I first saw these Impatiens capensis  (or Impatiens glandulifera depending on color) while hiking on an outdoors club trip during highschool. As far as I knew they didn’t grow in my native northwestern Ohio, but over in northeastern Ohio in the Cuyahoga Valley they seemed rampant. When one of my classmates told me there were seeds that exploded–really exploded–when you touched them, I didn’t believe him. Imagine my delight when we found some of the plants.

I want to plant a bazillion of these, but it seems (and reasonably so) that you can’t actually buy seeds for them here. I suppose they might be a bit invasive….

I have, however, planted one of these! I found a tiny egg-shaped terrarium that promised me an alien plant if I just added some water, and lo and behold it’s a Mimosa pudica! I probably get a bit too excited over plants, but I had one of these in the second grade after a field-trip to the local flower shop where we all got them as parting gifts, and it was amazing. A simple brush or press of the leaves, and they swing closed. It was amazing up until my father killed it. But now I’ll have another (and a whole garden of them, if I can help it!) How cool would it be to write things in them with just the pass of a finger?

I left myself cryptic notes for this post, back when I was trying to really keep track and keep up with this March posting thing. Now it’s half a month later, March is over, and I want to finish things how I intended. I believe I did a good job keeping art in my life, but not a very good job documenting that art every day. So, time to wrap things up.

amisha gadani – grass touching — center for postnatural studies

This is what I left myself. I’m not sure where I initially came across Amisha Gadani’s work–probably boooooom (give or take some o’s)–but it’s amazing. She creates clothing that mimics animal defense mechanisms. It seems she’s primarily a clothing designer (or at least this series is) but the idea of humans appropriating the animal adaptations is very exciting to me. Below is a video of one of her dresses.

She also did an earlier piece that involved a bed of grass as an electrical conductor, so when people ran their hands over the grass LED lights lit up on a panel adjacent to it. Visually I find it slightly less interesting–maybe if the LEDS were embedded in the grass itself so it just lit when you touched it?–but I love the idea. Anything that brings together nature and simple technology/wonderment is a win in my book.

The Center for PostNatural History is related to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, which is where Amisha Gadani created her dresses. (Also, the STUDIO is where Golan Levin works, and I’ve been in love with his work ever since seeing him talk at RIT last spring.) So, knowing these people are fully awesome and becoming intrigued by the title of this new space (very Kahn and Selesnick, right?) Taken from the grand opening website, “The Center for PostNatural History (CPNH) is dedicated to the research and exhibition of lifeforms  that have been intentionally altered by humans, from the dawn of domestication to contemporary genetic engineering.” While they are decidedly more science-based than me, and as the videos here lead me to believe, set up much like a natural history/art museum, I think they’re filling a really key area in our culture right now. Occasionally some sort of genetic engineering hits the mainstream and everyone is up in arms one way or the other, but most people don’t realize how much of our everyday life is made possible by genetic engineering, or how much it goes on around us. Putting these objects (experiments/artworks) out there for the public in a galleryesque setting and giving it such a descriptive-yet-ambiguous name is brilliant. If I hadn’t gotten deterred by all the math, I’d have been a scientist. Oh well, there’s always time for alchemy.

Dear lovely blog, I have not forgotten you or my promise to post every day. I will do right by you tonight.

Today was absolutely gorgeous. Though I watched most of it from inside an office, it was great seeing the campus come alive. So many students were out in the quad having fun, and one of the campus associations was doing free hotdogs and hamburgers not too far from that. I even saw one guy walk down the sidewalk on his hands. I hope your day was equally wonderful.

I have for you today a number of small things–which made me immediately think of the album/song by Mum. So I have that for your listening pleasure, as well.

Today is a good example of when I find something cool and the ideas just roll into each other. First, I came across this article and was intrigued. The artist/designer, Amisha Gadani, has created clothing inspired by defense mechanisms of animals–the separating tail of a skink, spines of a porcupine, and inflatability of a blow-fish. They look like relatively normal garments until the wearer wants them to not be. For example, in this video the blow-fish dress is inflated (can see it better when she turns around).

Then I remembered the clothing that had Nitinol in it (wire that remembers a shape and changes from the shape to straight with the addition of heat/current. I won’t tell you how long it took me to remember that the wire was called Nitinol) and went in search of those videos…

But while doing this I also found this video of fabric that acts similarly…

How amazingly cool is that? Make a garment for someone to wear, run some ice cubes over it so it constricts as you seductively touch it…

All this unexpected motion and adaptation-speak also got me thinking about those seeds that explode when you touch them–Impatiens glandulifera. I need to grow a lot of those. I should get on that. Then I can do a whole series about touch/seduction and excitement/recoil. Or at least that seems to be a linking theme tonight!

Also, my train-of-thought research has lead me to some more excitement–but that’s for tomorrow’s post.

Happy Pi Day! In keeping with the tradition I started last year, I will most likely make pie tomorrow because I completely forgot about making it today.

Tonight was the last session of my Intro DSLR class, and we fieldtripped to a park and I showed them all how to paint with light. Highlights were definitely getting a bunch of people to work together to make fun portraits for their children–writing names, drawing grass and flowers in 30 seconds is tough! I’ve made them all promise to post their photos to the class blog, so I’ll be sure to share when they do.

Today: two photos by Lisa Wassmann that I enjoy seeing together.

Hello loves. It is late and I am tired.
Today I discovered booooooom and it is exciting. I’m not sure how I missed it until this point. I will do a proper post about it here tomorrow, but in the meantime just go play over there. You won’t regret it.

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So basically it’s just a repository of all things awesome and arty. In particular, there are some paintings I really love. Go check out this work by Jeremy Geddes–my favorite is below.

There has been growth along the knitting front.

Also, I’ve decided that I want to go back to playing with the adaptations in ridiculous ways. I was misusing nature, and I still will, but I also want to appropriate (ridiculous? Unnecessary?) aspects of our culture into nature. I’m thinking hot pink long (like the ridiculous starting to curl under long) fingernails (& toenails) as claws. Sloth-like? Tiger-like? Basically need to find some press-on nails and then have a shoot and see what develops. But I know I want summer foliage…so early spring test shots it is!

Ants consulting maps on iPhones. iPhones as arrows (drawn, left) scratched in the dirt as waymarkers. Building a houseplant k-cup empire.

Nova told me that whenever we look at the stars, we’re looking at the past. I knew this, but it’s nice to be reminded and think about it.

Went away for the weekend, which is why this is a slightly cop-out post. But, I’m still making (here, knitting!) and still posting. Also, in the background, I’m applying and researching and doing lots of things that aren’t fun to look at. But for now, this will do.

Single Serving Cheer

Beginning of Good Day Sunshine Shawl

Draw Something is an app by OMGPOP for Apple/Android devices that has kept me doodling for hours. Designed similar to Pictionary, you pick a friend to play with, and then are prompted with three word choices to doodle. They’re ranked in terms of coins–1 through 3, with 3 being the hardest. If you’re able to draw that word well enough that your friend successfully guesses (anagram style from a handful of letters), you each get that coin amount. What do the coins buy? More colors! Luckily, it turns out I’m probably better at drawing with my finger on a touch screen than I am in real life with my hand and a pencil. The win/lose aspect isn’t so strong, though it is upsetting when you’ve drawn an amazingly clear rendition of say, a unibrow, and your friend doesn’t get it. Mostly, it’s lots of fun drawing back and forth, and being able to watch your friends try to guess in real time as the drawing appears. If you haven’t downloaded it yet (there’s a free version, though the pay version has more words) I would strongly consider doing so.

As of right now, the drawings don’t get saved anywhere, which is a pity. However, I’m thinking I might be able to screenshot them…which could result in hilarity. Stay tuned.

I came across one of these images a few years ago, but I’m not sure where, and I think there was only one.

His work reminds me of a less idealized version of Jerry Uelsmann and everything I used to fav on deviantart. However, it’s still well-done and fun to look at. Phaidon has a nice article about Kazanjian and his work on their website, which I’ll repost below the images.

Jim Kazanjian doesn’t depend on architects constructing buildings for him to photograph; he makes his own. By sifting through photographs found online, Kazanjian creates fantastical buildings using Photoshop and doesn’t even have to leave his studio.

“My technique could be considered ‘hyper-collage,’” Kazanjian says. “I cobble together pieces from photographs. Through a palimpsest-like layering process of adding and subtracting, I eventually merge these various parts together. I am basically manipulating and assembling a disparate array of multiple photographs to produce a single homogenised image.” He doesn’t use a camera at any point.

Sometimes using as many as 50 different photographs in one image, Kazanjian’s creations have realistic textures of plausible architecture but completely implausible shapes, reminiscent of M.C. Escher‘s graphical works. He has a database of over 25,000 high-res images in his collection. Kazanjian, who lives in Portland, Oregon, started his freelance career in 2010 after working as a commercial CGI artist for nearly 20 years. His roster of clients includes Nike, Adidas, NASA, HP and Intel. More recently he worked as art director for Portland based computer game developer Logic Factory.

He says he focused on photography as a medium because of the cultural misunderstanding that it has a kind of built-in objectivity. His recent work is inspired in large part by the literature of H.P. Lovecraft and other “weird” fiction writers. “I am intrigued with the narrative archetypes they utilise to defamiliarise the familiar,” he says. His current work is an attempt to unravel the photograph and play with notions of time, space and what it is that gives things context. Citing J.K Huysmans’ 19th Century novel À rebours - a wild and gloomy fantasy, which rejected naturalism –  the images comprise bleak landscapes, tempestuous weather conditions and crumbling labyrinths.

“I am interested in how an image can have the potential to unfold and suggest something outside of itself,” he says. “By this I mean something beyond the obvious and only discovered through a continued process of viewing. It is this act of “looking” that I find fascinating because it does not follow a linear progression like language but is interactive and random.”