I just had one of the best dinners I have ever had.ever. Seriously. A small restaurant on a small street in tokyo called laughing cloud. Omnivore's paradise. The sashimi was superb. Tofu with seaweed.salad with gyoza skins.soup... Excelent company and sake. The clouds are in this place further than I have ever been.

Labels: food, japan, travel

this strikes me as a very powerful/challenging piece. two artists get some sacrificed dogs in La Paz (Bolivia) and turn them into carpets. it's brutal and it confronts many things at the same time. read their interview here. i guess this is touching also because i helped a friend skin a dog once and because coming from latin america i'm used to seeing street dogs as regular autonomous inhabitants of the cityscape.

Labels: draw

and this is how i spent my saturday afternoon.

Labels: time lapse, video

from my friend dave.

i just got a new batch of stickers. i created a simple web page (http://urbansoil.net/hands) but i'm leaning towards scarce content. it has a gif image with things some friends wrote on the skinny sticker but i don't have much more. no manifesto, not so much into explanations. i guess this one is very graphic, very straight forward. any comments, ideas?

3 artists i'm excited about these days. i'm happy to have met two of them in person. joe linton, who recently started posting his drawings online (finally) at handmaderansomnotes, lots of interesting commentary about technique and process. eduardo recife who recently updated his website misprintedtype, his work is sooo great (yes, three o's). and michael napper, at mixedmedia, who's been cranking these beautiful pictures that make you wanna listen to black metal while watching Brothers Quay films.
by the way, i cropped their images without permission. apologies.

Labels: art, illustration, photograpy

i think this is one of those things were science meets art meets technology meets hacking meets playing. i'm so awestruck. the image above depicts the top screen of a nintendo ds running a homebrew application called glitchDS which is described by the makers as "a FREE homebrew Cellular Automaton music sequencer for the Nintendo DS. It’s perfect for creating IDM and Glitch style loops" (i sprinkled some wikipedia links for jargon clarification). but that doesn't begin to describe the elegant implementation and the fun it is to play with the thing. i had seen and had been amused by Conway's game of life but this is the first time i see someone/something using it for music creation. quite impeccable. take a 70's abstract model of life with deep philosophical implications and turn it into a pattern generator for triggering sound samples hosted in an early XXI century game console with a touch screen interface.
so lovely. i have gliders on my eyes.

i wrote about the beautiful book "recipes for disaster" and the way it came to me some time ago. one of the lines of experimentation that came from that book was the asphalt mosaic technique, also known as "Toynbee-tiles" (named after mosaics found in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
in brief, this is a way of creating permanent mosaics in asphalt by placing some kind of material on the road and allowing traffic to embed it over time. pretty much in the same fashion that random objects like keys and other pieces of metal get embedded on the road.

our first try was this "earth in flames". we followed the directions from the crime think article (web version here) except for the crack filler (instead we used henry's brand roofing repair tar) but the results were pretty good. it takes months for the thing to be visible since the layers of roofing paper have to be peeled away by traffic. the placement of this piece was somewhat unintentional too; we put it a few feet away from the crosswalk but the cars making a left turn and accelerating moved it on top of the white line.
it takes certain amount of patience once you install it but once it comes out it can last for many years. the downside of this particular location is that eventually the white line might be repainted by the city. lesson learned: don't put your mosaics on the turning lane.

now, if you are not the kind who wants to wait long for visible results here is another technique.
my work has been giving me access to a bunch of discarded roofing materials so i've been experimenting. there is this thing called modified bitumen (industry people call it "mod bit") that is used mostly on flat roofs. it's asphalt mixed with polymers then applied to a fiberglass or polyester mat and covered on one side with an even coat of gravel. there are two kinds, one is applied with a torch and the other one comes with a sticky underside protected with thin film that can be peeled, hence called "peel and stick", that's the kind you want, unless you want to be torching stuff on the side of the road. it comes in long heavy rolls so probably you don't want to buy it, it can be found in the dumpsters of roofing contractors or solar companies (check your yellow pages). i have found pieces left over in construction sites or even left on roofs (check your roof if you have access). if you live in a place with a friendly handyman he might have pieces laying around for repair work.

the material can be cut in any shape you want. you can use special roofing blades (they have a hook at the end) or tin-snips or even regular razor knife (the gravel on top will kill the edge pretty fast). but be careful, the stuff is somewhat sticky and hard so don't get cut. to place it just peel the back and put it on the road near a sidewalk or crosswalk but make shure cars will go over it so other people don't feel compeled to remove it (believe me, they do) and it gets flattened quickly. choose a light section of road because the gravel will dissapear and you'll be left with a nice black shape.

the mushroom above has been in place for about six months and the stars are a week old so the gravel is not gone yet. i still like the initial look, instant satisfaction, they are like asphalt stickers.

sometimes the color of the road matches the sticker too well and it's not so visible once it has lost the gravel coating:

turning cars can also damage your designs, so choose your placement wisely:


if you try the mod bit sticker technique i'd love to see your pictures, please leave a link in the comments. thanks to Yuki for co-creating these, watching out for incoming cars and taking the close up pictures above.

Labels: asphalt, graffiti, mosaic, mushroom, street art

im absolutely fascinated with the work of Paul Robertson lately. animations in the style of oldish videogames - a sort of decade specific machinima. a work of genius. it's funny to think that it has stronger resonances on a very specific generation with very particular tecnological habits. i wonder if this stament is true for most art deemed genius.

anyway, i cropped the image to the right from his piece Kings of Power 4 Billion % (awesome title) which is like brutal-excessive anime fermented in old arcade games and filtered through a discordian text for a very nice retrofuristic bouquet.
download it from his website for a nice resolution, it doesn't play as well in youtube.

i found out about this through offworld which is a recent subdivision of the classic good old boingboing, it's mostly about gaming and gaming-derivative arts. i wasn't so into it initially but i must say i've found a couple of very exciting things there: like the marvelous game world of goo (you can download a very cool free demo) and the nascent music scene coming out of the korg DS-10 software for the nintendo ds.

a quick cicuit bending weekend project we decided to test sunday night.  i'm particularly happy with the placement of the jack.  may all toy guns become "musical" instruments.

here is a mental snapshot: its 5:45 am, friday, the last day of a pretty long workweek , i'm ready to go, ready to endure the last day of work.  and what i feel is hate, hate and despair, despaired hate. abstract hate.  i don't hate anything in particular, i just hate it all.  the hate is located between my throat and my stomach.   the despair a little deeper in my chest.

this is my favorite piece of information for the week.  taken from the amanita muscaria article on wikipedia:

Fly agarics appear on Christmas cards and New Year cards from around the world as a symbol of good luck. They also function as Christmas tree decorations, derived from their ectomycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees. The ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott has suggested that the idea of Santa Claus and tradition of hanging stockings over the fireplace is based centrally upon the fly agaric mushroom itself. With its generally red and white color scheme, he argues that Santa Claus's suit is related to the mushroom. He also draws parallels with flying reindeer: reindeer had been reported to consume the mushroom and prance around in an intoxicated manner afterwards. Until the 20th century the red-and-white Santa suit familiar today was not firmly established, although Saint Nicholas, on which Santa Claus is partly based, was always depicted in red (see also: Origins of Santa Claus). One scholar researching possible links between religious myths and the red mushroom notes, "If Santa Claus had but one eye [like Odin], or if magic urine had been a part of his legend, his connection to the Amanita muscaria would be much easier to believe."
Ott also speculates about Santa's bag of toys. According to historians, ancient Siberia was one of the first civilizations to use fly agaric in practice.[citation needed] The Siberian hut, or yurt, is equipped with a smokehole at the top. Ott suggests that a shaman entered the yurt through the smokehole with a sack of mushrooms in his hand, to be placed in stockings over the fireplace where they could be dried for celebratory use.

so this upcoming christmas amanita muscaria mushrooms all around!

Labels: mushrooms

my work life is driving a copper rod through the rest of my life.   i've been working for a growing company that specializes in certain kind of alternative energy, it has been almost a year since i started.  a good learning experience, brutal ten hour days (four days a week) and pretty ok pay. but now, after taking a few weeks off work it has been sooooo hard to readapt.  and add to that a temporary mandatory 50 hour workweek due to a deadline the company needs to meet with certain investor.   

Labels: work