If you go to Webpages as Graphs, you can type in the URL of any website and see it slowly plotted as a graph, in a kind of magical animation. We did it with ‘the improvised life’ and watched in astonishment at the graphing of its nine months of life: it “blossomed” into what looks like a strange flower, bud by bud, one slowly emerging from another, like watching a time-lapse nature video. We remembered when this blog was only an idea, and the unfolding graph reminded us of the step-by-step process (full of doubts and blindness, setbacks and zig-zags), one thing leading to another, that got us HERE, where we are right now, and all the people we are connected to.
We graphed the New York Times’, and a couple of other websites, just to see if there was any real difference. And there is. Each site made its own unique pattern and vibe: each the product of many forces. This is ‘the improvised life’s. Amazing.
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist and writer whose work has been presented at many amazing venues like Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Biennale. We’re started to check out her work having been knocked out a really funny, charming, completely unexpected website she made about one of her books, No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories. It breaks every rule of website-making like allowing you to navigate back to HOME whenever you want to, and saying right up front what is going on, and having completely thought-out pages. July’s doesn’t do any of that. Hers is a journey of sorts that manages to tell the inside of what it’s like to do anything creative, of PROCESS (real but unheavy). In it’s linear way it delivers potent, completely unlinear, many-layered message.
July forged her website in two parts over the course of a year or so. The official URL starts at the second part; it will take you back to the beginning if you want, and the beginning is really fun…
Here are our favorite pages (it doesn’t give anything away to show them; the website itself is the trip)…. read more…
Last week, we read an amazing post by Anne Herbert at Peace, Love and Noticing the Details. She described the limited view we’ve been stricken with many times – and offered a simple way out. It is so perfectly and succinctly written, we’re quoting the whole thing right here:
“I can’t do it. All the times I say inside to myself, “I can’t do it,” I could be saying, what the heck, thoughts are easy, ‘I can do it.’
I need to find the knowing how to do it. The brain is vast, deep, includes the whole body. And the body includes the whole world as I hear someone on the street speak who just got back from a place I think of as elsewhere, as I breathe air that who knows where it’s been.
Who knows how to do this that I’ve been telling myself that I can’t do? Maybe me, as is, now, if I get confident, listen to “I can do it,” and sink into what I already know. Maybe I need to hang with someone else who’s been doing it for a while, and watch, listen, move. How big the world.“
Thank you very much, Anne Herbert. You are a gift!
We read that the decorating of Easter eggs came about in the 13th century, when the church prohibited eating of eggs during Holy Week. They couldn’t stop chickens from laying however.
How to identify those “Holy Week” eggs after the fact? Paint em’!
Soon the eggs, which were already an ancient symbol of new life emerging, became a symbol of the Easter.
It’s not too late to decorate an egg or two. You can do it the usual way by submerging hard-boiled eggs in a bowl of vinegary colored dye. But we’re wondering why not view an egg shell as a blank canvas, and draw or paint right on it? (Be sure to hard boil the eggs first).
Here are some pictures and resources, including read more…
We’ve been a fan of the amazingly inventive artist/designer JooYoun Paek since we came across a picture of her pillowig a few months ago. We’re thinking we should just make a practice of stopping into her website periodically to see what she’s up to and GET OUR HEADS CHANGED in a flash. That happened when we saw two little videos of her wearable inflatable chair dress which made us LAUGH and THINK and IMAGINE all at once.
It’s a polyethylene a dress that’s connected to shoes that pump air into an inflatable bubble attached to its rear part on each step. With each step, the dress slowly transforms into a chair (the view from behind is hilarious). The wearer can sit down when she likes; her body weight slowly deflates the chair back into the original dress. Paek calls her Self-Sustainable Chair a “conceptual garment”:
“…it motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit. The purpose of this project is to transform the humdrum experiences produced by routine walking commutes into an amusing interactive performance.”
The effect of Paek’s little videos are really surprising… read more…
One of the big fears (and realities) that can keep us from trying things out, taking them to the next step, or persevering with an idea, has to do with failure. We can judge ourselves like crazy for having failed at something in the past OR be terrified that we will fail in the future; both of those notions stymy improvisation and creativity and LIFE.
So, we’re always heartened when we hear the stories of real people who have failed terribly, learned a lot, found their way AND put incredible things into the world…like J.K. Rowling’s story of her “epic failure” years before writing the Harry Potter books, and what she learned from it, the unexpected gifts it brought. She shared it in her commencement speech at Harvard in 2008, which seemed to surprise everybody.
Here’s the video of the whole thing, and our edit of the essentials to read: read more…
Last December, Pam Hunter, the mastermind behind Studio 707, THE Public Relations firm in Napa Valley, closed its doors to take a sabbatical. On her website’s last post, she told the story of meeting two artists over the years whose practice of taking long sabbaticals from their work had impressed her deeply. Spain’s Fernan Adria, considered one of the world’s greatest chefs, shutters his restaurant El Bulli for five months each year, and told Pam how the experimental months of his sabbatical revitalizes his creative alchemy in the restaurant. Brilliant Austian-born designer Stefan Sagmeister, closes his design studio for at least a year every seven years, so that he and his staff can explore projects the don’t have the time to do when they are working. Pam had almost worked with him on a project but he was about to go on sabbatical, to which he is committed.
“Possessed as I was by the approach of both Adria and Sagmeister, I couldn’t bring myself to take the leap off the treadmill. That is, until late one afternoon in June 2009 when I received the telephone call that reframed everything instantly. ’You have cancer,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. By February I hope to be in remission and ready to begin my first sabbatical.”
Pam included a link to a Sagemeister’s riveting TED talk about why he insists on the year-long break for himself and his staff, and how it works…what it is really like, the kind of discipline needed. Pam’s post got us thinking read more…
For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft‘s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be over and use my computer to check their email or look something up. When Tom’s sign pops-up they invariably say “That’s SO great; can you email it to me?”. It seems Tom’s words are ones we would all do well to remember. They are another way of saying “answers always come“…”the moment provides“…
You can still enter Heliotown through the sign, a sort of back door…
Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day – all 24 hours of it – will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th in San Francisco; you’ll be able to move at will from one screen (or life) to another to get a unique view of what’s going on in daily lives all over the world. All are part of the Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, architects, designers, programmers, photographers, and artists working to document the diversity of human life experience around the planet. They are building, and inviting others to contribute to, a video library of individual “twenty-four hours”. Much of it will be available online, with subtitles in a host of languages.
“There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.
By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own…
…This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress.We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive – fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation. “
There’s been an immense amount of effort, and enthusiasm and money put into this project, as well as sponsorship, and media coverage. We have some questions: read more…
When my trusty lemon squeezer broke, I toyed with the idea of buying a new one, but found that design collaborative Platform 21′s Repair Manifesto (blogged last summer) had lodged itself in my consciousness. “REPAIRING IS A CREATIVE CHALLENGE“…and “TO REPAIR IS TO DISCOVER” subtly resonated. There’s a way to fix this, I thought, as I wandered around my apartment looking for a sturdy piece of metal to hinge the two enameled sides together; it would have to withstand the pressure of squeezing a lemon, and not react to acidic lemon juice.
The process was a simple one, really, once I finally focused on it (the broken squeezer sat on the counter for a couple of weeks while I mulled): I’d ask myself “What if I tried THIS? and then I tried the idea out, fiddled, failed a few times: a heavy-duty paper clip couldn’t take the pressure…I had no nut to secure a screw, which I suspected would rust anyway…Wire was reactive and would keep the hinge from moving properly. I found the solution in my office. read more…
Kevin Kelly recently wrote about Anne Herbert, a writer he knew in the early ’80′s who edited CoEvolution Quarterly, the companion magazine to Whole Earth Catalog. She is most known for coining the phrase, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Kelly hadn’t been in touch with her in all this time, but remembered her writing:
“…it was telegraphic, lyrical, abbreviated, evocative, extremely personal and mystical. She wrote in short bursts. Like proverbs from a secret bible…It was not like any writing I had encountered…
Everything he says about Herbert’s writing is true. It is often like haiku (without the constraints): tiny meditations that caste a unique light on everyday things. Here are some: read more…
Hunter Gatherer is a blog that is appears to be about STUFF: enticing pictures of cool things for sale (no words) that it is not selling (it just points to the place that is): like the simple desk for sale at Iko Iko with a lovely curved base that looks like you could make it yourself out of really good plywood. This curiously curated selection is almost always rich with interesting, if inadvertent, ideas, like Iko Iko’s concrete block shelving (totally unlike college dorm ones)… read more…
MacGyver is a 1980′s TV series about a cute, soft-spoken secret agent who doesn’t carry a gun or hi-tech tools; he uses ingenuity and science and whatever is at hand to invent solutions. Over the course of seven seasons, MacGyver fixed a truck with a pen spring, fashioned a harpoon out of a rod and electrical cord, used milk chocolate bars to stop a sulfuric acid leak, and faked musical notes with wine-filled goblets to open a lock…to name of few of hundreds of off-the-cuff macgyverisms. As MacGyver said:
“A paper clip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot.”
I watched this 7-minutes clip showing the ingenious ways MacGyver used a map to get him out of scrapes, and was smitten. read more…
. It breaks every rule of website-making like allowing you to navigate back to HOME whenever you want to, and saying right up front what is going on, and having completely thought-out pages. July’s doesn’t do any of that. Hers is a journey of sorts that manages to tell the inside of what it’s like to do anything creative, of PROCESS (real but unheavy). In it’s linear way it delivers potent, completely unlinear, many-layered message.
, but found that design collaborative 
