I just returned from a week at Anderson Ranch, where I took a printmaking workshop with Jennifer Ghormley. The workshop was a lot of fun, and the overall experience of being at the Ranch was a gift. I met many amazing people, and having a great space to work in and try out ideas made it nearly impossible to sleep during the week. Much more will come out of this once I have the time to unpack and build on the experience.

Snapshots are going up in the ranch photo set.

Written Images is an excellent project in generative bookmaking initiated by Martin Fuchs. He has an open call-for-entries to collect image-making applications. The site copy explains the project’s ambition:

Written Images; a project in contemporary generative print design and art. Its final products will be a book that presents programmed images by various artists. Each print in process will be calculated individually – which makes every single book unique.

I’m making my submissions using Cinder so I can get more comfortable with c++ and the XCode environment. To make my life easier, I added a WrittenImages project template to the excellent TinderBox tool that comes with Cinder. Get the template by either downloading my version of TinderBox (which contains the template), or checking it out on github. You can also look at an example of code generated by the template.

The template sets up your application to receive command-line arguments and handle batch-rendering of files to the provided paths. To use it, open up TinderBox and create a new project. Your settings should be: Target: Basic App, Template: WrittenImages. I think the code inside is pretty self-explanatory for use. To pass arguments to your application in the command-line (Assuming you named your project Sample, which you probably didn’t), do the following:

$ Sample.app/Contents/MacOS/Sample ./more.png ./like.png ./this.png

The reason for the longish path to your application is that the binary is actually in an application bundle. The Sample.app/ is just a directory, and to pass arguments to the application we need to call the executable part directly.

The written images deadline was just extended to July 15, so you still have a chance to make a submission.

Download TinderBox with the WrittenImages template.

While deinstalling Leaving Here, Being There, I had a hammer and access to some of my work. I learned a bit about what a hammer sounds like while sliding along a concrete surface. While learning, I recorded a short improvisation.

Concrete Audio:

Also, a few months ago, Erkki invited some music students over to our studio. Together we performed John White’s Drinking and Hooting Machine. I invite you to listen to a selection from that performance. The piece has a score based on each person’s phone number, but the performance is flexible as it is up to each performer to decide how long each tone will be and how large a drink they will take.

Drinking and Hooting Machine:

I just went home for a day to sing with my college Glee Club during my former conductor’s last concert. That was a wonderful experience, where I had the opportunity to sing and talk with a number of my classmates and see how life is treating them. On the plane, I read The Living Shore, which was engaging, inspiring, and sad. It’s encourages awe in the world around us and excites dreams of living our lives better.

Particularly challenging while reading were the passages about the recent success of conservationists in the Gulf of Mexico in creating habitat for oysters (The book was published in late 2009). We are hurtling past the critical point where we need to evaluate how we are shaping the world. Our farms produce more than food, and our factories produce more than products. They create ecologies. At present, they aren’t ecologies which we fit into. The Living Shore presents a past shoreline ecology which we likely cannot return to. Hopefully we will be able to create something similarly robust.

Last night, Pete Hawkes and I had the opening reception for our show–Leaving Here, Being There–in the UCLA Broad Art Center. I am happy with how the show turned out, and it was great getting a chance to talk to new and familiar people about the work.

An excellent Art MFA show also opened in the nearby New Wight Gallery.

Documentation of individual projects will go up over the next week, after Pete and I go in with a tripod to take photos of the work. For now, here are a few photos from the opening.