28 September 2008
20 September 2008
swifts
Went down to Chapman Elementary School in NW Portland the other night to see the swifts. Vaux Swifts, in the tens of thousands, roost in the school’s chimney in September before heading off to warmer climes. A crowd gathers each evening, kids, dogs and all, to watch the swifts funnel into the chimney over the course of an hour or so. Great sweeping, bending masses of birds swoop and circle and eventually flutter down in a cascade. The occasional Peregrine Falcon adds a bit of drama as it dives through the small birds looking to snag dinner.
A note nearby describes how the kids used to willingly suffer the fall chill until the birds left, waiting before the furnace would be turned on. Now with a new gas unit in the school the chimney is kept solely for the roosting birds.
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14 September 2008
supercolliderdangermusic
A (partial) ring of colliding blocks.
This bit of noise was inspired by Allen Bukoff’s “Danger Music 2008”
(still from video),
which had me thinking about noise,
and by the recent firing up of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,
which had me thinking about particles and acceleration.
This photo is post-acceleration, post-noise and post-particle ejection.
More images and information here.
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13 September 2008
theoretical cabinet
Went on a walking tour of Tilburg, Netherlands in Portland last night – The Portland Tour of Tilburg. Khris Soden led a group of about 30 folks around downtown Portland pointing out, amid our familiar geography, the well-known sites of downtown Tilburg (he will do the reverse soon in Tilburg, ‘The Tilburg Tour of Portland’). This proves to be an interesting stretch of the imagination – a very small park appears at the street corner, just one tree in Tilburg (a large column here in Portland), an old church stands in for the bland facade of the Portland Hilton, a collection of news stands arrayed before us becomes Tilburg’s sculpture of the ‘jug pisser.’ A particular favorite was the large green cabinet, a monument and memorial to victims of violence (below, with added not-so-imaginary dotted lines).
This cabinet has a drawer in the bottom into which items may be placed. Once a day a Tilburg city worker comes by and places the drawerful of items onto the shelves behind the glass, an ongoing piece of and about memory.
(Something quite nice about having to imagine this piece, creating a memory for a piece about memory.)
An interesting side note, given all the talk of late about experience, etc. on the national stage: of the 30 or so folks gathered for this tour (a self-selecting group to be sure), by a show of hands, 1) pretty much all were from Portland, 2) virtually the entire group had been to Europe, and 3) most had been to the Netherlands (nobody had been to Tilburg, or it seemed, spoke Dutch). That struck me as somewhat remarkable (not so much the Dutch part) given that it was quite a cross-section of age, gender and dress. Then again, it was an interested and curious group, which probably says a boatload when referenced back to the aforementioned stage.
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9 September 2008
4 September 2008
bottle cap sculptures
Getting a few more things up on the pages.
In this case, bottle cap sculptures.
Bottle caps, concrete, found objects.
3 September 2008
cook some bacon
(nitrite-free)
just sent this off to Cecil Touchon for FLUXHIBITION #2
Other bacon bits:
