"Electronic objects are not only 'smart', they 'dream' -- in a sense that they leak radiation into the space and objects surrounding them, including our bodies."

- Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

Electricity Drain

SItting naked on the stool allows electricity to drain from the body.

Parasite Light

This light feeds off the leaks radiation of household electronic products. 

Placebo by Dunne and Raby

After a winter, a spring, and a summer of samples, weaving, and hardcore computer time, TextEdit Textiles is now online.  Tell us what you think (kbrown4@saic.edu), we might do it again.

Making Something Out of Nothing is a textile design investigation of voids and nothingness. Beginning with a photocopy of a blank sheet of paper, I repeatedly copied the original until the visual static constructed a dynamic pattern.  The final images (translated through a popular pattern-making software, woven on a computer-assisted Jacquard loom, and the cloth finally cut and sewn into a scarf) represent the idea that everything is either devolving towards or evolving from nothingness.  The photocopier and Jacquard loom simultaneously assume significant roles in the process and production of the pattern by mechanizing and materializing a conceptual gesture into a wearable object.  

9 X 7 inches, full color

44 pages, saddle stitch

“I was haunted by another possibility. Apart from the arrow we had discovered, there was no knowing what other signs might be concealed on the walls or elsewhere. Might there not be a link, for instance, between the stain over the wash-stand and the peg of the wardrobe or the scratches on the floor? We might have spotted one sign, but how many more that we had not spotted might be concealed in the natural order of things? ... [S]urrounding reality was now contaminated, so to speak, by the possibility of innumerable hidden meanings, and this continually distracted me ....” Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz

Sculptures by Anne Truitt

first, 1961

primrose, 1962

sea garden, 1964

studio view (1980?)

In 1961 Truitt began to work in the style for which she later became known: she paints multiple delicate layers of color characterized by subtle variations on wooden constructions which she has fabricated in accordance with scale drawings; the structural elements of these sculptures constitute armatures supporting color. Writing in April, 1965, Truitt stated: "What is important to me is not geometrical shape per se, or color per se, but to make a relationship between shape and color which feels to me like my experience. To make what feels to me like reality." (emphasis mine)

www.annetruitt.org

Drawings by this and a somewhat related quote from Vannevar Bush:

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.  He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. "

Some early Dennis Oppenheim:

Whirlpool (Eye of the Storm), 1973

"3/4 mile by 4 mile schemata of tornado, traced in the sky using standard white smoke discharged by an aircraft."

Material Interchange, 1970

"Stage #1.  Fingernail lodges between gallery floorboards.  Stage #2.  Splinter from gallery floorboards lodged under skin.  

Some contemporary takes on Ikebana - the japanese art of flower arrangement


"Dan made this flower arrangement by sweeping flower petals across my floor."

Details from new Ruth Laskey:

Stan Shellabarger, Untitled Performance (Forest Walk 2007)

"Shellabarger walked in two separate paths, an "X" shape and an "O" shape, wearing golf spikes.  Shellabarger then placed wildflower seeds into the freshly aerated soil."

Western Exhibitions

Stripes, 2008

Examining the connections between bodies in public, private, and celestial spaces by simplifying collected data into stripe patterns.   Here's a few pieces...

Data Stripes: Twelve hours of "I love you", Movie Theater Stripes: Every curly-haired person, Apartment Stripes: Me watching you watch televsion

J. Morgan Puett

J. Morgan Puett has opened a collaborative installation with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a revolving show that will use over 100 glass display cases in the School's new Sullivan Galleries. Read more about "Department Store" on her site, where I found these beautiful images of her work.

Park of the Future

"A new design for a park. You visit a park meanly to enjoy the nature in it.
A new design for this is not necessary, just some adjustments and improvements, so the park becomes even more natural."
Marielle Leenders

Photosyntesis, 2003
"Photosynthesis Robot is a three-dimensional sketch of a possible perpetual motion machine driven by phototropism- the movement of plants towards the direction of the sun. The motion of the plants upon this four-wheeled vehicle would propel slowly over a period of time."
Future Farmers