i love math even though i'm not good at it. when i see an equation, or when i look at a letter/number/character, even, i see it as a shape or an object. do you realize how pretty these things can be when you see them in a different way? and when you put these characters together to form an equation, manipulate, and make it visual?
anyway, here are a couple of sites i think are pretty cool.
so much more out there, but i like these in particular.
what would the soundtrack to your life sound like?
for the past nth years i'd thought about this, maybe dating back to when i was 12 or 13. and every ten years or so, the soundtrack changed. it's a given, of course, with growth comes change and vice versa. the soundtracks went from music consisting of bands playing your standard instruments to electronic/digital with a mash of different stuff in between to even more diverse music now.
i grew up listening to the beatles, abba, the jackson five, michael jackson... but at 13, when angst started to creep in, i gravitated towards things that expressed and helped relieve that angst for me. this was my punk/heavy metal/rock stage. i hate to say i was an angry 13 year old and this kind of music was my release because how cliché is that, but i was. and when you're 13, you're also treading on dense waters, trying to figure out who you are, where you belong... i was listening to guns n' roses, skid row, and some riot grrrl stuff. that eventually lead to the alternative music phase like nirvana, pearl jam, alice in chains... somewhere in the midst of all this was sonic youth, the beastie boys, red hot chili peppers, a tribe called quest... remember the first ever tibetan freedom concert at golden gate park in san francisco? i was there. and all the bands i wanted to see were there, too. i think that's when i might have fallen in love with san francisco. this was in 1996.
at 19, i went through my first real heartbreak and all i listened to for a very long time, and even to this day, was portishead. this paved way for my love of electronic music. i had massive attack, tricky and zero 7 take turns rotating so my portishead cds wouldn't wear out. somewhere around this time was when i also really got into jazz greats, like billie holiday, john coltrane, miles davis... then the soundtrack just blossomed into and encompassed all kinds of music, even country! no, not billy ray cyrus country, but more like hank williams country.
in my mid-20s, i met and fell in love with an experimental musician who exposed me to the likes of john cage, iannis xenakis, and pretty much any noise, more electronic, and some ambient music. this is what made me appreciate the sound of silence, but hate it at the same time. i will always remember a concert we attended where the music was composed of two hours of silence, with maybe the sound of a pin dropping every 30 minutes. or maybe they were droplets of water, who knows? i was open to the experience and stayed patient (because that's what i do for love. ha!), but i didn't enjoy it much. the exposure to all of this, however, opened me up to so many different kinds of sounds, allowing me to appreciate music in all its form, how ever they may be composed, with what ever media. this was when i found and fell in love with boards of canada and an even greater appreciation for electronic/downtempo/post rock. although this is what my playlists have been consisting of the past few years, it doesn't diminish the love i have for all else that came before it.
so as i type this while listening to my playlist on soundcloud, i think about the music that i've been exposed to, inspired by, healed by, contributed to the person i am today, etc. i wonder what my soundtrack would be like now. i tried to make a list in my head, but it's becoming more difficult as the years pass. there were and still are so much good and progressive sounds out there that i wouldn't know where to start. one thing i wish i'd done, though, is keeping the cds/cassettes/lists i made of the soundtracks of the past years, because, what better piece of evidence is telling of a person's experiences than the music that made them feel alive, or maybe perhaps, lived within them?
so many possibilities with this.
francesco tacchini - space replay
"A hovering object that explores and manipulates transitional public spaces with particular acoustic properties. By constantly recording and replaying these ambient sounds, the hovering sphere produces a delayed echo of human activity. Space Replay responds sonically to people and its surroundings by means of a battery-powered Arduino, a Wave Shield hacked to record and playback audio and a small speaker. These were inserted into the balloon after being vacuum formed in the shape of a cone, in order to enhance the sound coming from the speaker."
let's fall off together.
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
― Alice Walker, Living by the Word
draw on the moon by ai weiwei + olafur eliasson
is a different frame of mind.
aweeeesoooome!
"Daniel Palacios creates machines that can scan and visualize the flow of visitors, objects that communicate with their viewers by means of artificial intelligence, or images that represent the intricate relations of a specific moment and space.
Viewed in terms of form alone, his artworks consist of complexly functioning machinery with scarcely comprehensible software components. Beyond such technical aspects, however, the artist’s works are stirring inasmuch as they are concerned with extremely human, philosophical questions, about perception, memory, time and space."
it takes an enormous amount of courage to put our guards down and disarm when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and our whole selves to be seen, heard, known despite past experiences. when we offer LOVE to another or are given this offering, honor and treat this immense and potent LOVE with RESPECT, TRUST, KINDNESS, INTEGRITY, AFFECTION... please?
