bag in a tree: October 2008

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

first outdoor scans | 2008

For a long time I’ve been trying to think if there was a way to have a pinhole scanner. Crazy, and perhaps stupid, but considering when I was in college — before PCs — I wanted to do the same to a Xerox machine, hoping to increase the depth of field above the platen. I also wanted to place a video monitor on a Xerox machine and photocopy live video, so one can see that the pinhole scanner idea wasn’t much of a leap in any direction. Actually, after some googling, it seems there are number of folks who’ve had the same idea and some success. Here is a link to an old thread about pinhole scanners etc. As I find better sites I’ll amend this post.

At any rate, I have a Canon N1220U flatbed that is very light and portable, so instead of trying to retrofit the scanner and probably rendering the thing useless, I decided try some outdoor scans.

still continuing with abstraction | jan 2007

cut out 1 2007

untitled 2007

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

continuing with abstraction

black and white 2 / 2007

These images grew out of some geometric/structural studies that were so seriously manipulated that eventually they looked like textiles and inadvertently echoed Samaras’ fabric works of the late seventies. I’ve enjoyed his work for a long time and I guess he’s been a greater influence than I thought. See image below and link, at the end of the post, to one of Samaras’ reconstructions.

Reconstruction no. 74 / Lucas Samaras

Monday, October 27, 2008

start of abstraction

While working on the money and toy-based work, non-photo backgrounds were usually abstract and meant to be backgrounds. As I tired of the toys the backgrounds became more interesting to me, and I staring messing around looking for images that could stand alone. There were an awful lot of images created as I bounced around between geometrics and organics, lines and solids, a few red-blue anaglyphic experiments, but for one reason or another most of them did not meet my expectations. In many of the images there were passages that held great promise, but as a whole cohesiveness was missing.

Other aspects that bothered me were working on the iBook with limited memory and a ridiculous obsession with eliminating the look of computer-generated work from computer-generated work. It took some time but I finally learned to embrace the pixel. The piece below was the beginning of the transformation.