Art

Videos for When Time is an Abstract Concept

Art, Reccomendations

Pandemics are weird. Some nights I go to bed at 9 o’clock because I’m exhausted from making my brain process consciousness. Some nights I am awake until 2am trading trippy animated videos with Mason. Here’s a couple things for your late night/early morning/time is an abstract concept viewing.

This is not animated BUT I watched a hypnotic Tictok with this song, which led me here. There is not a Tictok that could be made to rival the live performance.

Mason also had me watch this (The Secret City). It’s an educational PBS kid’s show from the late 80s and I LOST MY MIND. I know basic art concepts and this was still incredible. I felt like I needed to take notes. Watching this guy teach you about foreshortening is like watching magic happen, and he’s telling you HOW it happens and that it’s not magic, and I’m still thinking “no… that’s obviously magic.” It makes me FURIOUS. How do you WHIP IMAGES RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HEAD LIKE THAT. I have never been an illustrator or an animator and I am baffled. Grab a pencil and draw some shit with Captain Mark.

All I get to listen to now is the new Wax Tailor album. This video isn’t really much, but the song features Mark Lanegan so here ya go.

OH this would be a time to recommend “The Midnight Gospel”. I am not going to endorse all the views, or beliefs, or esoterica that is in this series, but what really drew me to it (aside from the animations) is the earnestness. The genuine desire for connection and understanding. It is refreshing right now because I miss my friends, and I miss strange, honest conversations, and it is soothing to hear people talk and listen to each other. It won’t change your life, but it might make you feel better for a bit.

(If you like it, listen to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour.)

Comments are open link some weird videos.

Whale Songs During/After

Art, Writing

For the first time in almost a century the
oceans were quiet; 
the deepness pinging nothing, like the
                                        waves ceasing to roar.

Inside that void you could hear the earth heave, feel the fathomless conversations of leviathans. 
                 An expanse, a wilderness.

Did they wonder at the absence of our unceasing rumor? 
Or did the space dredge up faint memories of silence in a thick, 
deep blue?

First, a whisper – then threaded calls stretching the ten thousand leagues beyond sound, voices lapping the jawbones of ancestors 
lying dormant on the dark sea floor.

Scientists studying North Atlantic right whales in Canada’s Bay of Fundy found a noticeable decrease in the animals’ stress hormones directly after September 11, 2001.

Nineteen year later, during March, April, and May of 2020, an unprecedented reduction in boat traffic in Alaska’s Cook Inlet resulted in calmer waters for beluga whale pods.

It is believed that in these quiet times whales find hunting and communicating easier, 
and return to waters they 
previously abandoned.

Welcome to the Labor Camp

Archives and Libraries, Art

I am entering the second year of my Master’s in Library and Information Science, with a focus on archives and digital curation. One of the tools we use a lot is Omeka. Omeka is a platform used by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to host digital materials and related metadata, as well as create exhibits. What it basically does is organize your stuff and let people search it from the comfort of their own home.

It’s also free. This means that everyone uses it. Every time I have a new Omeka project, I have to make a new account. I have made four – FOUR – separate Omeka accounts in the past year. I’m out of email addresses to sign up with. It’s truly madness.

For my last Omeka project (hopefully ever) I created this exhibit about artist Pitor Szyhalki’s COVID-19 Labor Camp Reports. Szyhalski created a broadside a day from March 24 to November 3, 2020, responding to the myriad crises America faced almost daily as the COVID-19 death rate soared in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.

Welcome to the Labor Camp (exhibit link)

Post Typography in Baltimore printed and wheat-pasted the broadsides all over the neighborhoods I frequented this summer – Charles Village, Old Goucher, North Ave., Bolton Hill, Mt. Vernon – and that was where I first saw them plastered on breaker boxes as I biked up and down Howard Street.

I’m not going to say a whole lot more about these because most of what I have to say is covered in the exhibit, but these images astounded me. I do not have any rapid-response ability when it comes to art, so the perceptiveness of the pieces is doubly impressive. Szyhalski has an eye for graphic design and a mastery of visual language. There is a collected book in the works, and you can purchase selected posters on the Frank webpage, and follow on Instagram for the entire collection.