Maps from Memory Flickr Group

This Flickr group includes many examples of how we make images to explain space and experience. See Nad's photo set.

Get Lost

A collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary.

It brings together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present, and future.

An exercise in emotional geography, GET LOST sketches the coordinates for an endless drift across the streets and myths of downtown New York.

Obsessive Consumption

Obsessive Consumption started in 2002 when Kate Bingaman-Burt decided to photograph all of her purchases and in turn create a brand out of the process to package and promote. She is currently hand drawing all of her credit card statements until they are paid off, drawing something she purchases each day and continuing to make piles of work (zines! pillows! photographs! buttons! more drawings!) that all fits into this brand she's built which mocks her own relationship with her purchases. And here's a link to her blog.

We Feel Fine, by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

"We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties ? color, size, shape, opacity ? indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds."

Morgan O'Hara: LIVE TRANSMISSION

Attention and drawing as time-based performance. O'Hara tracks the movement of the hands of people engaged in life activity. Essential vitality is caught and rendered visible on the page.

LIVE TRANSMISSIONS are drawn with both hands and with two or more pencils: people talking, working, dancing, reciting poetry, playing music, giving birth, repairing shoes, practicing martial arts. Other signs of life are also registered: movement of leaves on a tree, reflections of light on water, the tail of a pony, the flies on a cow, the movement of the incoming tide, the beating of a human heart. It is a body of work which grows as an international organism, a process of thinking about human life as diversified vitality.

Antonio Scarponi's Conceptual Devices

Antonio Scarponi is an architect who develops interdisciplinary research projects using cognitive tools and practices from architecture, visual culture and design to develop innovative devices with the aim to investigate and relate to social practices and behaviours in everyday life. His works operates through a shift of symbolic values due to the social utility and social responsibility of arts and design in contemporary visual culture.

Conceptual Devices are the result of interdisciplinary research projects, involving design, architecture and visual culture, with the aim to engage practises and social behaviour in everyday life. A conceptual device transforms information into a visual knowledge that produce a shift in symbolic values.

Fleshmap: Studies of Desire project

"Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation."

This American Life: episode #110, "Mapping"

Five ways to map the world. Five stories: one about people who who map the world the traditional way, by drawing maps of things you can see. The other stories are about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world, re-drawn, by the five senses.

WEEK 4 Happs

LOGBOOK: Swap with a peer

a) interview that peer to get a full grasp on exactly what their topic is, why they're interested in that topic, how they've been observing and collecting so far, etc.

b) collect 20 observations for your peer's LB–do each other's scratching!

c) you may still choose to continue to scratch for your own topic, you'll just need to collect and document in another form to be later transferred to your LB next week.


Self-Evaluation
Please include in your LB this week your responses to the following questions about your current creative practice in and outside of this class :

Specific to your LB exploration in this class
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1) What new discoveries have you made about your topic during this process?
2) What have you learned about your own current creative habits during this process?
3) Where/how have you surprised yourself?
4) Where/how have you disappointed yourself?
5) Where/how can you push or stretch yourself further?

Specific to your overall creative practice (outside of this class, in your area of discipline)
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1) How are YOU your own inspiration? (Specifically how does your autobiography influence your creative decisions?)
2) Begin a list of your personal inspirations with support information (artists, musicians, authors, politicians, scientists, animals, food, etc.)
3) Can you extend this list to include the inspirations of your chosen inspirations? (Mapping the lineage or legacy – you probably know this best with music. Now you must begin activating in the same way for art.)
3) Re-order the list by the subject matter that you've used/not used your work to date.
4) Prioritize the list by what you'd deem the most challenging subject, the least challenging.

Oblique Strategies ((Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas))

Here's the downloadable widgit of the deck for your laptops Oblique Strategies card decks that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt invented. It features the complete sets of the Original (1975), the Second (1978) and Third (1979) Editions, as well as the elusive, commercially not-available Fourth set (1996) by Brian Eno and Peter Norton. Selection of the Editions is user-controllable via a preferences panel. The timing for the Auto-Flipback feature is accessible via the preferences panel as well.

Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation. From the introduction to the 2001 edition: These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Here's more info on the Oblique Strategies...

An unofficial, yet thorough website complete with an online version of the deck in case you don't want to load the widget onto your machine.

Here's a link to an online version of the deck.

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More from Eno on the strategies...


The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."


The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was ...I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know...there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think. 


- Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80