It is precious to me . . .

After many years of waiting, and jumping through the flaming hoops of a variety of Napoleonic national beuracracies, I today finally acquired a full fledged work permit in Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany deemed it prudent to place two big stickers in my passport and it now seems heavier to bear in my hand or pocket.

So shiny, so beautiful . . . my precious . . .

Back at terminal.

Interview on art + virtuality

I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar led by Thomas Zummer during my last semester at Tyler School of Art. He's a philosopher and artist whose understanding of the synergies of media, language, and artistic endeavor is comprehensive. This is a brief interview posted from a conference in Brussels last year. I apologize for the poor sound quality. Listen carefully, near the end of the interview he starts to talk about role-playing and game-space as a valid artistic mode that is collaborative and extensible in its very nature. Link.

This led me to waste the day watching lectures on the web. Google has several "Tech Talks" of general interest. The best ones I saw today were on the scientific method and information visualization.

On the shame of using reference...

"Back in the late 80s, one of my first jobs was drawing the unauthorized comic biographies of rock musicians, which demanded likenesses of real people and locations in every panel. But even before that, I’d started a “morgue” of reference folders, each categorized and subdivided as required (”figures/ children/ perspective”, “technology/ industrial/ 20th century”, “architecture/ urban/ interior/ office”, etc). Each folder was filled with magazine clippings, photographs, photocopies and newspaper articles. The point being not to copy verbatim, but to inform decisions already made concerning any given composition."

...via Drawn.

Greetings from the Golden Triangle.

Transmaterial...

...is a catalog of innovative, computationally intensive, and green building technologies. For those of us who don't shell out money for catalogs like this, there is a companion blog that has a handful of interesting things. My favorite is the marquis camouflage, pictured below. Link.