Money Not Art (aside: one of my very favorite blogs). Truth be told the LOVE/HATE theme doesn't exactly work because the speech was for the We Love Technology day on July 12 in Huddersfield, GB.

Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806), plate 9.

Finally, and totally unrelated to anything about (so much for my circular mind melt) is an article from Cabinet Magazine about gestures lost through time

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.”

This is a pet love of mine. I did a couple of garments related to Alexander Technique in my first year of grad school. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any pictures handy, but maybe I will find some and revisit this. I love the body/garment connection.

P.S. A new blog I just started digging around on....hmmmm!

Dylan Trigg

I found some great posts on a blog called Side Effects by PhD student Dylan Trigg at the University of Sussex in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how I found my way there from Things (my favorite!), but I did also find among my bookmarks a link for his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay. While his main interests aren't exactly on target with mine (place, architecture, urban decay seem to top his list as opposed to my interests in the body, clothing, and emotion), we do have several areas in common (time, memory, light & shadow).

The quotes I loved are:

If, as architect Sverre Fehn has suggested, the creation of a shadow constitutes the origin of place, then how does this interplay between the place of shadows and the openness of light form a dialectics of memory?

Instead of viewing this relation between shadows and light as a transitional phase, in which shadowed place eventually gives rise to the clarity of light, let us think of the relation as the formation of a dialectic between presence/absence, inside/out, and process/stasis. Here, negativity and positivity appear as shifting perspectives, spatial patterns which reach a limit and then disperse.

If a shadow is also its double, so invoking an inherently temporal dimension, then it deserves to be held apart from the perception of light. We are in the midst of the texture of surface, a texture comprised from the jagged, uneven unfolding of shadows, shades, and modulating terrains.

From this post about shadows. And a few more from the follow-up:

Indeed, such is the centrality of light to the formation of place that Junichiro Tanizaki, author of In Praise of Shadows, is prepared to state that: “In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house” (p. 28). Further still, Tanizaki goes on to describe how Japanese design orients itself around “neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose” (Ibid., p. 30). The emphasis on the neutrality of space as a platform on which shadows form underscores the dynamic texturing of surfaces, as both morphing and enduring in time.

In all of these quotes Trigg is writing about places, but i think these ideas translate well to my interests in clothing right now. I'm developing some new work based on my Shadow Dress that was exhibited at School last year. It got a great reception and I've recently been thinking I should push my ideas a bit farther.

Trigg also writes a wonderful bit about how modern lighting (he posts a picture of a bland office) virtually eliminates shadows and the implicatioins this has on our experiences in that type of environment. That one goes on a bit so I won't quote it here, some of the posts are quite long and difficult to process. I feel like I've been missing relevent academic reading lately. I'm rather interdisciplinary, or maybe there's just not enough critical new writing about wearing clothes. Either way, I'm really enjoying Mr. Trigg.

A few more links about Dylan Trigg:
Interview about his book, The Aesthetics of Decay
Review of the above book
Article about place & Startbucks

Good Boing Boing!

A book about the significance of opjects on Friday July 6. I wish I had this book a year and a half ago when I was writing my dissertation!


Cabinet of curiosities creator is interviewed on Craft Zine found on Boing Boing on Friday the 6th as well. Lovely crocheted sea creatures....

A really interesting article from Monday July 2 about the divide between science and art. Lots of good links to other articles & books. I'd like to write a bit more about this one....

Kosuke Tsumura

One of my favorite web magazines Ping recently interviewed fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura. They talked about his most recent work where he designed 9 ensembles for 9 specific women, as opposed to designing for the market at large.

Now Ping described the project as "Tsumura would interview 9 women. Afterwards he would fantasise about them and would project things onto them – and create a dress based on these fantasies for each of them. Then, photographer Hiroyuki Matsukage would document the women wearing the dresses." But when I looked up the gallery's site, they described it as "he suggested to create the clothes exclusively to women who appeared in his mind. Based on the imagination, he selects the model. Having presentation and discussions with the models, he expands imagination and the fantasy more and creates a dress just for the model." To me, those are two very different scenarios.....but I guess, either way I find the project quite compelling.

I was surprised I'd never heard of Tsumura before, this project seems so relevant and interesting. But when I poked around his website and looked through his FINAL HOME work, I wasn't so surprised. It's a line meant to dress people up for urban survival. Sort of a practical take on the refugee/apocolyptic/natural disaster scene, without the power of Lucy Orta or the vulnerability of Hussein Chalayan. I'm not saying it's "bad", just that it's aim seems to be to really sell the work and reach everyday people and sometimes things like that don't get lots of press.

In some ways this project, I hesitate to call it a collection, felt flat to me by the way it was seemed more of a shallow fetishization of the female subjects. It was a bit too surface, in some ways. Tsumura said he only chose women because he couldn't "expand his imagination" on members of the same sex. Eh, I like someone who's not so afraid in that way. That said, the basic idea is a sound one that I won't forget.

The project is available in book form Fashion Mode to Order as well as being shown at Nakameguro’s Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo

In my explorations, I also found the bilingual art magazine ART iT (that origiinally commissioned the project and am in love!

quick clips

After all that writing last week, here are just a few fun pics:


Wedding dress from the Smithsonian made of a parachute that saved the groom's life during WWII [via]



They keep saying patchwork is hot at work....
fashion ads from Ebony 70-76



National Geographic does an interesting (and disturbing) article about the "shadow person"

secrets

The website PostSecret began three years ago and is hugely well known (also for being the largest ad-free blog on the internet). The secrets very from the very depressing and scary to the hilarious. Recently the website Orato posted an article by Frank Warren the creator of the site. Orato is an interesting site in it's own right, hosting only "true stories from real people." Anyway, Frank talks about why he started the site, how it blossomed, and what he's doing now (a book and Post Secret events). At the events Frank invites participants to share their secrets in person, shows some banned secrets from the book, and for everyone to talk about secrets together.

Frank says, "I don’t think PostSecret is a reflection of a highly dysfunctional society, quite the opposite. We keep secrets for a reason, obviously. But I think the feelings, thoughts, beliefs and fears we hold in private are often the exact same thing that unite us with others. They’re sometimes the most humanistic part of us."

I think secrets are a very interesting theme, sort of related to luck somehow.....

curiousity killed the cat

Italian artist Michelangelo Roberti is making 999 black cubes (20 cm each side) and selling them on his website saying that there is something different inside each one but DON'T OPEN IT! He also says:

"In this deep sense the thing inside the cube is a representation of the Absolute. A good definition of Absolute can also be 'something that doesn't draw its reality from the fact of being perceived'. Curiosity is paradoxical and comes from the useless hope to perceive the Absolute."

Nice.

Also a nice interview with him here

[via]

catch-up

Seriously so many notes I haven't been able to keep up with them! I've been doing a bit of graphic design work on the side too (sound/music) so that's been keeping me occupied....



Matt Webb did a presentation called Products Are People Too in June 2007 as the closing keynote to reboot 9.0. His emphasis on experience and stories parallels a lot of my own design interest. Actually in a lot of ways this talk has nothing to do with designing clothes and textile prints (duh), but it just feels like this must be related in terms of my work. Side note: I totally need to look through this site: unboxing.com but it's blocked from work! Also, favorite line: "Products exist over time. We meet them, we hang out with them, we live life together." gee!

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Really nice project supported by Eyebeam that replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database. It's not scheduled to be finished until sometime this summer, but I signed up for the mailing list so I can get it when it's ready.

[via]

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This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It) an interesting article from the NYT byt Benedict Carey that relates to the Procucts are People Too presentation noted above. Favorite quotes:

• “'When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?' said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, The Redemptive Self. 'Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.'”

• "Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find"

• "Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become."

via Kottke who also mentions Allen Iverson's training routine (I think, therefore I slam.)

more emotional/narrative projects

At the Great Eastern Hotel in London: Tiago da Fonseca - Bedtime Stories
The Great Eastern does all kinds of interesting projects with artists and designers. They have an amazing staff, and a brilliant roster of projects.
[via]

Social map: "When Andrew Enright and Heather Samples were married in 2006, they had a small wedding with a few groups of very tightly-knit friends and family. They made this graphic to help start conversations."
[via]

Ping mag from Japan talks about emotional wood furniture by Toru Shimizu's new project monokraft.



Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. This one is my favorite, but there are so many more.....makes me want to rearrange my bookshelves!
[via (but now I can't find the exact link!)]