Month: October 2011

cigarettes and chocolate milk

“… the best power/weight ratio for humans is found in 12-year-old girls, but unfortunately they don’t have the stamina needed to be long range human powered aircraft pilots.”

I recently spent a week and a half in Seattle attempting to take care of Tony, who just had all four of his wisdom teeth yanked out. It was, oddly, good times, even though I was sleeping on a cot on the floor and he was drifting in and out of hazy clouds of drug-hammered pain. As a bonus I tried get something new done every day, like hauling all the art downtown to be framed or finally getting the upholstery cleaned, that would improve his life but that he’d never get around to doing himself. I’m not sure how much success there was to be found in a week, but at least the surface changes were drastic. (Now if only I could bring the same zeal to my own housekeeping).

We also went to Seacompression together with Aleks, (who wore my Sputnik costume, ten points for giving it to a Russian to wear!), and danced our fool selves into exhaustion. The art there was amazing, as expected, but where we spent the most time was fairly simple, a boat filled with pillows that sat on the ground between three of the bars, stocked with two bamboo fishing rods and a bucket of “bait”, doughnuts, cookies with holes in the middle, and pretzels. It was surprisingly comfortable, (lending credence to my one-day-in-forever plan of using a small, hanging boat as a bed), and a ridiculously fun way to make new friends. I was hooked in with a chocolate doughnut, but when it was my turn I found the best return was in the cookies. Less of a commitment.

extraordinary.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs.

We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference.

Kevin Karsch, a Computer Science PhD Student, and his team at the University of Illinois are developing a software system that lets users easily and convincingly insert objects into photographs, complete with realistic lighting, shading, and perspective. According to their documentation, aside from a few annotations provided by the user, like where the light sources are, the software doesn’t need to know anything about the image. Even keeping in mind much demo videos are spot polished, I’m still astonished at how seamless it all seems. This could very well be ground breaking work.

the locked tiger they can’t lock up

For What Binds Us
By Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

THAT 1 GUY AT CHOP SUEY TONIGHT

Artist Profile: That 1 Guy from Pale Blue Pictures.

Mike is kicking off the Seattle City Arts Festival as That 1 Guy tonight at 7 pm at Chop Suey.

I’m so incredibly glad Mike’s in town. His tour with Pogo, (the video remixer known most famously for Alice), seemed to have him touring everywhere but the Pacific Northwest, leaving me to miss him even more than usual! (I was quite looking forward to finally meeting Pogo, too, but something went down last week and he had to cancel the rest of the tour and skip back home to Australia. Don’t know what happened yet, but hopefully nothing too dire.) Still, the timing seems perfect, given the onset on fall and its overbearing skies. Even though it’s been several years since we split, I still find there’s something soothing and perfect about him, as if his delightfully puckish and easy-going good nature is literally infectious, an airborne pathogen that makes everything okay.

life is hard & then you die, and so on, and so, on

Poussière from Poussiere LeFilm via COILHOUSE.

Because of you, it seems, I do not exist. I only want to wear gray or white or black, blanched of colour like a uniform, an armband of mourning, but from head to toe, as in anticipation of a funeral or an ill concieved joke. I think of zippers, how their brassy teeth unlatched, your damp palm on my shoulder, the sunset painting the room gold and red. The scarlet zipper sewn onto my dress, the new one you’ve never seen. How that haven’t makes you a liar, “I would never”. And yet you did. You said, yet I remain waiting. Shattered. The worst evolutionary consequence of love. It is a thing. It is a situation. Already it has been longer than we were together. Still, I cannot sleep.

when you burn, what will remain to teach me?

Eric Speed – Maniac

I used to wear a skeleton key around my neck that I found in an old house, a plain metal thing on a utilitarian chain, scuffed from a hundred years of use. I lost it somehow. Given away, maybe, or left behind somewhere after a shower or swim. I wore it for years, but forgot about it completely until recently, when a new, tiny key arrived at Burning Man, a pretty silver thing unsuitable for any actual, physical lock. I like it anyway, though. It is perfect, the artist’s grown-up designer version of precisely what I used to wear. Sometimes the best keys are the ones for inside our heads.