This idea - or at least the seed of it - has been floating around inside my mind's eye for quite a while. I finally have the tools to make it a reality, which I find pretty damn exciting. It is meant as a symbolic treatment of Richard Dawkins' "meme" concept:

"A meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene." (From the Wikipedia article.)

It's that "propagate" bit that this piece plays on in the form of a concentric ripple - an idea moving from mind to mind like a wave, spreading out from it's origin and altering the energy state of other ideas within the culture. It also employs the imagery of a matrix or lattice to illustrate the memeplex being made up of individual, discrete consciousnesses experiencing a collective and individual transformation through the propagation. I think of this process when I analyze the slow but steady progress our species is making from one cultural paradigm to the next, as ideas like liberty, responsibility, and reason spread virally and replace those of dominance, exploitation, and superstition. As more minds begin to cohere, constructive interference amplifies these waves - and everything gets just a little bit better.

Tags: Creativity, Stainless Steel

I'm currently reading "Mind Wide Open" by Steven Johnson (his most known work is "Everything Bad is Good for You"). It's subtitled "Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life". In it he cites the work of researcher Joseph LeDoux, who has found that the experience of danger actually follows two distinct pathways in the brain - one conscious and rational, the other unconscious and intuitive. The second pathway, dubbed the "Low Road", ends at the amygdala, which basically specializes in emotional response. This bifurcation is why you will find yourself suddenly frozen in place when you glimpse a very snake-like branch on the trail, before your cortex is able to analyze the much more high-resolution signal it receives and conclude that it's not a threat. It's very much a matter of bandwidth - the amygdala gets a very low-res version very quickly, while the cortex signal is slower but richer in content. Other studies show that our ability to apprehend the emotional states of others is handled much better by this brain sub-system as well - your immediate, intuitive reaction to someone's facial expression is much more accurate than the one settled on through your cortical deliberations. First thought, best thought.

This made me wonder if a person's predilection toward more sketchy, painterly artworks isn't somehow tied to this neurological phenomenon - we tend to think of it as a "gut reaction", but could it be that this is a function of the way our brains work? It's interesting to note that as we grow more knowledgeable about art, we tend to value works that embody a more spontaneous, less fussy visual style. Is this because we learn to trust our amygdala and depend less on our cerebral cortex - and it's greater complexity? To me, the whole purpose of art is to convey something universal about an individual, internal emotional state - what better part of the brain to utilize than the one that specializes in emotion?

Tags: Creativity, Process

I did a small commission for a woman who was heading up her own real estate group - "Blue Moon". It was a fun experience, as I haven't done any smaller works like this, where client interaction is taking place just like on the bigger projects. We played around with different designs until finding something we both liked. This is what we arrived at.

Click on the image to see more of the chronology of the design.

What does this have to do with leftovers? The Blue Moon piece included a crescent of silicon bronze, which my laser guys don't keep in stock - I had to buy a full 2 ft. by 10 ft. piece. Needless to say, I had a lot of leftover material. (A-Ha!) I've always really loved the volumes and shapes of horses, so I thought I'd just quickly model something up - a horse head - to use up that bronze sheet. It was mostly just a lark, I didn't really intend to come up with anything too special - but I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

There is an area of discoloration that occurs adjacent to each weld, called the Heat Affected Zone (HAZ), that can include gorgeous reds, blues, and purples - I've always loved that stuff. On this piece, I decided to just let it be, to not cave in and grind the welds back or do anything else to obscure them. Bronze is 95% copper, which is highly reactive to environmental acids and chemicals, so you have to seal it somehow in order to keep it from changing colors. Clear powder coat to the rescue.

Tags: Bronze, Stainless Steel, Process, Creativity

After struggling for days - literally - trying to get a computer site model ready for a proposal, I finally figured out what needed to happen. It sucks when the best course of action is either to half-ass the job or spend money on YET ANOTHER piece of software. So far my experience has been that it's much more difficult to do professional work with hobbyists tools (so, yeah, I bought the damn software). Now I'm gearing up for my first exposure to Rapid Prototyping. I think I'm just about ready to send files out for quotes. I rewarded myself with a bike ride and some goofing off with my camera.

This sculpture has been at this stage for a few months now. The guys at the laser cutting shop must have a had a tough time getting the cut parts out of the stock, as the metal shows quite a few dings and gouges from their efforts. I should have rejected the parts, but they were stacked together so I couldn't really inspect them properly. It turns out that my unfolding on this was erroneous, and the fabrication was a huge pain in the ass - you wouldn't think it would be big deal, but each of the faces you see is actually supposed to have a diagonal bend across each one. Just 1/64 of an inch out of planarity, and the design almost didn't work. Lots of clamping, prying and cursing to get the edges to line up even near appropriately. I need to decide if I want to cover up those dings and gouges by grinding them out and powder coating it an opaque color, or if I want the process to be transparent to the viewer by just using a clear coat. Hmmmmmm.



More pics here.

Tags: Creativity, Process

"In my sculptures I transform powerful images into sculptures that interweave personal narrative, with social issues. Made from newspaper and tape, which I refer to as “social materials,” everybody can equally access these materials; I cover each sculpture in expressive and abstract graphite markings. The contrast between the methodical binding of materials and the abruptness of the mark making suggests physicality as sensual and destructive. The intimacy of the figures’ interaction is agitated by the presence of the viewer. I am interested in how the viewer relates to the sculptures as either participant or voyeur. With this juxtaposition, I seek to reveal the corporeal and mental boundaries of desire."

Tags: Creativity