Berst of 23 (and a second after)
best+worst X (alternates +1s)
Waiting for below-zero again. Need a frozen lake to do my annual weatherwork art. 10 years now, working with — or rather, subservient to — nature, every winter I make land art using found wind,snow, rain and ice. These 50’ painterly installations are dependent on chance, are spontaneous, ephemeral but effortful, durational, and contextual to the surroundings and each other over time… just like The Window photos.
So, while I pine for ice, here’s a year-end ‘best of’* compilation of posts from The Window, but with a twist: a main-photo alternate image has been included here. New details are seen: arms now exuberantly lifted; the pointy toe of a thigh high boot in sharp relief; a chair hastily procured for the girl in distress; pants pulled up in preparation for the dance; the garbage man now illumed in ambulance red instead of blue; the silver-painted feet revealed… and The Window, ah the window, at night. (Click on the Substack links below each to see the differences & read the threads connecting the images.)
158,000 frames, 100,000 words, 30,000 notes, 28,835 days…
yes, horses, they fly!
TL;DR: movement moments In 1878 Eadward Muybridge proved that horses fly. With an array of twelve cameras (and tripwires) he captured the complicated leg movements of a galloping horse. The photographs revealed a surprise: the horse suspended in the air. (All hooves up at once, unknown at the time).
"How many goodly creatures are there here!"
How beauteous mankind is
TL; DR: How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!" PROSPERO: the magician THE TEMPEST (Shakespeare play): A storm shipwrecks a crew of men on an island (midway between Europe and Africa), where they encounter a man —himself stranded there years ealier— with magical powers. The magician’s daughter, and the son of a crewmember,…
Signs (& flags & tees) of the times…
Anti-candid…
The Drake Equation and A Drake equation
TL; DR: celebrete of renoun in the hous of fame Drake walked from the restaurant site to his SUV (parked in front of Ballenciaga), surrounded by his posse. When he paused to talk to an employee, the rest of his team spread out, positioned like posts in an electric fence. The sun was low and behind towers; it was getting cold, and very few …
Polyclocks and palimpsests…
Chronoception
TL; DR: the subjective experience of time The Window project has ended up being a polyclock, simultaneously tracking multiple types of time. It has captured milliseconds to millennium, from a suspended leap to a once-in-a-hundred year event (a global pandemic)…
Spooky action at a distance…
it takes two to entangle
TL, DR; entangled photons “In entanglement, one constituent cannot be fully described without considering the other.” Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two photons can be made to be intimately connected to each other*. The state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the other, even when the particles are separated by …
TWO OF PENTACLES: “Confusion. Your mind struggles with trying to make two seeming opposites combine.”
The Window Tarot
Actual Hermits, Knights, Pages, Jugglers, Judgement, Death, the Tower, and the Devil… all drinking, shoveling, féting (etc) below The Window: THE HERMIT: “The lesson and reward, but also misfortune, of solitude.”
The Window is a silent opera…
n0n-b1nary
If The Window is a visual opera of the early 21st century, this is one of its leitmotifs:
Doomsday clocks, crop top wars, hopak-kolo moves…
ne're attives
The Doomsday Clock has now been moved to 90 seconds to midnight, and as a result many cities have begun holding exercises to train for emergencies like nuclear war. Above, a group of crisis actors practice for such an event. The run-through took place over 8 hours. They were paid minimum wage for the night. They had a lunch break at 2 a.m. Non-gluten m…
:…suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified.”
u say tomato, i say sfumato
TL;DR: darkness causes us no discontent… “Darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.” Everything everything is so black white, left right, right wrong these days. Certainty certainly sells, but t…
The Window, Sets:
NOTES:
-*or worst of
-** a rare opportunity to make a Duran Duran joke, below
-happy holidays to all! (may you never have to wait for -20° C)
-K.I.A. art site: www.nu4ya.com
BONUS POST: The Window, itself:
“The best window is the one you never see,
As if hard air, it lets the sun through with ease,
But stops the sharp snow, and the soft bees,
And construction dust, and the airborne disease…”
13 Ways of Looking Out the Window
TL; DR: window as diamond, eye, iphone, spy… I The city, seen faceted: Tho flat, and flawed, The window, a diamond. II On my smart phone, astronauts Rocket to a red planet. Outside the window, two geese Fly through a condo valley.