Here's another Web site idea I'm working on for my Generative Design class. In the processing of converting these to jpgs though, the quality went down and the colors are a little off. Please excuse that!

Layers upon layers upon layers...

I've been thinking a lot about layers recently and how important they are in trying to visualize different time periods or different modes of time simultaneously. I used to layer pictures on top of one another in PhotoShop for fun when I was bored just to see what would happen because I love happy "mistakes". Here are a couple I really like because the sense of movement and time passing and small little pockets of time all happening on top of one another in the same image. There's a lot packed into one image.

Does Time Really Exist?

Thanks to Tom for this link. I may have to mull it over for a few days:

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

Here's the prototype for an interactive Web piece I'm working out using Processing (processing.org) for my Generative Art + Design (http://uic.edu/~dsauter7/ad406_S07/) class this summer. It focuses on layers of time based on the three major parts of the day: morning, afternoon and night.

Designing Time

Here is a link from the AIGA website about a group of student designers who redesigned a calendar for the Wixárika people in central Mexico.

From the site, "As many Wixáritari (plural of Wixárika) understand western practices and values, they increasingly migrate to urban centers in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit to study and work, often finding their cultural traditions and practices devalued and misunderstood. This is particularly evident in issues that relate to time. In contrast to the fixed western calendar, Wixáritari's beliefs and practices are aligned with nature's continuous cycle and careful observation of natural signs. As each culture's conception of time is based on different values, tensions develop (Maria Rogal, 2006)."

Thanks to Dori Tunstall for the link.


Also, on another note, here's a revisit to an older poster I did last year: Photos of Photos. I think it's worth looking at again because they're old photos and there's a lot to study here about the nostalgia aspect of time, and the idea of subjective memory when thinking of time.

sloooooooooooowwwww

apatheticfaucet
retardedice
creepingbuglegs
dreamysnail
loiteringobscenities
phlegmaticgrass
quietmistakes
stagnantlavalamp
idlepolaroids
tardyboil
bigyawnsmalltalk
hohumhummer
tamebubblebath
lingeringfuneral
simplealgebra
chokedivorce
relaxingdeath
winddownencyclopedia
dullmemories

A few weeks ago I was out having a cigarette with my friend from work who just so happens to be a comic book artist. i was telling him about the "time" thesis idea and he began telling me about how he deals with time in terms of comic panels, and how different sizes/placement of panels can denote different speeds or passage of time. this seems like such an obvious way to think about time, but i had never really applied to graphic design before.

It wasn't until I came across this image by artist Christa Donner (I've been a big fan of the artist Christa Donner for a few years now. I think I first read about her work in Venus Magazine), that the idea of panels as a way of showing time passing made real sense to me. Isn't it gorgeous? It really reminds me of the span of a lifetime in these really short little visual bits:


Another artist that is amazing and is worth checking out is Deb Sokolow. She does these great treasure hunt type maps that allow you try travel through and make connections and find secrets. Last year she had an exhibit at the MCA featuring a map that involved pirate ships and Mayor Daley and all kinds of kooky stuff. This stuff has been in the back of my mind as an inspiration for thesis stuff, but I'm not quite sure what the exact connection is yet. I like the idea of being able to travel around a page, through space and time, etc.

Speaking of movement and time not being able to exist without it, here are some short films that have been inspiring me lately:

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Duchamp is one of the big reasons I got interested in time in the first place. I took a class last year on the history of animation and we watched a few clips featuring his rotoscopes. A big chunk of my final paper for the class was about how Duchamp sought to create movement and a sense of time through his films and paintings, especially in his most famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase. This was very early Cubist experimentation which paints a woman from different points of view and different points in time/space as she descends a staircase.



Here's another (sort of crappy quality) video montage of the work of Eadward Muybridge, who was the inventor of the zoopraxiscope, a precursor to modern day cinema. He was a photographer who compiled his image to make the first frame by frame films.


Finally, here's part 2 of a gorgeous film made by Norman McLaren. This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with layers of image and information, and being able to "concretize" each second of time in a simple movement. This is my favorite video so far. Enjoy

I found this image when I was looking through Flickr and I did a keyword search of the word "time" just to see what would come up. I like this image because it contains different levels of information. It contains the past and the present. Right now I'm just trying to build up a sort of visual library of things that hit me on a very intuitive level (which is my favorite way to work) about ideas of time. This one really inspires me because it has so much to do with movement and I've come to realize that you can't really talk about time without movement. Time does not exist without space, or in a vacuum. It's subject to outside influences and factors just like everything else in the world.

After looking at this photo, I started thinking about layers of information and layers of images when trying to visualize time. Ideally, you're putting two, three or more layer of information down on the page when you try and visualize time--the past, present and future--or different versions of the future--or a stream of consciousness recollection of the past, something like that. It's never a flat, cut and dry image. This picture of the rear view window got me thinking about different ways I could achieve this idea. Mirrors are perfect for it I think.

The past: picture of a person walking down a long road, street, etc. holding a mirror at their back so that it reflects the path they have just traveled.

The present: picture of a person looking directly into a mirror

The future: picture of a person holding a mirror in front of them so that it reflects the path that they are about to travel

Or maybe it's something like this picture:

and less of a defined path and more of a circular one (sorry, I found this image on Flickr as well and cannot find who it is attributed to. I did not take either of these, just to clarify)

So, some of you may know this (and others may not) but I've decided to do my MFA design thesis on the idea of objective and subjective time. It's still very much a nebulous mess right now but what I'm leaning towards is trying to figure out ways to visualize time. This idea was very much inspired by Edward Tufte and especially The Quantitative Display of Visual Information but to go beyond that data-visualizing stuff (which is fascinating but can get a little dry) I wanted to introduce the idea of subjective notions of time, or the way time feels, in an attempt to visualize a more realistic or more human idea of the feeling of time, rather than the numbers of time.

I've done some research and really at this point, I'm just trying to organize everything I've found. The sources run the gamut from anthropological essays, novels, images, websites, and case studies. I think I'm going to use this blog as a way to organize my sources and discuss any thoughts I have and ask for feedback. So if anyone is interested in this type of discussion, let me know. It would really help me out a lot. Thanks!

This is one of the first web sites I've come across in my research. It's a website called Icastic where designers asked people to sketch on a piece of paper their own visualizations of time. I wish I had thought of this! Here are some of my favorites:

A String of Lies
It wasn’t me.I fell asleep.I was on the other line.My car wouldn’t start.I told a group of girls in college that I did a shot of booze with River Phoenix.Mom, I’m gonna sleep over with Kim tonight.Oh, I fell asleep.I weigh 120 pounds.I tell people at Starbucks my name is Bob when I order my coffee.I am sick today.I don’t care about him anymore. I didn’t use my credit card, I saved for it.I would never get married in Vegas. I used to pencil in my eyebrows.I often ask people for directions and as they are telling me I don’t listen and then when they finish speaking I say, “I got it.” I’ve been telling people for over a decade that I’m Jewish.I prank called an old woman and pretended to be her grandson.Every time I call in sick for work, it’s because I have a hangover.After 14 years, my mom still doesn’t know I smoke.I once skipped school to buy pot.I used to tell people I hated Nirvana.My best friend wanted us to dress up as Milli Vanilli for Halloween and I was too embarrassed so I told her I lost my wig.I used to go around parties telling people Ronald Reagan had just died.I peed my pants and told everyone I had spilled lemonade on myself.I used to pencil in my eyebrows.I lied about my weight on my driver’s license.

nuevo projecto

snowy morning

Best Things of 2006 (in no particular order)



the pumps. my bestest friends in the world. i love making stuff with you guys and i don't think i could live without our "circle times." it amazes me how patient you all are listening to me bitch about the same things over and over and over again, yet you never tire of it and your advice is always right on.


grad school. just when i was neck-deep in my quarter life crisis, i started grad school at uic and a whole new world opened up to me. i can say without any doubt at all that this is the best thing i've ever done. i've met 12 other interesting, funny, motivated, supportive people and it's wonderful company to be in. and don't even get me started on the professors.


my ipod on shuffle. a lot of people talk shit about shuffle but i'm here to say it's music at its best. i'm really into randomness and chance occurences and the shuff never disappoints.

my most played songs. she smiled sweetly by the rolling stones, tell him that i love him by the shangri-las, love is the drug by roxy music, pizza party by johnny and the limelites, kites are fun by the free design, looking for a road by baby teeth, heart love by albert ayler, history lesson part 2 by the minutemen


going iceskating with my 8-year old sister over christmas. i haven't been ice skating in 10 years or more but it was the epitome of freedom and feelin' young. very underappreciated by the older, urban, bargoing set. why don't we all just get together and skate on a friday night? whaddya say?


driving to boston for thanksgiving with the big b. i know we bickered about directions and got lost every time we left the house pretty much, but it was awesome showing him where i came from and experiencing his innocent awe and brand new eyes. it was like seeing boston again for the first time.


the freeeks reunion shows at o'briens and the august spies house. best weekend of my year by far. a bunch of drunk 20-somethings jumping around, trying to relive our teenage years...and we succeeded pretty well. lots of smiles, hugs, laughing, reminding me that we're still pretty young despite all the bullshit.


reading "in cold blood" for the first time. you can never get that experience twice. wonderful, captivating book. reading "henry and june" for the first time. if that doesn't make you feel alive, i don't know what will.

favorite movies (not all released this year). the legend of leigh bowery, all the cool shit i saw in my animation class: stan brakhage, jan svankmajer, marcel duchamp, fischinger, lye, that one russian dude whose name i can't remember, a streetcar named desire (marlon brando was the sexiest man alive in his prime), william eggleston documentary, grey gardens, inside deep throat, we jam econo, the squid and the whale, umbrellas of cherbourg

and everything else i forgot. sorry, thought i would remember more! anyone want to throw some more at me i didn't include?

bad medicine

Yay, my job took away my health insurance today. So I'm gonna go out and buy something pretty.

I also have a lot to update about Xmas. Maybe tomorrow. 'Til then. Mwah.

The Fruits of My Labor, or School's Out Forever (but really just a month)

Cut + Paste Poems

I haven't really been that interested in poetry since high school, mostly because I read so much of it then that I just burnt out on it. And now, I'm much much more interested in visual things rather than written ones.

But despite all that, sometimes I get bored and go through my diary and randomly pick groups of words of put them together to see what happens. I think this is a more visual way of writing because it forces/slams ideas together in really unexpected ways. This is the most exciting thing about art/writing to me really, is to smash things together and either go with what's created and flesh it out or abandon it completely. It's all about free association.

Here's some, I guess you could call them poems, but more like word smashes taken from my diary. See if you can figure out my life! Ha, I can't even do that...
I took liberties with a couple of them, but only to smooth out the narrative part of it.

He sat and waited for it to ring again
and opened the window a crack, only enough
and put on his father's old, moth-eaten peacoat
and thought of the words sensuality, enamored, crimson, aorta, orgasm, menaige-a-trois
*

Not that I don't want to talk to him,
I just feel like I don't

*

I want to sleep when I want to and read and drink tea,
Walk up a steep, long, green hill as part of the procession and
buy a bunch of summer dresses


whenever i get jealous of anyone i have to stop myself
because everything is green

not hide behind fetish or porn or any of that.
that's boring.
It is too self-indulgent and dull.
i want to make something visual that mixes...
it's numbing to even think about

All I really want is peace and quiet,
To dress in beautiful evening gowns.
Everyone gets really worn from the climb.

here's a new thing i made for my friend (ex-boyfriend) john. i love drawing birds.

The Farnsworth House

Yesterday, I went on a field trip with my fellow MFA-ers to Plano, Illinois to visit the Mies van der Rohe-designed Farnsworth House. You have to visit to get the full effect but I just wanted to share how beautiful the fall colors were up against the stark white of the house.

Despite the rain, it really was a great day and I'm glad I got to see such a cool piece of architecture/history in the flesh (errr, in the steel).

Here's some pics from the Web site. I would have taken my own but I'm lazy and didn't want to lug my camera around all day. If you have a car, just visit. It's only an hour and a half away and well worth the trip.

The Color of Chicago

I feel like I haven't posted in ages, so here's something. Not terribly exciting, just something I've been working on for school. I had to come up with a color pallette for Chicago for a poster project, so I decided to create one based on a bunch of rocks I found on Lake Michigan. I know it's not urban enough, but it was just an experiment and I'm obsessed with these rocks lately. I just wanted to try it out and see what happened. I made another one with more traditional colors, but I like this one better...



Here's the more traditional one, based mostly on lakefront colors.