Secret Squirrel

Stop and think Design Squirrel

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 01:31:26 -0400

Oh hell, these days we are living. Broken dreams, yes? And broken promises to self. How do we get through all the shit every day, to mine the one or two joy nuggets? And how does this happen so openly and gleefully for so many people that I know?

But I’m getting way off-track. I ran into my favourite design educator this past week, an oldie but a goodie, at Emily Carr, who asked me in passing about my experience at NSCAD and asked that we meet for lunch to discuss pedagogy. Ha! Yes, that was an actual conversation that I had, amidst the gloom and doom and gentle mediocrity of my day job.

I had to think back, like really think back, to my year at NSCAD, and despite all the hateful in-the-moment life stuff that blurred the lines of my experience, I came away with a much richer education than I give credit. I think of all the writing, the introduction to an array of obscure crazy ass (mostly Japanese) designers, architects and bio-technologists, to the concept of methodology and a kind of principled way of approaching that soft, nudgeable wall between research and practice, to the time – the TIME – available to think and to be articulate and to consider new ideas without a constant to-do list. I think the time factor alone is not inconsiderable. I can never do it all, never. I can’t even even do the 2 out of 3 that you’re supposed to get: you know, pick 2, career, life, love. I always get career, and then, not even, only out of fear, my choices – and the life and love be damned.

Pedagogically, there was an openness to the NSCAD way that I don’t think many of us appreciated in the moment: looking at obvious, slow, mundane life stuff as the rich material of design. When you can look at the mundane through the lens of design without necessarily factoring in a client concern or a design brief, you’re open to the blue sky (ugh – fuck, I can’t even write this without exposing myself to banality) the way we’re all taught to be in undergrad. But you never get there in undergrad because you’re so concerned about getting a job and learning hard skills and rationalizing the shit out of every thing you do that you stop short of that proverbial blue sky. At least I did, and continue to do, being all about the rules and such. Maybe I did let go, though, a little, and I also Had Opinions. Not something that comes easily to me, meek people-pleaser that I am. We Design Squirrels harbour our acorns of Opinion until we can fully fucking launch them, and then all hell breaks loose and we are labelled Moody. Or…Edgy….or… Burnt Out.

Maybe instead we are permanently discontented, as all good creatives should be? But also busy and curious, working away on large-scale impossibly complex and richly detailed Embroidered Landscapes, on our own retro, but contemporary, but nuanced, but – also derivative – typefaces, and also, on our Canning, our commitment to Slow Foods, and…to our Opinions.

In which Design Squirrel has a day off

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 17:03:46 -0400

Blog neglect, that’s what this is, straight up. I miss you, blog, but also you represent a psychic weight for me, and then there’s this whole mix of regret and blame and guilt, and a lot of sighing and wishing for more time and for more energy and for more space…bubbles of space, of airy, stress-clearing space.

But really what’s brought me back is a look ahead to my meandering career, and to the fear that this induces, and to the particularly terrifying comment made by one dean of design during one design documentary that sort of seared into me, and made me feel irrelevant and a bit lost and a lot scared. The comment is, very simply, that to deny the presence of social media, to deny its existence and its prevalence and to ignore it and sit outside of it…is to be irresponsible. To be an irresponsible designer.

And here’s me, this old-school, alarmist fuddy-duddy, who regularly sees the largely negative social consequences of pervasive social media in the classroom – rampant disrespect, poor or non-existent social skills, higher levels of anxiety and ADD, constant social tuning, or more accurately, constant self-tuning: am I alive? am I being noticed? am I being encircled by constant monitoring and self-publishing and updating? what am I missing right now? how can I blow up Twitter? – and then, well, fuck me, I’m an extroverted introvert who needs a lot of down time, removed from external stimuli, just to make it through my busy work week. So, these two facts together: my personality and this ongoing live social experiment with some (not all) of my students, really screw me for this inevitable future.

This is a recurring DS theme, wrestling with technological supremacy, and it’s not that I’m living in a cave or anything, it’s just, I can’t seem to find a balance that works for me, that’s integrated and seamless. And these kids today – there’s no anxiety, only acceptance and early adoption.

In a positive move forward, I’m taking an intro to iPhone app class in the fall, and trying again to get into the basic microelectronics class. The dream I had earlier in the summer to write and to pitch design articles – bwah ha ha ha! A pipe dream, if ever there was one. September 2013: design residency! Mark my words, that’s the plan. I’ve got a semi-diorama, semi-embroidery meets machine glimmer going on, like a way better grad thesis than the one I recently produced, more from inside the practice than projecting loftily from my desk. And a resulting kick ass paper, yes?

For now, I have 12 active dockets at work, a terrible, largely chips-based diet, an impending move – the 5th in 3 months – a breaking body (knees, hips, shoulders, wrists), and a holiday-less next two months…maybe I’ll just sad-sack tweet. You know how much I hate relentless goodwill and happiness:-)

In which the 99 causes DS mild despair

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:27:48 -0400

Hells bells! Another week gone by and not a thing to show for it except a kitchen piled high with dishes, a disturbing dependency on Babybels (full fat version), and a pretty knife-edged hatred of sick people riding public transit with abandon. Use your elbow pit! It’s not good for anything else! I will soon be a curmudgeonly germaphobe, dreaming of my simpler days in Halifax.

I’ll keep this short and sweet, more of a placeholder than anything else: back to weekly posts next week, once I wrap my head around a new fulltime job, teaching, commuting, catching up with friends, re-inserting exercise into my life’s plan, and trying to enjoy, in small measure, my lovely summer sublet on the Drive. Back to some design stuff, too – less bitch, more stitch around here. At least for a few weeks. Maybe interspersed with camping and husband-hunting adventures.

I am dealing better with the massive amounts of change with more grace than I would have imagined for myself. That is not one of those sneaky, vile backhanded self-compliments, btw, but an honest kind of awe given my weak constitution and overall lonely, crybaby nature. Somebody at work told me there’s something in the water, and I think that might be true.

Back soon with *actual* content.

On a cheerier note...

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:01:53 -0400

Ooh, am loving teaching right now! In class, we’re looking at biological and manmade systems as a means of understanding underlying geometries, patterns and grids that can be extended and abstracted into 3D models. The research portion is this week, the big install the end of next: I’ll ask my class for permission first, but will hopefully post some of the final pieces. If this project is successful, thinking about ways of extending it into something collaborative and ongoing with Vancouver artists and designers. I would love to curate a show at the intersection of design and science: not a new idea at all, but could be fresh with the right curatorial bent. Haven’t completely given up on my plans to write a beginner design article of some kind…but haven’t wrapped my head around the approach just yet. Maybe this could be the direction: to write something to accompany the show. My capacity each day, however, seems truly limited, especially with my heavy tv demands.

On that note: I could not love NY Mag’s Vulture blog any more! I read practically every article posted about tv: there’s a great series about the ongoing polarization around Girls, and just recently, specifically in defense of the portrayal of sex on Girls, which is pretty much my favourite part. Total train wreck sex: you can’t look away from the horror of watching Adam treat Lena Dunham’s character like a fleshy mass with holes for his own pleasure.

Design Squirrel has it all...and still wants more

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:47:11 -0400

When did I get so fucking crusty? Jesus. I mean, I know that this is not a new thing for me, the pessimism, but it’s really ballooned into something huge and unfathomable. I chalk up my poor attitude to post-graduation depression and the Death of Dreams. Like, I mean, I still have dreams, but I’ve pushed them aside momentarily in order to get on with those basic needs things. Full time job, check. Ongoing teaching career, check. Newly acquired and sweetly furnished summer sublet, check. Access to fluffy and delicious gelato, check. Reasonable commute to work, check. 2-block access to yoga, check. View of mountains, check.

At convocation Sunday, the lovely young woman who won the coveted design award (for undergrads only or else I totally would have crushed her) is on her way to a 10-week internship at Penguin in New York. I felt jealous rage, and also thought back to all the times I played it safe in undergrad: I never even applied to go on exchange. Everything feels unreachable for me right now, and all I’m responding to is the immediacy and relative knowns of Adult Responsibility.

LC and I have master plans for a cross-Canada mail project once she’s settled back in TO and me back in Van. I want to write a kind of binding Travelling Pants-type manifesto with LC in order to put into the universe our commitment to making art together and applying for grants and residencies that take us out and about in the world. We both feel like we’re #2 waiting in the wings, some other designer/artist genius always better at the doing than us. For me, it’s a confidence thing, and this damn moodiness that plagues me. LC doesn’t have that – she is optimistic and energetic, and good for me.

Dying to get out of Halifax. Not because I hate it, because I don’t, but because it feels like a stall right now, like a kind of groundhog day situation, where I sit and stew and worry and act hermit-like. But, am determined to enjoy my last 9 days eating my way through the city, as one should always do: cinnamon pretzels, coconut smoothies, korean tacos, salami heros, prosciutto and provolone croissants…and tonnes of (farmed!) steelhead trout, which I love for its delicious oily fishiness. And Garrison Red, the only local beer that I’ve come to appreciate.

Last week’s salami and pepperoni hero below, from Salvatore’s in the Hydrostone.

In which Design Squirrel doesn't give a damn about the polar bears

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:42:08 -0400

I’m going through a post-grad anti-design phase. Not the doing, just the keeping up with, the constant checking of blogs and reading of Knowledge. Oh God how I hate this time in our evolution. Superstardom or else.

Um, on that cheery note! I got my thesis books in the mail yesterday. Three go to NSCAD, one I got for myself. I’d never printed with Blurb before – I have to say, other than the exquisite carbon footprint that I have helped to generate, with a trajectory (via FedEx tracking), as diverse and cryptic as Seattle > Memphis > Mirabel > Goffs (NS) > Halifax – great service and good quality for a low-run digital book. Colours are darker, as often happens, so would compensate even more than I did next time, but, overall, I’m really happy. And it’s great to have a real, live book documenting my year, though of course I reject it on principle, being too design lite. But…still. It’s something, it’s done, here’s to a future in which I rise to the occasion and promise that the MDes *delivers*.

Moving this week, ick and double ick. Tried to stay away from the really harsh chemicals until I had a crazy manic cleaning episode last night, failing to scrub free several months worth of soap scum from my bathtub, and ending in a ragey over-purchase of a bleach-based “Scrubbing bubbles” and a poison sign-laden oven cleaner. I feel a great deal of self-hatred and shame today, but also, as I have never seen my bathtub so shiny or so sterilized before, a conflicting situational pride in my homemaking achievements.

I have some dreams for the summer: some guerrilla gardening (try getting a plot in a community garden in Vancouver! Hahahaha! Kind of like the myth of the co-op. Man, Vancouver’s for chumps: like, wtf, this mirage of leftist bullshit. Make it work, for real, City); um, some baby nurturing, some nerdy micro-electronics projects, perhaps like a small robot or sensing wall or something; um, a boyfriend…and just a lot of time drinking good coffee. Halifax, I love you a little more than I did this time last year, but for the love of God, make a f’ing double shot Americano in a SMALL cup.

Below is the link to the full thesis text on Issuu. For all that free time that is endless and boundless. More of a flipper than a readthrough. Maybe don’t make fun of the writing…not the best. I have many thoughts about writing a design thesis, not the least of which is the left brain/right brain conflict of interests. I can’t be creative AND organized, for example. I can’t write well AND make design models.

So there. Designing for Experience on Issuu.

In which Design Squirrel recreates her former life

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:22:39 -0400

Broken City Lab are in Halifax tonight, at the opening for their month-long show at a local gallery called Eyelevel. They’re a super group from Windsor who basically do what I was looking into for my thesis, only much better and with organization and with some growing fame. This might not be entirely true: they’re actually a lot more like a Canadian Candy Chang (than me), and I almost went to the opening expressly to grill them about how much of their ideas they had borrowed from Candy Chang, but then I realized how petulant and defensive I would sound, and how much those thoughts stem purely from end of thesis butterflies and future fears and overall jealousies. Of people who have their shit together.

Anyway, I will go to their show, I just couldn’t handle the opening. Which is dumb of me – imagine, I could have made some sweet contacts, maybe drummed up a residency? Really dumb. But who knows, perhaps I will have the confidence to contact them later in the summer about a Windsor/Van collaboration. I’m into pitching, I’m all about the pitching, I’m just fearful of the talking and the convincing and the nitty gritty detail bits. And the rejection. I want to pitch to Design Observer but I fear that I might be laughed right out of their email pile, having never published before. Start smaller, right? Or maybe not…I’ve had the opportunity lately to watch two of my male colleagues maneuver through their lives, and I have to say, there’s very little hesitation or internal turmoil or self-doubt: steamrolling is the method, and confidence the methodology.

I had all these ideas of moving to Berlin/Austin/San Francisco immediately upon graduation, as one does the summer before actual decisions need to be made, but I am now returning to Vancouver in 2 months time, to piece together a new-ish but old-ish life in the city that I love. Well, love/hate maybe. I’m scared about going home and falling back into a routine that exactly mimics the faulty one from before. My thesis advisor asked me the other day what I planned to do with my masters research, as in, what next, and of course I hadn’t considered a what’s next, just a done and done. So, whatever sort of career path I fall into, I have to keep one foot in the research door. There can be so much more depth and richness to any design project – but I still haven’t found a way to marry the rigor that I can bring to an academic setting into the real design arena, with a real client. Time and money, time and money.

This is when I move to advertising, yes? Then the money part is taken care of, the time part stolen from me, but the work, maybe closer to pure ideas…maybe?

My one Vancouver photo: cherry blossom snow! From Easter, below: preparing for an Easter egg hunt, and a blustery day spent at various coves south of a beautiful part of Halifax called Jollimore (on the Dingle).

In which Design Squirrel finally gets creative

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:33:28 -0400

Ooh, I am off to Vancouver next week for a UBC graduate symposium called The Unseen. I’m giving a paper, the writing and worrying over of which have nearly killed me, but am thrilled to get some academic creds to go along with my very subtle, but highly enviable, street cred. Last week’s brief but crippling major bummer mood has this week been replaced with October levels of work ethic! Ha! Also, it was 27 degrees in Halifax today, a cruel, cruel hint of summer to come: I enjoyed the outdoors for approximately 23 minutes, before crawling back to my lair, populated by coffee products, three kinds of chocolate snacks, super foods including but not limited to almonds and avocado, fluffy pillows and brand new markers. Markers! Ha! Man, I’m really getting back into hand drawing and collage-y things. Thank God – I thought those days were over. Am also working my way through a long overdue Sketch-up tutorial and slowly, so slowly as to be almost unobservable, creating a 10-second rotoscoping animation. The animation is the last piece of design that I’ll complete for my thesis work as a means of showing a gestalt visual of more wordy and nerdy thesis stuff.

Here is an excerpt from my paper. It is meant to lure you to my talk, if you happen to be a ‘Couv resident and a big ol’ lover of the liminal city. I am psyched to be paired in my session with a UBC grad student talking about Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work I reference about a trillion times in my thesis.

In 1901, theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater painted a series of “thought-forms”, visual and symbolic interpretations of emotional vibrations (Satz, 2011-12, 35). The paintings represent emotional states as specific as “hateful jealousy”, “sympathy and love for all”, and “vague intellectual pleasure” (2011-12). One compelling aspect to this line of research is the early exploration of synaesthesia and the aesthetic connections among cognition, emotional states and stimuli, attempts to “… externalize the inner world of the mind”(35). Kandinsky, in his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, advocated for the sensory experience of painting to capture or express the “spiritual impact of music’ (Forde, 2005, 12). He believed that music and rhythm captured a purity that could only be mimicked by other artforms. In his seminal book on sound theory, The Tuning of the World, Murray Schafer (1977) noted that, as early as the ‘60s, the distinction between signal and noise became murkier, as elements of feedback, looping, scratch and other “noise” techniques were recorded and worked into contemporary music. Cognitive, aesthetic and sensory mixing has a long history in visual culture: the city’s void and hidden spaces feed back so easily into this extant mixing, in that the spaces that are the least regarded come at us from a vantage point of a mixed pedigree of historical narrative, broken dreams, economic downfall (or windfall), nostalgic associations, wishes, resentments, and unlocked potential.

And that’s just a small but salient portion! Urban mixing, yo! The designer as trickster! If I can figure out how, I may post up the tiny test version of the animation – but until then, below, what it looks like so far if all the frames are squished together.

Miss you big time, Vancouver. Philips Blue Buck and spicy tuna cones: watch out, I’m gunning for you.

In which Design Squirrel revisits the uncertainty principle

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:00:29 -0400

I took metta meditation classes many moons ago – in January 2008, on the heels of a trip to Southeast Asia. I came back from that trip, maybe more enlightened, maybe braver, maybe more open to new things? But book-ended by a near miss crippling food poisoning incident, and the sudden feeling that I was being screwed over at every turn for being white, for being – in a universe other than my own Vancouver fuck-upedness – privileged. I also had this post-trip energy that made me go out and sign up for classes: Indian Head Massage, metta meditation…you know, those Eastern influences. In metta meditation, a branch of vipassana, you learn to send out goodwill and love to the people in your life – the ones you like, the ones you hate, the ones you don’t even know, and then, finally, to yourself. I loved my teacher – I could just sit and listen to her forever, and she lived and breathed the kind of measured, but grounded, peacefulness, that you try to achieve through a longterm meditation practice. And so I did that for awhile, 20 minutes a day, then a little longer, then a weekend sitting and walking session, and then…rage, followed by complete disavowal of all vipassana practice and a return to my pre-trip crusty, bitter self.

The other thing that meditation should bring you is an acceptance, and a concerted effort to relinquish all attachment: attachment to things, attachment to people, attachment to outcomes. I have met, in my recent life, dedicated practitioners who have this gift of acceptance, and who do live in the present, with chaos all around, and nay a negative thought. They’re not dreamers, or people that you necessarily want to punch in the face, you know, from Saltspring, or thereabouts: no – they are, in a word, happy.

I’m a fence sitter about most things, and especially about my love/hate attraction to Westernized eastern spirituality. I’ll be the first, and the loudest, chanting “longtime sun” at a really great kundalini class, but I’ll also be the first and the loudest, to despair and complain and be jealous of others’ successes. I’m at this difficult time right now at school, nearing the end, but terrified of the future, unable to sit and let the fates decide. I don’t want to return to my previous life, which was all work and no play, all uncertainty and no longterm planning, all wishing and hoping without the payoff. Pema Chodron wrote a super series of lectures about living with uncertainty, and it’s a book I return to often: she writes for and about the modern, Westernized Buddhist, whose ego is at once so massive and so fragile, and whose spectrum of success is so wildly skewed.

So, in my fence-sitting tradition, I cling to my yoga and to my patched-together meditation practice when I really need it, which is now. If I can do just one awesome thing in my own life, it will be to accept uncertainty and to just be cool.

The second and third awesome things will be: to have some fucking follow-through AND to be a micro electronics nerd. Stay tuned.

Hahahaha! Design Squirrel gets mini-famous

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:47:00 -0500

LC and I are staging a (hopefully) awesome fake pop-up shop Monday night at NSCAD, as part of our studio requirements. We inadvertently caught some press this week, with a very lovely shout-out in The Coast (Halifax’s Georgia Straight), in a section called Art Attack! The article is below (and should be posted online on Monday, on the Art Attack blog). Will follow up post-show with pics and comments and sighs of relief! Nerves are kicking in, the old insomnia’s back, but perhaps short-lived this time? Here’s to future LC/CH collaborations.

ps on the Coast website!
http://www.thecoast.ca/ArtAttack/archives/2012/02/29/la-belle-poubelle-gets-trashed

In which Design Squirrel dons a disguise

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:57:00 -0500

And alter ego! So the one project that I am actually 100% stoked about this semester is an upcoming installation/performance with my main girl, LeeAndra Cianci. We were asked to come up with a modern take on a Situationist détournement (a reference, incidentally, that comes in every single gd book about architecture, urban planning, or human geography, leading me to a meta-thesis about the nature of shared knowledge, as in, if we are all always drawing from this same pool of knowledge, are we not just constantly recycling content in some heinous…blah di blah…debate inserted here). Anyhoo, Lee and I decided to do a send-up of a pop-up store, the likes of which Douglas Coupland WISHES he’d done for Roots last year…that’s right, throwdown, British Properties. We are doing pop-up garbage dump, except fancy-like, all white and Kraft boxes and with a swirly-twirly custom stamp detail to boot. I won’t say too much more till the day itself, because of my increasing sensitivity to conspiracy theories and internet tracking and just being watched in general – eee – but let’s just say: awesome pants all-around. It’s interesting, too, to have to engage in some kind of actual social media campaign. It’s not like we’re actually going nuts, but it’s the first time I’ve had to think about content across Twitter, Tumblr (a separate, dedicated Tumblr), and Facebook, and do a kind of guerrilla QR code thing, too. I’m old and crusty and hate all this WORK: but do love the secret surprise of a new follower or an actual, honest-to-god tweet that isn’t a garbage (ha!) link from some creepy robot generator.

Please follow us on the Twitter! @bellepoubelle_

Unlike my own design squirrel Twitter, which I am hopeless at maintaining because I so often lose the thread/point of the whole business, this Twitter is actually easier to maintain because it feels purposeful and specific.

The Big Night: Monday, March 5, at NSCAD’s Dawson Print shop, 5:30pm. Do come if you are a local.

Our wordmark below as a stamp!

In which Design Squirrel becomes addicted to Bejeweled

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:49:20 -0500

It’s that time again…yet another week off at NSCAD, though this time officially sanctioned in the form of Reading Week. This happened to me in the summer, over our very first break in June: I played Plants vs Zombies for like 2 days straight, until I killed it. It turns out that I am very skilled at Diamond Mine, with a top score (so far) of 283,000. And several badges, just saying.

Also, I am crazy bored. It’s been another strange and lonely week at school, plugging away each day in the studio, without a soul to be seen or spoken to. Whatever fantasies I had about grad school being this great, personhood-expanding, collaborative joining of the minds: shot to shit months ago, but still a shock to me, still a huge and enduring disappointment. And I always hear this kind of pandering from my not-lonely friends, something along the lines of, Oh, but you’re so FREE, you’re so independent, you can do anything…but no, that’s not true. I feel really ready to move on from the solo journey, it’s not so freeing anymore. My own mind left to its own devices is crazy oppressive and cruel, barbed and unforgiving. I want to have a ball and chain. I want to fight and compromise and yell at someone over mundane things like toilet paper. And ride bikes to eat burgers – the good stuff.

Maybe in good news is that I made some good progress this week on thesis, and on preparing for my UBC talk…it feels really good to be getting into specifics, to be getting into some new territories that possibly I am creating for the first time. I can’t stand to look at books anymore, or the internets…everywhere around me there are better and bigger and smarter ideas. Hence the addiction to Bejeweled, which is like putting myself into an active coma state. I also have a couple of teaching gigs lined up for the summer, which help to ease the pain of upcoming taxes, the big move back west, and future planification. There’s a lot of unrest in the studio these days, what’s next, what’s next? where did you apply? oh, you’re not going BACK, are you? Once again, why can’t we just all get along?

Some much better pics of new models below…and a random wintry pic from late January! And another post to follow tomorrow, a much cheerier one about my upcoming art performance debut with LC!

ps I bought those furry tacks a while back, just itching to use them and they ended up working really well in my “pit kit” model, where you can start with a basic sets of modular forms and install your own street furniture using existing bits of crumbling infrastructure in urban voids. Over time, the furniture ages, and might become moss-covered, as with this lovely stool arrangement.

Design squirrel seeks purity, and decides to chuck design for art

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:06:31 -0500

So here’s a fun game: I am not myself very pith-worthy – you wouldn’t necessarily find a reason to integrate Carley quotes into a dinner conversation, except, unless, you were engaged in a lifelong conversation about television with me and found me to be both delightful and insightful on that particular topic…but say, just regular insights, and just regular pith: a dirth. So the game is this: I looked back over my notes from this past week, from my sketchbook mostly, and I noticed just what incredibly quotable moments I lived through. Here, as a kind of manifesto, my week:

MY EPIPHANY BLAZED OUTWARD

THE PARADE BREAKS THE TABOO OF THE CITY.

SOHO WILL BE NORMALIZED AT 5:01 PM

PANTS MAN TO EXPAND AT THE REAR

RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH

DYSLEXIC SUDOKU

SHE STICKS OUT AMONG HER BOORISH AMERICAN NEIGHBOURS LIKE A UNICORN THAT HAS WANDERED INTO THE COW YARD.

AN ARK KIT PUNCTURE, ANARCHY TORTURE, AN ARCTIC LECTURE, AN ORCHID TEXTURE, AN ART COLLECTOR…

That last one’s been quoted and passed about the bloggy blogosphere a million times, but it’s just from such a compelling artist/architect that I gave myself over to the impulse. Gordon Matta-Clark, super cool dude who died way before his time – here, from Wikipedia:

Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his “building cuts.”

Matta-Clark also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture). He demonstrates that the theory of entropy applies to language as well as to the physical world, and that language is not a neutral tool but a carrier for society’s values and a vehicle for ideology.

I’m using his Fake Estates project as part of my thesis contextual review: there’s a great article on the Cabinet website for any fellow nerds who want to follow up. Also, capital C Culture for Carley: Thursday night one of my longtime heroes, Mierle Ukeles, gave a talk at NSCAD, followed up by La La La Human Steps last night (kinda mediocre: technically brilliant, but cold and installation-y, not heart-stopping like Salt so many years ago). The first three quotes above are from Ukeles’ talk: she’s a doer, that one. The sheer scope of her work, and her incredible capacity to recruit powerful narratives from ordinary people, are truly inspiring. She got me started on my own obsession with Fresh Kills in New York, and on her entire body of work around maintenance as art. And to hear her speak! It was like a master class in pacing, in generosity, in humour, and in the subtle insertion of polemic as conversation. I was too chickenshit to talk to her in person, but she was very much available and open to everyone who approached her. Adbusters! You did one thing right by me: Mierle!

In which Design Squirrel discovers that she is not the sharpest tool in the shed

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:40:00 -0500

So…today…just reading some stuff, as one does in the modern world, when I thought to myself, just what in the hell does GOP stand for, anyway? There is no R in GOP, there is no way to make some kind of six degrees of linguistic translation from GOP to RNC…right, right? So I did have to look it up (this after reading a couple of great scathing Republican leadership campaign snafus), and I know you’re all with me, and you were there several years or decades ago…being politically savvy and well-read yourselves: GOP= Good Old Party. My education has failed me.

And then, just now, while randomly perusing a shiny new library book called software studies, which rivets with every page, I came across another acronym (sort of acronym): codec. Here we are again, with a term that I’ve heard for years without truly absorbing or questioning its root: codec = code decoder (an MPEG, for example, is a codec). Yes! So elegant, so now, so much like what you might name your second kid, the weird one with the cowlick: and this is our second born, Codec Bartholomew. Please DO NOT call him Cody – he HATES that.

Been looking around lately, poking at the four corners of my life, and realizing quite shockingly just how little I know, how few skills I’ve developed, how small my world is. Clearly that’s a total drag to hear and to read, but it’s about something bigger, about my life and calling as a generalist. We are lowly beings, we generalists, never ever sought after, never ever described in breathless, wordy job postings for wunderkinds, never the shiny award-winner, or the best-selling author/marathon runner/TV moralist. No – we like to know just a little about everything, and everything in moderation, for example, this article called “Glitch” in software studies, followed up by a nice hot chocolate and a little Southland, chased down before bed with a little light stretching and one or two ukulele chords (but not especially good ones).

It is a simple life, and a happy one – well, no, that’s actually total bullshit – BUT, in thinking about what I need to think a certain way, to think and to write and to make stuff, the scale seems to be tipping more and more toward a 25:75 sort of balance, in which I spend that 25% of my time extending myself in the ways that I’ve always wanted to when I think about design, and then that other % of my time decompressing and making sense of an increasingly difficult and disconnected daily life. This is not a balance I advocate or desire in any way, but it’s a reality right now. And all this fucking screen time – this is the exhausting part. I want to use my body, to extend and to feel and to stretch as a haptic connection to work, not as this precious gift I give to myself twice a week. Thesis time is the best time: I’m building this imaginary world for myself that does aim to connect the possibility of play and serendipity into everyday life without the tedium and relentless striving of most designed spaces.

So…um…nowhere closer to any big answers or any personal goals, but this IS the year that I meet and marry my husband. Ha! Watch out, Vancouver: there’s nothing worse than a generalist on the prowl…

I am firm, however, on one skill: my nose for second hand smoke seeping into my apartment, even in minutely unmeasurable ppi quantities, is top-notch. A “nez”, if you will.

More models coming! With much better pics. Oh, AND: learned a little modern Good Manners today – it’s not okay to say “No problem” as a follow-up to a thank you (as this response may be perceived as entirely ego-driven as opposed to courteous and polite). “You’re welcome” or “My pleasure” are de rigueur! I write this because I OFTEN say “No problem” and now I feel like an ass, and, also, karmically endangered.

Design squirrel recreates the wheel and feels annoyed

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:45:46 -0500

Goddammit. You know, Japanese designers, you really piss me off, with your advanced notions of design and Shinto and gentle, elegant gestures. And also, stop stealing my master ideas.

Last week, I had this kind of unformed idea that I rationalized out into a simple paper model, meant to work out something about malleable topographies. I was thinking, what if, through some collective agency, we could actually start to morph and change our physical environments – not the buildings or the manmade infrastructure, but the existing landscape? Not concrete form changes, as in a swimming pool manifested from a hillside, but maybe more subtle changes to create ledges for sitting, or blob-like crests that blossom out and take over the road, or creep up the side of heinous condo developments. Sweet and salty, you know?

So here I was, all thrilled with the discovery of my own genius, when I happened to read Design Observer today, today of all days – and found the following:

Floating cities. Capsule towers. Buildings that mutate. A reimagination of the physical landscape. Such were the promises of the Metabolists, the Japanese avant-gardists who emerged as a phenomenon in 1960 and reached their apogee a decade later as cultural heroes. They are back again today, and in all their modular glory… – Mark Lamster

I read further, and I guess it is soothing to note that the Metabolists were keenly interested in modular architecture, and not so much in my more (poetic? naive?) notion of a modular physical landscape. And…well, Archigram were interested in similar ideas, during the same timeframe, with their Instant and Walking City design proposals. But still…the more I research, the more I realize quite profoundly that I’m adding next to nothing to the body of design knowledge.

I’m going to keep pushing on, and see where the malleability idea leads: in the meantime, below, some recent 3D models. These are TERRIBLE photos, I know: bad lighting, my crappy point and shoot, rushed, and something strange and grainy going on – but enough for now. These are some of the visuals that go along with my thesis direction on pedestrian studies: connecting sound, tuning and social patterning (i.e. commuting) to visual outcomes in the cityscape. The key idea is the co-creation of biographical traces and and the capturing of rhythms that change and grow and dissolve in real time, resulting in flashes of change and delight and surprise in pursuit of the everyday. And instead of something like Nuit Blanche, which essentially does the same thing but in one moment, I’m proposing an integrated system that works with existing void and derelict spaces in the city.

I built models of two real places in Halifax: a short stretch of Barrington Street (with the funny grey cutouts) and a derelict (but still used) parking lot in the North End, behind Propeller Brewery. They look way better in person:-) Do not judge. I learned a lot about scale, and using really simple visuals to get across otherwise intangible ideas. More to come!

The moire patterns in the last photo are created collectively from pedestrians walking along the same route: the resulting patterns can then be captured and projected into the streetscape to alter or blot out a derelict or transitional space.

Design Squirrel hoards for the winter

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:50:55 -0500

Think back to the last time somebody said “content” to you, as in “the content of the piece.” One may speak of “designing a program” without having to come right out and say “arranging the content.” This word, like “program,” “product,” “audience,” says less about the phenomenon to which it refers than it does about a vast distance between the speaker and what he or she is naming. Meanwhile, the tiny gap between content and nontent approaches zero. — Carl Skelton, Cabinet Issue 4, Fall 2001

Synchronicity once again: I like this last idea here, the infinitesimally small distance between content and “nontent”. In our studio class, we’re looking at détournement and the Situationist International/Guy Debord, etc., and at the concept stage of our very own individual détournements. I had a discussion in class with my instructor about designing a book of contentless content – an idea that he had already begun in his own practice. The thing with being in MDes is that you find yourself constantly questioning the what: there are so many chances to slip down the rabbit hole to nontent blather. You can easily, and with dedication, research an entire topic and be well-versed on that topic, and then write about that topic, summarizing other great thinkers, only to be caught out at the end, when someone, or some small voice inside, thinks to ask you just what the fuck it is that you speak about with such authority. “Place, transgression, and the practice of resistance, duh”, you might answer, and 1 million other graduate students in the fine or liberal arts will nod their heads in solidarity. And then you’re asked to visualize this thing that you know so much about…and that’s about when the gleaners (the good shit) and the reapers (the bat shit?) show their true colours.

So, all this to say that I’m still very much finding my place on the bat shit spectrum. I made a model for last week’s thesis class, and it helped, this solid visualization of fuzzy ideas. But now I have to go past that, do more, do better, for this week’s class, and I am stuckity stuck stuck. And, ghost of junior jobs past – Adbusters comes up, like, all the time now, what with the culture jamminess of this latest studio assignment. Are we not over culture jamming? Can we not move forward? I would love to create some weird, weird, Negativland tribute video, but I don’t know how to sync up a family of suit-wearing cats with the Great Speeches of Our Time. Dammit! I so hate it when my crappy technical skills bite me in the ass.

I’m staying inside these days, carb-loading for my few ventures out, where the brisk -10 degree days rob me of my skin’s lush moisture and cause tears to stream down my face…though I did, on one such day, discover, to my delight, a chocolate/almond danish that, for ONCE, meets all my requirements for pastry deliciousness, including those for size (just larger than my fist, but not monstrously huge), ratio of flaky, buttery pastry to tasty, decadent filling (approx 1:1.5), and cost (under $2, a bargain in these hard times). Halifax is, YIKES, growing on me, though perhaps not quite enough to create a full-on coup situation.

In the words of that great statesman, Cicero, One should eat to live, not live to eat. Or, wait…that’s not right. That guy clearly spent way too much time fighting wars and not nearly enough time seeking out the perfect Danish. Live to eat!

Design Squirrel meets the apocalypse with grace

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:13:00 -0500

Blah-di-blah, it’s the New Year. I have a terrible, terrible birthday coming up in six weeks, one that will formally mark me as being in my late thirties. I am homeless, jobless, and newborn-babyless…sigh. I came back from my summer break with infinite amounts of energy and promise, envisioning this kind of seamless academic life /social life / future opportunity slow-motion mash-up, in which I dabbled a bit in thesis production, dashed off a few brilliant freelance projects, became the epicentre of my Halifax world, and called up jpringier in Berlin and asked for a job – and they were, like, why haven’t you called us before? Now back from my winter break in Alberta, I’m feeling a dark force at my back, something more mercurial creeping from within. Why is it so hard to be happy and ambitious?

Okay, so, backing up to the reason that I’m here, this thesis business, back in the fall, when I was still looking very deeply into boredom as the root of certain kinds of behaviors, I was trying out all kinds of search terms for my lit review, and again and again typed in “Optimism”. There’s a book I keep coming back to, wishing and hoping that it will finally be available, called, appropriately, “Cruel Optimism”. The contents description is kind of hilarious, like possibly a rough outline of a breezily postmodern Dickinson poem (see below).

I am very much affected by this constant search for a very North American brand of happiness, a can-do spirit laced with hope and gratitude and large, doe-like eyes. I do not have this ability to be effortlessly happy, to snap myself out of moods, to see the hilarity and precious memory potential in all situations. There’s something very oppressive about this – and I have one friend in particular who constantly pushes me toward “cheering up” – and I spent my entire Christmas holiday thinking about where I stood on the whole spectrum of optimism. Slow death by lateral agency…I think that’s me. Ultimately, I’m bored and antsy by a constant state of imposed relaxation.

Below, from that special list of topics that librarians render – a sort of deeply persuasive skill, no? – for the book Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011).

Contents: Introduction. affect in the present — Cruel optimism — Intuitionists: history and the affective event — Slow death (obesity, sovereignty, lateral agency) — Two girls, fat and thin — Nearly utopian, nearly normal: post-Fordist affect in La Promesse and Rosetta — After the good life, an impasse: time out, human resources, and the precarious present — On the desire for the political.

Okay, right? How good is that one spartan line, within which lies so much content? Two girls, fat and thin. And then, another: Nearly utopian, nearly normal. WHAT? That sounds like a line that you keep in your back pocket, for awkward engagements with Heads of State: it basically covers a range of neoliberal arguments. I swear, I want to publish a condensed version of my own burgeoning thesis, in this very format, as a beautifully elliptical poem.

Now, let’s compare and contrast with this gem, from a self-help-y book about Optimism:

Contents: The Optimism Advantage: 50 Simple Truths to Transform Your Attitudes and Actions into Results; Contents; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Trade Being Your Own Worst Enemy to Become Your Own Best Supporter; Chapter 2: Deal with the Hand You’re Dealt; Chapter 3: Your Choice: Victim or Resilient Survivor; Chapter 4: The Optimistic Power of Purpose; Chapter 5: Optimists Update Their Gifts into Recyclable Assets; Chapter 6: Your Health Habits Impact Your Attitude; Chapter 7: Optimists Embrace Action; Chapter 8: Optimists Dispute Catastrophic Thoughts; Chapter 9: Optimists Give Thanks for Gratitude; Chapter 10: Optimists Provide Constructive Self-CriticismChapter 11: Managing Your Own Motivation Means Catching Yourself Being Effective; Chapter 12: Simple Pleasures: The Optimist’s Wild Card; Chapter 13: Humor Is the Joker in the Hand of Life; Chapter 14: Build an Optimistic Network that Works; Chapter 15: How to Become Optimistic in Life … By Really Trying;

I try every day to catch myself being effective. Ha!

Fuck…I’m a judger and an observer. I walk the earth with one foot in the past and one foot dangling precariously in the future. I am so rarely content with the solid reality of today. In my defense, I do have the spirit of the new year, truly, and an old dash of my quasi-hippie/spiritual west coastie self pushing through: yoga, Greens, walnut oil, quinoa, Shambala Centre. You can’t stop the train. My body is my temple, it just happens to be built on a crumbling core of sharp jabs and vengeful thoughts.

To 2012, and to the apocalypse, in whatever form it may take. And to hastening back to my beautiful Vancouver life.

Amanda Church, girl wonder

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:42:31 -0500

So, I thought it might be a refreshing change to stop with the internal dialogue and switch things up for the next few posts. I will now be featuring the Work of Friends that I admire. My friend Amanda, a very cool, very wild, very off-grid gal who lives mostly in the Kootenays, in the Slocan Valley, but who has, on a well-intentioned whim, travelled to Montreal for a few months, makes beautiful tile paintings, with really distinctive and compelling elongated figures. She’s making tonnes of them and installing them in and around Montreal, as lovely surprise guerrilla art gifts to passersby. She’s a real gem in person, too – completely loving and unjaded, up for anything, totally into communal living and openness.

Below, some of her work (all from the last two months) – mounted in secret locations in Montreal. Coming soon (I saw a recent preview): papier maché wolf pack!

Design Squirrel decides to marry Deerhunter

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:35:22 -0500

Well, no big surprise there. Who doesn’t Design Squirrel want to marry?

Ha ha…anywho, okay, I have been obsessing over “Revival” all day, and I have to say, it’s really taken me to that next place as I write and labor over the goddamn methods and methodologies section of my thesis draft. Like, that next place where a beautiful, talented boy sits at the island of my dream kitchen and plays and sings Revival to me on my equally beautiful, though shamefully underused, ukulele, while also eating tiny, pastel-coloured French macaroons (which I have lovingly made).

I have also been obsessing about a particular scene from the movie version of Wonder Boys, which I have embedded below. Okay, so, Michael Chabon – how much do we all love The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay? How hot is that one sex scene? Ooh…I think that Michael Chabon single-handedly turned me on to contemporary US fiction. I swear to God, for so many years, I was this totally unbearable CanLit snob – which, incidentally, roughly matches up with the worst years of my 20s depression. You know why? Because fucking CanLit is peppered, nay, liberally doused, with a kind of landscape of yearning, bleak harsh wintry times, unspoken words, prairie pastoral/German religious repression, etc. etc. Okay, so back to Wonder Boys: remember pre-Spiderman Tobey Maguire, all soft and squishy and unformed, with that particular timbre to his voice and that loveable Gothic loser persona? Ooh…and then, and then, this scene, with that equally loveable (but still drunk in the year 2000), Robert Downey Jr, in which he recites a partial list of tragic Hollywood suicides?

I would like to marry Deerhunter and pre-Spiderman Tobey Maguire.

Wonder Boys clip – my fave, “Suicide Savant”.

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:33:53 -0500

Wonder Boys clip – my fave, “Suicide Savant”.

Secret Squirrel

Stop and think Design Squirrel

In which Design Squirrel has a day off

In which the 99 causes DS mild despair

On a cheerier note...

Design Squirrel has it all...and still wants more

In which Design Squirrel doesn't give a damn about the polar bears

In which Design Squirrel recreates her former life

In which Design Squirrel finally gets *creative*

In which Design Squirrel revisits the uncertainty principle

Hahahaha! Design Squirrel gets mini-famous

In which Design Squirrel dons a disguise

In which Design Squirrel becomes addicted to Bejeweled

Design squirrel seeks purity, and decides to chuck design for art

In which Design Squirrel discovers that she is not the sharpest tool in the shed

Design squirrel recreates the wheel and feels annoyed

Design Squirrel hoards for the winter

Design Squirrel meets the apocalypse with grace

Amanda Church, girl wonder

Design Squirrel decides to marry Deerhunter

Wonder Boys clip – my fave, “Suicide Savant”.

In which Design Squirrel finally gets creative