envelope and contents, including Drawing #81, Binoculars, 2008
from Jason Polan (The Drawing Project)

Jason Polan has been posting daily drawings on his blog, The Drawing Project, since the end of November and making them available to the first reader to e-mail him with their name and address.

Just the other day I received Drawing #81 in the mail, a lovely little (3.625” x 3.25” in.) pen and ink rendering of a pair of binoculars. I suggest subscribing to his RSS feed if you want to grab one of these.

Thanks, Jason!

Popularity: 26% [?]

randomly generated pairing of image and text [permalink]
© Shane Lavalette / lyin’ in lyon

Anything is a [dynamic website, pointless experiment, fictitious book, waste of time, collaborative magazine, source of inspiration, diversion] that lets its contributors freely add/edit any image or text to it, as often as they wish. Don’t quite understand what this means?

In each of its 64 main pages, there is an area allocated for 1 image (left side) and 1 body of text (right side). Upon registration, each contributor is asked to choose whether they wish to upload image or text, and they are permanently assigned a random page (with another contributor).

In addition to the 64 pages, visitors can also click on Give Me Anything!, which randomly combines any of the currently available images and text to create a ‘new’ page.

This project is inspired by web sites like ffffound.com, Derek Powazek’s Kvetch.com, and Maura Johnston’s Bittersweets.org, and off-line projects like Christy-Claire’s Something Anything.

To contribute you must be invited by someone who has contributed already. Each contributor gets 5 invites to give out as they see fit. Currently it’s a bit image-heavy (33 image contributors, 6 text contributors), but I imagine that will change.

Visit the website and watch it grow!

Popularity: 19% [?]

Improv Everywhere brings us the public performance, Frozen Grand Central.

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them.

Brilliant.

Popularity: 24% [?]

cover and p. 1 of About 2 Squares, 1922
© El Lissitzky

In one of my classes today we spent a little while looking at and discussing this beautiful children’s book by Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect (seriously!) El Lissitzky, titled About 2 Squares.

In the images above, the page on the left (the cover) translates from Russian to English as “About 2 [Squares]” and the page on the right translates as “To all, for all Children.” Lissitzky produced and sold about 3,000 copies of it in 1922 – quite a lot at that time.

The MIT Press released a great letterpress reproduction with English translations printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian in 1991 – now out of print. From their website:

El Lissitzky’s first supremacist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky’s “scientific romance,” an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.

It’s really worth seeing if you can find it. Lissitzky’s vision of design and typography was brilliant for his time and he was making work that was both visually innovative and socially/politically relevant.

See more pages from About 2 Squares (with text in Russian) here.

Popularity: 24% [?]

still from Office Baroque, 1977 (16mm, color, sound, 44 minutes)
© Gordon Matta-Clark

For those of you interested in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, you’ll be happy to find that a number of his films are available on UbuWeb. I believe the video of Splitting, Bingo/Ninths, and Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1974-1976) was added just yesterday.

See them all here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Noah Kalina’s internet-famous video was parodied last night by The Simpsons. Pretty funny – congrats, Noah!

Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years:

Homer Simpson takes a photo of himself everyday for 39 years:

Read what Noah has to say on his blog.

UPDATE: Take a look at these related stories…

Karl Baden – 20 years of photographing himself
Ahree Lee – 3 years, with facial feature alignment

And lots more to be found here.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid, 1980
Jerry Hollins, Chicago Federal Courthouse, 1980
Unidentified Man, Ankara, Turkey, 1980
Unidentified Man, Ontani Hotel, Los Angeles, 1980
© Sarah Charlesworth

Here’s another intriguing project: Sarah Charlesworth’s series Stills.

Stills are black and white enlargements made from newspaper photos of people in mid-air. The images show people jumping from burning buildings in an attempt to save their lives, as well as individuals who are trying to commit suicide. Neither the intention nor the outcome of the jump is apparent.

The series reminded me of Carolee Schneemann’s more recent controversial project, Terminal Velocity. This project consists of a grid of photographs of people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Terminal Velocity, 2001
© Carolee Schneemann

Utterly disturbing, but somehow very beautiful.

See the rest of Sarah’s work on her website – there’s a lot to look at.

(via This is That)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Untitled #3, 2005-6 (from “Love = Love”)
© Kent Rogowski

Kent Rogowski’s puzzle montages from his series Love = Love caught my attention today. From the statement:

Flowers and skies were taken out of over 40 store bought puzzles and combined to form a series of spectacular landscapes. Although puzzle pieces are unique and can only fit into one place within a puzzle they are interchangeable within a brand.

(thanks, Laurel)

Popularity: 11% [?]

Eric William Carroll recently updated his website with a new project that he has appropriately titled Human Error. As Eric describes it,

Human Error is an exhibition in three chapters. ‘Tests & Arrays’ are attempts at tracing designs used to calibrate photographic equipment. ‘Dust & Scratches’ is a series of darkroom experiments that solely depict those sworn enemies of photography. ‘Sneezing & Crying’ is a series of photographs/video stills/self-portraits that depict myself either sneezing or crying. Together, this somewhat disparate group of work attempts to approach the topic of the mistake as something uniquely human and beautiful. Instead of trying to cover up the error, I’m putting my own faults front and center. It is my desire to embrace these slip-ups and acknowledge their own beauty.

Sneezing & Crying, Pigmented Ink Print, 32×40”, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll

Tests & Arrays, Ink on Vellum, 11×14”, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll

Dust & Scratches, Chromogenic Print, 16×20”, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll

Lots of other interesting work can be found on Eric’s website (see Sunburn and Punctum/One Year of Taking Pictures).

I might add that Eric is a fellow blogger with good taste in music. And another little “fun fact” – he’s Alec Soth’s (R.I.P.) studio manager. Eric, should those of us who can’t make it to Memphis give up on hoping for the Tunnels and Birds images to appear on Alec’s website?

Popularity: 13% [?]

Untitled (from “Drifting Water”)
© Semâ Bekirovic

I came across some interesting conceptual photographic work by Dutch artist Semâ Bekirovic (see Drifting Water and Museums) – as well as a few nice video and installation projects (see Birds of Prey and Grid).

As Marcus Bruystens writes, “An important theme in her work is the tension between obtaining and the letting go of control.” I like this idea and I, too, can see it in Semâ’s work. He goes on,

She creates a situation for something to occur and lets coincidence decide how the work develops… Semâ’s videos and installations evolved from her fascination with the medium photography. Not only is she interested in the nucleus of an image, but also in the effect the image can have. A photo can change the meaning of things without altering the things themselves.

Take a look at Semâ’s website for more.

Popularity: 8% [?]