Extreme Mending

Superpsyched to see this post from the Cooper Hewitt museum

Brown, Susan. "Extreme Mending." Cooperhewitt.org. 6 Nov 2012; 17 Oct 2016. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2012/11/06/extreme-mending/

Language of flowers

I've talked with many artists about the language of flowers, but it never occurred to me to look for a dictionary. Until now. And, thanks to Temple Univeristy Library, here are a few...

de la Tour, Charlotte. Le langage des fleur. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1858. (French, illustrated)

Dumont, Henrietta. The Language of Flowers. The floral offering: a token of affection and esteem comprising the language and poetry of flowers. With coloured illustrations from original drawings. Philadelphia: H.C. Peck & Theo Bliss, 1852.

Ingram, John H. Flora Symbolica; or The language and sentiment of flowers. London: F.W. Arne and co., 1869. (link)

Wirt, Elizabeth Washington Gamble. Flora's Dictionary By A Lady. Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr, 1832.

Artists as correspondents...

I love letters. Writing them. Getting them. Don't do it enough, though.

Here are some stories about artists' letters...

Brooks, Katherine. "Sol Lewitt's advice to Eva Hesse is what every creative person needs to hear." The Huffington Post. 27 Oct 2015.

Also this:

Savig, Mary. "The Art of Handwriting" The Atlantic.com. 5 Jul 2016.

Repair rights

Another one for the file on care and repair...this time addressing manufacturers' interests in keeping users from fixing their products...

Matchar, Emily. "The fight for the 'right to repair'. Smithsonian.com. 13 Jul 2016. 13 Jul 2016.

Quote

“I think I became an artist because I realized I needed a field in which the construction of fictional authorities and imagined quotes would be a cause for celebration rather than […] disgrace” (14)

– Wm. Kentridge

Six Drawing Lessons

Fixing books

When you start to notice something suddenly it's everywhere. Here's another piece on repair, this time on books, by Christopher Jobson from Colossal (The Ingenuity and Beauty of Creative Parchment Repair in Medieval Books, Nov 7 2014; 10 Jun 2016.)  A quick peek at the Erik Kwakkel's blog about medieval manuscripts suggests theres' more to learn there...

And it is inching toward reality...

The wind has been crazy the last couple of days! Trying to get a good shot for the catalog is challenging...

More maintenance

I didn't love Interstellar, but it did strike a chord with me.

The film's long set-up describes a world where no chances can be taken because society can no longer afford them. Being part of a generation that was too late for the babyboomers' party and always knew it would be in charge of the clean up, I saw something painfully familiar in the story where characters were encouraged to go into farming and discouraged from breaking new ground through exploration.

Maybe that's what has me following all this stuff on maintenance and repair (which I've tagged this and other recent posts with). If you Google images of 'maintenance' you get hundreds of faceless drones like those below> they generally hold hand tools, but some of them have wrenches and computer keyboards, implying that a wrench is used to keep a computer up. Clearly, the world is screwed.

What you find when you look for 'maintenance' online...

Either way, I had the same sort of grim recognition when I read Laura Bliss' essay in the Atlantic's 'Citylab' ("How 'Maintainers,' not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn", April 16, 2016). So I wanted to add it to this list...

At some point we'll get to how all this fits together. For now...there's a clean up on aisle three...

This might be going too far....

Mitchell, Nancy. "Broken is Beautiful: The Japanese Tradition That Makes Broken Things Even Better than Brand New". Apartment Therapy. 19 May 2016. 6 Jun 2016. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/broken-is-beautiful-kintsugi-makes-broken-things-even-better-231069?crlt.pid=camp.pEvil9o3aFse

Article identifies the practice as kintsugi.

More on Mending

Wanted to add this piece by Felicia x on Visible Mending to the list of things on repair I've put here...will have to go back and make a tag for them now...

Latest versions...

It was a pretty spring day, so I thought we'd see how that looks...

Progress

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 1)

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 2)

Working on patterns as backgrounds for the banners...

Tisdale's book tells about his experiences serving on the Olympia. I've been mining it (and other period writing) for text to encode on the banners...

Why do we quote?

Homework!

Bullhorn politics

So for some time I've been compiling research on how racist groups communicate their messages in the public sphere. I've spent a lot of time on the SPLC website, on the ADL site, and even a few hate groups I have tracked down. My assumption - valid until this election cycle - was that publicly displaying one's racism was a risk to these people, and that the symbols they used to telegraph their views was an essential adaptation to a world with which they are out of step.

Boy. Am I an idiot.

This has been driven home as candidates on the right have abandoned the dogwhistle for the megaphone. There are a thousand regrettable examples, but I want to just looks at this one for a minute. I don't know journalist Tom Cahill's work at all, or follow usuncut.com, but I appreciate his eye. In a story that ran on March 17, 2016, (picked up by Gawker...I know, I'm still in the depths here, but that's where this stuff happens some times) Cahill pointed out that PBS Newshour ran a story on Trump's popularity in the south on March 15 in which they spoke to (and photographed) a person named Grace Tilly and members of her family. Cahill (and others) observed that Tilly  had some prominent tattoos - one of a Celtic cross and another of the number 88. In certain contexts these signs are associated with white supremacist groups. Tilly, according to PBS, denies any white supremacist or Neo-Nazi allegiances and claims, "are connected to her family’s Celtic religious beliefs".

Is this some form of plausible deniability? I think it's hard to imagine - based on the data in the story - that the Tilly family represents a model for racial tolerance in 21st century America. Another member of the Tilly family interviewed in the piece, Pete, complains about, "all these protesters and all this stuff, and people saying [Trump is] racist" and specifically goes on to mention Black Lives Matter, before performing the signature move of racists everywhere and denying the value of race as a subject. Ms. Tilly's claim about her Celtic ancestry may or may not be true, but it tracks terribly close to the going mantra of 'heritage not hate' behind which hate now tends to hid.

So what we have here is someone who waves the (coded) flag and, when confronted on it, refuses to take responsibility for the message that's being sent. (I have considered the possibility that Ms. Tilly went to get tattoos that would celebrate her cultural identity that she thought had no meaning other than the one she intended. That is a very remote possibility given the popularity of number codes like 88...which, so far as my research has gone, has nothing to do with Celtic myth and are widely known among tattoo artists).

And this is a parent who kept her 11 year old home from school, "so that he can see democracy in action."

Grace, for the love of God, let your kid go to school. Don't do us any more favors. Please.

Concordance table

"Oh the discrimination of flags and pennant! Some day [...] I will go to the flag locker [...] study them out and write a descriptive poem about them. A flag that means yes at the main truck means no on the after gaff."
L. Tisdale, Three Years Behind the Guns, 205

Abbreviation	Text	1917 Code
BTW	By the way	HAD, HAS, or HAVE (the person indicated) he not...
FUD	Fear, uncertainty, and doubt	Bandit
IRL	In real life	Cistern
OMG	Oh my God	Handspike
SOL	Shit out of luck	At (the time indicated) we were off
TMI	Too much information	Plates (crockery)
WTF	What the F*ck	By steamer

Maybe we're getting some where...

I still think it needs to be clouds of text...

Working...

I started thinking of the composition as one long banner after visiting the Olympia a few weeks ago. My original suggestion for a site wasn't workable, so we are now on a lower deck, near the captain's cabin (and its large guns...)

As I have tried to hone in on a message, I have been increasingly overwhelmed by the range of the codebook. It seems some how not fitting to have a single message...or even a single code. I have been peppering these latest images with Morse.

Here there are texts at various scales and saturations of color...I like the way the gray carries the white of the hull up on the upper decks...

This one is getting a lot of different messages into the mix...I'm not satisfied with the organization of it, and may go back to the units defined by the stanchions of the deck rail.

All our cities

Text messages as signal flags...

Some images of popular text abbreviations rendered as signal flags for the Artship Olympia project...

IMO (in my opinion...)

OMG (oh my God...)

POS (Parents over shoulder...)

TBH (To be honest...)

WTF (What the f*ck)

Another avenue for this is still to use the old signal flag code books to compose a story of some kind. I have begun to try my hand at a pre-colonial form of writing from the Philippines called Baybayin...I think it would be interesting to have a subtext in that script...

Manilla Location flags with Baybayin subtext...

Where in the world?

In in the International Code of Signals (1917 version), there is an extensive index of four-flag codes for locations...I am thinking of using them as I hone on on the text for the banners that will be on the Olympia this summer...

Boston 

Los Angeles

Manilla

Philadelphia