idea: mixtures
Mix beauty products with opposing or contradictory effects. Observe the results, then bottle and market it.
…One afternoon my wife and I built a puppet theatre. After propping the theatre on the top edge of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The couch and the theatre’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire theatre, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing in a heap of cardboard, wood and cloth — leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch’s rim, my puppetted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theatre had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double-take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before — and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a non-existent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness.Albert Appel Jr.’s introduction to the Annotated Lolita via: dot dot dot
In a way, [Man Ray is] like an object. You can look at him and say, how am I going to use you, whereas you can’t with a person…You can manipulate him so that he doesn’t feel manipulated, so that he feels he’s doing something he’s supposed to do or having fun, one of the two.William Wegman
idea
Keep a log of the web-pages for every local ad I see on the subways. delicious tag: subway_ads
idea for a one day video
Make a set that is basically just a table, but like, really good. Cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, and with one collaborator, videotape eating each meal. ummm…
Idea
‘How I Earned the Right to Vote’ - title for an autobiography up to the age of 18
I wish...
I often find myself wishing that everything I owned had a telephone number so I could find it when it’s missing.
The Problem
The basic thing I want from the video I’m working on is to convey the feeling of recognizing that you exist for other people as they exist for you, and that they have a consciousness that is as expansive and unfathomable as your own. The difficulty is in the complexity and fleetingness of this moment of consciousness.
Art, history, documentation, culture, context
Everybody agreed a while back, I guess, that context is important to an artwork’s meaning/significance, etc., and I was just thinking about why that is and why it became more true, or at least more recognized (same thing?) during the 20th century, and I think it has to do with mediated culture. With the advent of photography and mass media, a work of art was photographed in context and its reception, placement, etc was chronicled in newspapers, magazines, and many more books than before. This mediation made it so that artworks were no longer singular presences etc etc etc but mediated multiplicities whose manifestations were recorded and augmented in their reproductions and representations.
So then the obvious question (so what if it’s obvious that doesn’t make it less relevant but more) is what does will this mean when media (witness all the tumblrs for example) is placed into the hands of every actual body to the point where it’s likely impossible to digest or even determine the proliferation of a single event into media.
Why did I keep getting defensive? Who reads this? Jen. Jen reads this, I think. Jen, are you still reading this? email me at ando.steinmetz (at the) gmail.com if you are reading this.
