Sculptor's Source

The designer and artist talked about his sources of inspiration, latest works, favourite Malaysian tourist spots, crazy hotel carpets and his new fondness for random assistants

I talked with the director of a documentary which explores the life of young people in China who earn a living by playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day, and produce virtual goods which are sold to richer gamers all over the world for real money.

• Our surveillance society goes online | Technology | The Guardian
  Being able to make your own decisions and hold your own views without interference; controlling information about yourself; and being in charge of your personal space - these basic elements of privacy are under threat, according to a new book, The Spy in

A robot is dreaming, others are struggling to make a decision, an elevator appears to be self-aware and a vintage radio relentlessly searches for God. Welcome to the world of Fernando Orellana

• Is in vitro meat the future? - Times Online
  Chicken, beef and pork that has never been a living animal could be better for people and the planet. But will it catch on?
• Friday question: the most surreal games in history | Games | Guardian Unlimited
  Was it pretentious Spectrum classic Deus Ex Machina, with its free music and narration soundtrack, starring Jon Pertwee? Was it lewd photography sim, Gekibo? Or maybe Pa Rappa? Or LocoRoco? Or Revenge of the Mutant Camels?

• The failures of the legal system for both the torturers and the tortured. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
  There may yet be verdicts at Guantanamo. But following years of abuse, neglect, and extreme secrecy, there won't be justice. The other place we won't see legal accountability is at the upper levels of the Bush administration, where evidence of lawbreaking

In her installation and book, Ines Doujak criticizes the way multinational corporations reap profits by taking out patents on indigenous plants, food, knowledge, even human tissues from developing countries and turn them into lucrative products. Without sharing the benefits with the country of origin

• Human memory: memory chip could mean we never forget - Telegraph
  However difficult the practicalities, there's no reason in principle why neural prostheticists in future couldn't pick up where nature left off, incorporating such master maps into neural implants: the kind of brain-boosting chips familiar from science fi
• Embryo research: a source of hope or horror? - Telegraph
  These are profound issues in terms of science, law and morality - and this is why the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is among the most divisive to have come before MPs.
• CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say…

Wooden boxes that deliver Situation(ist) quotes, order you to bring them to their friends upstairs within 30 seconds, and treat you like delinquents or servants

• notes from somewhere bizarre: Trash the swim
• Physically attractive| Skin + Bones | This is London
  Somerset House relaunches its Embankment Galleries with Skin + Bones, devoted to ideas shared by fashion and architecture. It examines themes of geometry, identity, tectonic strategies and more, using breathtaking examples of structural play from some of
• Entramos en los lugares prohibidos de América · ELPAÍS.com
  La caja'. Lugar de recreo del corredor de la muerte en Mansfield, Ohio. Presume de ser la democracia más adelantada del mundo occidental, pero en Estados Unidos aún está vigente la…

When I was a kid, I read my share of comic books. I'm not much into them now, but I remember them fondly, and still get excited when a movie starring one of the characters premiers. Over the weekend, I was one of the billion people who went to see Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr.

How would I rate the movie? I liked it a bunch. Check it out sometime.

Before you scroll down to the images, look to the sidebar and press the play button of the soundtrack. I tried to give you some audio to listen to, as you follow this incredible story of good over evil.

OK, now start the music (you'll find I…

Antarctica is the first complete and organic public showing of the artworks created by the artists as a result of their experience to the edge of the world

• Death Row Rodeo: the Louisiana prison miracle - Times Online
  Through rodeos and rehabilitation, Burl Cain has transformed America's most violent maximum security prison into its safest.
• Impossible smells exhibition opens at University of Sunderland
  The world's first exhibition of 'extinct and impossible' smells is under way, from the metallic fallout of the first atomic bomb to the aroma of cloves and oranges from first aid kit of a medieval plague doctor
• on the surpassing of the real by the virtual | varnelis.net
  report that the greenhouse gases emitted to power data centers are becoming a…

King Corn: The Rest of the Story

Monday, May 12, 6:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Hollywood Library, 4040 N.E. Tillamook St.
503.988.5391

King Corn and Portland filmmaker Curt Ellis shares the environmental story left untold in his award-winning feature documentary.

Free tickets for seating will be available 30 minutes prior to the program.

• Muslims feel under siege as Italian Right sets up town vigilante groups - Times Online
  saddest part of the article is the comments
• ArtCal - Chelsea - Bortolami Gallery - Jonathan Meese, Dictatorbaby Mary Poppin's Cats Dogs and Eggpies (The Revoluionbaby De Large IS Back)
• BIP Computers / Alberto Mozó » Plataforma Arquitectura
• The Art of the Prank » Performance Art: When Shock is Not Enough

I've been wanting to do this one for a while now.

The Eighth International Conference of the European Academy of Design will take place at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, 1st, 2nd & 3rd April 2009.

Conference themes are:

Design Connexity
As the trend towards globalisation continues there is a growing connectedness between all our actions and a growing interdependence between the social, economic and the environmental. This increasing connectedness raises new moral and ethical issues and challenges. This concept has been termed ‘connexity’ (Mulgan, 1998) and provides the title for the conference and the backdrop for the…

I have no inclination to talk academically on essay’s of note on “Art” but sometimes I get the urge to comment on selected “bits”! No highbrow stuff from me I'm afraid!

Cindy Jackson, on page seven of her essay entitled “Linear Form vs Organic Form” asks us to compare Rodin’s figures with Clodion. She concludes, I think, that there is no emotional content in Clodion’s anatomical master pieces where in Rodin’s it is all about emotion.

Art is, for me, all about emotion; so does this mean that Clodion’s work is not Art?


My wife felt she had had enough after room eight at the…

Humanity made even more upsetting and menacing than ever through the innocent magic of plasticine

Pierre Huyghe, Joep van Lieshout, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Despina Papadopoulos, the Guerrilla Girls, David Adjaye, Nam Goldin speaking and discussing at Tate London

Play is being reformed and reversed; it embodies social and political acts and issues; it becomes a tool for activism; it mingles the virtual and the real; it revitalizes other disciplines; play can be misused and exploited; while stereotypes are challenged, questions are raised and different understandings are offered

April 15, 2008


April 18. 2008


May 1, 2008

For more information, see Packy mural coming down

Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance

The final project for Post-Optimal Objects (POO) at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design was to design a placebo object for a real or imagined, physical or psychological phobia that would challenge our expectations and preconceptions and provoke new ways of thinking about designed objects and how we use them. Class participants were asked to explore the complexity of how designed objects can modify our behavior by addressing needs that raise questions rather than just be practical, ergonomic or aesthetically pleasing (this project was shamelessly based on the 'Complicated…

Gary Ewing was the co-creator of the Traveling Tranquility Circus, a festival of positive hippy energy, roughly 1968, here in Portland. The Circus was music, dance, costumes, some theatre, all enclosed in a gigantic polyurethane balloon the size of a small building, inflated with huge industrial fans. The Circus traveled the NW and performed at college campuses and human-friendly festivals.

Gary's special treat was to blow your mind with his light show, projected onto the surface of the balloon where he mixed small blobs of brightly colored oil on the surface of a high octane overhead…

I was always interested in the jarred up little creatures in biology class. I also think of the
"Abby Normal" scenes in Young Frankenstein. But this is dedicated to a friend known as "bunnie", who collects preserved specimens.

Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of Stamen Design talks data visualization and urban space

A video commentary on the banality of warfare, the fine line that separates authoritarian control from abuse of power and the ease with which society is incorporated into the mechanisms of institutional violence

A wholesale car dealer in Milwaukie, Oregon has built a 60 foot replica of the Statue of Liberty in its parking lot at Roethe Road and McLoughlin Blvd.

EXTRA - more about this landmark at waymarking.com

For those of you who are regular visitors to that blog, you saw this yesterday. I just checked it out after being gone for a few days, and Noah did a fantastic job with his end of the collaboration. I hope you'll check it out here.


[edit] Here are the characters on my back porch as I was making them.

I loath everything about Raymond Kaskey's 1985 hammered copper sculpture, bolted to Michael Graves' Portland Building.

The name sounds like boosters at the City Club thought it up on a boozy Friday afternoon. The first mention of the name in the paper of record is in 1986. Yes there are female trident-carrying goddess types in local decorative artwork, but these were previously referred to as "Columbia," a general 19th Century patriotic icon, not Portlandia.

The location, perched on the third floor landing of a garish pomo hybrid government building, surrounded now by leafy trees, is both…

"It is a book of "design fictions." By deliberately creating objects that cannot exist -- because the material is not yet available, or the business plan, or the manufacturing process, or the infra- structure to support it, or even the human sensibility -- it becomes possible to explore the meaning of design at a more profound level and to think more richly about what is and what might be.

The principal objective of the book is to stimulate thought: What is an object? Why do we desire what we desire? Why has "functionality" been defined in such a historically narrow way? What is beauty?…

I was honored to speak at the GEL conference yesterday, and wanted to say a special "hello" to anyone from there who may be visiting. They had a lot of interesting speakers, and I'm sure some of the creative thinking that I witnessed there will work its' way into the blog here.

I'll be posting something brand new to the blog Tuesday, so be prepared!

A Dutch fashion designer inspired by prosthetic technology, fetishism, genetic manipulation and animals

Reprinted from the Ashland Daily Tidings, April 23, 2008

This is one fix that Harry Potter might not get out of.

The world’s most famous fictional wizard was dismantled from Ashland High School’s senior mural Friday by Principal Jeff Schlecht, who deemed the material inappropriate.

Echoing Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Chapel, the mural features Harry as Adam and Professor Dumbledore as God, surrounded by other characters from the best-selling book series as cherubs. On Harry’s lap is a Golden Snitch, which in the Harry Potter books is a walnut-sized magic ball with…

Several stories to tell about the Portland Art Museum's casts of Roman statues, which are replicas of early and lost Greek works, including this Doryphorus by Polykleitos (click the picture to enlarge).

Importantly and foremost, these casts were and are teaching tools; replicas yes, but fair representations from a time when travel was difficult and Naples was a far distant civilization. I don't know why the museum bought a version without arms. Casts or replicas of important artworks was often the only way a provincial community could acquire a grand artwork, and an essential step in…

From the Oregonian, by D.K. Row April 21, 2008. The text below is becoming an annual feature by Row, a clear, brief summation of the Portland art scene. I've republished it here because the Oregonian's web site is unsearchable.

Like the roil and thunder of the stock market this year, the local art world has been experiencing its own kind of subprime mortgage fallout.

The beginning of last year hinted at great promise ahead --fueled by a several-year deluge of artists moving to Portland. That new talent resulted in the emergence of a vital nonprofit ecology and deepening layers of artistic…

Saturday April 5, 10 AM to Sunday April 6, 10 AM. Cosmic Monkey Comics - 5335 NE Sandy Blvd.

A 24-hour comic is exactly what it sounds: one complete comic story (24 pages) completed in 24 hours. Writing, drawing, lettering, and if you're really ambitious, coloring -- it's all gotta be done on the spot. Similar to the ever-popular National Novel Writing Month, it's an opportunity to celebrate your art form, get your creative juices flowing, and enjoy the rare opportunity to have some company working alongside you!

Respond to cosmicmonkeycomics@earthlink.net or 503-517-9050 to RSVP! Space is…

From the Daily Astorian - March 20, 2008

Russel Reier said he tried to tell investigators he knew where to find the head of Sacagawea.

The Clatsop County jail inmate said he knew where two heads from a bronze statue stolen from Fort Clatsop were, he just needed someone to listen to him.

A 5 1/2-foot statue of Sacagawea and her baby, Jean Baptiste Charboneau, was stolen from its mounting bolts at the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park site Jan. 19. The case attracted national publicity. One man has been sentenced to 50 days in jail after admitting the crime March 5.

As Reier was being moved…

A home on Northeast Columbia Boulevard has kept a concrete monument of the former president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem (1901-1963, in office 1955-1963) in it's front yard overseeing thousands of trucks and trains each day, for the past 20+ years.

Diem's amazing, corrupt, and dynamic career set the stage for the US defeat in Southeast Asia. For some Vietnamese who profited greatly in the early years of the wars may consider Diem to be an modern leader for a tiny weak nation stuck between two superpowers. For the rest of the world he was a petty dictator propped up by the French and the…

There's art in Second Life, it just took me a couple of years to realize it