i walked over eleven miles today

first lessons = hydrate; take a good map; be able to change camera battery or memory card while walking in the rain; this (kisokaido) is achievable

kisokaido = nakasendo

don't know why more than one name but that's presumably learnable. anyway seem to be same thing.

so recently i got a grant, after applying to several different ones, and there was a reception, and i met another artist, who agreed that the best part of applying for stuff is that it forces you to articulate what it is you are doing or want to do and helps refine your thinking and your projects. monday are two deadlines i've been looking forward to for months and months. kisokaido seems like a perfect fit for both. i've been really into building real-world pieces with dynamic digital components, both request a more web-based approach, usually i would just say "that's not what i want to do" and forget about it. but kisokaido has been beckoning web-aspect...

anyway can't do everything and right now will go take pictures and walk in manhattan, related to kisokaido, back-thinking to update another time

eyesore

your-garbage-is-my-gold, all familiar with that, just hammered home to me again...
http://www.lmcc.net/art/programs/2007.3.27reconstruction/index.html

third paragraph states that orange cones are part of a disruptive presence. i beg to differ! they are a benign and divine omnipresent source of aesthetic pleasure. by the fourth paragraph they (to be fair, along with many other glorious manifestations of humans altering the planet) are referred to as "eyesores."

that makes my gut sore. i'm a huge fan of traffic cone aesthetics and believe that traffic cones are the closest artifact we have to art, but i haven't proven that yet. if ever an open call had my name on it - well, the obstacle is the same, how to make art about something which is already so close to being art in its own right? ten years of thousands of traffic cone photos and still haven't been able to crack the medium-isn't-the-message puzzle. that doesn't make any sense. haven't been able to find a form which does them justice, is probably what i mean. photos don't really get the coneness of cones. painting is old. i saw a sculpture in chelsea a few months(?) ago in a window composed of chopped up traffic cones but they were just used as raw material to make a rhinoceraus or whatever it was - not an homage, i don't think, to the raw faster-than-thought power of perceiving a lone traffic cone guarding absolutely nothing.

one final source of irritation - don't get me wrong, i'm thrilled about lmcc, what they do, that particular open call specifically, etc. - i guess we're all too close to something, like if you try to talk to a yankees fan about arod maybe - anyway, there is at present a startling influx of yellow traffic cones in manhattan. not orange - yellow. a small percentage of the total but so many of them are new and shiny and so obviously different - balm for my city-sore eyes.

maybe just one to start

painting, not project. "painting" i mean. christine said i might have to let go of paint eventually. yeah yeah yeah, that's been niggling at me for years. ok, so a spring somethingorother, that's the other project still on the brainburner and not yet manifesting itself in the physical universe. sequel to "autumn leaves" and "winter branches" but still not clear - growth? bud? here's what it looks like right now:

ummm, i need to order a new projector bulb, do you think if i project sunlight onto seeds in earth they'll sprout? that's the first part of the plan, get some kind of mesh, and fill these babies up with the stuff of life... but it was getting overwhelming so i'm going to start with just one. this week i think.

and hope to buy hiking boots tomorrow night, so can do a little practice/training walk saturday, and see how much training i'd need to do for nakasendo. which, by the way, like everything under the lamp, has been done:
http://www.hiroshige.org.uk/hiroshige/kisokaido/kisokaido_road_map.htm

nakasendo

matthew wants to walk from kyoto to tokyo. me too. this coming autumn. he doesn't want to be too conspicuous. me, i want to do an art project, otherwise can't self-justify the time/expense, but can figure out a way to incorporate that and still have meaningful friend conversations, also not make spectacle of selves. so, that's another project in initial pre-stages, really. nothing exists yet, just this vague thought of pictures or postcards or computer and harddrive or video camera, maybe people can print out stuff at home or i can mail things, instructions perhaps for how-to-assemble-this-new-media-installation with your own projector, computer, or dvd player, should this stuff stay secret until i act on it? can't do everything

oh yeah, if you google "nakasendo" you'll see it's a thing, been done, in the past, this walk from kyoto to tokyo, not as random as sounds

and if you read a little about it you'll probably know more than me because i haven't really spent any time doing that yet

chess

about to start a new project. well, already in a way it's in progress, conceptualizing and thinking are really when things happen. i mean, each piece only gets made by following certain processes, right? a landscape painting can happen when a painter walks out into a field, sets up an easel, and applies paint to a two-dimensional surface with a brush. this chess project, is it going to involve an easel? other people for sure. two-dimensionality = yes. other things being worked out, in my head, in conversation, on little scraps of paper. good morning world.