Toban Nichols @ Adobe Books

December 11th - January 10th

Nichols developed an algorithm that replaced every 4th word in Vogues Book of Etiquette with the word "PUSSY'....

and objects, and objects...

"... including...

... ultraluminous galaxies that are breeding stars copiously inside shrouds of dust..."

photo by Chris Hetlage

(On what NASA expects to see with its new WISE)

FULL ARTICLE TEXT by Dennis Overbye

New Blue Chromophore

Mn³⁺ in Trigonal Bipyramidal Coordination

"The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with other chemicals and heating them to high temperatures.

Then Mas Subramanian, a professor of material sciences, noticed that one of the samples that a graduate student had just taken out of the furnace was blue."

FULL TEXT

-New York Times: Kenneth Chang

"We show that trivalent manganese, Mn³⁺, imparts an intense blue color to oxides when it is introduced at dilution in trigonal bipyramidal coordination. Our optical measurements and first-principles density functional theory calculations indicate that the blue color results from an intense absorption in the red/green region. This absorption is due in turn to a symmetry-allowed optical transition between the valence-band maximum, composed of Mn 3d_x²−y²,xy states strongly hybridized with O 2p_x,y states, and the narrow Mn 3d_z²-based conduction-band minimum. We begin by demonstrating and explaining the effect using a well-defined prototype system: the hexagonal YMnO₃−YInO₃ solid solution. We then show that the behavior is a general feature of diluted Mn³⁺ in this coordination environment."

MORE INFO

-Journal of the American Chemical Society

Good News

"A Long Island deli owner who held a robber at gunpoint, then let him go after giving him $40 and a loaf of bread, says he got an anonymous letter from the crook that included a $50 bill and a thank-you for saving him from a life of crime.
The mysterious writer apologized to his would-be victim, Mohammad Sohail, saying, 'First of all I would like to say I am sorry at the time I had [no] money no food on the table no job and nothing for my family.'
Similar to comments he made on his knees during the incident last May, he said he realized that trying to rob the store with a baseball bat 'was wrong but I had [no] choice. I needed to feed my family.'"

FULL ARTICLE TEXT

-From the New York Post, writer:KIERAN CROWLEY

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Brothers living in cave to inherit billions from lost grandmother

Two penniless brothers who live in a cave outside Budapest are to inherit most of a reported £4 billion after an astonishing twist in their family fortunes.

Zsolt Peladi: Brothers living in cave to inherit billions from lost grandmother">

FULL ARTICLE TEXT

-from The Telegraph UK, writer:Henry Samuel

Gold Zone

Things That Jiggle

Video Short - science, retro animation & psychedelic big band - inspired by physicist Richard Feynman's quote about 'things that jiggle'.

Figs! Alla 'Fallen Fruit'

"'Public Fruit' is the concept behind the Fallen Fruit, an activist art project which started as a mapping of all the public fruit in our neighborhood. We ask all of you to contribute your maps so they expand to cover the United States and then the world. We encourage everyone to harvest, plant and sample public fruit, which is what we call all fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots."

-Fallen Fruit is David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young

627 Precita
You'll find a sweet lil' Fig Tree, sidewalk side.

A Property Called Strange

"'The neutron and proton I believe you have already met. In the next row you have the sigma particle, which can manifest with both positive and negative electric charge and also with no charge at all. It consequently appears as if it were three different particles. In the center of the pattern you have the lambda, which is a single particle with no charge. These are all strange particles,' he added.

'They all seem very strange to me, ' agreed Alice, as she came over to look at them more closely.

'No, no. Strangeness is simply a property possessed by certain particles and which happens to have been given the name of strangeness. Rather like electric charge, you know—except that it is totally different,' he added unhelpfully. 'The remaining two particles are both the Cascade. It comes in tow different charge states, so there are two of it,' he explained. 'it is double strange, of course.'

'Of course,' echoed poor Alice."

-Alice In Quantumland, p148-149

by Robert Gilmore

Holiday Shopping?

Curated by Glen Helfand and Rebecca Bollinger

A temporary art space is created in the Alameda Shopping Center.

Graduate Students from CCA create unique and unusual shopping experiences for mall-goers.

People dance... sculpt globes... trade a can of food for a porcelain sculpture of a can... draw zombies... and much much more!

more info @:

www.superpopupshop.com

The space... a very raw shell of a retail store probably destined for mediocrity and superfluousness.

visitors: Artist Suné Woods and son Ayler try their hand at envisioning the 'Mall Zombie'...

... don't we all turn into brainless zombies when we are in the mall? I know I'm guilty.

Visitors: Curator Matt Post, Artists: Brandon Olsen & Gareth Spor basking in the glow of Alex Beckman's onsite projection: Staycation Sno-Globes

Artist and Writer, Alex Vikmanis' Super Shopping Stories!

Alex created a cozy fireside experience where visitors could snuggle up and listen to a recorded shopping story, or, if they were lucky, have one read to them personally by the artist himself!

Political Ceramicist, Brad Meninga, invited visitors to inscribe a clay sphere with their vision of the earth and their hopes for it's future.

The Charming Rebecca Ora, Artist & Provocateur, was ready to assist visitors at the Super Pop-Up information kiosk.

Artist Zarouhie Abdalian worked on site during the event gilding a crack that she discovered in the cement floor of the interior.

Artist Dorathy Lye, in keeping with her ongoing investigation of personal navigation and relationships to space, created several shopping-cart/walking stick prototypes. Geared more toward children because of their small size, the cart-guides were charming mobile sculptures.

Dorathy Lye Sculpture in use.

Artist George Pfau asks Mall Goers to recollect any zombie sightings they might have had at the mall or its surrounding areas. Visitors illustrate their sightings and take home a copy of the Super Pop-Up Press, full of personal accounts of zombie sightings.

Artist Hannah Ireland's Dance Swap lures passersby onto her custom-made dance floors with hard-to-resist classics like the Twist, the Electric Slide and the Macarena.

Artist Jay Dion presents a wall of Porcelain vessels cast from the forms of tin cans. Dion offers an exchange: one of his sculptures for a can of food brought in by the visitor. Swap by swap the wall of pristine artist multiples is replaced with the colorful labels of canned corn, condensed milk, cranberry sauce... just in time for Thanksgiving.

Artist Adeleine Daysor speaks with interested customers about her sculpture-cake-frosted-wood-blocks. (Adeleine likes to frost things..)

Brion Nuda Rosch @ Baer Ridgway

Ara Peterson @ Ratio 3

Electronic Skin Tattoos

Okay. this is weird.

Phillips is developing this technology to implant microchips embedded in silk fibers into the human skin so that the skin becomes a screen.

One of the uses of this would be changeable tattoos that apparently are stimulated by desire... just in case you couldn't tell you were turned on? -- After all, why pay attention to your partner during sex when you can just read the bulletin on their skin... for anyone who pays attention we already emit bulletins...

More likely this technology is being developed for devious military reasons. I read an article somewhere in the last couple of years that talked about making clothing that was screen-like and could match the visuals of the environment around it... the ultimate camouflage... this kind of technology could make the wearer virtually invisible, just a ghost, shimmer, or static, just like in the Predator movies...

So maybe they're cloning human/robots who will be virtually naked except for their skinscreen which can shift or transform to hide them in the environment, or maybe the military will learn the techniques of butterfly display and exhibit monstrous visages on the skin of their new stealthy-soldiers to terrorize communities... or maybe they'll display hypnotic patterns and put adversaries into suggestive trances...

Yes, I have a good imagination.... but if there is one thing I've learned over the years... if I can imagine it the odds are somebody else with the means, and way less of a conscience, has already made it a reality...

Makes me want to pull a Thoreau

Anyway. Here's the Article and Creepy video:

LED Screens Could Turn Skin Into Screens

Face to Face

Communication has been a big theme in my work. -- This piece is from 2005.

This 'Strangeness'

" This 'strangeness' is 'strange' because reality is so fucking extraordinary, and strange too because most of us try to live without strangeness, and construct something called the 'ordinary' which never existed. Actually, the strangeness is so ordinary as to be quite natural. The strangeness is wonder and what is wondered at is so wonderful that it is strange we do not wonder more."

-Peter Redgrove in a letter to William Malpas

from The Art of Richard Long

Pile of lovely

Window Shopping Through Time

Wandering through Echo Park, never been there before, headed to a bookshop, and we pass this storefront. 'Mart', 'Time-Travel', my friends continue on, but something grabs me. Everything about the facade (almost everything - I hadn't noticed the robot/caveman display yet) says 'quickie-mart', 'convenience store' but something is different... something else is going on here... some invisible force pulls me to the door. - Turns out this is one of Dave Eggers' storefronts that functions in conjunction with the writing centers he has set up for kids around the country. I had never heard of this one before, it was love at first browse. The place was brilliant. Filled with hourglasses, cans of mammoth meat, robot milk, donuts from 1985, and of course a selection of publications by the kids and by the organization.

The Meeting of the Folds

Switch in context

A mixture of genuinely old and conceptually futuristic

The details really made it come alive, like this casually written sign suggesting that the visitor come back 'yesterday'.

This was one of my favorites. Shade in a bag. You buy the seed of a tree, go back in time, plant it and water it, then come back to the time where you began and there should be a nice lovely tree waiting for you to relax under it. Of course, realistically this scenario is fraught with all kinds of hiccups, what with the dangers that trees are subjected to these days, but the sentiment is lovely.

Rubber Bands II

Rubber Bands

Magnifiers

Beautiful Decay

Writing As Material Practice

• Defining ‘Writing’: How do we know when writing is ‘writing’? Is this category appropriate for characterising past forms of graphical symbolic expression?
• Scribal Technology: How do materials, tools and technological choices relate to the expression and meaning of writing?
• Inscribed Object Worlds: How does the substance, surface, shape or size of an object inform the expression and meaning of writing thereon?
• Writing as Embodied Practice and Performance: How does the physical expression of writing inform physical and sensory engagements?
• Methodology: What practice- and materials-based methods can be developed for the study of past writing, from documentation during excavation, analysis, interpretation and publication, to teaching and learning?

http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tcrnkep/

Human Nature: Justice vs. Power

Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault
Transcript, 1971

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm

Phenomenology

'As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience.” Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl’s method which entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the “science of experience,” the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, Husserl’s theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality which are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not “in” the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e. the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.'

-from Wikipedia
more...

OrangeFlowerBlueWall

Could Chance have brought this flower to a better place to die?

Drifting in the wind to lay beside my complement...