My Ugly Sweater

taking a break

2006-09-01T09:31:00.000-04:00

myuglysweater is on a short blogging break, gearing up for the next semester. back in a couple of weeks!

crafting the art world

2006-08-20T16:57:00.000-04:00

i sometimes wonder if there are any contemporary artists out there who aren't at least tangentially involved with the formerly dismissed realm of craft. whereas for ages artists such as colette whiten and her crosspoint newspaper images, faith ringgold's quilts and rosemarie trockel's knitted and branded balaklava's were at the margins of the art world, now it seems that knitting, sewing, beading, weaving and macramé are defining the work of a massive number of emerging and established artists. as i collect the names of artists and craftworkers for my post-doc i am constantly amazed by the sheer volume of work that is being produced at the formerly contested boundary between art and craft.

although my own work is concerned more with the infolding of craft into the spheres of technology, primarily through the platforms used for ubiquitous and wearable technologies, i nonetheless remain fascinated by the way that crafting has come to redefine a number of artworld spheres. while betsy greer argues in her MA thesis that crafting (in particular knitting) holds within it the potential for a radically subserversive performative community-building, i wonder if (or how) this holds true when the use of craft begins to intersect with the profitability of global art markets, creative industries, and the seedy underside that continues to define the sweatshop production of textiles, yarns and clothing.

in large part, these are questions that remain unanswered and largely undiscussed in the burgeoining field of art-craft (of high craft or fine craft or whatever you want to call it). so too is the role played by craft in the proliferating discussions over creative economies, creative cities and cultural capitalism. on the other hand, to define something is often to pin it down thereby adding boundaries to the direction that it might take. but on the other hand, these are also, i think, important questions for those of us who are both academics and practitioners (and there seem to be a growing number). though these are questions that will certainly come up in my work, for the moment i'm just collecting, questions as much as artists.

one of my recent favourites in shirin neshat's film women without men. i haven't seen the film, but have obsessed over the still images from it.

From a review of Shirin Neshat by Britta Schmitz:

"Neshat's most recent works, "Mahdokht" (2004) and "Zarin" (2005), constitute two independent sequences of what is to become a five-part feature film entitled "Women without Men". The novella of the same name by Shahrnush Parsipur was published in 1989 in Tehran and subsequently banned. Today the author lives in exile in America. [9] The book comprises several metaphorically related short stories about the lives of five different women who are suffering from their respective situations and run away. They ultimately find themselves in a garden where they seek to form their own new society. Writing in a feminist, mythological terminology, Shahrnush Parsipur describes the cultural and religious social pressure facing women, which often leaves them with no other resort than to go mad or commit suicide. The book proved to be an immense provocation to the Guardians and Administrators of the Revolution under Khomeini.

Following the election of President Khatami in 1997 life in Iran changed; and even the rules governing the wearing of the chador are now observed with increasing carelessness. [10] With each millimeter that overcoats have become shorter and tighter-fitting, Iranian women have gained new ground in terms of self-determination. Color permeates the cityscape, the provocative game of concealing and revealing is flourishing, as is a nascent fashion industry devoted exclusively to the veil and chador. Satellite television and the Internet are essentials for city-dwellers without being considered a sign of "Westernization," but rather posing questions as to a unique, non-Western identity.

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York, many things have changed in the USA as well. The declared "clash of civilizations" has changed the land of individual liberty and the culture of critical faculties. Shirin Neshat's response to these changes has been seismographic. As an artist with a transnational education and consciousness located within Western discourses, who has played an important intermediary role between Western and Iranian, or Islamic, culture, she has an unusually clear view of the vulnerabilities of a particular society.

In a certain sense, "Mahdokht" and "Zarin" are strange and new in her oeuvre, since Shirin Neshat refuses to fulfill any "orientalist" expectations. Both films are produced entirely in color; Zarin is structured like a feature film and includes spoken language. The frequently cited dualisms of black and white, male and female, are abandoned by Shirin Neshat in favor of a style closer to magic realism.

In "Mahdokht" the camera emerges from graywhite surroundings and travels along a clear and lively stream, passing through an opening in a clay wall into a luxuriant, green garden. At the beginning and again at the end she is shown floating, like Ophelia in a white gown, dead upon the still and shallow water as though sleeping; swathes of mist cover her like a veil. Children and the young Mahdokht play in a fertile, paradisiacal landscape and Mahdokht is consumed by the thought of knitting an inordinate amount of children's garments with yellow wool. She wishes she had a thousand pairs of hands in order to carry out her mission. At an almost crazy speed she knits with the yellow yarn strewn throughout the surrounding landscape while hordes of children frolic around. "Mahdokht" features an almost surreal ambiguity, though it refers to an infertile civilization in search of revitalization - here in the image of a woman (Mahdokht) obsessed by fertility. Mahdokht, the mother of civilization, Mother Earth and the vitality of the garden, has drawn the wrong threads together and ha departed from life in a state of despair. What remains are lichen and seeds with which she will spread herself across the world.

In the novella by Shahrnush Parsipur Mahdokht wishes she could turn into a tree: "She wanted to grow on the riverbank with leaves... She would give her new leaves to the wind, a garden full of Mahdokhts... She would become thousands and thousands of branches... She wanted to, and it is always desire that drives one to madness. [11]

The central place in both the novella and the film is the garden, for the garden is a motif of major importance in the Islamic world. Islam and Iran are renowned for their gardens which embody a stark contrast to the seemingly infinite expanse of the desert and offer something of a reflection of the garden of paradise. The idea that a human being in a garden can become a tree is a widespread metaphor in Iranian mythology which stands for the human being's rootedness within the community. The transformation of a woman into a tree would allow her to found a new society, a female society and to be included in a community. She would not be coerced into adopting a passive role, or forced into a private, shielded domain of society. Rather she would become the active figure in determining her own way of life."

sweater update

2006-08-20T16:46:00.000-04:00

the left front of the sweater is done... and my friend is now coming on saturday. finishing will be no problem! yay. meeting all of the other deadlines.... well, that's a bit trickier, but progress has been made.

in the meantime, i went to little miss sunshine. it was wonderful, except that i have now had the song "superfreak" in my head for three straight days. nevertheless, it's definitely worth a little disco-head....

what is this mess?

2006-08-17T09:39:00.000-04:00

it's a half-finished, much enlarged, acrylic and sari silk baby kimono from the mason-dixon knitting book (a treasured birthday present). problem is, said baby is arriving (at my house, not in the world) for one day on wednesday, which leaves me six days to finish this sucker. that would be no problem except that i also have only six days to finish several assignments for my web design certificate, polish off a chapter, write a paper and fit in a whole lot of research work. typical week i guess.... but in the great battle between academia and knitting... who will win? (actually, i would have to vote for the felt optimus prime puppet that was recently posted on the makezine craft archive.

updates to follow....

a lovely new skirt!

2006-08-13T10:20:00.000-04:00

i worked my butt off all day yesterday, so i took a break in the evening to finish a wardrobe refashion project that has been sitting on my table for a month and a half. it was very simple, but also very effective, and i love the end result! i've decided to enter it in the deconstruct/reconstruct whiplash competition as well.

i began with this boring but well-made skirt that i got at the salvation army for $1.99 last year. i bought it for teaching, but never wore it because it was too bland. then one of my friends showed up in the grad room with a cute skirt with a knitted waistband, and i knew that i needed one as well!

i started by unpicking the zipper. this skirt has a particularly long zipper, so i took it out, and then sewed together about 2.5 inches at the back. it's very important at this point to make sure that it will still fit over your hips. the final skirt hangs low, so choose a point at the widest part of the hips, measure up 1.5 inches from this point, and then cut off the fabric above (on newer skirts with lower waistbands this will be less material than on vintage skirts with waist bands that end somewhere around the ears).

i then cut off the waist to the level that i had sewn the back together (approximately 4 inches of fabric). i sewed the lining together in the back so that it lay flat, and finished off the top with the sewing machine so that there were no raw edges.

i set the skirt aside and knit the waistband in noro kureyon #52. i cast on 16 stitches and knit in garter stitch. when stretched, the waistband should fit snuggly around the waist (the stretching is very important). don't cast off!

i then hand-sewed the knitted waistband to the top edge of the skirt. i didn't cast off, because it's important to stretch the waistband as you sew, and it's very difficult to estimate the exact finished length. when i was about 3 inches from the end, i added a few rows, cast off, and overlapped the ends of the knitted waistband. the skirt will look a bit puckered and funny, but it will hang perfectly once on. it's very important to stretch it as you're sewing because otherwise it will stretch itself and fall off. and no one wants a skirt that randomly tumbles to the ankles! i added three buttons for decoration, and hey presto, a new skirt that i adore!!!

feta fête-a

2006-08-12T10:07:00.000-04:00

i really i have to get back to work. the summer is almost over, and the amount of work that i still have to do is giving me stomach-butterflies. nevertheless, T and i decided to have one last celebration. my friend was supposed to hand in her dissertation yesterday. she didn't make the deadline (who does), but we decided to have a bit of a feast anyway. and because we had a chunk of feta the size of the goat that produced it, it was a feta-themed extravaganza, featuring myuglysweater's easy as pie (actually A LOT easier than pie ... pastry is so difficult) recipes....

1. delicious baked olives: take a whole whack of olives (kalamata and otherwise), put them in a baking dish with some olive oil, thyme, garlic, and chili pepper flakes (all to your taste), cover the dish and pop it in the oven at 350 for 40 minutes. watch out though - people devour these ... make sure you get your share early on!

2. even more delicious feta-pepper spread: roast 2 large or 3 small sweet red peppers. i do this by putting them in my toaster oven on the tray and running it through 3 cycles of dark toast. works like a charm every time. peel them, chop up a jalapeno (i use 1.5 because i like kick) and dump some feta (maybe a cup?) in the food processor. process and voila - tasty deliciousness. serve with baguette. for an even better, but more expensive treat, replace the feta with goat's cheese. also, try to get feta that hasn't been stored in brine - it makes a big difference to the taste. and bulgarian feta, in my experience, is by far the nicest.

3. zucchini pancakes: grate 2 large or 3 small zucchinis. crumble whatever feta remains (0.5-1 cup), add 1 large or 2 small eggs, salt and pepper to taste, and then add flour until the mixture sticks together (there shouldn't be water on top). cook in a frying pan or griddle until brown on both sides, and serve with plain yoghurt. this is one of my favourite dinners, and i've added all sorts of things to these - everything from mint, to potato and onion, spinach, corn, peanuts (not so successful), and whatever else happens to be lying around. they're almost always scrumptious.

i'm of the "if it's easy and it tastes good it is delicious" school of cooking, and i'm not sure where any of these recipes came from. they all seem very 1970s party to me though, so i tried to take a 1970s style photo, complete with random adornments. the tea pot stand in front with the poppy was a gift that my mum got me from the highland pottery. they have beautiful, if not easily accessible (as in, it's in the middle of nowhere), dishes, and my mum (lucky thing) has a whole set that she got for next to nothing when they were working out of a shack on a hill. i get homesick every time i look at it, but i love it nonetheless.

anyway, happy eating. and now i fortunately have plenty of leftovers and snacks for the work marathon that i see in my future.

camping slide show; or, three and a bitch

2006-08-11T12:34:00.000-04:00

T wrote in french to book one of our campgrounds: "nous sommes trois avec une chienne." when he ran it through google translate to check it, it returned "we are three and a bitch..." which of course became the calling card of the vacation.

7 delightful days on the north shore of the st. lawrence. many marshmallows met sticky ends, many whales were seen, many pictures of the dog were taken, much fun was made of the fact that i could not, for the life of me, remember the word for zodiac (as in, fast greenpeace style boat in which one takes one's life in one's hands). in fact, the only word that came to mind was "gazebo," so of course my darling travel companions had to yell "gazebo" every single time we passed a boat. they think they're funny.

anyway, the trip was great. we camped at île aux coudres, in the middle of the river. it poured with rain and twenty minutes later the road was covered in a blanket of yellow snails. lucy enjoyed a supper of escargot and then lay down in the mud - truly a dog's dream vacation.

we then went north to tadoussac where you can see whales from the beach. they come in to shore because of some weird freak geology that has carved out a deep canyon along the shore full of plankton and other delicious whale treats. several hump shaped rocks were pointed out and accompanied with the cry "look, a whale!" but we did see a couple ... i think. although it is possible that they were just particularly animated boulders. otherwise we walked on rocks and i managed to get a nice lobster burn. lucy's vacation got even better when she found the biggest bone she had ever seen. the fact that it was part of a whale skeleton on display at the museum didn't seem to bother her. and the guards were too busy laughing to do anything about it. seriously... dog heaven.

the only bad part was that she had to sit outside while we ate lunch.

we finally ended up at an amazing campsite in bergeronne, where we could just sit and watch the whales go by. this time we really could see them blowing water out of their spouts and generally ignoring all the dumb humans waving and pointing.

it was stunningly beautiful, although our diet of marshmellows seemed to attract all the mosquitos. we cunningly didn't shower for a few days in hopes that they would mistake us for walking trees, but alas, it was not to be. my sunburn (now cadmium) was polkadotted pink as well. i was truly attractive on those last couple of days.

on the last day i was convinced to go out on a gazebo... uh, i mean zodiac. i was against it, having been on a whale watching boat in newfoundland that actually hit a whale. it was horrible and traumatizing, and whales are fricking BIG! some day that whale (which wasn't injured by the way) is going to exact its revenge, and being in a rubber dinghy in the middle of the bloody-huge-river-that-eventually-flows-into-the-sea surrounded by his relatives and friends did not sound appealing. nevertheless i was convinced/dragged, and of course it was a blast. i'll be a rainbow warrior in no time flat. i particularly enjoyed having to dress like a space explorer and making lame neil armstrong jokes (they were really lame and do not bear repeating here).

then it was time to go. boo hoo. we went back via quebec city, one of my favourite places.

lucy impressed tourists with her acrobatic drinking skills. some even took pictures. obviously i should have handed around a hat.

and that was that. now i'm home and have stacks of work to do. i wish i was a whale. i would eat plankton and avoid tourists and all would be well.

gone camping

2006-08-02T10:12:00.000-04:00

gone camping. back in a week (with pictures).

Molly 1992-2006

2006-07-29T11:17:00.000-04:00

lucy with molly, 2005

it is with great sadness that the myuglysweater family announces the passing of molly pearson this past week in truro, nova scotia. molly, a dog of uncertain beginnings, heroically endured a full 138 thunderstorms in her long-held position on nova scotia storm patrol. molly was a trailblazer in finding safe places to experience chaotic weather, discovering first beneath-the-bed cove, and second under-the-basement-sofa bunker. she also discovered early in life that the occasional windstorm could be comfortably passed on the basement couch. molly was rescued from a farm by the pearson family, and grew up from humble beginning to become a brilliant dog. after failing obedience class (the weiner was too much), molly came to excel in sports such as "carry your own leash," and "quell the antics of your doggie cousins." molly also led the way in the butt-wiggle-wag, a sport often perfected by dogs without tails. an expert in investigating the dishwasher buffet, molly could often be found sporting "dishwasher dreads," a hairstyle that she invented through a combination of soft fur and tea spilled from the top level of the appliance. this was particularly popular with her cousins, who would lick the top of her head. also known for the hot chocolate and ice cream dance, the sneeze of excitement, and her patented game "round and round the basement," molly will be remembered fondly by her cousins lucy and libby, and the rest of her extended human family. we will miss her very much.

making some changes

2006-07-26T21:40:00.000-04:00

i'm making some changes to my template - it should be done this evening. apologies for any broken webrings - they'll be back up in a short while!

rock n roll knitting

2006-07-24T18:33:00.000-04:00

some time ago, back in the days before eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (one of my favourite movies), what was french director michel gondry doing? eating delicious "i'm from paris" éclairs? well yes, i imagine he was (certainly that's what i would be doing if i was in paris right now)... but he was also directing music videos, including walkie talkie man for kiwi punk/hip hop band steriogram. why is it special? the ENTIRE thing is knitted. everything from the band's instruments to the monster/club-bouncer who tries to take out the band with his monster-sized knitted hands. fortunately the producer (gondry's kid) is a quick thinking knitting whiz, and he pulls a thread in the monster's finger, unravelling his EVIL (imagine evil echoes here ... evil evil evil). actually the monster/bouncer kind of looks like richard, the cook that i worked with in oxford who introduced me to the disgusting beauty of the chip butty. but, nevertheless, it is a great video, and a seriously catchy tune. i wonder who did the knitting ... there are no acknowledgments anywhere, as if it simply appeared. maybe it was the animation studio?

anyway, the video can be seen here,

and an article on its making can be found here.

and more of gondry's music video work can be found here

and if i were a cookie...

2006-07-15T18:56:00.000-04:00

spicey chocolate cookies, photo by rorie from milk and honey

...these are the cookies that i would be. actually, if i was a cookie, i would choose to be an arrowroot or a prune delight or something, so as to expand my life expectancy. but, if one was voting on the queen of cookies, these spicey-chocolate nuggets of deliciousness are seriously and truly divine. i can vouch because my friend came over for a gossip and comiseration session (she has had a terrible semester), and i think that we consumed about 14 of them. well, maybe not 14... that might be a slight exaggeration... but it doesn't mean they were't so good that i wanted to eat 14 of them! end result - cookies really do make you feel better, especially when they're spicey and chocolatey! yum.

dixie cup dodecahedron

2006-07-14T09:34:00.000-04:00

if i was a dixie cup...

... i would make it my life's ambition to become part of a dixie-cup dodecahedron.

loose end #4 brought to you with step by step instructions from instructables.

loose end #3

2006-07-13T12:12:00.000-04:00

a colleague and friend of mine died very suddenly and mysteriously this week. everyone thought that it was a heartattack, but it turns out that there were no signs of heart disease at all. he was fairly young and in good shape, and it came as a total shock. and it remains a shock because there is no finality in a death that cannot be traced to a cause. the world lost not only an excellent art historian, but also a very kind man. sad days.

******************************

a couple of weeks ago, i saw al gore's an inconvenient truth. i enjoyed it for what it was, and thought that it made its point clearly and concisely. but it bothered me that global warming was seen as completely disconnected from other global currents - the circulations and flow of capital, the neverending movements (both forced and touristic) of populations across the globe, the intimate relationships between the environment and global communications. the lack of all of these things seemed to leave gore's definition of global warming, and the cure that he posits for it, as an iceberg (albeit one melting at a rate threatening to do us all in) in a sea of networked power relations, rampant consumerism, conflict and inequality. in the battle against global warming, for example, is walking to work enough when the manufacture of your computer, blackberry, ipod and cell phone tally up to massive environmental destruction and the exploitation of pink collar workers?

on the other hand, i loved that gore refused pessimism, and i liked that his main message is that we can't wait for other people to get us out of this mess - we created it, let's change it. nevertheless, there is a built into his thesis an acknowledgment that we may have gone too far, and we may have done too much damage, too rapidly to turn back. this oscillation between futility and action reminded me very much of this project (from rhizome):

"Heavy Breathing Blog
In their participatory project, Talking About the Weather, Australian media artists Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark collect human breath via individual contributions to a blog and their live performative encounters around the globe. The project is a dramatic, yet absurd attempt to save us from 'the terrifying spectre of global climate change.' Following in the footsteps of artists like Alfred Jarry, Eugene Ionesco, Joan Miro, and Marcel Duchamp, Miranda and Neumark seek 'an imaginary solution for an actual problem.' Asking us to save the breath we normally use to talk about the weather, they invite us to donate our exhalations to 'blow back global warming.' Since CO2 emissions are part of the problem, the artists' plan is futile: Taken literally, it's as desperate as the Sioux Buffalo Dance intended to magically restore the herds decimated by the white man's massive slaughter. But metaphorically, it's an urgent call to action: The more human breath expended in this cause, the more likely we are to reverse the lethal trend. The breath collections will be exhibited at New Zealand's Govett-Brewster Gallery, in mid-July. More contributions are invited. - Marcia Tannerenter

heavy breathing blog can be found here.

and because i began by talking about networking, connection and communications, the heavy breathing project in turn reminded me of germaine koh's prayers from 1999. from the catriona jeffries website:

"Throughout the day, a computer interface captures all the keystrokes typed on another computer within the same building. In real time, this raw data is translated to Morse code and broadcast into the surrounding atmosphere in the form of Morse-encoded smoke signals issuing from a vent or other opening in the building as longer and shorter puffs of smoke. More and less active at various times of the day and its output more and less visible under varying conditions, the apparatus is a kind of exhaust system for the machine of daily industry. At the same time, it relates today's electronic communications to previous technological and communications revolutions: telegraph, binary languages, steam power, smoke signals. Everyday hopes and fleeting desires, channelled through the implements of daily work, are briefly given form as they are dispersed into the world at large, on the wing of a prayer."

Germaine Koh, Prayers, 1999

loose end #2: microsoft and creative commons

2006-07-07T10:25:00.000-04:00

From the creative commons website:

"Microsoft and Creative Commons have teamed up to release the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office, a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licenses to works created in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint to easily select Creative Commons licenses from directly within the application they are working in. The first document to be CC-licensed using this tool is the text of Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil's iSummit keynote speech in English and Portuguese."

there are articles here and here

clashing of cultures? complete co-option? or wonderful opportunity?

and a "related" article from the archives of the onion

loose ends

2006-06-30T19:53:00.000-04:00

i'm feeling a little bit at sixes and sevens of late, and i find that i'm actually missing my dissertation. that is, while i definitely do not miss the ongoing wearing down of soul and body involved in the last couple months of writing, i do miss having one single project that could bulldoze anything else out of the way. i feel a bit unmoored now, mostly because i'm having to deal with heaps of loose ends that were pushed aside by the dissertross. well, loose ends as well as all the fun things that i didn't do for 6 months. so i dash about knitting a couple of rows here, spackling a hole there, sending off an abstract here, updating the blog there, trying out new recipes, weeding the back garden, fixing the typos in the diss, trying to pull together a few papers before the fall, but mostly running around like a chicken with its head cut off (ooh that makes me think of the magnetic fields, maybe some music would help!). anyway, in honour of having both too much and too little to do, i introduce seven days of loose ends ... a few little things that interest me, and about which i've been meaning to blog. and then i really, seriously, will get back to work.

loose end #1

1. there is a very interesting discussion going on over on craft research about definitions of "fine craft". having taken two classes in my MA where the separation between art and craft was dissected at length, i wonder if this is not a revisiting of those ideas outside of the original Marxist framework. does "fine craft" refer to its exorbitant price tag? its perceived qualities as an Art? that is, as craft that is able to cross the boundary into the halcyon art world (and market), or is it yet another semantic splitting of hairs?

hmmm... makes me wonder ... what is damien hirst's diamond-encrusted skull? ? art? craft? fine craft?

Charlotte Higgins writes in the Guardian, "[Hirst's] latest work, now under construction, sees wealth and death in a stand-off. The Love of God will be a life-size platinum cast of a skull covered entirely in diamonds - 8,500 of them. In the centre of its forehead will be a 55-carat diamond, worth between £4m and £5m. The cost of the raw materials alone will be £10m. 'It's almost like cash against death,' he says."

or how about frank gehry's earrings for tiffany's? as the top flight artists and starchitects turn to the worlds of craft and fashion (rem koolhaas's line of shoes being a case in point) is it a merger, a hostile takeover or coolhunting? when there's a promotional video and a short film involved... i would have to side with hostile takeover. and it makes me wonder, does "fine craft" simply create a new distinction wherein synergy within the art/craft/architecture worlds can take place, in much the same way that we see taking place in the world of corporate capitalism?

will the advent of globally-renowed architects and artists in the formerly (largely) overlooked (and feminized) realm of craft function to highlight the work of other lesser-known producers? probably not. nevertheless, within the business, art and theoryworlds, such mergers, while cutting off certain opportunities, have also initiated some extremely interesting oppositional projects. i look forward to seeing where both the conversation will go, and also the craft production/designer-maker/intelligent-making that will take place.

spanish ruling to save the great apes

2006-06-30T10:26:00.000-04:00

photo by: Schalk van Zuydam, AP

Spain has recently passed legislation to support rights to life and freedom for great apes. it is the first time EVER that any national legislature will recognize such rights for non-humans. not only has spain pledged to protect apes in spain (there remain only a small number), but in other countries as well.

this is wonderful news, but how did great apes get to be in such a precarious position? if you have a cell phone, you might want to read this:

Species on the Brink

in brief, the plight of the global population of great apes, and their imminent danger of extinction, is, in part, a direct result of the world's hunger for cell phones. much of the great ape population resides in a contested region between uganda, rwanda and the democratic republic of the congo. it is an area that has seen a bloody civil war, waged in large part over mineral rights, and the rights to mine in the area. why such turmoil? because the same region that is home to the great apes is one of the very few areas in the world rich in tantalum. columbite-tantalum, once mined, becomes coltan, and coltan is used in EVERY SINGLE cell phone capacitor. apes depend on untouched habitat, and mining, forestry, and war tend to destroy that habitat. in the past ten years, as cell phone use has skyrocketed, the great ape population in the area has declined by up to 90%!!!!!! there are only 3,000 great apes left alive.

well, quite frankly, this ripped my heart out when i first read about it, and the spain ruling is the first light of hope in a struggle that promises to end all too soon.

there is, however, plenty that can be done, starting with writing to your cell phone maker. although most corporations are not directly involved in the mining of tantalum (and in fact, make darn sure that they're far removed from it, buying instead from intermediaries), public opinion counts for a lot. there are safe ways to extract tantalum, and to protect the apes. further, there are a number of groups working on this issue (addresses below). finally, buying recycled phones is infinitely possible, and retrofitted phones are available all over the place (further, charities are beginning to recycle phones themselves, thus making it a double good deed to donate to a charity in order to buy a used phone). and of course, there's always doing without. sometimes it's just nice to not be in constant contact.

Orangutan Foundation International
Bushmeat Crisis Task Force
Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP)
The Bonobo Initiative
Jane Goodall Institute
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International
Ape Alliance
Pan African Sanctuary Alliance
Canadian Ape Alliance
Great Ape Trust Recycling Program
Eco Cell
cell phone recyling
Kinshasa Declaration on Great Apes (pdf document)

2006-06-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

i've been a big fan of emilie rondeau's work for some time, and i finally bought one. it's tiny - 4 inches by 4 inches - and looks sort of like the one i've posted here, except that it has a shiny resin surface. i would have loved to have had three different ones to hang in a row ... but alas, one will have to do it. maybe she'll be back next year?

i found it at a local art fair, where i was also enamoured with céline malépart's work, although it was unfortunately just out of my price range. she was lovely though, and so was her work, particularly her new set of paintings (not shown on her site), which combine her illustrations with recipes (my favourite was the banana cake one).

read-o-rama

2006-06-25T13:43:00.000-04:00

it seems that balancing semi-holidays with pseudo-work is easier than i originally presumed. call me the queen of novel reading (although i have found time to get a bit of work done). this is a wonderful thing! i was reading over emails from last semester the other day, and was instantly greeted with the scent of smoke - what is that? oh, it's that girl burning out again. i did manage to avoid complete burn out, but last semester was too much - teaching in two cities (one two hours from home, the other even further), finishing the diss for a deadline two months earlier than anticipated (pesky post-doc with its cast-in-stone hand in date), a book to edit, papers to write, conferences, and a smattering of job interviews. well, i barely saw T for three months, and i think the cats forgot who i was, but i did make it through. and now i am enjoying my semi-vacation. yeah, there's still stuff to do, but i seem to have little free time because i spend it all reading novels, not because i'm responding to two hundred student emails while editing the final chapter of the diss and talking on the phone with an editor. anyway, it all worked out in the end, i got to see a lot of my friend who lives in one of the cities where i was teaching, the defense was great, and i met some awesome people who helped me through, and really, the hell of it is largely forgotten. like labour i guess. anyway, i imagine it will happen again when the big T of tenure looms on the horizon, so i am making the most of this summer. and it is excellent.

7. caroline graham a ghost in the machine
bad people do bad things to each other, and good people get punished anyway ... or have their heads smacked in by medieval torture devices. well-written, entertaining and replete with smarmy characters. it's a good one.

there are a couple of excerpted reviews here

8. john darnton the darwin conspiracy
ghost in the machine was a fun read, unlike the darwin conspiracy, which read like the da vinci code meets charles darwin. i suppose the formula has evolved (pun very much intended) somewhat - i made it through without wanting to throw it in the trash. but, there's something annoying about historically-based novels that try far too hard to combine fact with fiction. okay, darwin was a hypochondriac, i get it. but does that really mean that he was a lying, cheating, conniving imposter? the next time i have a cold and think it's meningitis, i will definitely make sure to screw someone over ... just to prove darnton's point. still, it's not unreadable, and there was a lot in it that i didn't know, so i don't consider the time it took to read a waste ... it was just a bit forced. it's too bad it wasn't even worse, as then i could have made snide comments about monkeys typing it, etc. etc.

the reviews on amazon are pretty funny. i particularly like the description "as bland as an empty ice cream cone."

9. laurie king the beekeeper's apprentice
very nice. sherlock holmes has an apprentice and she's a teenaged genius. they go on adventures, they avoid intimacy, they avoid getting killed, they talk randomly about bees, and it's all good. certainly not the best book i've ever read, nor the best mystery, but this is the kind of first novel that makes me want to search out everything that the author has written.

more information, reviews and photos on laurie king's website.

10. jonathon safran foer everything is illuminated
okay, it's pretentious, it's modernist (god forbid), it uses every hackneyed writing trick perfected through the twentieth century, it's self-serving, it's self-involved, but I LOVED IT. in fact, i savoured it, i devoured it, i returned to it, i coveted it, i bought it (a rare occurence, i'm a library kind of woman), i re-read it, and, as i said, i adored it. for me, this book is like a linguistic nadia comaneci - i love watching/reading it because a) it's stunning, and b) it's something that i could never do.

good review
bad review
balanced review.

11. elizabeth kostova the historian
if the darwin conspiracy went up against the historian in an epic battle of survival of the fittest, the historian would win hands down. strangely, they use the exact same device of flipping between contemporary scholars finding hidden histories through the archives. the structure of the two books is identical, only one is about darwin and the other about dracula. i couldn't put the historian down (although it is exceedingly large and hence heavy, so my arms would begin to droop, and i'd end with my forehead practically on my knee - i'm sure it has caused a whole new level of carpal tunnel syndrome). beautifully constructed, and actually scary in parts, i read this in a marathon two sittings, and emerged looking for ghosts in the shadows and bite marks on the necks of passersby. it reminded me of the shadow of the wind, one of my favourite books, and for a first novel it blew me away. and freaked me out. dracula says read this and/or suffer.

lots of reviews of the historian here

12. julian barnes arthur and george
entirely unexpected. it's not that i expected it to be bad, it's just that i actually had no idea what to expect. and i went through an odd sherlock holmes moment when i read this right after the beekeeper's apprentice. it's a fictional reconstruction of the events that took place when sir arthur conan doyle picked up the case of the wrongly accused george edalji. barnes has this way of writing that is both intimate and disconnected, and it's perfect for the book, which i suspect is also an allegory for contemporary britain. arthur's fetishistic repetition that the accusation must be race related, and george's denial of such builds up to the point where racism is there primarily because arthur expects it to be there. the reviewer in the guardian wrote, "His prose, and, particularly, his facility with dialogue, is a kind of homage to the stateliness of late Victorian letters and, in particular, to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, whose great gift was his ability to embed his narrative in speech." i agree.

the guardian review is here

13. jill churchill love for sale
my mother always said that if you can't say anything good, say nothing at all. i liked that this book was short.

people who liked it better than i did have posted their reviews here.

POC

2006-06-24T12:36:00.000-04:00

i have the worst digital camera on earth. i look at it sometimes and wonder if it's actually a children's toy masquerading as a "real" camera. but no, the packaging assures me that this is indeed an adult-sized, fully-functional, terribly exciting, digital camera. ha. at three o'clock in the afternoon on a blue-sky (but not too sunny) day, said camera (let's call it POC, short for piece of crap) might give you a decent photograph. it might. but, being the tempermental POC that it is, if it's something that you reeeeally really would like on file forever, forget it. this camera is the spokesperson (spokesPOC) for relying on memory - call it the socratic camera. needless to say, this makes taking photos of completed projects somewhat difficult. like, let's say there's a 24 to 1 ratio of dubious hazes to images that remotely resemble what i've created. the only good thing is that i can blame any terrible sewing errors, wonky lines and missed stitches on POC - really, it's just out of focus!

in any case, i'm still unpacking, and we have to paint the colour-chart nightmare that is the new apartment, so i haven't been able to produce a great deal for wardrobe refashion. just one little bag, made out of the same blue corduroy and a sample of harris tweed that i picked up when i was there (on lewis island) several years ago. the inside is lined with the bottom of the kitchen curtains. and i also made a little brooch out of old buttons and a pin that i found during the move. POC doesn't have a zoom feature (or it does have a zoom feature, but all you get is a fuzzy blur), so it's a little far away. but, for a glue-gunned brooch, it seems to be pretty sturdy, and i think it's quite cute. i also have two skirts underway - one, the attempted save of a throroughly butchered project from last year, and two, something that i hope might turn out to be a closet favourite (fingers crossed ... i've said that before and ended up with scraps).

and finally ... the dissertation scarf. i originally picked this wool up because i wanted an orange indoor scarf - something to brighten up a specific outfit. then i cast on too many stitches, so that now it's more of a spring scarf. then my final deadline was moved up, so that all the free time that i was going to use to knit it, was sucked into a dissertation black hole. anyway, i knitted a few rows here and there, and this very simple drop-stitch scarf actually took me almost a year to finish. but it is finished (yay!) and i like the result, as does the cat, who took up residency upon it shortly after i finished.

and in other news, i haven't finished unpacking, or started painting, but i have made my way through several novels, which i will post, and, more importantly, i sent in both of my papers. i have a couple of very short pieces, the edited volume, and two small research jobs to do this summer, but i actually feel like i'm finally on (almost) holiday and in a much more relaxed frame of mind. and i have almost enough saved up (much of it in change, stashed in about ten different jars) to finally replace my camera. i think this calls for some cinnamon toast.

moving

2006-06-14T16:51:00.000-04:00

i moved yesterday, so everything is extravagantly chaotic. oh the joy of living out of boxes. i used a sheet after my shower this morning, because who knows where the towels are, and i'm wearing the same pair of socks that i've worn for three days (yuck!). for that matter, who knows where anything is, including angus. he (little grey cat that he is) has found every crack and cranny in the new apartment and has taken some incredible shrinking potion in order to cram himself in. not that i can blame him. while lucy was treated to a swank afternoon with her best doggie friend, the poor cats were locked up in an empty room with an enormous cactus and a variety of random objects that didn't fit into boxes. then they were dumped in their own box and transported across town with lucy breathing down their neck (they're all friends, but still... dogs can be so gauche sometimes), and then dumped into a new apartment where all of their stuff is in boxes (because, of course, cats consider everything from the couch to the dinner plates to be their own). i admit that i felt like crawling into a crack myself - i am not a fan of upheaval. and then, to top everything off, i went into the bedroom last night to find a regular texas standoff. the two ENORMOUS cats who live upstairs were sitting on the deck outside the window (which is right at cat height) staring silently in at my poor traumatized muffins. there was bad feeling in their eyes i tell you! i have never seen cats this big - i'm scared of them myself! they are obviously some kind of cat-elephant-chimpanzee hybrid. and poor angus, who only weighs about ten pounds when soaking wet (generally from having been licked by lucy), took one look at mr hairy-face-elephant-cat-from-upstairs, and hid himself in the fold of a foldup chair with only his little nose sticking out. this does not bode well for future feline tea parties. nevertheless, in spite of the trauma of moving, i'm fairly sure the pets will love this place. so many windows for surveying the neighborbood, cracks and crannies galore, and a back garden! it's unfortunate that the previous tenants had a love of orange and mint paint, but i'm quite looking forward to painting and decorating. before and after pictures to come! (but probably not for a while)....

angus in happier times

bad art and ugly crafts

2006-06-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

it poured with rain last night. buckets and buckets of rain. the perfect night for staying inside, catching up on almost-overdue papers, and above all, packing for the big move on tuesday. but have i so much as lifted a finger to pack my closet? not at all ... instead, i spent last night at my friend's BAD ART AND UGLY CRAFTS PARTY. i now know that chocolate martinis + sequins + dismembered pseudo ken dolls equals a good time. and if the glue gun gets a little out of control as the chocolate martinis pile up, so much the better. so much the better, in fact, that we decided to make it permanent. you too can join the glittery fun at the BAD ART AND UGLY CRAFTS flickr group, you too can indulge in the somewhat creepy, somewhat fantastic feathered and sticky extravaganza that is BAD ART AND UGLY CRAFTS. now where did i put the glue gun....

wardrobe refashion!!

2006-06-10T11:12:00.000-04:00

i finally finished two projects for wardrobe refashion. it looks like i'll make my two months with absolutely no problem, primarily because it takes me so long to unpick all of my sewing mistakes that there's no time to think about buying new clothing! in any case, complete with wonky sewing lines, dodgy fabric choices, bad measurements and equal parts frustration and pride, here are my first sewing projects that have resulted in actual objects, rather than unweareable weirdness. (please insert appropriate trumpets, drumrolls etc. etc.)

i'm also putting this in for my whiplash introduction. so this is me, this is my site, and this is my cute, but not very well sewn laptop case and top. as for me, i am myuglysweater, and i recently completed my PhD in Visual and Material Cultures. i'll be starting a postdoc in september looking at the links among textiles, wearable technologies, globalization, activism and crafting. i've been crafting since i was a child, but have become more involved in the scene and in a number of groups, of late. i'm a much better knitter than i am a sewer, but i owe my refusal to give up sewing (in spite of numerous piles of scraps, unwearable clothes and wrecked sewing needles) to my brother. for a long time i wanted a sewing machine, but couldn't afford it on my grad student penance. so my brother agreed to bring my mum's old machine across the country to me. it was stinking hot, and he and his girlfriend decided to stop off in another city along the way. their train to come here was at 5pm, and at 2pm the lights went off and the city was mired in the biggest power outtage ever (this will be well known to anyone from toronto). anyway, as the city ground to a halt, my brother walked through 30 degree (celcius) weather with a 70lb sewing machine to get to the train. 7km later, they made the train, but my brother made it very clear to me that if i didn't use the sewing machine i would owe him a 7km, plus 30, walk, complete with the 30 year old sewing machine (affectionately known as "the beast"). hence my repeated attempts to learn how to sew ... and now two new things that actually don't suck. yay!

first up, a top (pattern here) that T and i called "eight months" the whole time i was sewing it, in honour partly of how long it was apparently going to take to make it, and a nod in the direction of the fact that smock tops tend to make me look like i'm having octuplets. strangely enough though, once i finished it and put it on, the tucks (which, according to my mum, i did completely incorrectly) actually turns it into a flattering top that looks as if i tailored it exactly to my size (ha! lucky accident). my mum also had a fit when i told her that i made the straps out of a thick corduroy ... who knew that some fabrics are taboo ... and sure enough, it doesn't lie exactly right, but i like it anyway. the fabric comes from my stash - it's from the 1970s, and i got it on ebay ages ago for a couple of dollars. the corduroy came from the bargain bin of a fabric store near my house (also ages ago), and the green facing (it can't be seen in the photo) is from an old sheet. i'm really pleased with this. it's not exactly my style, but the mere fact that it's wearable is enough for me!

second is a laptop case for T. his old computer had a huge crack in it from where he got hit by a jeep when crossing the street (an ongoing hazard here where people tend not to look when they turn corners). anyway, he had to get a new computer once the duct tape stopped doing the job, so i made this to keep it looking new (and also as a somewhat belated birthday present). the grey material is an accidently felted sweater.

a couple of months ago, our washing machine decided to have a "moment," and all of the settings magically changed themselves - i did my laundry in cold, and it ended up felting/shrinking/ruining an entire load when it decided that cold meant hot. i was peeved because i had been wearing the sweater practically every day. hmph. nevertheless, i think it makes a nice computer case complete with a singing allouette. i'm actually secretly hoping that T might find this too girly and pass it on to me....

it's lined partly with an old pillowcase and more of the green sheet. i had to buy the zipper, and as i've never sewn a zipper in my life, i don't think that i did the best job of it. but, more beginner's luck - it fits the computer perfectly.

the little dish is by caroline beale, one of my favourite local artists. anyway, happy days! next up, i'm going to try and fix a skirt that i made a mess of last year, and finish a scarf that i started almost a year ago.

KNITTA!

2006-06-07T17:31:00.000-04:00

if you read the make magazine craft archive you might have seen this:

but if not, let me enlighten you.

"Knitta began in August 2005, when AKrylik and PolyCotN were discussing their frustration over unfinished knitting projects: half-knitted sweaters and balls of yarn gathering dust. That afternoon, they knit their first doorknob cozy. Then it dawned on them… A tag crew of knitters, bombing the inner city with vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around everything from beer bottles on easy nights to public monuments and utility poles on more ambitious outings. With a mix of clandestine moves and gangsta rap — Knitta was born! Today, Knitta is a group of more than 10 ladies of all ages, races, nationalities, religions, sexual orientation… and gender."

"Warming the world, one antennae [or doorhandle] at a time"

oh... yeah. KNITTA rocks.

virtual diasporas

2006-06-05T09:47:00.000-04:00

i'm still writing like mad, although i have found some time for sewing and reading mysteries. the ability to sit down and just work all day seems to have departed with handing in of the dissertross. still, this is probably healthier, even if it takes longer to get things done. so, in the meantime, i direct you to the site of my friend ayesha hameed. she's doing fascinating work for her phd on the history of trans-Atlantic slave trade as a haunting that constantly (re)surface in contemporary life (hence the title of her website "virtual diasporas"). she has also refused the traditional format of the dissertation, and is working partially in digital medias, including the work (my favourite) outer space, which was done partially as a residency at studio xx.

ayesha writes about outer space, "outer space looks at the parallels between tropes in science fiction, the fantasies of colonial expansion and current conditions of potential immigrants. What unites science fiction and the colonial-metropolitan imaginary, is a charged conception of distance or ‘outer’ space and the aliens who come from there.

outer space is also a personal exploration into my own life as migrant, looking at the funny places where sci fi has turned up in my life."

diaspora + bert + the wrath of khan = awesome.

poop socks

2006-06-02T09:43:00.000-04:00

i'm going on a writing retreat. not as in a fun in the sun writing retreat, but as in a retreat from anything fun writing retreat. i have three papers to complete, plus a review, plus the typos in my diss to fix. hopefully none of them will be poop socks (thank you toothpaste for dinner).

ring ring

2006-06-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

in answer to a question that i received over email... this blog is not really anonymous. if you wanted to know my real name it would be very easy to find it out, and i haven't really made an effort to preserve my anonymity. although i do like the semi-cloak-and-dagger of being known as myuglysweater, the research documented here is also my research off line. in fact, as i start to put more of my work up here, i probably will license it with my real name under a creative commons license (and as it stands there are already links to papers, conference presentations etc. with my real name on them). i'm just saying this because my emailer was someone known to me from my off-line existence, but who wants to maintain an anonymous online presence. so yes, theoretically if there are details in your comments that would reveal your name by being traced back through the "real" me, it could happen. my nameless emailer hasn't commented yet ... but i thought i would put this up as a heads up.

*******************************

i've just put my fabric for the smock (see below) in the washer. i don't have a picture (and the camera is out of batteries), but it's a vintage pattern that i got on ebay ages ago - yellow, orange, green and turquoise flowers on a white background. it looks exactly like someone's kitchen curtains from the 1970s. in other words, it's totally awesome. it looks like it might rain, but hopefully i'll be able to dry it on the line first. i plan on cutting it (eep) tonight, in between cleaning the apartment and re-constructing a paper that i wrote. the paper is on the use of cellphones in activism and art, and i had forgotten that the final draft is due on monday. it COMPLETELY slipped my mind, and i ended up having to cancel my trip to toronto and the subtle technologies conference in order to get it done. no one to blame but myself, etc. etc. ya di ya di ya di. i still would rather be hearing about smart material and responsive architecture, but nevertheless at least it's not as frustrating a paper as the last one.

in fact, it's fairly amazing how quickly the cellphone has come to be both the tool and the material of a number of contemporary artists and activists. i was specifically interested in how a piece of equipment so central to the flows and circulations of post-Ford capitalism could also be used in other, often oppositional or resistant, spheres. from activism using cell phones, to the fate of gorillas in the democratic republic of congo, to NIMBY activism surrounding the disguising of cell phone towers as trees in suburban america, and burgeoning global youth cultures, the cellphone is amazingly multifaceted in its varied uses.

the sheer volume of art using cellphones and cellphones making art is phenomenal. my personal favourite remains the SEED collective in Montreal.

the blurb on the website states, "SEED explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery users create and populate a forest together. By dialling a particular number, each audience member will be given a “seed” to grow using the keypads of their cell phones. With each punch of the keypad, audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and colour."

Not only connected to the virtual world, the SEED collective is heavily involved in the greening of urban spaces. "Currently a new version of SEED is being created for Public Schools in the Toronto metro area, we intend to prodive a fund raising tool for students to organize Green Groups in there schools. These funds will also help revert paved school yards by bringing the sponsorship money required to plant and maintain trees on the school grounds."

there are videos of the installation on the website, and i believe that you can still participate in the project.

i also enjoyed DIALTONES, the mobile phone orchestra.

samples of the three part symphony are available online, as are the technical specs, and the ideas behind the project.

i took my students to hear one free minute when it was part of an installation at the YYZ in toronto. i couldn't drag them away ... and it truly is addictive. the idea is very simple, people call the given number, and have one minute to say what is truly on their minds. one minute of absolutely free speech. the results are broadcast in public from the actual sculptural object (see above), and are also available online. the phone numbers are up online, and the project is ongoing. "What would you say given one free minute of anonymous public speech?"

i'm mostly talking about the mobility and community building encouraged through art using cell phones, but i nonetheless enjoyed gu xiong's the sickle and the cell phone. it's a guelph university, and the artist writes:

"My installation attempts to comment on the shaking and shrinking of Chinese agriculture under globalization. During the Cultural Revolution, I was sent to a rural village as a labourer along with millions of other youth. The state of the village in my own past will be juxtaposed with the conditions of China in the present, flooded with images of globalization. Chairman Mao and the Communist Party taught people to revere and learn from the peasants, who comprised ninety percent of the Chinese population. In Chinese Society, to be a farmer and to work the land was a way to purify the self of reactionary elements, therefore, it was ‘honourable’ punishment.

"However, after the economic reforms of the early 1980s, China is now the largest market, and thus target, for multinational corporations. People hunger for consumer goods, creating a powerful mutual attraction. Agriculture has lost its respect in the minds of ordinary Chinese. Urban centres are expanding, while rural areas shrink both in size and wealth. At the same time, past social currents and traditions are shaken from their foundations. Coming to Canada, my own past and ideals have also been shattered, then rebuilt. Thus, I believe that it is only through this kind of painful death and rebirth that a better life is possible."

but if the fate fo communism gets you down, perhaps a jewelled mobile might appeal? (i also liked sidney mobell's jewelled sardine can).

or, if the bling is too much, and a little privacy is needed, try jenny chowdhury's cell atlantic cell booth she writes: "As I grappled with these issues of privacy, personal space and nostalgia for a "simpler time", the idea for portable phone booth was born. The portable phone booth, which I call the "Cell Atantic CellBooth", is a wearble object you can carry around with you and set up when you need a moment to talk . The deliberate nature of setting up the booth and standing in place while one talks enforces the idea that the call is important -not something to do while picking up the kids, working out, or driving. Ultimately, I desired to recreate the illusion of privacy and stillness afforded by oldschool, 4-walled phone booths, but also to update the booth as a portable object that would fit into a modern life.

What emerged was a wearable/portable phone booth and subsequently a piece of performance art that calls the attention of New Yorkers to the changes in human behavior due to the ubiquitous use of cellphones. The project prompts people to take stock in how cell phone technology has altered the ways in which we communicate with each other and the environment surrounding us."

i guess the question that i have is whether the opposition between the play encouraged by many of these projects, and the instrumentality of the cell phone, is enough to overcome the materiality of its manufacture. in other words, is using a cellphone for resistant ends enough to "forgive" its manufacture in sweatshop conditions, or the destruction that has been wrought by the search for coltran? i'm actually not sure, and though that question only forms a small part of the paper, it's a question that keeps popping into my mind as i'm writing. can activism be effective if it is intimately contained by and woven into global capitalism?

i don't have a cellphone, by the way....

patterns

2006-05-31T12:51:00.000-04:00

i've signed up for the wardrobe refashion 2 month challenge. the idea is to not buy any new clothes for two months, but rather to refashion, reuse and recycle those that are already in the closet or the yarn/fabric stash. i would have liked to sign up for longer, but i'm not sure that my sewing skills (or lack thereof) are up to it. my fabric and wool stash certainly is though! anyway, as i'm not sure that i can handle complicated clothing, i'm also taking the curtain refashioning challenge. i'm moving in a couple of weeks, so cushion covers and curtains will be the name of the game! i'm going to start with this pattern (see picture). it looks fairly straightforward, and i can follow it in my head. there may be pictures up here next week of a pile of scraps, but i have to start somewhere!

speaking of patterns, and perhaps of sernedipity, i have, of late, become interested in the international journal of pattern recognition. it's not that i actually understand any of it, being a complete and utter neophyte when it comes to technology, much less to artificial intelligence. but, like sewing (and perhaps in conjunction with sewing) there's no time like the present to learn.

the blurb from the journal's website reads:

This journal publishes both applications and theory-oriented articles on new developments in the fields of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence, and is of interest to both researchers in industry and academia. From the beginning, there has always been a close relationship between the disciplines of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. The recognition and understanding of sensory data like speech or images, which are major concerns in pattern recognition, have always been considered as important subfields of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, topics like knowledge representation, inference, search or learning that belong to the center of artificial intelligence, have constantly attracted the attention of researchers working in pattern recognition. IJPRAI is the first to cover both fields in one periodical, and particular emphasis is put on papers which are in the intersection of both fields. However, it is open to articles from "pure" pattern recognition and "pure" artificial intelligence as well.

* Contains current material on applications and theory research in:
o Image Processing
o Natural Language Processing
o Computer Vision
o Speech Understanding
o Pattern Recognition
o Robotics and Related Fields
o Expert Systems
o Artificial Intelligence
o Knowledge Engineering
o Neural Networks

neural networks, knowledge engineering, pattern recognition ... yesssss.

and speaking of patterns of another sort. i recently came across ray fenwick's photo set on flicker. each pattern is accompanied with a statement: "Who doesn't like patterns? I'll tell you who: bad people with foul hate in their hearts," or, captioning thee battle of excelsior gulch (shown here), "Totally inappropriate pattern made from another drawing. Suitable for pajamas worn at an all-night coke/chips/nintendo/drawing party." meandering through the site, i came across this, the very t-shirt that i had (literally) just bought from threadless for tim's birthday present. is there a pattern in the things that i like? definitely.

everything on fenwick's site is awesome ... but i'm particularly fond of the truth bear.

upgrade/upchuck

2006-05-30T20:07:00.000-04:00

i was at the upgrade conference (critical practice resuscitation ... or cpr) in montreal today. i gave my spiel on radical knitting and the viral knitting collective, talking about the possibilities of mixing low-tech and high-tech activism as a potential for encouraging the spread of ideas across political, gender, age and ethnic lines. the whole idea of the conference was that it would be more discussion than presentation, and it did turn into an excellent debate over the future(s) of activism and tactical media (is it stagnating, heading for inertia, or about to explode), the use of pedagogy in encouraging new activisms, and the difficulties presented by the term "gender" when combined with technology, the use of technology as tool, and time. that is, teaching takes time, new ideas might take in a minute, or they might not surface for several years. the world, however, seems to be inexorably speeding up. the question on which the panel ended was how might we, as activist practitioners, educators, artists etc. think of ways to work within this time lag, and to encourage whatever triggers might activate now latent resistances.

unfortunately i was only able to stay for the one panel. i'm usually not a conference speak-and-dasher, but this time lucy ate a huge chunk of ... well, i have no idea what it was, but it was certainly colourful when she puked it all over the floor. so i was on barf patrol and had to come home to clean up. dogs. both of the cats looked on with that form of disdain peculiar to superior cats, but i believe lucy is feeling better now. she ate part of her dinner, and unless she's found a new spot for her own spiels, it seems she's done. eating crap off the sidewalk is the one thing that we have been completely 100% unsuccessful in her training. that dog once consumed three wagon wheels complete with wrappers before i could even tug the leash ... and that time she showed no ill effects at all. i hate to think what she ate this time.

in any case, in honour of lucy's gastric issues, i present dorothy's waffle, by canadian artist sara genn. i went to high school with sara, but had actually forgotten that until i came upon this video. i adore it! and will enjoy watching it with lucy.... see how (sort of) well behaved dorothy is?

2006-05-29T19:40:00.000-04:00

3. geraldine brooks year of wonders: a novel of the plague
girl with a pearl earring suffers through the plague. who knew there were so many proto-riot grrls in the seventeenth century? having casual sex, popping bubos, riding horses bare-back and engaging in witch craft is just par for the course for anna, heroine of this "based on a true story" novel by journalist geraldine brooks. it's fine for what it is (an historical novel with a twentieth century protagonist) ... but the moral of the story seems to be either than if everyone around you dies an extended, pus-filled, painful death then you will most likely become a feminist, or perhaps, if you are a feminist, everyone around you will die an extended, pus-filled, and painful death. or be attacked by a maggot-ridden baby (it happens, i swear).

you can read the intro here

4. janis hallowell the annunciation of francesca dunn
teenager serving meals to the homeless in a local café is mistaken by chester (the hackneyed sage-like street-dwelling visionary) as a reincarnation of the virgin mary. one false pregnacy and several dubious healings later, francesca becomes to centre of a cult of worshippers, while francesca's academic mother is off frolicing in the hills of arizona looking for plant fossils. mum comes home and freaks out, carts off francesca, rumours of abortions lead to hysteria and, surprise, surprise, someone is sacrificed to save all from their sins. the reviewer from publisher's weekly writes "The conceit is snappy, and the narrative moves effortlessly, but the novel lacks a genuine sense of the spiritual lives of its characters. Instead of exploring the intricacies and ambiguities of religious faith and revelation, Hallowell builds her story on platitudinous sound bites."

5. elizabeth peters guardian of the horizon
more amelia, more parasols, more lost oases! there is enough stereotyping and dodginess in this one to make me squirm, so i wouldn't rate it amongst my favourite peters's extravagazas. but, nevertheless, the amelia peabody series is an excellent way to pass the afternoon. unfortunately this was the last one for me... i've read the whole series now. boo hoo.

there's a review you can read here

6. elizabeth george playing for the ashes
my mum's recommendation.... it was pretty good, and george has a way of expanding the traditional slim mystery volume into something much more detailed and engaging. however, i suspect that my mother might have had ulterior motives! the family relations in this novel are such that we look like the most functional of functional families! and if the strained family relations don't pique your interest, perhaps the spineless cats will?

elizabeth george's website can be found here

is there a doctor in the house?

2006-05-29T00:07:00.000-04:00

whoo hooo! i am now officially doctor myuglysweater. yay! the defense went really well, so i'm feeling half euphoric, and half stunned that it's over. my 24 year career as a student is done. yeesh.

illustration thanks to david shrigley

my last day as a grad student

2006-05-26T07:50:00.000-04:00

today is my defense. i'm heading off to my university in half an hour (eep)!

image thanks to toothpaste for dinner

30 fun things

2006-05-24T10:53:00.000-04:00

in honour of my partner's 30th birthday, and because the sun is shining (but my paper still isn't done).

1. a hilarious article from the onion

2. ink polaroids

3. questionable content, one of my favourite online comics

4. cat and girl, another of my favourite online comics

5. carey young. i'm not a huge fan of the ybas, but i do think that young's work is interesting, and, despite her best intentions, politically motivated.

6. cocoa locale - the best cupcakes in montreal (and the place where we will be going for birthday treats)

7. the weakerthans - one of tim's favourite bands, and one of my favourite websites

8. anonymous juice. the zine of a friend of mine from undergrad. i should contact him ... we haven't spoken in ages.

9. preloved. delicious remade clothes

10. wardrobe remix. cooler people than me, in cooler clothes that i have

11. phinished. where would i be without phinished? sitting here still working on chapter 1.

12. me and you forever t-shirt. excellent movie, excellent t-shirt

13. and speaking of miranda july...

14. and speaking of t-shirts

15. supermaggie (i just got a t-shirt from here and am very excited about it)

16. dogs and laser beams = wonderful

17. monks and cheese = even more wonderful. we take lucy here sometimes ... the cheese and cider are delicious, and so is the scenery.

18. the journal of aesthetics and protest. enough said.

19. amelia peabody. i'm obsessed with parasols and emerson

20. the planetarium (where we're going today for birthday fun)

21. vices and versa - my favourite bar in montreal ... even if it is miles from where i live.

22. hippo noodles (thanks tabitha grimalkin for this)

23. strindberg and helium

24. lewis island - best trip i ever took, and near where i'm from

25. fresh - juice for life. i often wished that i lived in toronto for fresh and for the knit café

26. germaine koh. one of my favourite artists

27. jill bennett empathic vision - one of my favourite academic books

28. pandas (who doesn't like pandas?)

29. cute overload. i can't help it - ever since i saw the picture of the husky puppy in the refridgerator i've been hooked!

30. lynn canyon. site of my childhood and still one of my favourite places on earth.

yay for birthdays!

creative cities

2006-05-23T09:06:00.000-04:00

montreal was just announced as the latest UNESCO creative city.... very interesting. canada has been a bit arm's length on the whole creative industries/cultural capitalism thing, at least in terms of public consciousness.

"The Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity has designated Montreal as "UNESCO City of Design" as part of the Creative Cities Network," announced today Gerald Tremblay, Mayor of Montreal, and Benoit Labonte, member of the executive committee responsible for culture, heritage and design.

With this honour, Montreal becomes the first North American city to join the recent UNESCO City of Design network after Buenos Aires (August 2005) and Berlin (November 2005), in addition to other cities recognized by UNESCO in other fields of excellence, including literature, music, food, cinema, folk art and digital arts.

Through this award, UNESCO recognized the effort and enthusiasm of the public and private sectors, Montreal civil society, as well as the city's potential for economic and social development in the field of design. With the participation of the design community, Design Montreal, applied for this honour at the request of Benoit Labonte and the Montreal executive committee. The certificate will be presented by Mr. Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization as part of a visit to Montreal scheduled for the month of June.

"After becoming the headquarters of the International Design Alliance (ICSID and ICOGRADA) last year, this UNESCO award represents major international recognition for Montreal and all our creators and players involved in the fields of design, culture and economy," said Mayor Tremblay. "This title rewards the sustained efforts by Montreal and its partners since the publication of the Picard Report in 1986 which focused on design as one of the priorities of metropolitan economic development. Montreal already exports knowledge in the field of strategic design promotion, since its original Commerce Design Montreal concept was picked up by the cities of New York, Saint-Etienne and Lyon, and it will continue to do so as part of the "UNESCO Creative Cities Network". Design is also one of the elements of the Imagining - Building Montreal 2025 game plan, in which Montreal committed itself to becoming one of the world's most attractive cities, through design quality and innovation," added Mayor Tremblay.

"Design is a strategic strength that Montreal must develop. The honour bestowed by UNESCO acknowledges both past experience and our visible commitment in the field of design. It must now serve as an incentive lever to accelerate implementation of the recent municipal action plan Montreal, Design de ville / Ville de design, launched in September 2005. We firmly believe that a strong combination of design, architecture and urban development contributes directly to the quality of life in Montreal, highlights the sense of pride of Montrealers, as well as the interest of visitors and investors," said Benoit Labonte.

Montreal is a city where design and designers, be they involved in the fields of interior, industrial, graphic, fashion or architectural design, represent a dynamic force of cultural and economic life. According to recent statistics, design is responsible for 20,356 jobs in Montreal's metropolitan area and economic spin-offs of more than $750 million. Also, 65.3% of Quebec workers involved in the field of design live in the metropolitan area. Montreal is the only North American city to have established, as early as 1991, a bureau dedicated exclusively to the development and promotion of design. Important achievements are owed to this bureau, including the Commerce Design Montreal competition, which has contributed to the rise of Montreal as a city of design.

Montreal is clearly part of the network of cities of knowledge in the field of design with four universities teaching design, architecture and urban planning, as well as five university research chairs in those fields. Montreal is also home to a rich network of high-level establishments dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of design, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Centre de design de l'UQAM, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with its decorative arts collection. Montreal also hosts numerous design-related events, several of which occur in May, referred to as Design Month. They include the Montreal International Interior Design Show and the Gala des prix de l'Institut de Design Montreal.

According to the interim director of the Arts and Cultural Business Division, Mr. Indrasen Vencatachellum, "The global alliance of UNESCO has created the Creative Cities Network to support cultural pluralism and to make creativity an essential engine of economic and social development. This network wishes to promote development by using the potential of local cultural industries through partnerships with the public and private sectors, sharing sound practices and knowledge internationally. By using this network as a springboard, cities pool their experiences to help each other to strengthen local skills and increase the diversity of cultural products available on the national and international markets."

source: http://blog.kennisland.nl/knowledgeland/archives/2006/05/
http://www.ccnmatthews.com/news/releases/show.jsp?action=showRelease&searchText=false&showText=all&actionFor=595286

gloom

2006-05-22T16:35:00.000-04:00

it is not just the weather in montreal that is making me gloomy these days (we are currently on our 12th straight day of rain), but also the paper that i am struggling to finish. it was due at the editor's on friday ... and i'm still trying to write a decent opening paragraph.

the abstract, which i whipped off in haste upon receiving an email from the editor requesting a submission, is sitting like a weight on my shoulders. not only has it proved difficult to find examples, but i actually disagree with what i originally wrote:

Capturing the Movement: Anti-war Art, Activism and Affect

In a recent exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, one hundred pairs of used combat boots were arranged in rigid rows on the gallery floor. The boots were suspended from the ceiling, the left one of each pair slightly raised. As visitors moved through the space of the gallery, the air currents of their presence stirred the installation, making it swing eerily in the dark space of the gallery (fig. 1). Through the gallery marched the haunting presence of an invisible army, incorporating the viewer in an anti-war statement through the overwhelming and dizzying effect of the echo of a pervasive but invisible military power. The affective/emotional reaction tied the visitor into much wider currents of the then-current anti-Iraq-war movement, as well as the consequences of a military-economic machine on contemporary life in North America. The simplicity of Québec artist Dominique Blain’s Missa, comments on the seductive power of military organization, the atrocities of war, but also, I suggest, on the basic involvement of all viewers in the currents of conflict (and current conflicts) in the contemporary world.

Missa contrasts markedly with the majority of anti-war art, photographs, and posters that circulated after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it is this contrast that I would like to explore. Without denying the importance of photography and new media arts to anti-war activism, this paper suggests that a number of contemporary artists have purposely turned away from new media (i.e. digital works, web-based works, photography etc.), instead using low-tech or no-tech materials in attempts to contrast their work with the vast technological resources of a military-industrial complex. Following this idea, I suggest that a number of artists have implicitly equated new media with a video-game mentality of war, and have turned to the simple and the affective in a series of intimate works that contrast the technologies of war through the most basic of materials – string, wool, thread, embroidery, used boots, pencil and paper. Suggesting that as critique such works depend on capturing movement – in the eerily swinging boots in the work of Dominique Blain, in the intimate gestures of the repeated stitches of knitted landmines and bombs of Barb Hunt and Maria Porges (figs. 2, 3), and pencil lines that trace the lines of networked connections between the military and multinational corporations in the work of Marc Lombardi – this paper argues for a rethinking of the use of new media in contemporary anti-war art. Beyond the mere shocking, much recent anti-war art relies on metaphorically performing the trauma of the war in the bodies of those on the home front. As such, I suggest that there is a slippage here among the anti-war “movement,” the “movement” of information through the channels of internet and viral communications, and the kinetic and affective energy that is used to incorporate viewers into traumatic anti-war activist art works. In this paper I question the reasoning behind turning away from new media, and suggest that occasionally agitation and activism can occur in the quietest of spaces.

******************

so i'm still trying to turn this into a decent (and nicely succinct) paper, without moving too far from the original claims. however, this has led to two weeks of procrastination and (as my mother would say) lollygagging and gallivanting.

in the lollygagging and gallivanting file, i did go to an excellent architecture in helsinki concert, i saw pride and prejudice (and was pleasantly surprised by it), i spent a day at the anarchist bookfair, and then i sat around moping, reading mysteries, getting progressively more nervous about my defense (this friday), and avoiding the paper. so add seasonal allergies on to that, and i am about as gloomy as gloomy gets (and lucy agrees)....

The Knitting Map

2006-05-19T09:07:00.000-04:00

As part of the EU Capital of Culture project, the city of Cork, Ireland, recently staged the Knitting Map. I've included the site description below, but essentially groups of knitters gathered to "knit" the movement of people in the streets, changing weather patterns, and the "experience" of walking through Cork. In each case, movement in the city is represented through knitting patterns (i.e. cable, garter, ribbed etc.), while weather patterns are evoked through different colours of yarn. I find the intimate interweaving of experience, mapping, movement and weather (not to mention the global linking of knitters, and the networking of cities and creative industries present in the Capital of Culture project) to be exemplary of new possibilities for global networking that functions both within and against neoliberal capitalism. This project was not an activist one, but in its format and execution I see myriad potential. The Knitting Map project will, most likely, play a central role in my postdoctoral work.

From the Knitting Map site:

"Imagine This...

Above the earth there is a satellite which looks down at Cork and watches the movements of people and cars around the city. Through a strange technical alchemy, this information is transformed into a knitting pattern, which constantly shifts – some hefty cabling during rush hour; quiet lulls of stocking stitch on Sunday mornings; bobbles of blackberry stitches for the un-quotidian gatherings of Cork mortals. Down in the city there is a large empty hall, with a semicircle of chairs. It is here that fifty people knit for a year. They work in relay, their knitting moving slowly into the space between them, where the strips are sewn together to form a single vast document of the city. The hue of yarn shifts with the weather, and the descent of the year. During the day, people arrive to view the installation. They hear low voices, and the tapping of knitting needles. Before them this great knitted cartography, moves gradually across the space and then begins to pile up of the floor of the hall in the half-light...

Commissioned by Cork 2005, European Capital of Culture, The Knitting Map drew its inspiration from Cork City, celebrating its place at the cultural heart of Europe. The Knitting Map is not a literal map; instead of a single still image, it is a moving, evolving translation of the busy-ness of Patrick Street; the wetness of May or the frostiness of November. The Knitting Map took the pulse of the city throughout 2005.

Different technologies observed and measured aspects of the city centre: the movement of people, as well as the weather – how rainy, warm or windy it was. The Knitting Map translated this information into a vast knitting pattern which was updated daily. In the Crypt of St Luke's Church overlooking the city of Cork, up to twenty knitters were knitting every day, and the Knitting Map grew into a vast, textured, colourful textile, that documents what happened in Cork in 2005. During the year, we had more than 2500 knitters from 22 different countries taking part."

The technology for the Knitting Map was created by half/angel, a company that sees itself as interested in both emerging technologies and also in performance, dance and choreography. The two founders, Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall, have both written PhDs on the company. Unfortunately the links from the website to their writing were not working when I last checked, but there is still plenty to explore in the archives.

50 book challenge

2006-05-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

well, i never was one to turn down a request (thanks tabitha grimalkin and pam), so i hereby begin the 50 book challenge, "twinkies" and all.

1. achmat dangor's bitter fruit.
very beautiful, very layered ... the kind of writing that slows down the reader. it is languid, in spite of the intensity of issues covered in its plot. the story of a family struggling with their past(s) in post-apartheid south africa, it uses an economy of words that i found inspiring. at the same time, however, that economy forces the reader to focus on surfaces. it left me disturbed, and unsure of any grip that i might have had on it - the words slid away even as i read them.

apparently i needed a break from the booker award-winning set, because i went on a bit of an elizabeth peters rampage after finishing bitter fruit. i love elizabeth peters. i would love to be elizabeth peters. complete with a phd in egyptology from the university of chicago, she now writes mystery and suspense novels, many of them tracing the exploits of the irascible archeologists amelia peabody and her husband radcliffe emerson. personally i can't get enough of them, although i noticed that the one that i gave my mother is still sitting on her bookshelf unread (hmph). thanks to tabitha for introducing me to these!

2. Elizabeth Peters, The Last Camel Died at Noon
Pretty typical Emerson-Peabody antics. This one wasn't my favourite, but I really just can't get enough of Amelia and her parasol!

3. Elizabeth Peters, The Copenhagen Connection
Not one of the Amelia Peabody series, I have to say that I found this book a little lacking. Still, it made the subway to and from the university a little more entertaining, particularly because of all of the hysterics over "Margaret's bathrobe"

Currently reading: Geraldine Brooks, A Year of Wonders
and Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision

novel ideas

2006-05-17T15:53:00.000-04:00

i've handed in my dissertation, so myuglysweater is back up and running.

a group of friends and i were recently talking about the tendency for graduate students and university faculty to be addicted to a veritable cornucopia of chemical substances. oh was I ever revealed in my true nerdiness. i mean caffeine, drugs, alcohol, yeah all of those things are great, but the one thing that truly obsesses me, the one forbidden pleasure, the prize that kept my going through the last eight months of writing is, i'm sorry to admit, the lowly novel. actually, not even the novel, but the library book. i guess my ideas of capitalist accumulation have always been somewhat askew - there is something in the idea of giving back an object that i own in memory but not in fact that is the delicious pleasure that keeps bringing me back to the library. that and the fact that there are always more books (as i said, it's a little bit obsessive).

for the last eight months (aside from a few plane trips) fiction has been strictly forbidden, for i can't just pick up and put down a book. no, i have to read the whole thing in one sitting. and in the final months of writing, finding enough time for that was impossible. that and the fact that like a mountain of crack, i can't just read one book, but have to read fifty (there were some troubling moments for me when i read james frey's million little pieces). this has long been a secret. i wish now that i had worn my nerdiness with pride, that i had chatted with the librarians, made friends with the reading club, been the first to find out about the incoming books (isn't that how it works in fiction?). but instead, i organized my trips to the library as an exercise in stealth.

in retrospect, i'm sure that none of the librarians ever talked to me because they must have thought that i was a complete freak. my stealth operations involved various hats, different hairstyles, forcing other people (generally my mother) to take out books for me, complete silence (i never actually talked to any of the librarians whose judgment i so feared) and all accompanied with a general queasyness that i still get when i cross the threshold of that particular library - its yellow walls, its now-retired librarians, its particular smell of paper and glue and carpet. i could glide silently between the shelves in that library, i could pick out a new book at a hundred paces, i remember the configuration of the stacks, the pictures on the walls, the colour of the carpets, the shelf of civil war novels to be avoided, better than i remember my house. it was a dry pleasure cut short by the sweaty-palmed nervousness of having to approach the front desk with my stack of books. i don't know what i expected; it seems to odd now, to have feared the wrath, or the judgment of a small town librarian. but whenever i hear the words "painfully shy," it is this walk from the carpeted staircase to the polished floor in front of the desk that i think of, the intolerable pain of having to face those stoic librarians with their averted eyes yet again. i don't know what it was that i feared. i wasn't so popular that having my nerdiness revealed would have been social suicide, i wasn't so unpopular that hanging out in the library covered for complete social ineptitude. i think that it was the fear that the librarians must believe either of those options, and to hear them voice it would be to make it true. my carefully guarded nerdiness (i believed) seeped out only when i allowed it. in truth, it was probably visible from a mile away - hence the reason why not a single person has ever questioned my path to grad school.

i would take my stack of books home, and i would set it on the hearth in front of the fireplace, and i would curl up in the corner of the couch and begin. i looked up this morning and realized that twenty years later i was still doing the same thing. i came home from the public library yesterday, having already been turned away by yet another librarian (you have too many books out already), to arrange my stack and work my way through it. i was on book number three when i decided to write this. and to confess not only my addiction to fiction, but also my abominable taste. growing up with a small library and an addiction to feed meant reading a lot of dean r. koontz and catherine cookson.

i basically have two systems of judgment: 1. good fiction that i like, and generally take my time to read and 2. bad fiction that i like and speed through like a demon. unfortunately reading so much has not made me a very successful judge of good and bad. nor was i ever tempted to take up english so as to learn how one might judge properly. in hindsight, this was probably a good idea. as an art historian i can never go into the gallery without a crush of theory of knowledge preceding me. it's hard to see a painting when derrida and foucault and deleuze and guattari and butler and virilio and spivak and whoever else happens to be present are blocking the view. it's hard to smoke crack, um, i mean read a book, if you have to dissect it first. so i still have the stultifyingly annoying habit of saying, i don't know why i liked it, i just did. and with this, i introduce myuglysweater's summer reading project. i have plenty of academic and other work to get through this summer. but, for the first time in months i also have spare time, and i plan on dedication that to catching up on fiction reading. i might even put up a few reviews here and there.... or maybe i'll just sit on my butt reading.

DNA Personality Test

2006-03-21T09:22:00.001-05:00

i'm still on a writing hiatus, but thought that i should post something in order to keep the blog going. i'll be done on april 18th and will start to post regularly again! in the meantime, i've become increasingly interested in DNA and coding, hence the DNA personality test. you can scroll over the boxes to see how i scored. as an academic writing on knitting (who also owns a lot of pink clothing), i particularly enjoyed my "high masculinity" score!!

Respectful Creator

dissertating

2005-11-19T20:17:00.000-05:00

i'm on blog sabbatical finishing up my dissertation until december 1st.... see you then!

knitted naughty bits (as promised)

2005-11-04T23:27:00.000-05:00

knitted womb anyone?

how about a willy warmer?

or your very own how about a knitted vagina?

don't want to hear about it? maybe you would like to put on these ear muffs? (pun VERY much intended):

i'm sure i should write something deep and meaningful ... but i keep *tittering* like a twelve year old!

the patterns for all of them are online, except for the vaginas, which can be ordered from crochetmycrotch.com.

happy hallowe'en!

2005-10-31T23:54:00.000-05:00

yoda costume from crafster.org (where else?)....

digestive system in knots

2005-10-30T18:14:00.000-05:00

thanks again to my friend K for sending me this link to a knitted digestive system, knitted by the "congenital pirate" arrmatie. wonderful!

it reminded me of the canadian artist sarah maloney's work in the "knit" show in halifax. she knitted an entire nervous system, from brains to neurons. unfortunately there's no picture online, although i did find a slightly dodgy rendition of her embroidered "circulatory system".

on a related note, freddie robins, one of my favourite artists, now has her own website here. i find her knitted skins fascinating. literally second skins that can be worn and taken off like sweaters, they address not only the tactility of skin, but also the interpollation of body with world (it brings to mind merleau ponty's writing in the most literal of ways), and the increasing threats to the epidermal layer in a polluted world.

Skin - A Good Thing to Live In, 2001

Headcase, 2000

Billy Wool, 2001

now that would be an excellent hallowe'en costume!

next post ... knitted naughty bits!

moomintrolls

2005-10-28T20:16:00.000-04:00

i'm in the last stages of writing the final (rough) draft of my dissertation. this means that although i seem to be too busy to post, clean my apartment, do laundry, eat, or talk to anyone ... i still manage to find time for quality procrastination! i was visiting my friend during the canadian association of cultural studies conference last weekend in edmonton, and she introduced me to the finnish sensation of the moomintrolls . well ... i can think of worse ways to procrastinate....

"A Moomintroll is small and shy and fat, and has a Moominpappa and a Moominmamma. Moomins live in the forests of Finland. They like sunshine and sleep right through the winter. The snow falls and falls and falls where they live, until their houses look like great snowballs. But when spring comes, up they jump...."
- Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books 1974.

the stories, written by tove jansson, are pretty cute, but it's the 1970s illustrations that send me through the roof. they also make me want to rush out and adopt cats so i can name them after characters: a tiny orange cat named little-my, a tabby named too-ticky, a fat calico named moomintroll....

in my moomin travels, i also came across this, one of jansson's books translated into three languages, and illustrated by a finnish grade 2 class. some of the illustrations are wonderful!

what kind of yarn are you?

2005-10-12T16:37:00.000-04:00

You are Mohair.

You are Mohair
You are a warm and fuzzy type who works well with others, doing your share without being too weighty. You can be stubborn and absolutely refuse to change your position once it is set, but that's okay since you are good at covering up your mistakes.

knitting melodrama

2005-10-12T08:59:00.000-04:00

i haven't been posting recently because i was at the refresh! conference in banff. while there, someone showed me veronika schubert's stop-action knitted animation, and i am hooked! the video is available for her site, here (the video is titled Tele-Dialogue), and i've put up a few stills to give you an idea. i am in love!

i ran out of laundry...

2005-09-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

my ugly sweater (the real one), is one of the most precious things i own. it came from a value village in newfoundland, and has been passed from friend to friend whenever a hand-knitted brown and beige acrylic wonder is needed. it's been mine through dissertation-writing time. nonetheless, i enjoyed this definition in the urban dictionary.

and speaking of ugly sweaters ... leslie hall's single-handed attempt to glorify the bedazzler is truly ... bedazzling (and hilarious).

going underground

2005-09-21T08:43:00.000-04:00

i've been thinking about going underground. this line of thought came from a post of lagusta.com, which is an excellent and occasionally beautiful site for political rants and delicious vegan recipes. the anonymous lagusta ranter who caught my attention talked about her activism going from loud to quiet, going, in her words, underground. arguing that her animal rights activism, and participation in a variety of activist groups left her exhausted and frustrated, she now talks of a sense of satisfaction of living creatively, of refusing to even participate in the regime she had been trying to take down: "underground, fuckhead bush does not exist. underground there are no mass produced sweatshop clothes ... underground activism is obsolete."

for this ranter, her daily resistance - refusing to wear sweat shop-produced clothing, eating vegan, recycling everything has become a way of bringing creativity into a scene that would otherwise destroy those activists fighting the system.

activism, i think, goes in waves, and i see the sentiments of the anonymous lagusta ranter all over the websites and message boards of former riot grrls, former environmentalists, of those who participated in the global justice movement. i'm exploring in my dissertation how this sort of wide-spread burnout has resulted in a huge number of creative projects, not just in the resistance of daily actions, but in a concerted attempt to affect change through creative endeavours - knitting, community-organized art shows, communal living, art in the streets...

one of my favourite groups is the Cast Off knitting group in London, England, who knit in public in an attempt to invest the increasingly privatized public sphere with a moment of caesura in the smooth space of capitalism. taking over underground carriages on the circle line of the london underground, the members of Cast Off suggest that the interpersonal actions of group knitting, conversations started across gender, age and class lines while knitting, and making ones own clothes, are deeply political acts. as an act that crosses conservative/liberal lines, knitting opens spaces for discussion, and also for a whole series of fascinating art projects ... some of which i'll document in this blog.

i was reminded while writing this, of tobias vv's post on katrina and new orleans. in it, he writes eloquently "No -- this isn't anarchy. This is simply the rupture of the facade of global capital, the destruction of social mores via the ultimate devastation of infrastructure, doing nothing more nor less than revealing, quite simply, and aptly, the social anger, the vengeance, not merely of "the criminal elements" or "a few bad apples" as has been quoted, but of the poorest classes of the United States."

tobias continues: "Brian Massumi and others have laid it out .. compassion has never been possible in Bush's language nor his affect. When speaking of vengeance, of bloody justice, his voice rings true and strong. But when faced with the immanent peril of his own people, he can only stutter and promise patience, that help is on the way. Unlike the war presidents he so dearly wishes to emulate, he cannot rally his own people for, quite simply, they have never been a concern of the machinery, of the elite, of that other black power--oil."

Deleuze writes of the coming into being of communities at the moment of their erasure from mainstream discourse. communities thus come into being when there is an absence of language. for every one of bush's empty, stuttering worlds, there must be an action in response, and it is here that i place the small actions of daily activism, of radical knitting, of underground living. i guess the question might be who will burn out first - the activists or the oil?

lucy

2005-09-19T22:24:00.000-04:00

this morning
my beautiful dog
threw up all over my work

i've been reading sherwin tjia's new book the world is a heartbreaker - now i can't stop thinking in three line poems.

i spent the afternoon
retyping
puke-stained scrawlings.

KNIT IT

2005-09-15T15:17:00.000-04:00

more information here

It is natural! Have deliciously.

2005-09-12T18:58:00.000-04:00

i was actually looking for writing on activist knitting when i came across these pictures of japanese carved watermelons on an american motorcycle racing site. the rhizomatic potential of the internet? in any case, i tracked down the artist, Takashi Ito, who enjoys european food, takes one hour to carve each watermelon, became a master watermelon carver in a mere three weeks, and who answers the question "have you eaten your work?" with the wonderfully translated "it is natural! have deliciously."

DNA knitting

2005-09-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since i posted ... mostly to do with being alternately overworked and on holiday. It has been a nice summer, although the fall looks positively frightening. I just finished knitting this double helix as an illustration for a paper that i wrote - it's coming out in the journal Public in January 2006. I've put up the others, knitted by Communications scholar Nikki Porter, web and graphic designer Brad Colbourne, and CEGEP instructor, philosopher and crafter Jim Morris. It was a fun project, the idea behind it being whether new forms of academic writing, particularly those that follow series of rhizomatic linkage rather than linearly defending a thesis, actually echo the act of knitting. For the most part it was tongue in cheek, although by the end I think that I had largely convinced myself! I'll post the full paper up here once the edits are done.

i'm trying now to knit the code of the amino acids making up the genome of spider web ... but it's quite difficult. this is the pattern for the dna should anyone want to download it, work it out and knit it. the intarsia is a bit of a pain, but it's not overly difficult!

the pattern comes from the knitpro tool on microrevolt.org - a great site to check out!

too much

2005-07-10T11:13:00.000-04:00

too much to do
and not enough time.
i may have bitten off more than i can chew...

more miserable children here.

fractaliscious!

2005-07-09T22:54:00.000-04:00

i've been away from my blog for an age ... various things to do with traveling, churning out a dissertation, heat stroke, and an encounter with a pinãta. i've also been making gas mask knitting patterns, which i'll post on here as soon as i can figure out how to convert them.... in the meantime though, i've rediscovered a love of fractals. i wish that i could understand the math behind them, but i was always too careful a mathematician to capture the materiality of numbers - an ongoing disappointment. and i can do little more than wrap my tired brain around the seeming perfection of fractals, wherein the whole and the many are one and the same. and now that the vegetable store near my apartment has begun to stock broccoli romanesco, well, i can have my fractals and eat them too! for now, i'm set to unwind, but my ugly sweater is back up and running.

plus 40

2005-06-12T16:51:00.000-04:00

i never read, she says, because i start to write in the other author's voice.

it is so hot today that my skin appears to be sliding off. half crazed from the sun, i went home last night and burst in to tears while dancing around the living room and cursing my landlord, whose bellowing at the lazy refrigerator repair man has left us fridge-less for two weeks. the repairman won't darken the door. the fridge is stinking in the kitchen like a great rotting hulk - it is a tease, a misanthropic practical joker. i left the front door open and the dog ran out on to the porch, thinking we had been storing winters just out of her reach. her expression when she came back inside summed up everything. and i would give my pinkie for an ice cube.

i've been reading lorrie moore's self-help stories. i am entranced.

poetry

2005-06-07T21:41:00.000-04:00

the following was written, like a poem, on the inside of the cover of mcgill's copy of brian massumi's edited volume a shock to thought: expression after deleuze and guattari:

contingent
tensile
tensor
novation
mythopoiesis
tarantella
voluble
contagion
inflect

i think deleuze would have been proud. especially if artaud had yelled it at a mystified audience. possibly while throwing shoes and lattés at them.

the last two paintings are by members of winnipeg's royal art lodge. they neither throw shoes, nor, to my knowledge, understand deleuze and guattari - i'm sure there's a link somewhere though.

bring me a latté and a new pair of shoes

2005-05-29T15:25:00.000-04:00

as i was gearing up to write today's post, i read over "stinky," my last entry. why do i feel like its not jut a question of this and that being commodified and co-opted, but of everything? i can't even ask a question without feeling like i'm on an episode of sex in the city. or in carrie bradshaw lingo: "can it be that the entire act of questioning has been co-opted?" how depressing. bring me a latté and a new pair of shoes.

stinky

2005-05-18T11:33:00.000-04:00

my fridge stinks. in fact, my entire apartment is a little whiffy. the result, i guess, of four people and three animals living in fairly cramped quarters over the last 10 days just as the weather turned from cool to hot. but even with the guests gone, i seem to have no compunction to clean up. i've just stopped looking in the refridgerator. it would seem that i've reached the point in my dissertation where shedding dogs and rotting vegetables are enough to set me off - so i just ignore them.

but the decrepit state of my apartment might also explain my recent wish to go out for coffee with anyone who asks ... and might possibly also explain my rekindled interest in ants, bacteria and affective squirming. although not together of course. the ants came out of a story on cbc radio, detailing how ant colonies have been used by all points on the political spectrum, from demonstrating adam smith style laissez-faire economics to principles of anarchist community building. reading david graeber's recent article on the university's neglect of anarchist philosophy, i was taken with his point that anarchist-thinking often comes to embody the revolutionary potential of the left wing in times of peace. unthinkable during periods of mass armament and collective threat and fear, after the cold war, graeber argues, libertarian politics came to occupy a space of creativity, imagination and resistance embodied in the global justice movement. arguing that nuclear armament can actually be beneficial to anrchist politics (in that traditional war is avoided), graeber, recently fired from his position at yale university, paints a post-september 11th picture of the war against terrorism as an opportunity. he was, i think, writing before the war in iraq, but as i ticked the box in the on-line petition to save graeber's position (itself a somewhat oxymoronic calculation - anarchist supporters organizing to keep one of their own at one of the most elite and expensive schools in the united states) i couldn't help but think of that radio show. are we like ants, determined by large scale economic systems (essentially the need for food i suppose)? does anarchy as alternative exist only because the united states is the lone superpower? is it the absolute friction between these systems that determines their emergence? for graeber this is a positive condition ... but i'm not so sure. certainly the academic dismissal of marxist thought, identity politics, and so on, and the rapid turn to more open systems of circulation, nomadism and globalization is fascinating, and exciting, but leaves me wondering if we are little more than the largest ant colony imaginable. and graeber was still fired.

underground women (part 1)

2005-04-24T19:40:00.000-04:00

the paper that i was writing was so difficult in part because it has nothing to do with my current work. it was a bit of a fossil from my ma. the person it was about, however, was a fairly interesting woman, so i'm glad that i did finally finish it.

her name was ethel mairet, and she was an early twentieth century british handweaver. that doesn't make her sound like the most interesting person on earth, and i have to admit that i liked her at least in part because she was a no-apologies crotchety old bag who liked her dogs and her cats more than the people around her. in any case, she ran a weaving workshop for some time, was briefly married to ananda coomaraswamy, who is himself a fascinating case study, she helped to teach gandhi how to weave, she traveled all over, married a second man 15 years her junior, divorced him, and spent most of her time at a loom simultaneously griping and weaving. in any case, i liked her because her story completely upsets the new categories of art history - she had an interracial marriage, but was liberally racist, she was middle class but liked to pretend she wasn't, a feminist and submissive wife - in other words a category stumper, a boundary blurrer.

the one friend she was able to maintain was marianne straub, herself a weaver, though she trained more in the technology of weaving than in the use of wool and colour. straub was eventually responsible for some of the weavings used as fabrics in the london underground, which was, at least for the first three quarters of the twentieth century a beacon for modern british art in a way that blurred boundaries of its own - craft, design, high art. it would make an interesting case study for the subversion of the white cube space of the gallery....

...the idea of hand-designed work that would then be taken up by industry and mass-manufactured was the goal of both ethel mairet and marianne straub. they both saw it as a way of controlling capitalism, of adding a human element to the disembodied industry of textile production. neither, of course, saw the current move of textile production to sweat shops and offshore free trade zones, though both would have been horrified but probably not surprised at the complete separation of production and consumption (mairet actually predicted such an outcome during her travels with coomaraswamy in sri lanka where british imperial pressure was moving textile production from a community craft to a factory-based system of production).

neither of course did mairet or straub predict the links between computer coding and weaving - the binary code of programming actually follows the logic of weaving, visible, i think, in some of these weavings.

in terms of the tube as a moving gallery, the map of the london underground might be a case in point.

designed by henry beck, it's actually based on an electric circuit diagram, abandoning scale and geographic convention in a diagrammatic outline that actually inspired a whole series of other art works, like scott patterson's great bear (actually in the saatchi collection),

of course a geographically accurate map had to be made...

and the following rather lovely tale of the moquette seating on the london underground, borrowed from taxloss at this isn't london:

""Moquette" is the robust, deep-pile material used to cover the seats on the London Underground and on London buses.
For many years these seats were simple wooden benches. When the decision was made to upgrade to padded seats, the Royal Geographical Society despatched explorers to points throughout the British Empire to find a material tough enough to withstand the rears of thousands of Londoners.
The breakthrough was made by Sir Magnus Larchwood in south-west Africa. In 1923 he discovered a species called the moquette (a relation of the meerkat) that had checked fur in a variety of striking colours, notably orange, purple, blue and brown. A trade in the moquette was set up and Tubes were furbished with their hides.
Sadly, such was the demand for moquette skins that the native population quickly dwindled. The ranks of this noble beast were further eroded after the second world war when they fell prey to Wrigley's Disease, a malady spread by discarded chewing gum. The last moquette died in captivity at the Royal College of Fashion in 1974 during a desperate attempt to equip the new Jubilee Line. "

in actual fact, it was something more like this:

"Following the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, Frank Pick, the charismatic vice chairman set about creating a distinctive corporate identity for the new company including commissioning freelance designers to create customised seating fabrics. Pick, now London Transport's Chief Executive and his Publicity Officer, Christian Barman, invited established artists and textile designers to submit their ideas for new seating upholstery. These designers had no specific experience of designing moquette fabrics but Pick wanted to persuade the manufacturers and designers to work together to produce not only hard wearing, but also aesthetically pleasing materials. Their brief was to design fabrics that responded well to artificial light and patterns and which took into account wear and tear and soiling. The first four artists commissioned were Marion Dorn, Norbet Dutton, Enid Marx and Paul Nash and the new moquettes produced were predominately geometric and utterly contemporary – truly cutting edge design overthrowing all the floral patterns previously produced. This tradition has continued today with moquette designs by such textile designers as Marianne Straub and other 70’s, 80’s and 90’s designs still distinctive in every commuter’s memory."

strindberg and helium

2005-04-14T16:34:00.000-04:00

i'm desperately trying to finish a paper - hence the complete lack of posts. but in times of paper burn out, there is really nothing better than a little strindberg and helium...

misereeeeeeeeeee...

leftist totalitarianism?

2005-04-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

this just came in on the undercurrents listserve:

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
THE LAW COULD LET STUDENTS SUE FOR UNTOLERATED BELIEFS.

By JAMES VANLANDINGHAM
Alligator Staff Writer

TALLAHASSEE — Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities.

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened.

Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.

“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay
court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of
legislation.”

The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts.

But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said. “Being a businessman, I found out you can be sued for anything. Besides, if students are being persecuted and ridiculed for their beliefs, I think they should be given standing to sue.”

During the committee hearing, Baxley cast opposition to his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.” “The critics ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty,” he said, adding that he was called a McCarthyist.

Baxley later said he had a list of students who were discriminated against by professors, but refused to reveal names because he felt they would be persecuted.

Rep. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, argued universities and the state Board of Governors already have policies in place to protect academic freedom. Moreover, a state law outlining how professors are supposed to teach would encroach on the board’s authority to manage state schools.

“The big hand of state government is going into the universities telling them how to teach,” she said. “This bill is the antithesis of academic freedom.”

But Baxley compared the state’s universities to children, saying the legislature should not give them money without providing “guidance” to their behavior.

“Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a
dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?”

In an interview before the meeting, Baxley said “arrogant, elitist academics are swarming” to oppose the bill, and media reports misrepresented his intentions.

“I expect to be out there on my own pretty far,” he said. “I don’t expect to be part of a team.”

House Bill H-837 can be viewed online at www.flsenate.gov.

************************************************************************************

in a sense, watching what is going on in the states right now is frightening, but in another it has a sort of car-crash fascinating quality. how has the right managed to so powerfully mobilize the language of 1990s identity politics and minority rights?

i've been re-reading brian massumi's parables for the virtual for a reading group, and herein might lie some sort of answer for why the right has been able to mobilize language so much more (a)effectively than the left. massumi suggest a sort of affective resonance that spreads through the use of language and performative movement - actions and words that don't always match, but leave a radical openess into which political interpretation (often controlled by conservative news reports, civil society etc.) can be injected. the following is his description of why ronald reagan managed to be a popular politician in spite of some ... ah ... flaws.

"The last story was of the brain. This one is of the brainless. His name is Ronald Reagan. The story comes from a well-known book of pop-neurophysiology by Oliver Sacks.

Sacks describes watching a televised speech by the 'Great Communicator' in a hospital ward of patients suffering from two kinds of cognitive dysfunction. Some were suffering from global aphasia, which rendered them incapable of understanding words as such. They could nonetheless understand most of what was said, because they compensated by developing extraordinary abilities to read extraverbal cues: inflection, facial expression, and other gesture - body language. Others on the ward were suffering from what is called tonal agnosia, which is the inverse of aphasia. The ability to hear the expressiveness of the voice is lost, and with it goes attention to other extraverbal cues. Language is reduced to its grammatical form and semantic or logical content. Neither group appeared to be Reagan voters. In fact, the speech was universally greeated by howls of laughter and expressions of outrage. The 'Great Communicator' was failing to persuade. To the aphasics, he was functionally illiterate in extra-verbal cuing; his body language struck them as hilariously inept. He was, after all, a recycled bad actor, and an aging one at that. The agnostics were outraged that the man couldn't put together a grammatical sentence or follow a logical line to its conclusion. He came across to them as intellectually impaired. (It must be recalled that this is long before the onset of Reagan's Alzheimer's disease - what does that say about the difference between normality and degeneration?)"

Massumi argues that Reagan politicized "the power of mime" - that in spite of his faltering health, his inadequate ability to give speeches, he was able to offer a wide enough appeal to win two presidential elections. Reagan was able to be an effective leader not in spite of, but because of the disconnect between what he was saying and how he was saying it, because both were held together by the affective timbre of his voice.

"Reagan," writes Massumi "operationalized the virtual in postmodern politics. Alone, he was nothing approaching an ideologue. He was nothing, an idiocy musically coupled with an incoherence. But, that's a bit unfair. He was an incipience. He was unqualified and without content. But, his incipience was prolongued by technologies of image transmission and then relayed by apparatuses such as the family or the church or the school or the chamber of commerce, which in conjunction with the media acted as part of the newvour system of a new and frighteningly reactive body politic. It was on the receivin end that the Reagan incipience was qualified, given content.... That is why Reagan could be so many things to so many people; that is why the majority of the electorate could disagree with him on major issues but still vote for him. Because he was actualized, in their neighborhood, as a movement and a meaning of their selection - or at least selected for them with their acquiescence....

What is of dire interest now, post-Reagan, is the extent to which he contracted into his person operations that might be argued to be endemic to late-capitalism, image- and information-based economied. Think of the image/expression-events in which we bathe. Think interruption. This of the fast cuts of the video-clip or the too-cool TV commercial. Think of the cuts from TV programming to commercials. Thisnk of the cuts across programming and commercials achievable through zapping. Think of the distractedness of television viewing, the constant cuts from the screen to the immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits. Think of the joyously incongruous juxtapositions of surfing the Internet. Think of our bombardment by commerical images off the screen, at every step in our daily rounds. Think of the imagistic operation of the consumer object as turnover times decrease as fast as styles can be recycled. Everywhere the cut, the suspense - incipience. Virtuality, perhaps?" (pp. 41-42).

I don't find all of Massumi's writing convincing, but here, I think, there is something. It certainly explains why one of the most common responses I receive when interviewing people is that the left is "whiny," and they "complain too much." By reconstructing language/performance along such radically open lines (i.e. Anne Coulter freely making up lies about Canadian participation in the Vietnam War while wearing an expression of absolute intractibility) the far right has been able to gain a certain validity on very shaky ground (much like the American economy). While I'm not sure that Massumi's explanation is the only one in action, there is something to be said for the links between a burgeoning virtual/capitalist economy and those best able to function within it. In essence then, is there a leftist totalitarianism? Not of the "dictator professor" sort, but of a reliance on outdated methods of communication that cannot make the transition from an economy based on tangible possessions, to one based on intangibles and virtualities? And what might activists, left-wing academics, anarchists, and really anyone left (pun intended) do to counter this?

7 days later...

2005-03-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

a week later and i'm still sick. maybe some www.cat and girl comics will cheer me up. or if not ...

kit and kirsty's ginger & yam soup

2 tsp. olive oil
1 leek, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 kg yams, peeled and cubed (approx. 4-5 medium yams)
as much ginger as you can handle, chopped or grated
4 cups vegetable broth
sea salt to taste
fresh cilantro

heat oil in saucepan, then add the leek and carrot. cook until
softened, about three to five minutes. stir in the yams and ginger,
then add broth. cover and bring to a boil, then simmer until the yams
are soft, about thirty minutes. blend the soup and then add more
broth if it's too thick. season with sea salt as you reheat. garnish
with cilantro and serve.

i will be back on track tomorrow ... i've had enough ginger to boost the most suffering of immune systems! in the meantime i'll just make up ridiculous steps to danceable tunes...

sniff sniff

2005-03-21T19:15:00.000-05:00

(this is actually flesh eating bacteria ... i'm not feeling that bad yet)...

while staying in toronto to present my paper on viral knitting i managed to catch a cold. how typically ironic. or maybe it isn't ironic - alanis and hello kitty collectively ruined my understanding of irony sometime around the age of 14 - i'm not sure what it means any more. so i'm going to bed and thinking about nothing for the next couple of days.... well, maybe i'll think about www.thinkgeek.com and their plush virus and bacteria toys, but probably i'll think about nothing...

common cold (sniff sniff)

poor bookworm

oh albo

2005-03-14T20:08:00.000-05:00

i'm finally finishing up the knitting and networks paper for the conference at york. i had to find a way to bring everything together, and albo jeavons, philadelphia anarchist and art school dropout, did it nicely. the elusive overlaps between bodies, networks, corporations and textiles come together in his newest work/sculptures that interrogate the 1886 passing of a law by the United States Supreme Court giving corporations rights as persons. imagining the "corporate body" as a many-headed, network of stuffed-shirts (pun intended), jeavons wonders: "how does the corporate person eat, shit, and fuck?"

jeavons writes: "I’ve been fascinated with business suits for years; with their bizarre blending of the militaristic and the foppish, and with the symbolic role they play in the colonization and subjugation of individuals and the world. The generally ignored outlandishness of the suit: the skirted jacket, the strangely-shaped lapels, the belted pants, the buttons (always on the right side for men; women’s buttons go on the left), and of course that incredible, hilarious, centerpiece; the necktie. Thrusting upwards, so huge and virile that his pants can’t contain it, rearing up, framed by the lapels and silhouetted against the pale torso of the button-down shirt; a bare display of phallic power, so blatant and yet so rarely acknowledged as such. Looked at this way it’s hard not to laugh, walking down the street surrounded by all of these “upright” men with big symbolic cocks sticking up out of their pants."

his work, shown in galleries, but also occasionally "left" outside outlets of the Gap and Banana Republic are, i think, a potent reminder that sometimes the simplest of artistic statements can be the most powerful. jeavons is also behind the virtual MoCow museum ... but i'll save that for another post...

scurvy sea dogs (in honour of alex m's birthday)

2005-03-07T20:46:00.000-05:00

i went to alex's surprise birthday up at snowden on the weekend. as he is obsessed with everything pirate, the theme was set. not having any pirate attire of my own, i instead wore shiny-pink pants and bought a paper-mache parrot at the dollar store. actually, it was a budgerigar, but maybe i'm short enough that it just looked like a small parrot (probably not though...). but it did sit quite nicely on my shoulder.

like many montreal apartments, alex's is maze-like. it looks tiny from the front entrance, but rooms open onto room in a dizzying array enhanced by montreal hip-kids walking around in skeleton costumes and eye-patches and rrrrrrum punch. midway through my second glass eric told me he had ms. in the maze-like apartment, trapped between two hallways leading seemingly to nowhere i followed my own path back to my own father's death from ms 11 years ago. i hate thinking about it. but eric looks great. and talking about the special privilege of the already-dead, the still-alive, those of us granted extra life through artificial means at a party for pirates... it was delicious.

but back to pirates.

the following is an exceprt from a paper written by my colleague lily cho, at the university of western ontario. the full paper is downloadeable here, and was presented at the most recent cacs (canadian association of culture studies) conference in hamilton, ontario. lily's argument with regard to Black Atlantic studies, Aisian diaspora and indentured labour, mutiny, and the shadowy borders of piracy on the Atlantic has stuck with me. questioning the trope/stereotype of Chinese coolie labour as passive and docile, lily examines instances of mutiny and piracy that instead speak to a murky history of Chinese piracy, a parallel between Asian and Black diaspora studies, and an agency hetetofore overlooked, or overwritten in mainstream history....

"1866. Somewhere between South China and Callao, Peru. The ship is on fire. There are 650 Chinese indentured labourers in the hold who have started the fire in a desperate attempt to seize the ship. The crew cannot put out the fire because they had placed tarps over the hatch in an attempt to suffocate the mutineers and every time they lifted the tarp to pour water into the hold, they accidentally created a huge backdraft which only worsens the fire. Eventually, the crew abandoned ship leaving the hatches locked and everyone inside the ship’s hold to burn alive....

The Napoleon Canavero was originally named the White Falcon. It was built in Pittston Massachusetts in 1853 and was one of the fastest clipper ships of its time. It was mainly used on the trade routes between China and the west Coast of South America. It momentarily disappeared in 1859 when it left Callao for Hampton Roads with a load of guano. It was found in 1862 ashore at Foo Chow in South China “being floated with the loss of a portion of keel” (Howe 693). Had this ship already survived one mutiny? What had happened between 1859 and 1862 and how did it end up in China when it was last seen in Peru? But I am getting ahead of myself – these are questions we will come back to. The White Falcon was docked and repaired at Hong Kong and then sent to Manila. It was sold in 1864 for $28 000 to Cana Vero and Co. of Lima, became a Peruvian ship and renamed the Napoleon Canavero. She was then put into the service of what is euphemistically called the China trade until she burned with the screams of those trapped in her hold echoing in the guilty ears of the crew who escaped.....

.... According to reports compiled from newspapers at the time and a number of secondary histories, one out of eleven coolie ships mutinied. It was not unheard of for the crews of entire ships to resign upon learning that they would be sailing a coolie ship because the dangers of these voyages -- the potential for mutiny was so common. Persia Crawford Campbell notes that “[c]oolie-voyages to South America become so risky that in August, 1852, though large contracts were in the market, no vessels could be procured for shipment” (97). I am haunted by the stories of these ships, burning in unknown waters with hundreds of the already dispossessed burning alive locked in the hold. I want to find a way of understanding their resistance as neither futile nor naïve. Yes, these were desperate acts. But surely, just as there is still no end to the desperation which unhomes hundreds of thousands of people every year, then acts of resistance do no simply end with the terror of those did in the hold.

One glimmer of possibility lies in re-orienting our understanding of coolie subjectivity and following the history of some ships that really do seem to have disappeared. While there are records of ships that have burned at the hands of mutinying indentured labourers, there are also records of ships that have simply seemingly disappeared. If you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. Usually, some member of the crew survives to tell the tale. Ships are vast objects and do not simply disappear. One possibility then would be to read in these disappearances the possibility of successful mutinies.

One of the most fascinating parts of the indenture archive is the occasionally slippage which occurs between coolie subjectivity and pirate subjectivity. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, there are moments where we get a sense of the intermingling between pirates and coolies, of pirates infiltrating the barracoons where coolies would be imprisoned prior to sailing, of pirates leading ship board mutinies on indenture ships, of coolies and pirates as being one and the same. The slippage in this language around piracy and indenture captures a fascinating area of ambivalence between these terms. As the work of historians such as Dian Murray and Marcus Rediker suggests, many pirate communities can often be understood as anti-colonial and anti-capitalist communities made of the desperate and the dispossessed. While there are relatively few records of coolie rebellion in the imperial archive, there is a vast record of piratical activity and the fight to suppress piracy along the very coastal towns from which coolie labour was recruited. Maybe, just maybe, what the British called piracy and terrorism in the nineteenth century would be what a diaspora critic might now call agency. This is a possibility that I am hoping to explore."

the viral knitting project, part 2

2005-03-06T23:06:00.000-05:00

after the digipopo conference, it looked as if the viral knitting project might be confined to the dust. however, it somehow turned into a chapter of my dissertation (actually my favourite chapter), and took on a life of its own. after the conference, i refined it a little bit so that the code red of the virus corresponds to the terrorist alert codes in the united states: code red for imminent danger, code orange for danger and so on. i will eventually work out the number of days each code has been in operation since the signing of the patriot act, and then the scarves will be knitted proportionally (i imagine that they will be primarily orange and yellow). i'm not sure though if each line will represent a day, which would make the garments about the length of an actual scarf, or if each run-through of the code red virus (in knitted form) would represent a day. the latter form would give the possibility of recording the performance as a duration as the finished garment would be many metres long, but it would also make it unwearable, which goes against one of the original intentions of the project.

in any case, the viral knitting project will be performed march 19 at a conference put together by the culture and communications department at york university. as i have to put the pattern together for the conference, i hope that i'll be able to distribute it, and hopefully the project will take on a second life - maybe over the internet, adding a second layer to the original idea of binary codes and internet communications.

the viral knitting project, part 1

2005-03-01T12:59:00.000-05:00

at the digital poetics and politics conference at queen's this summer, i worked with a group to come up with the initial viral knitting project. the idea was to combine our four interests: knitting and activism, computer viruses, ad busting and design, and computer manipulated sound. we only had three days to put it together, and what we came up with was a riff on the idea of internet communication. essentially, we knitted the binary code of the code red virus - an early computer virus known for its virulence. we wanted the finished garment to be both comforting and threatening - a wearable, tradeable, portable virus. at the centre of the project was a video, with a still seen here - an endless loop of knitting with an eerie background complete with knitting needle glitches.
we also discussed the potential for knitting as a form of activism, its position between art and craft, between violent and non-violent protest. the calgary revolutionary knitting circle has been at the forefront here - attempting to separate the media-manipulated image of the violent window-smashing, cop-beating "anti-globalization" protester from that of the lived reality of activists. however, the potential of knitting as activism, also lies in its potential as an easily co-opted, commodified form of essentially useless activism. to this end, concordia communications prof matt soar created some wonderful magazine covers, aimed at jamming the jam - bringing the loop of knitting full circle. the video can be viewed here .

mapping

2005-02-28T16:10:00.000-05:00

mapping

2005-02-28T14:23:00.000-05:00

"Nicheworks is a interactive tool for visualising massive networks with hundreds of thousands of nodes. It was developed by Graham Wills at Bell Labs. The screen-shots here show Nicheworks visualisation of the network structure of a large Web site. "

my dissertation is becoming itself. i started talking about art and protest, but it quickly unraveled into a series of connections: protest - nation - embodiment - imagery - action - network - tourism - display - ubiquitous computing - politics - code - knitting. yes, knitting. i started by looking at knitting in terms of binary computer code (this is sadie plant's doing, in the book zeros and ones: digital women and the new technoculture). i started with the revolutionary knitters, but their own analyses didn't go far beyond the violent.non-violent dichotomy, this time couched in some pithy one-liners (this will have you in stitches, protesters needle the police, a close-knit community). i started to think that i had the wrong end of the needle.

but by following the links through knitting as a web of its own to protest on the internet, and then in the webs of the city, my dissertation came to be about the connections rather than the spaces between. no one, i think, was more suprised than me, particularly as i was the one getting wound up in it, and i was the one who eventually lost the thread - the neat 6 chapter outline that i handed in and defended. the pithy-ness comes with the territory, but ruth scheuing demonstrates that it's not without its own meaning.

in the end, well, not the end, somewhere in the middle, my dissertation became a web. it lost its chapters, it became a hypertext document, a map of itself. i lived in england briefly, and worked as an underpaid waitress in a café staffed entirely by those on their way to somewhere else. someone i loved (briefly) gave me julio cortàzar's book hopscotch as a going away present. written in 1963 it is a book with no beginning, no end, no middle. the reader, the back cover informs me, becomes the architect of the novel.

i want this for myself. i want to be able to take this plunge, to write without borders, to follow these connections. but i've also been told that i have to have chapters to graduate. which makes me wonder if i just can't get my thoughts in order. or possibly i'm still mourning the note inside the front cover of hopscotch:
"i've got a problem with people. i just don't care for them, or i fall in love with them terribly. let me be a sentimentalist. despite the time, i started to love you. oxford, 1999."

maybe i should just knit a pair of socks and sit down and write.