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Jason Polan reports (in drawing form, of course) that there is already a line queueing up outside the MoMA to catch the last day of Marina Abramovic’s exhibition tomorrow. Sitters will be limited to 15 minutes each. I was going to try to make it over there, but now I’m not so sure that I can handle the madness.
(via jenbekmanprojects)
Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis (Spectral View)
Metastasis or Metastaseis (“dialectic transformations”), is an orchestral work by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer-architect and a major figure in the postwar development of musical modernism worldwide. He is particularly remembered for the pioneering use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases, aleatory distribution of points on a plane, minimal constraints, Gaussian distribution, Markov chains), game theory, group theory, Boolean algebra and Brownian motion.
Metastasis was inspired by Einstein’s view of time (a function of matter & energy) and structured on mathematical ideas by Xenakis’s colleague Le Corbusier. The 1st and 3rd movements don’t have a melodic theme to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time. The 2nd movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a 12-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…)
The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation looking more like a blueprint than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with sound frequencies on one axis and time on the other. In this video I tried to display this by presenting the frequency spectrum (0-20.000Hz) of the piece and how Xenakis actually “drew” music.
SWF Symphony Orchestra Hans Rosbaud, conductor October 1955
Saw the Iannis Xenakis show today at The Drawing Center and it blew my mind. Architecturemusicdrawing.
The ultimate collective mind-map.
Fear, organized. Brian Rea, organizer of worry, “I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears — after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional.” After 11 years in New York, he made lists of his own and those of the people around him to fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall, an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona called Murals.
An interview with Kentridge wherein the artist comments on his own responses; these appear in blocks of white that interrupt the original interview.
Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman of Pentagram have designed a gorgeous book to accompany the William Kentridge retrospective at the MoMA. I had the chance to see Kentridge speak about his work and the opera he is working on a few weeks ago and found that he is all-at-once academic, inspirational, and hilarious. Did I mention the work is beautiful too?
The Pentagram designed book, above, honors and accentuates the work in a variety of ways, but I was particularly taken by the design of this interview that was later revised and annotated by Kentridge. After one lecture it’s not like I know the guy, but to go back and comment on his responses seems so delightfully like him! I’m glad to see it executed so sharply in terms of design.
Got a projector this afternoon and tried playing with the Processing app I put together to take notes about music on an animated timeline.
My projector was stuck low to the ground inside a heavy A/V cart, however I realized it would be ideal to have the projector on the ceiling and pointing down at a table to be able to work horizontally. Drawing on a perpendicular surface fairly low to the ground was no fun. Also, I’d like a jog wheel so I can quickly scrub back and forth.
I kept getting the feeling, as I was drawing, that it wasn’t that revolutionary to have a vertical line and time code scrolling across my page. But once I shut the projector off I realized how much richer the simple animation had made my note-taking experience. I feel like having the soundline was incredibly helpful for understanding the structure of the song (see those thick black lines? they represent different acts in the piece. look how differently they are proportioned!), but as always I wish I was at this point a week ago to see where I could take this into the realm of color, rather than just sort-of-random marker scribbles.
Cahill-Keyes Megamap prototypes
Fig 7. Another view of the Megamap’s 16-panel assembly prototype, toward a template for the graticule, with a closer view of the Maritime provinces outtake. A single octant would be 62 square meters. The 20 x 40 meter Megamap comprises 800 square meters, but the graticule and geographic contents only occupy 496 of those square-meter panels; the rest are backdrop. The square accent lines now enclose a grid of 200 x 200 mm, where each millimeter represents a kilometer: i.e., a 1/1,000,000 map. These panels were hand-drafted in pencil, using x-y coordinates manually compiled from a Sharp EL-515 calculator, and others output with a BASIC program.
© 1978, 1980, 2009 by Gene Keyes
Photo by Peter Weeks, 1983-10-21
Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56% annually. For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law,” which states:
The number of colors doubles every 28 years!
If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons!
(via austinkleon)
Punishment-circle drawings (1999-2003) by Torgeir Husevaag
The task was to draw circles around each other, as close to each other as possible, while trying to avoid that the line/ circle I am drawing should not touch the line within. The consequence of a mistake, (a touch) is that I had to draw a “punishment-circle”, - a small circle “growing out” from the main circle at the spot where a mistake was made.
I used these guidelines as the starting-point for approximately two hundred drawings, a performance and a roof-painting. I investigated the possibilities within the framework, by adjusting the element of chance and the set of rules I would work with. The drawings dealt with time and processes; with each drawing I started a new process I neither could nor would change along the way, even though I were a part of it. Minor motions of my body, - a blink of the eye, a twitch in a finger, would influence the result.
The punishment-circle drawings eventually led to map-projects where my body would serve as a drawing-instrument on a much larger scale.
(via bdif and thanks Loretta!)
Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness is one of the treasures of the internet. My immediate comment on reblogging this was going to be: “I will never stop posting these.” But as I read through to the end I discovered that this will be her last post. Jeez. The blow is lessened by Kalman’s beautiful parting words:
In my family we do not say “goodbye.” We say “so long.”
Also, the book will be released October 2010!
(via youngna)
I am competitive, and since I knew I could not compete with Dan’s drawing ability, I understood that to be happy, I had to invent a creative way around the problem of making things look beautiful. So while Dan was drawing perfect renderings of the beach, I drew two straight lines on a page, dividing it into thirds. I wrote ’sky’ in the top third, ’sea’ in the second, and ’sand’ in the bottom third.
I realized in that instance that the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea. This simple realization has changed the way I approach almost everything I make. If something does not come naturally, I search out an alternative way to respond to the problem.
Daniel Eatock
