choose.your.own.adventure

southwest parking lots

2010-03-21T01:10:00.000-04:00

fields of used to be
and could be
filled with dreams
of buying
time

Time present

2009-07-20T17:52:00.002-04:00

Since it's been a year and a half since I've posted to this site I don't suppose anyone checks it anymore but for vanity's sake, I choreographed and performed a work in progress yesterday at ADF.

It's something I've been thinking about for a long time but just finally put my body into working on it. Some of the choreography is based on text from TS Elliot's Burnt Norton, Baudelaire's Le Fleur de Mal and a Gertrude Stein quote. So it's called Time Present or Sur les balcons du ciel or When this you see - I can't really decide.

Rough but in existence:

time present/when this you see/sur les balcons du ciel

snow on power lines

2008-01-16T16:30:00.000-05:00

some powerlines for laura because we had a snow (that i missed by leaving for a business meeting at princeton 18 hours early) that stuck really well to everything - super picturesque. today it's all melting and ice cubes are falling off the trees, houses, power lines, etc. ouch. ouch. ew.

some stories

2007-01-29T01:28:00.000-05:00

i finally got around to typing up some stories i wrote down from people (my neighbors and their relatives) while we were traveling in mexico. primarily from while we were in janamuato for my neighbor's (tony) father's funeral, when people sat down and were still and told stories. tony was trying to scare me with some of them, but he ended up scaring himself and waking up in the middle of the night. revenge.

"She said, “I was sitting by the peach tree when I was touched three times. It was a gentle hand. Three times like gra’ci’as. It’s because of this that we must keep the peach tree.” Or something very different but I understood something like this: he touched her through the peach tree to say thank you. And I am here."

"When I was little, maybe five or six years old, I was playing outside one night with the other kids. Holding hands to spin in a circle, but it was late and my mother called me to come inside so she could lock up for the night. But even when I was going to bed, I still wanted to be playing outside. In the middle of the night I must have gotten up and gone out in the street. And I was spinning. I guess, I don’t know if maybe I dreamed it, but I remember so clearly the feeling of my hair lifted off my neck, and it felt so good, the breeze, like if we flew like birds. It felt like that. A neighbor saw me though and called to me three times. The first time she was so far away, then the second time close but still far off, but the third call was right there and so loud. I woke up then in the street and ran inside."

"It was Thursday, so it was the sixth day of rosaries, when the middle son was reading the scripture. Each day as the women chanted the birds would make so much noise, maybe it was because dusk was falling, but it felt like it was the women's voices that called the noise out of the birds: chirping, squawking and jumping around in the trees. But this day while he read they were particularly agitated and all at once they went flying though the arcade, lined with women, looking for a place to settle down. As if to hide from some impending danger – an earthquake or fire – but he kept reading. They flew out, settled back into the trees, and no danger we knew of ever arrived."

"For the day of San Juan they make a big party and bake a lot of bread. So we were coming back late from my grandmother’s house and, you know, we were kids, so we were running ahead of the adults and back and forth. So I was running ahead and came to the electric pole at the top of our street, and it was probably one in the morning and you would maybe see a drunk man out at that time, but not a lady. But I saw a lady, just walking in circles by the electric pole – around and around. I was a kid though so I just turned around and ran back to the adults – I didn’t mention it – and when we turned the corner together she was gone."

hwy 101

2007-01-04T13:46:00.000-05:00

because it's been so long since i've put anything up and i haven't done anything terribly pretty lately - these are just a few pictures from along hwy 101 in october. some powerlines for laura. maybe some pictures from mexico soon...

alexis

2006-10-11T12:38:00.000-04:00

"it was like a whole library burned to the ground"

world without end

amen

scandinavian bathrooms

2006-06-17T15:25:00.000-04:00

I was being very narcissistic staring at my new hair cut so I thought I'd take pictures in as many bathrooms as possible (where i had privacy and the camera). So I think it's a kind of interesting series as bathrooms are awfully similar but also pretty different. And then there's me trying to figure out how to arrange my face... mixed success.

Reykjavik, Iceland. Reykjavik 871 +/-2.

Reykjavik, Iceland. Kling Klang Gallery.

Stockholm, Sweden. Malmö Konsthall.

Stockholm, Sweden. Stockholm-Arlanda Airport.

Helsinki, Finland. Tori Tower.

Helsinki, Finland. Artist's Home.

Helsinki, Finland. UIAH - University of Art and Design.

Helsinki, Finland. KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art.

Helsinki, Finland. Museum of Finnish Design.

Oslo, Norway. Japanese Restaurant.

more words?

2006-06-02T13:58:00.000-04:00

i've been liking bits of words lately...

antique memories, yellowed
leave from the the brittle petals
of painted dresses long unworn

.

little word thing

2006-04-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

i fell into a hole
a while back.
it looked so warm and so dark.
and it was so dark it was bright
and i fell so heavy i was light.

my breath was a scream
later it whimpered
now we sing.

it's gotten too hot so shiver
shake - and it's dark and i glow
and the hole flows past
fast and smooth
grating so slow.

turns out it's nothing much
more than a hole.

also... what is dance? (in progress too)

2006-04-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

Dance is movement.
Dance is stillness.
Dance is communication.
Dance is art.
Dance is ritual.
Dance is ephemeral.
Dance is bodies in space.
Dance is social.
Dance is individual.
Dance is courtship.
Dance is intuitive.
Dance is learned.
Dance is performance.
Dance is ancient.
Dance is present.
Dance is intentional.
Dance is…

Dance is movement.
This seems to be inclusive of all dance, but not exclusive to dance. A moving body is not necessarily dance as a quadrangle is not necessarily a square. And yet is it fully inclusive. Is a woman lying still on a stage in a long red dress, partially illuminated by a square shaft of light dancing? Does the dance not begin until she moves?

Dance is movement and stillness.
But sleeping is not dance and walking down the street is not dance. But is it dancing if a group of people has been instructed to look out the window at the store you are walking by? What if there are forty people walking down the street in synchronization? Is a parade a dance? Carnival in Rio, yes? A military parade, no?

Dance is a communicative accumulation of stillness and movement. All dance, both social and concert dance, communicates something: desire, emotion, narrative, political statement, or more. Unlike mime or sign language, in dance each motion or phrase needn’t literally correspond to a specific meaning, though some may be contextually understood to correspond to a meaning.

Dance is a communicative accumulation of the stillness and movement of a body or bodies. Dance is unique and distinct from other art forms in that it utilizes moving and still bodies in space and through time to communicate. Dance differentiates itself from theater by taking the body as its central focus. While speech may be used in dance as in theater, dance takes as its core material the presence of the body along with whatever tools of communication it may or may not use: sound, object, light, text, etc. In meetings, in prayer, in conversation the stillness and movement of the body is used to communicate context or subtext. Is a slouched student fidgeting dancing? Is a row students seated purposefully slouched and fidgeting with pencils dancing, maybe. The intention, the awareness of gaze, of time, of the purpose of the motion and stillness is too crucial to the dance. So what is dance? Dance is many things. Dance is ambiguous. Dance is precise and essentially what it is. To stop, perhaps dance is…

…the conscious, communicative accumulation of the stillness and movement of a body or bodies.

self-portrait solo statement (in progress)

2006-04-11T17:31:00.000-04:00

The body moves involuntarily, constantly. Breathe, circulation, blinking, adjustment of weight and balance. We sneeze, hiccup, cough, burp. And then the body moves voluntarily near constantly – deep stillness is rare and captivating. We make an effort to walk, to run, to sit, to cross our legs, to roll our shoulders, to shake another’s hand. Depending on culture we move our heads more or less to speak, move our hands to illustrate and emphasize. We cross our arms, twist our feet, slouch, stand straight. We do these things with more or less awareness. And these movements are universal and they are individually specific. Some cultural and social patterns are easily spotted and many motions are universal in occurrence (interpretation not necessarily so much) but the particular combinations, inflections, amplitudes, contexts and meanings of each person’s movement are unique to himself to his particular confluence of cultural, social and economic positions, familial traditions, era, friends, training. Particularly those movements that occur with little to no conscious thought or awareness are to me the vulnerable points of a personality, the hole in the armor where you see the naked self through his adornment, without acting, without pretense.

A woman starts on stage. Still. She rubs her head, slowly, thoughtfully. Thinking of something entirely not here. She scratches at her skin. She pries at imperfections. She bites the skin from her nail; she tastes it and realizes she’s doing it again. She stops. She begins to fidget in a less distant way. Scratching her leg, combing her hair behind her ear. Pressing her palms together. Recrosses her legs. She rests.

She spasms, to the right. A quick shudder and a short cry, or her mouth opens, or she breathes. She breathes so hard it’s a yelp. She didn’t mean to. She knew it was going to happen. Well not really, but just in the moment she knew – a split second before you did.

To cover she moves, thinking about twitching, she twitches. And her hands fidget and she stretches her back. And she tries to explain – it’s like a sneeze, just say bless you – and her hands won’t stop the harder she tries. They hold each other and squirm together. And maybe she should stop talking and just trace images in the air. It‘d be clearer. Movement isn’t weird if it’s dancing. But there’s no dancing about architecture, no dancing at the dinner table. Making faces is for kids. She makes a face at the saddest person. He makes a sad face. She makes a funnier face. He makes one too. Smile. Shake it off. Her hand is a spider – slow then quick. Pounce. Two-finger kick-line. He smiles. Shake it off. They re-enter the cold stream of conversation and sadness moves back in.

She shakes again – she definitely squeaks but she tries to swallow it and it’s hollow and no one smiles. She goes to the bathroom and her hands explain herself to the mirror. Without words it’s better – it’s like a song.

4/4 Mass Ave pictures

2006-04-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

a few images from 77 mass ave. the bus was very slow in coming...

the orange city at night
holds disasters in its streets and
hides monsters in its shadows.

i have given in to the wave

2006-04-04T11:49:00.000-04:00

i've submitted and made a blog. i'll start putting meaningful things on it in a bit.

sorry for the long address - it's from this discussion:

"it's like a choose-your-own-adventure, you could've chosen a fuckload of other adventures... but, oh well... you didn't." -on the fear of architecture students to make a decision when under the influence of computer generated iterative design. (and life and art and work in general)