Slide Show Project

Alright, so a bit late but so it goes. I spent last Thursday finishing up the piece for the 'Slide Show Project'. Here are a few of the work in progress images. I'll post some images from the event later or tomorrow. ;)

So this project has rather been in the pipe all semester, though of course everyone is just now putting things together for it. I guess that's the way things go. *chuckles*

Anyway, it started with the fact that the local university is scanning and decommissioning all of their slides, which they were then putting out on the free table. During the course of a number of conversations we decided it would be interesting to do something with all of these slides. As things progressed we ended up working with the Sculpture department in it as well, so it became a joint show between the textiles department and the sculpture department. :)

As you can see the event actually took place last Friday. ;) All things  considered the event went well. For being the end of the semester, the last day of finals.

Above the Creak Monster

V. You know it's lurking there, ready to grab any stray boots!

J. MUNCH!

V. Aaaagh! My $200 dollar boot! [dives in to retrieve the expensive snack...]

J. Do you make an even more expensive snack? How does your life compare in value to the half of a pair of $200 dollar boots?

V. Ah, OK, it took a couple of days to do the tally, and the verdict is... The boots are the most expensive part!

J. I don't know i would think that the feet are rather more irreplaceable then the boots.

V. Turns out, however, that I have magical feet that keep growing back after being chewed off. Only they always grow back in pairs, so I always have an odd number of feet. This week it's 7. I suppose I could even them out by having two chewed off at once, but that would still be odd.

J. Hahahah! Next time you should try and hand and see what happens with that. You may magically end up with an extra pair of helping hands for the trouble.

V. Ooh! Yes, then I'd have 7 feet and 4 hands, which would be a trifle odd...

J. Aye, it would be rather odd; however, it could be mighty useful as well, or they might just get in the way... I wonder if you could roll around on seven feet instead of walking. You'd probably end up going in circles and looking like a deformed clown balloon.


V. Wow! I'd almost like to try that, but people might be a little hesitant to approach me...

J. Ah but they would be so shocked and amazed by what you can do that their mouths would drop open all the way to the ground and their eyes would get big and round like dinner plates. Then you could roll up to them and go 'Boo' in a very small voice and they would fall over backwards. Thus you could approach them because they'd be in awe and unable to run away.

V. That would be quite a social advantage!

J. Not to mention always having a helping hand when you need it.

V. And helping feet, too. I would be a one-man dance team. Play two pipe organs at once.

J. You'd be a really great tap dancer and just imagine what you could do to the piano. I saw a duet one time that was two guys playing the piano at once, that was really neat.

V. Oh, yeah! Wow, I'd be like Fred Astaire, squared! Oh, and the piano... I'd be able to play all of the Schubert "piano, four hands" literature on my own... [Not sure if you know, but there's a whole genre of piano music for two people at one piano; it was popular in the days when people had pianos in their parlors and everyone knew how to play, so married couples and sweethearts often played such pieces, I think...]

J. I actually didn't know anything about that. But, I found that there was something very moving about watching two people playing together. There was something beautiful about it, even more then the dance piece that was going on--which wasn't overly inspiring.

 This conversation in it's entirety took place here and was conducted by vanilla-vanilla and myself along with a number of others that may eventually find their way here.

Furniture Sex and Fungi

V. A giant comb, and... Ooh, wait! What's that!? One ultra-rare photograph of picnic tables mating... :-) Wow, do they allow this stuff on DA?

J. I don't know. I think might have to put up a mature content warning on this one. I hadn't thought of that until you said something. Amazing, I captured that moment without seeing the obvious... I wonder how big we can blow up the image, print it and plaster it around campus. Everyone will be totally amazed! They won't know what hit them. Heheheheheh!

V. Great idea! Won't the faculty be surprised...

J. Unfortunately, I'm afraid we might have to include diagrams to that people truly understand what is going on. Other wise they just might miss the awesomeness of the moment and that would really be sad.


V. Ah, yes, must include the detailed, educational diagrams without which any discussion of other-species mating rituals is so incomplete.

J. People get so bogged down in the details that they can not truly comprehend... after all most do still firmly believe that such objects are inanimate and thus incapable of such actions. That, I know a great many people when faced with such a truth have not been able to handle it.

V. But now, with your photos and diagrams, and the video out there on the net, they'll just have to believe! It'll open a whole new world.

J. And then no one will ever believe that I managed to do anything else with my life in the future. Because all they will remember is mating pick nick tables.

V. Oh, yes! You do not want to be one of those authors/artists who do one really big thing and then everyone forgets that they ever did anything else. Like Carl Orff. J.D. Salinger. Harper Lee. Pachelbel... ;-) So, I agree. Better to bury the mating tables, and let someone "discover" it after you're gone. Then people will say, "Wow, that J did all of that and this fabulous undiscovered work, too!"

J. Of course then there is the risk that they will somehow try and name this variety of mating pick nick tables after you and that can be a rather scary thought as well.

V. ! :lmao: Oh, yeah! But that could be lovely, couldn't it? Doesn't every woman want to have a species named after her? ;-) (Hmm, OK, you have to wonder about guys who name gross little parasitic worms after their wives and stuff... I mean, a species of flower is one thing, but.)

J. "Honey, I'm home."
Kiss, kiss, "Welcome home, sweatheart. What did you do today?"
"Well... I got a surprise."
"Oh, what is it?"
"Here," Hands a photo.
"Mmmm... and what is this little wormy thing?" Tries to sound polite and interested.
"That my dear, is the new species I named after you today. Isn't it great," Pulls out a wad of papers from his pocket, "See, I have a certificate of authenticity and everything. You my lovely are looking at the new form of fungus, the Mildred. Or as I call her Milly for short."
Btw, on a side note these things are cool [link].

V. Yes! Exactly! The next frame is where she beans him with a frying pan! "Is that all I mean to you?" :crying: "Frank's wife got a new rodent named after her..."
And those fungi! Ooh, they look so incredibly ALIEN! Wow! And to think some of them are only
down the road from Santa Banana. I might be able to see some in real life.

J. Poor Bob, he just couldn't do much to please Mildred... besides it would've served her right to have a rodent named after her. Frank's wife was much to pretty to be named after a rodent but ahhh a fungi. She would make a beautiful one.
I know aren't they.

V. LOL, she would make a beautiful fungus...!

J. Fungi just have so much more class then those stinky pooping and eating little rodents.

V. LOL...!

This conversation in it's entirety took place over here, and it was conducted between vanilla-vanilla and myself.

Bob the Brownie Alien From Outer Space

V. Strange... What is it?

J. It's a little brownie house. Or perhaps it's the little alien's from outer space that just wanted to be left alone. So they came to earth and made themselves a little tiny house out in the middle of no where so that it could be left alone.

V. Very cool. Maybe you can hang around and try to get a photo of the little guys... Probably best not to poke 'em with sticks though... ;-)

J. Yeah they aren't very nice when they get mad. Their jaws elongate and then they have teeth that seem to come out of nowhere and they go ONOMNOMNOM!

V. But all those teeth do have their good points...

J. Aye true, they are very good for munching up limestone rock to get the minerals he's needs and for scaring off annoying woodpeckers that come to bother him. However, at least woodpeckers are as insistent as alien sales men are; all you have to do is show them a little teeth and they don't come back again.

V. I can see him now, baring teeth at the poor woodpeckers!

J. Oh yes, and if the woodpeckers aren't fast enough... well they are at least a mouth full. However he doesn't like the feathers because they get stuck in his teeth and it takes forever to gather each one of them up to bury. Because he can't just go around leaving mounds of feathers all over the place, people would start to wonder and being a recluse he'd rather not draw attention to himself. Besides he's much more a vegetarian most of the time--except when things piss him off and then he forgets how much he hates feathers in his teeth--but his favorite food is pond scum or river weed. It's nice an ripe.

V. Oh, I like this! I think you just about have yourself a once-upon-a-time story going here!

J. *grinz* I'm rather enjoying this. Now he just needs a name, something rather absurd but fun at the same time...

V. Yes, I'm sure you'll come up with a fun name. You're keeping track of all this, right? Maybe you have a smash hit in the making.

J. Lol yeah, keeping track of the comments. Lol not sure what to do with it yet but it's there. *chuckles*

V. Oh, good. Someday it'll all gel and you'll have something fine.

J. lol eventually the pygmy alien and the creak monster will meet and have beautiful children...

V. Oh, I can't wait to see 'em. Maybe I'll have to try drawing one. Oooh, a family tree...

J. Hahha... Would that be a pygmy creak monster? The one that fits in the little creak-lings and thus makes no place on earth truly safe from the creak monsters?

V. Yes! Pygmy creek monster!! LOL...

J. It runs around--because being part pygmy alien it can walk on land at least for a little while--trying to eat birds. Because it has decided that it like it's farther prefers bird to human; however, it's mouth is so small that it can not eat a whole bird.

The actual form of this conversation can be found here and was conducted by vanilla-vanilla, and myself.

Remember, 2010

So, the semester is mostly over now. The Textiles department in tandem with the sculpture department is doing a joint show at the end of the week. Well, this weekend I finally got down to work on the piece that I'm going to show there.

Over the course of the semester the school has been switching over to digital art images and discarded all of their slides. The Slide Show Project, us utilizing all of these discarded slides, and creating art objects that use them in some way.

I went through a fair number of project ideas, in trying to approach this project. Finally I settled with the idea of memory and the way that we remember things. The way that I remember things vs. the way that someone else will remember it and how that can change over time. The idea went with the image of a child reading a book at night under the covers.

Thus this project is made out of old bedsheets that have been sewn together to create a miss-matched window pattern across the surface. The second step is to sew a number of slides onto it. I'm going to go with the smaller sets of four and not the full pages of slides. This last stage is the one that I'm currently working on.

Teleporting and Nose Wiggling

V. The only problem with both of these concerts was the one-hour drive on either end of each concert so, all in all, it was not a very green weekend, and I feel guilty about that, so I'll probably stay around Santa Banana for a while, holding in my carbon emissions.

J. We really must perfect the teleportation device. Or strengthen our minds enough that we can do it with a Ooommm, a blink of the eye and a wiggle of our noses. ^_~

V. Yes! Teleportation! Knowing our universe, however, it would probably be more polluting than oil. Nose-wiggling, however, is probably entropically neutral, so to speak...

J. Physic pollution, everyone popping in and out here and there, falling on top of each other, exploding into each other in mid air. It would be a chaotic mess! And all that nose wiggling, man... people would start developing little twitches and itches that they couldn't control until their noses would start wiggling on their own. Then you'd have people who would start popping in and out of their houses at night while they slept because of their facial twitches. Though I suppose people popping themselves into oblivion is one way to deal with over population.


V. OMG! That really gave me a laugh. Wow, I guess people don't think about how chaotic it would be. Thanks for warning me before I hit the switch to turn on nose-wiggling in your universe!

J. *grins* I guess we'll just have to settle from some other--probably less entertaining--form of chaos.

The entirety of this conversation can be found here, and was carried on by vanilla-vanilla, and myself.