interesting robots

scanning my list of regular sites, i found a story on it's nice that about the eske rex drawing machine
you can watch the video of the machine in action via the link above, but better at the eske rex site as it opens into a big screen

the crazy wonkiness of the movement reminded me of a walking machine i'd seen several months ago. i was just wondering where i'd find the website for this, when i found a story about it on another favourite site, my love for you is a stampede of horses
it is the strandbeest, by theo jansen
jansen has made lots of these kinetic beach-walking sculptures (put standbeest in google images!) what a wild world. how interesting people are.

i was thinking the other day, that kids are little dynamo packages of potential, you don't know what they'll come up with, or who they'll become. real life "transformers".

it's exciting

tangled & frayed

i find something winsome in tangles, the torn & frayed
some images to get winsome about

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

image list

• trolley - no source


• karen o'leary via yellowtrace


• mattress tangle, light & victory


• bicheno beach, little glowing lights


• fishing floats, light & victory


• janet echelman via yellowtrace


• no source given, intelligent clashing


• elana herzog via yellowtrace


• il lee, via but does it float

tiny town

sometimes the world makes you feel small,

good time to go to tiny town

here's one

forgive me

after karen green's husband, david foster wallace died (suicide), she couldn't work for a year. her first major art piece after her grief hiatus, was a forgiveness machine.

This article in the guardian explains it: This article in the guardian explains it: This article in the

This article in the guardian explains it: For a long while after that, she says, she couldn't make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. "The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long," she says, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto... In the end, Green didn't use the machine herself, except to put a few tester messages through. "I couldn't give it my full attention," she explains. "I was worried it wouldn't even work for the full four hours of the show's opening. I was also kind of a mess about surviving the opening itself. Seeing people, chatting. Not 'kind of a mess' – a mess. I couldn't imagine doing it." She thought she would come back to visit the machine after the opening but instead she drove to her new home, not far from where she grew up, and stayed there. The machine was overwhelmed, too; it couldn't process all the requests and was eventually dismantled. "Forgiving is never as easy as we would like," she says. "Apparently quite a lot of people cried."

cyrk cirque circus

oh a few weekends ago, there was the most wonderful documentary about alexander calder including calder as a white-haired older gentleman happily playing with the wire and odds and ends circus he made when he first hit paris, back in the 20s/30s youtube brings it all to life part 2 clip here

a still image circus set-up!

a poster of calder's cirque at the whitney

i'm not the biggest fan of circuses, but i do love circus-related art.

i'm not the biggest fan of circuses, but i do love circus-related art.

i'm not the biggest fan of circuses, but i do love circus-related art.

i'm not the biggest fan of circuses, but i do love circus-related art.

i'm not the biggest fan of circuses, but i do love circus-related art.

as well as calder's cirque-ing around, there is the wide world of polish cyrk posters i bought one recently on a trip to the national gallery in canberra.

ironically (tragically?) they don't know the artist of the poster.

i recognised the poster from an article in projekt (1968), a polish graphic art magazine my parents had from the 60s, polski plakat cyrkowy polish circus posters // l'affiche de cirque en pologne. (article in 3 languages, how european!)

cyrk, tadeusz jodłowski (the one i bought in canberra)

henry tomaszewski cryk, 1965

jan lenica, cyrk, 1976

old couple dreaming!

what's important in life?

someone to grow old with...

someone to share your interests...

hee hee

everything flows...

this morning, i heard a song on the radio

when they back announced it, they said, that was teenage fanclub and everything flows from a catholic education

hilarious.

when you have had a catholic education (primary school, high school, but not much extra-curricular) i suppose it's a little hard to tell what flows from that, and what flows from life in general

nature, nurture or catholic education?

last weekend, there was a story on the radio (another station) about parents who had tried to give their daughters a catholic education, and what two of them had received instead was sexual abuse by the parish priest (father kevin o'donnell). o'donnell was eventually charged and pleaded guilty to various counts of abuse, and became the oldest man ever imprisoned in victoria

father o'donnell was the priest associated with my primary school. my sister remembers the principal being livid when she found out he'd been appointed to our school.

because of course, catholic church style, he'd been moved on to a new parish after the rumours got too obvious in his old parish. and apparently he practised his sexual abuse in every parish he was in.

i told my first confession to father o'donnell.

i remember when i found out about his behaviour many years later, and i wondered what on earth he thought of my innocent "sins". not much probably (i told him sometimes i didn't want to wash the dishes when my mum asked, especially if i was watching bugs bunny cartoons).

i'm lucky he wasn't thinking about getting me in the back of the sacristy, i suppose.

what a creep.

here's bugs