This week was an unproductive one due to the flu. I spent Thursday, Friday, and most of the weekend in bed with a fever. Despite this I have a couple ideas of things to work on… videos, drawings, objects.

How many of them will actually get made, I don’t know.

Time Log: 6 hrs.

My show is going to be hosted by Atelier Mankouche at their office on Felch St. They’ve got a very nice space and I’m pleased that they’re helping me out.

I’m realizing that in order to keep myself going I need to take an inventory of what I’ve done so far and start to figure out what I’d like to have in my show. So, I think a portion of this week is going to be dedicated to beginning that process and printing things that haven’t yet been printed.

Things are hanging from the ceiling, I still don’t have pictures… maybe tomorrow night I’ll haul my camera stuff to studio and do it.  I’m considering what I want the purpose of the space to be and thinking also about the notion that an image can be a registration of activity.  I think that I need to really inhabit the shifted space in some way and since it’s a studio space it probably should have work made in it.  So, I’m thinking about making some drawings on the desk in different orientations (i.e. hanging desk, desk on wall, desk upside down) and seeing what comes of it.  A registration of disorientation.

For more formal documentation of the activity… architectural plan, elevation, section.

Also, maybe I’ll make some furniture sculptures to deal with the previously mentioned low end of the scale.

Theme word for the next while: displacement.  Theme sentence: To the degree to which we are unable to live with failure, we adjust.

Time Log: 12 hours

Jobs Applied For: 3

Currently Reading: Architecture Studio, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Freakonomics, The Cyberiad

I’ve started an installation in one of the studios which involves moving the room’s contents to 3′ above the ground plane.  Why am I doing this?  Well, the logic goes something like this: I want to create a space where the normal order of things breaks down & people become uncertain as to how to interact with the space.  When we walk into a room we automatically understand (because of experience, embedded cultural knowledge, etc.) that a chair is for sitting in, a table is for working on, a trashcan holds trash.  These object associations operate on the smaller end of the scale spectrum of a room; the larger end being that we stand on the floor, the ceiling is above us, the walls surround us.  The plan is only the generator because we walk on the floor.  By shifting the floor plane up 3′ you disarm the assumptions that we make about how to interact with a space.

So… I’m hanging things from a ceiling and soon I’ll take some process shots and eventually I’ll make some architectural drawings.

Time Log: I’m not sure… I haven’t been keeping track

Jobs Applied For: 2

Currently Reading: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Freakonomics, The Cyberiad

I entered a set of my collapsed building drawings in the All Student Exhibition.  They won a Guy Palazzola Memorial Senior Award! Yay!  I’m very excited, this means a lot to me to have a success in the art school.  The nine other folks who received the award have excellent work so I’m proud to be honored along with them.

In other news, I’m taking a little bit of a break since it is, well, break.  But I’ve got some great ideas for drawings that I’m going to work on over the holidays.  They involve taking a set of rules from one system and applying it to an area outside of that system’s jurisdiction.  So, we shall see…

(image by Ron Passaro, ASHI Founder via This Old House

This morning I found a goldmine. “Home Inspection Nightmares” on This Old House.  It’s a 14-part series of about 20 images to each part and is full of such lovely systemic failures as a light switch located inside a shower, supply and return vents right next to each other, and a giant mass of plugs all feeding into one outlet.  Wonderful!  So inspiring!

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/info/0,,20211283,00.html

I’m starting to try and take a break from thinking about building systems for a while.  Thinking about other systems and other failures so that I can come back to buildings later when I have a better grasp on what I’m after.  So, I’ve been looking at car crashes, dissolving typography, people falling over, the Bay of Pigs invasion, dead flies, and William Carlos Williams (not that he’s a failure but he sometimes writes about it).  Here’s a little sample of the broken (?) typography:

I also tried to crush this thingy:

I say “tried” because I failed at crushing it.  Thing just fell over.  So, I need to stabilize the base and then go at it again with heavier things.

Back onto process though; I’m also realizing that by stopping drawing things I sabotaged my process a bit.  I think when I draw.  Drawing helps me throw things out there and see what comes back.  Yes, the drawings are small and underwhelming, but they are a stepping stone to bigger ideas and bigger things.

And I also need a break.  I’m looking forward to taking a little mental vacation in approximately 2.5 days.

Time Log: 19 hours

I’m still working heavily on my website (having to teach myself CSS, so I’m having to redo things as I learn more).  The url is http://hattiestroud.com

Here’s a couple photos from last weekends building hunt:

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving with good food.

Time Log: >12 hours (I wasn’t keeping good track of it)

Umm, what have I been up to this week?  A lot of intense work on my website, which is probably the reason I feel this way.  But asides from that I printed photos of the abandoned factory I visited last weekend, finished building the stick cube, finished assembling THE WALL (which now awaits spackling and painting), got an old set of rapidograph pens working so that I could try drawing on one of the printed photos, thought about the financial crisis and doodled it, and went hunting for abandoned buildings.  I’d post images but I haven’t downloaded them yet and I’m tired.

The buildings that used to be across from Two Wheel Tango are regrettably demolished which is too bad because they were awesome and I never got photos of them.  However, Sherri pointed me to a condemned house up near Dixboro and Joy Rd which I visited but will need to return to with my better camera and possibly at night.  On the way back from this building I drove down Pontiac Trail which happens to be practically lined with collapsing, worn-out buildings.  So, unlike a real-estate agent, I am extremely excited about this and will be making an excursion with my camera and tripod later this week.

I’m wrestling with what I intend to do with these buildings and images.  It is unsafe to go inside buildings with the level of collapse that I am interested in but I’m not sure how I feel about only having exterior information to work with.  Also, I wonder about what is gained from measuring and modeling a collapsed building.  Isn’t it just another form of illustration?  Does this technique finally engage with my ideas or is it just another misguided attempt?

I was reflecting on a semester-long project from last year and the process involved and I was reminded that the entire semester I was very intently involved in making things (collages, models, plans, sections, etc.) and that it was this which allowed me to stay interested and work through the ideas.  Although I am making some things for IP I don’t feel as obsessed as I’d like to be and I’m not sure why.

Time log: 16 hours

Ok, a few new things started this week but none of the old stuff finished because it is evidently underwhelming.  I’ve started making one of the most basic systems that I can think of which is a 3-dimensional grid structure.  It’s 8×8x8 units and part of it looks like this:

I think it’ll look a little bit like Sol Lewitt’s cube structures but then I’m going to cause it to fail somehow.  Can’t decide if I want to smash it, burn it, or cut chunks out of it.

I think it’s very difficult to show both a system and its failure simultaneously because every idea I seem to come up with is either just an exploration of a system or a depiction of a failure.  The only way I’ve figured how to do both so far is by building a system and then causing its failure.  Or making a system which is destined for failure.

I also went to a vacant factory building this weekend and took somewhere around 100 photos.  The coolest (and coldest) part of it was a decaying building built with the Butler system.  Here’s a couple images from the trip:

I think several of the photos turned out quite good, although they’re not ultimately what I’m looking for with this project.  I think it might be possible for me to get access to the space again…

Time Log: 19 hours