Archive for July, 2009

wall text from “Creating the Modern Stage”

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

“Working on a sketch for a setting is probably the happiest and briefest part of the artist’s work in the theater.” — Donald Oenslager (1902- 1975)

Morgan Library exhibit

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

from “Creating the Modern Stage”

Alexandra Exter, Construction for a Tragedy ca. 1925

from Morgan Library exhibit

along the way

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Yesterday Michael and I met to get the blog going, for real. All went smoothly until we tried to embed video. No luck. Michael had to leave before he figured out a solution, and he is about to go on vacation. Well, I should have known that he would keep working on it: this morning I got a lengthy email outlining the reason why it didn’t work and the options (with pros and cons) of fixes.

I am writing this to make a note of all the details along the way of making a body of work—the vast effort that is never seen, but is so crucial to development.

space sketch

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

space sketch invert

Lighting ideas

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Lighting ideas

heavy lifting

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

I want to start doing more on PAPER. I would like to draw more. More physicality as opposed to making everything w a keyboard and/or screen. That will be a big part of the exhibit, that is, the tension (literally) between digital and physical.

The hoisting of words with your whole body vs. the little finger hopping. I like the hoisting.

So, hoisting words. Heavy lifting. What would such an exhibit be like? Is it possible to tie emotions of words to actually lifting them?

Are the words going to be heavy words or frivolous words? What would it mean to have to exert great force and effort to lift trivial words?

Shopping for Inspiration

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

When we met last week, one of the things Wendy and I discussed was going shopping for inspiration: hardware stores, fabric stores, etc.

I mentioned that ITP has maintained various lists of good places to find materials:

Here are some that I think will be interesting to visit in the NYC area:

Test from Wendy’s Side

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

[Michael posting as Wendy] Now the two blogs are syndicating one another.  Let’s see if duplicates begin to appear.  I’ll leave the system alone for the afternoon and check back later to see what has happened.

[update] As of 2:54pm, this post didn’t make it over to ropeandpulley.com; however, it was seen by Google Reader when I fed the feed (http://wendyrichmond.com/blog/category/collaborations/overheard/feed/) into it.

What happens if I delete a post?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

What happens if I delete a post that was syndicated? Does it still stay in the recipient’s blog?

Testing Syndication to Overheard Blog

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

In order for Wendy and I to maintain a shared information space as we work on the installation at the University of California at San Diego, I’m configuring both of our blogs to utilize the FeedWordPress plugin which acts as a content aggregator (and cross posts between our blogs).  What I want to happen is anytime I post items to my “collaborations->overheard” category, they will automatically be posted into Wendy’s blog and vis-a-versa.  We’ll still need to figure out what she wants to name her categories.

The other potentially tricky bit is that we may end up with some sort of circular reference if her posts and my posts are mutually syndicated.  If her blog is pulling in posts from my “collaborations->overheard” category and publishing them to the same category that my blog is pulling out of, won’t we end up with an endless loop?

A quick brainstorm of how to solve the problem if mutually syndicating the feeds does indeed cause an endless loop…

  • take a look at the “remove duplicates” plugin for FeedWordPress
  • investigate whether categories can be hidden in Wordpress and whether it is possible to make categories which are the union of other categories.  If these are possible, I could write my shared posts using a hidden category  Collaborations->Overheard.outbound (which Wendy’s blog subscribes to).  I could categorize (on my blothe posts that Wendy writes on her blog as a hidden category Collaborations->Overheard.inbound.  At the same time, I would create a third visible category Collaborations->Overheard which is the union of both Collaborations->Overheard.inbound and Collaborations->Overheard.outbound which will be displayed on my site.  This composite category will allow me to display both the inbound and outbound posts as a single category on my blog and prevent a loop between our two blogs.
  • Yahoo Pipes could be used to generate the composite feed…

face and type

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

face and type

Hello world!

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Thank you Michael!

remember bill viola

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

viola barrelYesterday I was trying to put a digital frame inside a trash barrel to show Michael a Bill Viola-like thing- the monitor at the bottom of a barrel of water… and the frame did not quite fit, so it was at an angle and it was so cool, bc it reflected on the side, and it was so off hand, casual, DISCARDED. Hmm, just like words of these halves of cell phone conversations are so un-precious, so discarded. Wow, words in a trash can. The words are discarded, thrown away. Words are heavy, words are light, so is all about words now. The words we throw around and away so casually… so unprotected.