And that’s not even touching on the static nature of the symbol vs the fluid nature of meaning.  Which is probably the most fascinating part of communicating and what I’m trying to explore almost always.  Positively or negatively, the meaning of the words change with duration, but the words stay the same, sometimes enhancing their original message, but just as often revealing deep ironies.

Which inevitably brings me to Love.  As Cleo says in Cleo in the Universe, “How can I love somebody when infinity exists?”  How can I tell someone “I love you,” when what’s making my heart beat isn’t those three words, but something much nicer, bigger, and more sincere?  I’m stuck with these clunky languages which don’t allow for any sort of uniqueness, and are tied to history, mythology, and all that.  There just aren’t enough words.  I need an infinite amount.

But, that’s life.  We only get “I love you.”  And so, we put our most fragile hopes and thoughts into these static words that stay the same, while the meaning remains in flux.

With this project, I wanted to explore the fragility of the meaning, and impose it on the static symbol.  Instead of impenetrable, revered, and absolute, the words are delicate, made with the flimsiest, most ephemeral materials at my disposal.  I want the words to be vulnerable.  I want them to be affected by people passing by, by gravity, and by their own imperfect construction.

The project is on-going, but this is Part One:

8x12’ Acrylic yarn and scotch tape.

Here is the much-anticipated debut episode of The Jazz Hour with Jimmy Marble.  Tonight’s guest Eric, Legendary Jazz Musician, discusses with Jimmy his forthcoming album, “Nuclear Red Fusion Tributaries,” which is dropping later this week.

Join us for a journey of self-discovery where jazz is our vehicle and destination.

Host Jimmy Marble

Legendary Jazz Musician, Eric

Download audio file (Special_Guest_Eric.mp3)

My friend Nora and I found ourselves in this situation just recently.  Not being the types to wallow in passivity, we took it upon ourselves to dabble in inventing our own technology to make expanses of geography easier to shoulder.  The result is what we’re now referring to as the Telepathic Device.

Nora modeling the Yellow and White Telepathic Devices

The Telepathic Device DOES NOT allow the wearers to communicate with their minds in direct and secret conversation.  For example, by using the Telepathic Device a subject could not say to another subject, “I wish we were hanging right now.”  The Telepathic Device is much, much more nuanced than this.  It operates in a more similar way to lying with your friend in a field, possibly a beach, or mountain top,  and gazing at something very big and remaining very quiet.  The Telepathic Device guides two thoughts in the same direction, allowing the users to grow and develop their own thoughts independently, while sharing an experience.

Finally, here are four examples of the Telepathic Device in action:

The Telepathic Device remains in beta testing.  But, we feel as though we have struck a major breakthrough for Friendships around the world.  We will continue our work on perfecting this important new discovery.

XO

J&N

Stock Photo: Halloween year preceding death

My best friend died and became immortal in the same afternoon.

It was Water Day — the day in elementary school when instead of learning you go outside and wear swimsuits and play in hoses and do the whole slip’n slide thing.  Anyway, I was fat, but my best friend Beans, he was even fatter.  I’m not sure how much he weighed, but he was nine and if you put him next to a third-trimester-already-overweight-expecting mother, she looked reasonably fit.  As one might imagine, we hated taking off our shirts in public.  We hated it a lot.

A week before Water Day Beans approached me with an idea.  Ever since last year’s Water Day when Beans got his nickname for having breasts shaped like beans, he had been hatching a plan to avoid disrobing in front of our class.  Knowing we were more or less in the same boat, he assumed I’d be interested.  And of course I was.  I didn’t need a food-based nickname; what I needed was Beans’ plan.

The plan was simple, but genius.  He told it with fervor and conviction.  In one fell swoop he would skip out on Water Day and regain his lost dignity caused by being Beans.  He calculated that Water Day would begin directly after recess — - it did in first grade, it did in second grade, and by God he said, it would in third grade, too.  At recess when the bell would ring, he told me, we would stay outside and hide in the covered slide.  Once everyone was back in class, Beans and I would sneak behind the gym, climb on top of the dumpster, at which point we would climb the ladder to the roof.  Once on the roof Beans had figured out that we could tap into the school’s electrical system.  That was what Beans called the money shot.  If we rerouted certain wires we could short the school’s electric fuse causing power failure in the entire building, perpetuating, Beans hypothesized, the principal canceling Water Day and sending all students home.

I know I should have stopped him right there.  But, there was a charisma in Beans’ voice that was irresistible to me.  In hindsight, I imagine Beans could have grown up to be a Chairman Mao, or possibly even the first man to travel to Mars (barring physical shortcomings).  I was in, though.  I would have followed him anywhere.  And I really, truly did not want to take my shirt off in front of my classmates.  So we stayed late after recess.

We climbed the dumpster and snuck across the roof and found the electrical box.  Beans’ face looked as though he had found some kind of long-lost ancient and terribly Holy relic.  Yet, without hesitance, he opened the gray metal box, revealing a mass of tangled wires.  With a slight shake in my hand I just held the box open, looking at his face.  His lips were slightly parted, and I remember having a rather riveting suspicion that Beans had done this before.  He was re-matching red wires with green wires, and yellow wires with blue wires.

Then Beans cursed.

He said the F-Word.

He was the first person my age, maybe even the first person outside of the movies I had heard use that word.  He noticed I was spooked and calmly explained he was stumped.  He said there was a white wire that he didn’t know where the fuck to put.

Caught in the moment I told him to cut it.  Except I said cut the bitch to feel cool.  Fueled by our mutual swearing, he did.

Beans was launched an estimated forty feet into the air.  He created a small crater next to the monkey bars on the fourth– through fifth-grade playground.  He died on impact, if not sooner.  His knife, however, caused an incredible short circuit that caused a citywide power outage.  (I never looked into the details of the power outage, but apparently it made electricity go backwards through the wire, exploding all the daisy-chained transformers.  Again, maybe that’s not what happened in real-life, but that’s what everyone was saying on the bus the next day.  It does boggle the mind to think about, though.)

Everyone at school was sent home.

Unfortunately, the release of the students from the building couldn’t have been anymore untimely.   It was instantaneous with the arrival of Beans’ paramedics.  Everyone saw dead, electrocuted Beans on a gurney being lifted into the back of the flashing truck.  A part from a few crying girl classmates, there was a silence in the air.  A respectful silence.  Even though we were very young, we all understood the great sacrifice Beans had made that day so we could all be free.

A week later we held a vigil for Beans behind the backstop on the far side of the playground.  Everyone in our class attended. Even a few second and fourth graders who were neighbors with Beans showed up to pay their final respects.  I was asked to give the final eulogy, which I did.  I delivered my final goodbye to Beans, whom I was now referring to as Electric Beans, with the tenderness and mild manneredness of a panda bear, which was my favorite animal at the time and whom I looked to for inspiration during my youth.  The ceremony ended with us singing “Yankee-Doodle-Dandy,” which we had just learned in music class, and was the only song we all had memorized.

It made me sad to see Electric Beans’ dream come true and for him to not be able to see it.  In fact, I still get kind of bummed out when I think about it.  But on that afternoon I know my chubby friend was looking down on me and everyone else and was smiling.  Presumably with his shirt on.

And I can keep that in my back pocket.

Flying over California, I noticed how much we humans love geometry. In a world of gradients, geometric shapes and pattern give us the comforting feeling that some sort of order exists in the universe–they’re kind of a visual equivalent of religion. When we look at them, they say “outside of these four right angles is the vastness of infinity and billowing chaos, but in here, in here I’m 100% square”.  Out the plane window en route to Sirocco, there was this warm embrace waiting for my eyes:

Just look at that and tell me you aren’t in love

Coming into Sirocco, my first task was waiting for me: build a bed. When it came to beds, I and most people I know have been operating under the assumption that we sleep on whatever Swedish designers tell us to—would you like the RYKENE or the FLORÖ?  In the SRL though, everything was built by hand, including my allotted space to sleep, which was a hardwood floor until I made it otherwise. Luckily the Labs are somewhere between a lumberyard and a preschool, with endless stacks of wood from old sets and rack over rack over rack filled with every mark making tool you could dream of. The tools were there; all I needed to do was build.

For the first time in my life, I was forced to build my space for sleep and privacy which felt like a small scale version of building my own house. And because a stapler has been the most industrial tool I’ve used over the past ten years, the sawing, measuring, drilling, and screwing I had in front of me made the road look that much longer.

I spent my few hours in the labs sketching what it was I would be sleeping on for the next month. There was no deadline or due date, but my current hardwood floor-bed brought an urgency to the process. In most art forms, you have the time to draw and erase, paint then paint over, add and remove—a process more of experimentation than planning. With no place to sleep, I had to scribble out some ideas as fast as possible so I could start making said scribbles into a structure.

My first few ideas were a bed in a box (felt too much like a coffin), bed on a box (fine, but just a bed on a box), bed with long legs (getting there), bed with legs and a mouth desk (still too open) , and bed with legs, desk, and fort fabric (perfect!). After the rough idea of my bed was sketched out, the building process was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. I’m still torn as to what my favorite part was, either the 8-year-old-fort-building feeling or going to the garment district with Martin to get my fabric.

I decided to follow my heart, and it took me to polka dots

All together:

Such a direct hand-to-mouth relationship was really exciting; having grown up in a world where actions are always ten to twenty degrees removed from their consequences (e.g. how a comedian can feed themselves without ever having seen a plant), building my bed felt like farming my own food. And while the actual construction was easier than I thought it was going to be, the direct manual labor that went into my bed made me feel like I earned a place to sleep for the first time—tonight I won’t be sleeping on a mattress and frame, I’ll be resting on sweat and determination.

So as you can see, my first week in the labs was hardly about beds. Bed building was really one task that embodied two different lessons. The first was straight from the heart of Sirocco, a lesson about personal agency and hidden imagination — learning to close your eyes and use your hands to make what you see under your lids. The second was about our need for definite lines and shapes; because in the end, my bed became another extension of this geometry we so love. Before, my bed was a sleeping bag dot in a prairie sized room in an infinite city.

But, by assembling together an assortment of hard and opaque objects, I now have my own geometry to crawl into that says “outside these angles is the vastness of 15 million people and billowing smog, but in here, in here we’re 100% dreams”. Until next week, I’ll be here, staring out my rectangle window.

–forrest–

]]> http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/life-lessons-of-an-intern/feed/ 0 http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/schmolodex/ http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/schmolodex/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:18:56 +0000 Martin Morse http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/?p=234

NOW, what you’ve all been waiting for, the new and improved “SCHMOLODEX”!!  Made from door trim, ring binders, and a dowel rod, it can EASILY accommodate contact information for hundreds of your most colorful friends.  Place it on a desk, mount in on the wall, suspend it from the ceiling; ANY way you look at it, batteries aren’t included.. THAT’S RIGHT!!  There’s not a single circuit to bend, no buttons to push, and nothing to rub… SOOOOO, sneak into a local construction site and build one TODAY!!

When your team is an array of residents all up and down the west coast, production meetings become a thing of beauty. A real testament to how cool the internet is.

Our weekly Monday MASS =

Intern #001

Name: Forrest Kahlil Perrine

Age: 23

Location: Los Angeles, California

Prior Location: The Vanilla Dome; Bellingham, Washington

Objective: Somewhere between life experience and logical conclusion, perhaps both.

Latest experiment in the research labs: Film shutter speeds and documentation of subject on skateboard.

Creatively most envious of: Charles Burnett

Enjoys terribly: Fauvism, and documenting projects that were built with his hands.

Conclusive Report: Forrest is intern 001 for one month in Los Angeles.  A list of preferred women are Suzanne Sontag, Yayoi Kusama, Samira Makhmalbaf and Hannah Hoch.  A list of preferred men are Carl Sagan, Charles Burnett, Dan Savage, Erik Satie, and John Baldessari. Favorite medium is currently collage. Lastly, given a $100 budget, he would create a film of himself consuming $100 worth of Twinkies or an 18-year-long choose-your-own-adventure film about a father who is a spy in the Appalachian mountains.

In this episode, Adi and Jimmy ask each other questions about making art, positive thinking, two dimensions, and ghosts.

Download audio file (ART_SHPLART_1.mp3)

Check out our feature article in this month’s issue of the ever so awesome Chicago based art rag, Jettison Quarterly. Issue #6 is gushing with some Labs love.

Some amazingly charming photos were crafted by the Labs to add to the article. More on those soon.

Thanks, Jettison, for all the love. We plan on coming to Chicago soon to give you hugs and thanks in person.