This really amused me. “Strong currents and Quicksand”. It’s the sort of sign you really want to see on a seaside holiday… This was hidden away on the waterfront at Portmeirion in Wales. This is the place famous for the setting of the original 1960′s ‘The Prisoner’ TV series. Quite a neat place to visit.

be seeing you… :0

I like finger limes – Citrus australasica - I like growing them, how they taste and especially how they are shaped and what they look like inside. hmm… not sure what else to say about them though. This one just fell off one of my trees in a mid summer hail storm. That is nature’s way of saying gravity works.

Got this Gibson Acoustic Robert Johnson L-1 about 6 months ago and am loving it. It’s a beautifully made small bodied guitar with a very loud yet subtle and smooth sound. It’s a 12 fret neck but feels a really comfortable size and it makes you want to noodle about on it constantly… actually it makes you feel like most other guitars are too big and too obtrusive. This one feels like an appendage that you need to have permanently attached.

I have always admired Robert Johnson and his style of playing Delta Blues – since i first heard him when looking into the world of blues and guitar. It’s a unique and fascinating sound. And his life story plays out like some sort of ‘made for TV’ mini-series script.

His story is so interesting as it covers a really important formative time of cultural change in the USA.

There is no known film of him playing but there is a good set of recordings: Robert Johnson: The complete recordings

The film made in 1992 – The Search for Robert Johnson – narrated and presented by Guitarist John Hammond is really worth a look and gives a great background to his life and times.

The Hal Leonard Robert Johnson Guitar Signature licks DVD is also useful mainly because looking at transcriptions for his music is mind blowing to try and comprehend. You really need to see someone else attempting to play it to get the feel for what he was doing.

Being a white man trying to play something so uniquely connected with both african-american culture and a very unique individual musician is a little daunting but given another 30 years of guitar playing I might be able to at least do a pale imitation that sounds like I might vaguely know of his music. If not I guess I can at least do some nice noodling of my own on a nice sounding guitar…

I noticed this interesting arrangement of items yesterday while traversing the back streets of Chippendale in Sydney. A fascinating collection of incidentals placed in a strong and strangely alluring yet dissonate composition. The fresh eggs particularly attracted my attention due to the odd way they had been placed in amongst the other hard disassembled objects.

Self portrait with algae… this is some real nice slime discovered after the recent bush fires created with organic leakage onto the paved areas from the regenerating plants.

Ok this is one of the small but long term projects I have been working on. These 2 little bio systems in containers were set up in 1994 as part of an installation entitled ‘sssshhhhh’ in a shop window for ‘Walking the Street’ as part of the Newtown Community festival (Sydney) with Wayne Stamp. The festival is run every year by the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre.

The ‘sssshhh’ work consisted of these little ecosystems and other various compost and eco system related objects including a rosemary bush and a lot of live worms, surrounded by  a range of large laminated  and backlit digital print images.

These 2 of the original 3 containers have not been opened since November 1994. However they have suffered some weathering and obviously there is some transference of moisture and heat etc through the cork stoppers. The third container sadly suffered severe damage from a metal bar falling on it about 6 months ago. The contents are basically a combination of various soil components and a few minimal plants species – primarily spaghnum moss. Other types of moss and plant life have colonised the cork surface of the lid and various odd coloured fungi appear at various times of the year inside. You can see a small patch of red fungus near the base of the side view. They seem pretty happy still and are very satisfying to look at and think about.

pogo sketch pro stylus by Ten One Design – nice feel and excellent for those freeform moments on the iPad or other touch screen device you use for artwork. It is hard to do some of those refined and detailed movements with just your monstrous finger…

“Poses”  by Yolanda Dominguez - Ah this is such a beautiful thing…

A series of public poses forms a tribute to all those beautiful people who contort themselves in such a casual way… ‘I always wanted to be a model’

kind of like a ‘serious’ public voguing…

I was impressed  by this article last year on BBC about the people at Cornell University’s Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL)  using 3D printer technology to output food items built like you would a plastic rapid prototype object. It opens up a whole range of possibilities when you start to think about building objects from other possibly perishable materials.
Sure cooked and decoratively performed food is one obvious option, but personally I immediately thought about using some interesting starting cultures of various biological components such as fungi and plant cloned cell cultures for building some rather fascinating self reproducing snacks that could be ‘something I prepared earlier’, that could then grow itself into more appetising forms when activated or left to it’s own devices.
You could also print the food direct into it’s packaging like gel capsules using an edible gelatine or similar. Yummy! and so practical…

Cornell Paper here: http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/69-Lipton-Mutlimaterial%20food%20printing%20Final.pdf

The printed future of Christmas dinner By Lakshmi Sandhana
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12069495

reworked on www.bitrebels.com as:
Technology: Use Your 3D Printer To Print Edible Food!
http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/technology-use-your-3d-printer-to-print-edible-food/

I’m very much interested in the small hidden boundaries and the cracks and crevices of life. This series of works explores a tiny section of these ideas. More later…