Structural Chaos

Structural Chaos, originally uploaded by iHeartDimSum.

I've been feeling sick since the end of our trip - I think I may have caught some food borne illness from a 'pasta with squid ink' dish we ate in Hong Kong the day before we flew home. My stomach feels like it's filled with all of the pipes of the above photo, and then twisted in on itself. Very fun. Definitely something you should all experience at least once. Go on... eat some raw chicken or something. The result should be similar.

Anyways, I've managed to stay awake long enough to finally do a preliminary sort through of my photos from Japan (stupid jet lag), and will present a series of them from now until pretty much eternity (30 gigs!!!). The one above was of the exoskeleton structure surrounding the West Facade of a quirky modern art gallery nestled in a maze of side streets of the Harajuku area of Tokyo. The gallery itself was interesting, but the highlight was definitely the spiderweb like monstrosity of pipes outside. Photo was processed in CS4 to give the colours a slight vintage look.

More to come later tonight. My stomach is dictating that I must return to the washroom now.

-G

Flatiron Building

Flatiron Building, originally uploaded by iHeartDimSum.

Back from our trip to Japan and Hong Kong. It was a blast, but as always, felt way too short. Japan was an interesting study in contrasts - it was so modern, yet so old and traditional. You could literally find glitzy shopping complexes placed right next door to old traditional shrines and temples. A bit of a clash of old vs. new on every corner. I shot some 3000 plus photos, so I'm finding the task of even deciding what to start processing/ editing very daunting.

So instead, I present to you another photo from New York city. This is one of the Flat Iron building, photoshopped to look like a vintage photo taken from the hey day of grainy black and white film.

One Year Performance

I've become very fascinated by this artist I discovered during our visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. The artist's name is Tehching Hsieh, and he explored some very extreme forms of performance art over a series of years. The 'piece' (if you can even call it that) on display at the MOMA involved the artist voluntarily locking himself up in solitary confinement for a year in 1978, as an exploration of the passage of time as art.

Taken from Wikipedia: One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece): September 29, 1978 through September 30, 1979.
In this performance, the artist locked himself in a 11′6″ × 9′ × 8″ wooden cage, furnished only with a wash basin, lights, a pail, and a single bed. During the year, he was not allowed to talk, to read, to write, or to listen to radio and TV. A lawyer, Robert Projansky, notarized the entire process and made sure the artist never left the cage during that one year. A friend came daily to deliver food, remove the artist's waste, and take a single photograph to document the project. In addition, this performance was open to be viewed once or twice a month from 11am to 5pm.

I'm sure many of you are thinking this was a complete waste of a man's life, which may or may not be the point of his pieces that explored time and human nature. But even if you fail to appreciate this for what it is, the photographic display of his portraits by the day is very interesting, and I'd hazard a guess that this is the first 365 photo project that everyone seems to be doing nowadays on Flickr, etc. Seriously though, check out his website to see the other challenging performances that he completed. You haven't seen dedication or belief in art until you've seen what he went through in each of his one year performances.







-G

Missing the big Picture

A shot of the Calgary Skyline at night - 15 second exposure, zoomed out during the last 5 seconds. I'm taking the intro photography course at SAIT right now (it's a prerequisite to any of the advanced courses), and they aren't teaching anything you can't learn on your own. So instead, I've been doing more people watching than paying attention. You can always pick out the Engineer in a room - in my class, he's the guy with the Nikon D700 ($3000 body only) that didn't know what a sensor was, and couldn't understand how going from 1/60sec to 1/125sec was a halving of the amount of light. "60 into 125 ISN'T a half!!!" I'm thinking that he's, pardon my pun, missing the big picture?