Peep show

Continuing my research on moving image formats, I’ve been very interested in the mutoscope. Flipbook machines were part of how silent cinema was popularized in its earliest era. A rotary flipbook was driven by hand crank and viewed through a magnifying eyepiece. Inside the metal case, 850 cards fan out from a round core, each printed with a sequential frame. When the crank is turned, it plays at about 14 frames/second, strobing a moving image for a minute. I’m struck by the similarity with the short form video that has become predominate on apps like tiktok and instagram.

Mutoscopes were also called folioscopes. Along with Edison’s kinetoscope, which used film loops in the same way, with a single eyepiece and coin operation, they were some of the first ways the moving image was presented. Before large scale projection had been engineered, the problem of monetizing the viewing of short animations was solved with these vending machine-like outlets. They’re like if a film storage cask had mutated into a mechanical theater. The rotary flipbook has a similar sense of being a mutation of film stock stored on a reel. As close as I could abstract it, its almost like an analog instance of a codec or interlacing pattern; linear (film) or planar (flipbook) frames.

The mutoscope machine bears a resemblance to the machinery of the camera in a similar way to how projectors do. Like projectors and televisions, it’s a scale format of the Cinema. I find it an interesting one because in its original use, which it was designed for, it existed in a kind of public space that became sick and died over the twentieth century, which is attested to in the changing fates of the humble hand-cranked theater. For the scale of the object itself, something about the public placement of the machine, and the scale-play of the tiny, magnified moving images that live inside, in a warm light. On the altar-like ornamented metal canister, the eyepiece is at a height accessible to both children and adults (they’d as often be loaded with cartoons as smut). The average man would bow by necessity to turn the crank after dropping his coin in.

In terms of soundtrack the mutoscopic films are silent, only emitting a muffled chatter that evokes the genuine mechanical commotion of a film projector, amidst the white noise of the usually busy place the machine was placed. The images similarly do not flicker in exactly the same way as in film projection, but could almost be said to flutter, as they advance and burst toward the viewer at the speed of the motion. The effect is more or less the same though, because for the flutter to occur and the images to animate there is only one speed, forward. If one stops turning the hand crank, the flipbook goes slack, and flaps back against the card where the image had appeared. Each image that flutters past when in motion is first held in place for a fraction of a second, by a detente, and it is against this point that the rest of the spool will return if not pulled forward by the crank. The only point of tension with the structural points that define cinema is that the moving images are lit externally by light and aren’t as stencils giving it shape in shadow. But mutoscopes elevated the flipbook to a near-indistinguishable scale instance of cinema. Their obscurity today seems to me to be more about the course of their declining use, than anything necessarily about the their competency as an alternative cinema, in much the same way that comics related at one point to genre fiction in the main before a long relegation to outsider art and an eventual resurrection as competent media.

The flipbook conceit of the mutoscope is what allowed it to hold a patent in spite of Edison having one for the Kinetoscope, which achieved the same ends by cranking a loop of actual acetate film. It turned out that the flipbooks were much, much hardier than early film and before long the tempermental nature of the kinetoscope led to its decline. But for decade, after decade, after decade, the mutoscopes continued to collect change in amusement halls. So much so that their coin mechanisms needed to be updated several times to keep up with inflation. So much so that they outlived any public memory of the ‘amusement hall’, with a few practically outliving their descendant, the video arcade. Most met the end of their duty when the porno theaters of the 1970s closed in the late 1990s-mid 2000s, as the internet ushered in a new era of short-form smut, which bears some symmetry to their “what-the-butler-saw” peep-show origins, as prude as they may seem to us now. They can still be found at seaside attractions, where like much of the urban fabric, their seedy midlife is glossed over.

The scale factors all throughout this extinct media fascinate me. As a theater, the audience sits outside and looks in the only windows. The ticket booth is a patinaed plaque bearing instructions, and a burnished crank that brings the theater whispering to life. Only your coin and your gaze are permitted entry. As you turn the crank, you see a warm flickering image in the eyepiece protruding from the metal walls of the machine. Two footmen in swirly armor hum to life, and draw a heavy velvet curtain, revealing a large clamshell, which steadily lifts its top half in a grand yawn and exposes a venusian figure, who rises in a shy stretch before settling back on the soft bed of the shell, as it closes gently on top of her, and on cue, the footmen close the curtain, before a few blank pages of static flicker to a slow, and the light turns off. A little shrine, an architectural aedicula, and one that is also a simulacrum of the camera and the projector.

the slow-moving image

| Andy Warhol

 

| Andy Warhol

On July 24 and 25, 1964, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas and John Palmer shot six and a half hours of footage of the empire state building as dusk settled over the city and the floodlights atop the tower were switched on and then some time later, off. They shot 11520 feet of film from 8:06 pm to 2:42 am. The raw footage could be unrolled almost ten times the length of the Empire state building itself.

“Empire” the film that was produced from this shoot, slowed the projection of the film from the speed it was shot further, so it became 8:05 long. It is the longest film made by Andy Warhol, although he made other “long films” like “sleep”, a 5-hour film of a man sleeping. Warhol said that cinema was about watching time pass. From the early 1970s, until his death in 1987 his films weren’t accessible to the public, and during this time Empire took on the stature of an oral myth of Warhol’s outrageous persona. It was said to be 10, 12 or even 24 hours long.

It was from this film that I developed an architectural maquette for my thesis project in 2016. The final, larger project on a site on the Lower East Side called for consideration of timber construction, and the maquette brief was to design a viewing pavilion for one of Andy Warhol’s films.

My design responded to Empire as a mirror to the urban landscape. It was a simple cinema, but on the front facade it had another screen: a tile grid that was meant to constantly have its units slowly and continually replaced. a small robotic arm housed in a scaffold-like tower moved on rails across the facade, placing and removing tiles made of an MDF-like pulp, reconstituted from the shavings of previous tiles being shaped by a CNC mill in an annex where the tower would park. The tiles were given depth profiles to look like the various facades of the city, which could be documented by LiDAR scanner. They fit to a grid of spring-actuated clips. Like the serial nature of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints and of the images on a filmstrip, the tile grid is meant to be repeatable, and to potentially produce a run of multiples: each unique although occuring in a series or sequence. The circular way that Warhols films are both pictures and dithers of grain, and that his prints are both images and blobs of ink is also reflected in the notion of the tiles being made of a reconstitution of wood: cast from the off-shavings of other castings.

When the sun set the tile grid wall was to be lit from within, with the very thinly carved areas appearing to glow. When each tile was replaced, for a moment the light from inside the billboard sized array would project. Like warhols multiple, they are sort of caught between being like frames of a film and like printing blocks. Inside the theater, the viewing space is like a vacuum tube Television in section, and as a vague viewing space it’s meant to recall lost spaces for cruising and loitering. It’s a place for time to pass 24 hours a day whether or not anyone is watching.

format wars

Some of my fondest memories are from around the days when YouTube was created, when my cousins and I would make home movies together on a DV handicam. It recorded to little magnetic tape cassettes and through itself, it could transcribe them to the computer. We were really impressed by it, and it came while we were still kid enough for it to be used without much shame or hesitation. They existed in our households because our parents had bought them to record us, but in a way only matched by the computer, the camcorder became ours to record ourselves.

We made the silliest home videos with the loosest of storylines; interviews with a puppet, a satire of American Idol… When the office debuted, we assembled at my mom’s office on the weekend and covertly shot a remake of our favorite scenes from the pilot. Then skate videos caught our eye and we started recording ourselves mountain biking and skiing to set to music. We had all that fun on just 640x480 pixels!

That’s a 4:3 aspect ratio and although we definitely didn’t have that terminology then, at the time we could tell you how un-cinematic everything we shot seemed. We could edit in letterboxes across the footage and fake a shakey, handheld 16:9 but it never seemed right, and usually ended up cutting things off in ways we hadn’t planned for. It also made our already fuzzy image even smaller. While any aspect ratio can be adapted to any native format of video, some leave more to be desired than others.

The modern high definition formats all either conform to a wider 16:9 or a 3:2 aspect ratio, but classically many films were shot with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The similarities between classic filmmaking and standard def DV camcorders start and end there, though. No amount of labor or finesse could have elevated the tapes I made with my troupe of cousins to the lovely and still sometimes amateurish image making of a bolex, and yet their footage exists inside the same framelines.

Ironically now the 4:3 aspect ratio has made a resurgence on the artsier side of filmmaking. The popular opinion seems to be that the cinematic look of fifteen years ago, which used 2.35:1 widescreen and anamorphic lens effects, steadycams, etc has become achievable on a budget and thus ubiquitous in a way that it no longer feels cinematic. 4:3 is the classical broadcast aspect ratio for television, and was common in documentary filmmaking, which shared some of the same 16mm production regimes.

Unmodified 16mm cameras record this shape of frame because originally, 16mm stock was perforated on both sides. When the cellulose used in film improved a single sprocket did the trick, and the remaining space where the perforations had been was left to be exposed as a photo-sound track. Super16 is a near-16:9 aspect ratio format that is sometimes done by widening the film gate and re-centering the lens of a 16mm camera. The frame is the same height, but widened into the soundtrack margin. Sound is captured by separate means for these. There are also native Super16 cameras. Ultra16 is a less invasive modification made only to the film gate of 16mm cameras. Because these modifications are made without affecting the lens calibration or position, they can be done much more cheaply than for Super16.

Originally, in the 1920s, the 16mm format was sold as a consumer product advertised as both safer (non flammable) and cheaper than the existing 35mm film stocks. As that space was overtaken by smaller formats over the century, 16mm remained popular for some uses like documentaries and the news for a combination of image quality, stability, camera size and a variety of modern aspect ratios. It places film in a role where it can really shine: small enough to have inherent character in image (grain & unique depth of field), large enough to be vivid and clear, and yet still small enough to be economically shot. A lot of independent, experimental, and student films were shot on it between the 1960s and the 1990s.

video formats compared with the native resolution of 16mm film stock

However, by the time I had a chance to take classes in filmmaking in 2011, 16mm seemed to be on its way to extinction. Excitement had reached a critical mass around the new digital gear that was just over the horizon. Digital SLR cameras had just started to have video capabilities. Around that time I got a Canon 7D as an all purpose camera to document my work and with a limited sense of what was possible to do with digital video from a camera using SLR lenses. I used it a lot during the summer before college in a documentary mode, of my friends and I working at summer camp. I could only preview it because editing software was still almost as costly as a camera itself, but it looked surprisingly vivid and cinematic in Full HD, 1920x1080. With resolution measured in pixels becoming the dominant paradigm, it was only a matter of time before 16mm was surpassed and then qualified as obsolete. Film resolution maxes out at 160px/mm, meaning 16mm film records a roughly 2 megapixel image at 1650x1200 (4:3).

Still, at that time, it wasn’t just my professors nor my own opinion that analog filmmaking was an eccentricity. In 2010 Kodak discontinued a number of film stocks and it was really only available on ebay when I first sought it out. As industry use of 16mm film declined, and more and more documentaries, television series and independent films were shot digitally, the format was largely relegated to student films during the 2010s. In class we were shown a Bolex, and exposed 100’ of black and white film in groups of four or five, but it was almost emphasized as a novelty, as something we were lucky to get to experience as film students, to shoot a 20 second clip as your rites, but not necessarily a practical tool. Strangely, I think in the context of taking film classes at art school, the error of impracticality was not a deterrent.

After experiencing a live film set as a P.A. following my first year of college in 2011, I was so preoccupied with the professional equipment I saw that I looked up some of the best 16mm cameras, Aatons and Arriflexes. At the beginning of the 2010s, they could be had for like, a tenth of the going rate the decade prior. Seeing the price of these legendary aircraft-grade feats of engineering sometimes dip below the msrp of the new plastic digital cameras broke something in me.

I didn’t think globally enough to connect the fact that their price was because of the maddening drought of stock to record on. At that time it seemed the format had been phased out, more or less; but to me they were something that lay just out of reach. At the time, the impossible project had just bought a factory in the Netherlands but had not yet produced any film. I remember an early research rabbit hole on producing a lightproof box with rollers, inside which acetate could be perforated and coated in emulsion and wound into a tin for removal. There were a few photos of such a homebrew film-making machine on flickr, but to my dismay nothing like a blueprint could be found. Like I’ve said, the market for the equipment at the time pushed something beyond its limit inside me.

And, on checking back in on the space now almost 15 years later, it seems I wasn’t the only one… There’s an active user community worldwide responsible for a lot of homebrew engineering that all seems pretty reproducable, feasible and well documented. There are well designed tools for developing and scanning that have been fabricated and offered for sale by those in the community, too. After I mentioned to a friend in passing conversation how it had once been an interest, I was curious to see what the market for vintage equipment looks like nowadays, too. And, today: film’s cheap, cameras aren’t.

Today, those same aatons and arris demand around $20,000. And while film is cheaper, it isn’t exactly cheap when factoring the cost of development and scanning and the postal rates at each stage. A 100’ reel of 16mm can record at most nearly 3 minutes of footage. That will cost between $100-$150 after all is said and done, between 75¢ and $1/second. So, again I find myself in a situation that sort of breaks my brain. Film can be had for as little as $30/100’ but processing it makes it something that needs to be either tightly shot or tightly budgeted.

But…

Maybe it wouldn’t have to be if I could develop, dry and scan it myself. I have experience with black and white darkroom chemistry, and I quickly found the kind of development tanks and reels that could hold 100’ lengths of 16mm. The chemicals are simple and cheap, and there are ways to automate the agitation cycles. A drying cabinet with HEPA filters, positive air pressure and laminar flow could be made with very light-duty construction. Following down a rabbit hole, I learned about how a film projector could be run using a stepper motor controlled by a computer that also runs a small camera and LED lights to capture the film frame by frame as a series of small image files.

And there it was. Maybe it could be improved on as I went, maybe expanded to use more expensive and hazardous color chemistry in a cost effective way too, but for the time being, I could see an actually pretty reasonable breakdown of a system for controlling the costs to where I could go wild with the format, in black and white at least. One must become their own filmomat but the with advice and homebrew documentation from the community, this is achievable today. Other anachronistic passions like for instance wooden boat building have cultures that celebrate the absurd, ongoing labors that are entailed in doing it yourself. If the moving image is truly a relative of still photography, I feel confident there’s a pleasure in the every measure of the pain of getting off digital.

I might be alone in that view when it comes to it being a rationale for actually wanting to do things as manually as this, but there is a growing popular opinion that the last 15 years of digital advancement has not necessarily been predicated on the “creative destruction” of all that came before it. Film isn't a horse and digital isn’t a car, it’s maybe more like gas and electric. There are times when a digital format is called for because of various economies, and there are times when film is called for to achieve a filmic sense of moving images that simply cant be achieved any other way. At no point during the rise of digital cinema was 35mm production discontinued. This has always been the way that imaging formats have worked, and film and video today are just contemporary formats.

To stay with the idea of film being the “gas” format, let’s acknowledge a few parts of its nature. 16mm film debuted in 1923, at the same time as leaded gasoline. It was first marketed as safety film, because it replaced an earlier consumer celluloid film that was extremely flammable. Some 16mm cameras contain an oil dispersal system that keeps the internals lubricated. They need to be stripped and re-applied about every ten thousand feet of footage, or every 4 hours of film-time. ‘Footage’ is a real dimension, and the camera usually has an analog odometer to show how much runtime is left on the reel, and a speedometer to show when the motor is moving the film at the correct speed to match the audio recording. There’s an early-aerospace feeling when you hold a machine like this precisely whirring away, completing 24 distinct exposures, pulsing as such through the reflex and the viewfinder and moving about 7 inches of film through the gate, each second, nearly silently. It’s a combustion of light and time contained inside a machine.

Developing is similarly petrochemical, employing bleach, ammonia and borax as well as proprietary chemicals which strip out dye from the film while its being processed. As with automobiles, mechanical speed is a nimble commodity that finds its full substantiation in large unseen reservoirs of chemicals both yet to be used and exhausted. And of course the image itself lives forever on an acetate, although this is the one part of the process that’s archival, and not waste in itself, provided storage conditions don’t cause spontaneous combustion. All of this seems a little gluttonous for the creation of a short run of images, two and a half minutes, give or take. But, then it’s worth mentioning that most modern media is archived by being printed on film stock. Analog trounces digital in this respect, as once it begins decaying it does so steadily and slowly, as opposed to instantly and totally.

‘Invisible’ limitations of this sort, are brushed off as outside of the average use-case, or as an improperly extreme measure of an otherwise dynamic format. Like with a plug-in car, digital filmmaking appears to transcend the consumptive nature of its predecessors. You can lay on the “footage”, which is idiomatic, and capture long sequences in their entirety, limited only by the expansive sizes of storage media, then review everything in-camera instantly. Footage here refutes its origins in a similar way to how mileage does in cars; where originally the odometer measured the distance until the oil lubricating the engine was exhausted. The modern quotation describes how far an electric car can venture on a repeatable series of outings, wherein driving displaces battery charge temporarily. Electric cars don’t have engine oil to change, but they do have limits to the distance that their charges will power them. There’s a tension in a similar way to how footage is applied to both film stock and video files. The terminology meets at a point but diverges.

Digital AV technology itself subscribes to an incrementalism that is different than its filmic forebears, in spite of inhabiting the same name and similarly designed systems, digital and analog cameras are divergent technologies. In the 100 year history of small format filmmaking the improvement of the format involved widening the image exposure area without changing stocks and improving the constituent systems of the camera. Optimization of a set of limited constraints defined the medium. Digital camera technology, having ably replicated and automated the mechanical aspects of photography, and eliminated the problem of film movement, continues to improve the cybernetic capabilities of the sensor: its size, range of color, resolution, and light sensitivity. At each stage of development, new product families were produced in tandem, shaping the next moves for the industry in superficial ways, but never defying Moore’s law. In terms of electric driving, first and foremost you’re encouraged not to question a society and world that depends on and renders all public space and experience unto cars. The “problem” solved by these technologies is just that there was friction in constant and needless consumption. While further privileging driving speaks for itself, digital technology removing the limits of recording may seem benign or utilitarian, but it’s part of the economy that has situated both media and art as “content”.

Where improvements to analog photography and cinematography were axiomatic; like silent camera operation and a recordable soundtrack on film, enabling sound to be synchronized, the improvements made to digital cameras of all kinds are incremental. Last year it could do 10,000 iso, next year it will be 12,500. Except that’s how it was when I last checked in, and today its more like 100,000 to 125,000. The basic reflex to explore the medium through modular tools has taken flight into wild incrementalism, in which the art itself becomes confused with existing within the narrow band of technological capabilities of the very latest equipment. Reporting on the cutting edge of imaging technology, absent any artistic context whatsoever is a predominate form of influence peddling on youtube, with a level of production gloss that gives me a kind of wry-delight because it underscores the mutual confusion of social media creators, audiences and platforms about the distinctions of tool, form and art. These are essentially tautological infomercials in which owning the correct professional tool is positioned as being critical to participating in the artistic discussion, which is itself mostly avoided besides as a foil.

One is reminded of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, when the characters visit “the most photographed barn in the world”. One character opines on how once the visitors have seen the signs showing a photographed view of the barn, they become unable to see the structure actually standing in front of them. As the characters observe the tourists assembling at marked positions to take their own photos of the barn the characters remark on how they are part of a system for reproducing the views of the barn and, looking down a row of them, how each tourist can’t seem to see the others also training their cameras on the barn.

“The artistic discussion” evoked in this youtube content dwells on a sense of tools being “state of the art”, as a kind of arms race to supremacy. In subscribing to this view, which is fixated on the possibility of replicating the quality of the motion picture industry on a ‘prosumer’ video rig, the purpose of a camera and of moving images is so framed. Because the budgetary restraints are removed from shooting digitally, with only the best equipment you may be granted the aura of the professional producer. The aura imparts the sense that wherever you go and use this tool a well conceived product will result, somewhat magically, insofar as it will be a result of the achievable aura of the professional equipment. You will be standing in the right place to “see” the barn, as prescribed on the post cards of the barn for sale.

It’s easy to come across the products of this approach in the prosumer video space of youtube. Besides the “informercial” type, a common variety is the plotless cut of B-roll titled, tagged, and SEO’ed by the equipment used to shoot it with no other commentary. In spite of the absence of anything interesting in the production of the piece, it has a pre-emenince, a sort of cockiness in how it seems to flourish on video platforms. This kind of vague, unfinished content is presented as experimental, but if it was seriously critiqued as such I have to imagine there would be a pivot to situate it as something diagnostic, for internal use among other camera operators. This duality seems related to the prevailing aura I’ve been outlining, where the tool is self evidently the frame for a creative product. The digital camera is a perfectable, consumptive cyborg meant to stand in as a proxy of the author. The camera operator dispassionately adjusts their little pet-artist-machine, but only it sees.

What I see digital video as is a genuine and total improvement over its magnetic tape origins, that can be merged with analog production in interesting ways. But I am less keen to see the latest capabilities of digital recording as distinguishing it as a supreme form. They are just descriptive metadata to me— I take seriously the defensive tack, that the dry content I’ve been describing is just diagnostic material for prosumers. To me, the generative urgency of a limit is a better muse than that of limitless ability. If a worthy idea demanded that I record for many hours at a time, I’d feel glad for the latest video formats.

For most of my ideas, while at first blush the cost of continually buying and processing film might seem exorbitant, it presents a steady rate after the one-time cost of obtaining the recording equipment. The material concerns of accessing a high quality effect are modular and simple. The costs and concerns associated with digital filmmaking at a similar level are fractal-like. All of the parts, each with their own minutiae, will be steadily made obsolete in ways that film will simply remain unchanged. In five years, most of that digital equipment will record a product that is read as a deliberate aesthetic choice. It’s a strange state of affairs that reveals the true nature between the contemporary tech and the legacy formats, still in use by industry, popularly deemed “obsolete”. The aspect of digital tech being able to record infinitely is in tension with the short, insect-like lifespan of its hardware before it becomes obsolete.

The creative destruction of film was an overzealous narrative that after 20 years hindsight can perhaps be forgiven according to the purer optimism of the time about things simply improving without complication, and for taking for granted how capable and adequate the analog formats they already possessed truly were. It’s one of the ways that perspectives have shifted a lot in so short a time, that today so much cultural enthusiasm is focused on the past, however recent. I feel like I have seen the digital format of moving image come into its own from the days that it still relied on tapes as a kind of vestigial, film-like medium. I have lived to see the time when consumers can record at a resolution approaching IMAX film, while at the same time many of the latest innovations are sold on their ability to introduce loss and lower the fidelity of the image. Now long after the thresholds were crossed around 2008, things aren’t so simple as they seemed then.

all zipped up

queer carping

I had the pleasure of being the TA for this year’s queer basic carpentry skills class at Hammerstone! It’s held every summer during pride month and its like gay summer camp with saws! I had so much fun helping this sweet group learn by building their own sawhorses.

quilted canvas

Recently, I wanted to make a heavy-duty set of bags for my grocery-getter bicycle. Using duck canvas and bias tape, the seams became thick assemblies. I realized that with more careful planning of the layout of the quilt, the seams could be laid out like a rope basket, within the tote-form of the bag.

good dirt

I’ve been using my compost bin a surprising amount this winter. I’m feeling relieved that the absolute labor of building it over the summer wasn’t for nothing. I also made a video documenting the weeks I spent at that.

It hasn’t gotten up to a stable temperature, but it seems to be turning into a flatter and flatter pile each week. With the cold weather, I’ve been spending a bit less time working on the property, but I started experimenting with some brass sheets to make better roofs for the posts. The roof itself is held together by the standing seams alone. The rivets are made by hammering sections of brass tubing with a ball shaped strike, and are used in the structure that anchors the cap to the top of the post.

Organon (2012)

Organon was the title of a research project that I worked on while studying abroad at the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. Although I was admitted as a student of print and painting the individually directed format of the studio allowed me to experiment with a research-driven process. I eventually produced a manifesto and two house designs.

The idea of tools as a means to derive order from chaos traces to a greek word; organon. Equal in the definition were the connotations of sensory organ and thought structure. My research began to develop its own internal dogma around low technology, the merging of modern and traditional design languages, and permaculture (zero-waste gardening). There was an admiration of communal shelter from antiquity, and the manifesto engaged more and more with the overall goal of a system pertaining to a unit greater than a single person, and yet was not strongly imagined as a family structure, either.

When I returned to the united states, I applied to transfer to study architecture. The following years imposed their own microcosm of intensity and discipline, and swallowed by the spectacle of New York City, I lost sight of my original vision completely. But the critical framework of my organon research was never truly so buried. Design at one point became a sort of religion for me— representing the essential cosmology of what is humanly possible. I was driven by an interest in the real possibilities of cooperation, and the way that it could be monumentally expressed.

But finding out that the job in so many cases involves trampling some of the existing social fabric and period texture and universally abiding in the whims of the upper class left me bereft. I took some temporary solace in the artistry of drafting, both hand drawn and computer aided, but this was all unsatisfying as the realization dawned on me that I had become caught up in an idea of myself as an architect.

Originally, researching as an artist, I was subject to my own whims and explicitly defied the genealogy of architecture history and the current trade discourse, treating all things as equal in the formulation of a design language built around my niche interests like the amsterdam school and expressionist architecture. I realize now that I was working on an anti-modern project about consumption and obsolescence, but at the time I was proceeding along my own path of logic innocently.

The influence of the arts and crafts movement during my time in Scotland left me obsessed with the concept of a building being the direct footprint of the craftspeople who collectively built it. So my designs for country houses were taken partly from that tradition of William Morris; to have a cell of artisans housed together in self-sustenance, and for the building itself to feed into the loop. I was also bent on fusing divergent notions of architecture as organic and machine-like, by programming silos, wind-stacks and animal pens and bacterial digesters alongside human users as part of the positive feedback loop of shelter being proposed.

Forest Organon

The designs pick up where the texts of utopian catalogues and self-published designs of the 1970’s— authored both by hippies and ‘paper architects' left off, with a repository of “Low technology” that makes an easy link to traditional methods and forms. The designs adapt formal language from the machine aesthetic and the usonian school, contrasting the iconography of le corbusier with frank lloyd wright and bruce goff, to evoke the complex program of the building. Traditionalism in material and construction is decoupled from form, like thatch insulation under the stucco walls of the Narkomfin building). Like a strange mirror to Le Corbusier’s admiration of the grain silo, the organon house is a sort of machine mill for living. But just like mills were very function-driven constructs of their time, the approach for a house-as-mill did not call for stylistic historicism, but rather a kind of vernacular-driven, hand-built functionalism.

Prarie Organon

works on paper

 

About ten years ago I was making art thinking of myself as a painter. I was trained with oil paints by an intense and dogmatic teacher who was fanatical about one way of putting paint on canvas. Figurative art with direct decisive paint strokes and faceted gradations of observed color were the laws of painting I was taught, along with how to build and stretch a canvas, maintain brushes and handle the paint, thinning media and other arcane chemicals.

In the last few days before I went home for the summer, having finished and packaged my canvases, I dug up some tubes of gouache in a materials closet that I should have been cleaning. When I brought the tiny, rolled up tubes of paint to my teacher and asked to use them he wasn’t thrilled, but I had managed to replicate the pigments of my oil palette completely, which being his formulation couldn’t be argued with. I spent the last few sessions of class getting to know the paints while making two simple observed pieces on paper. I found that if I treated the gouache just as I had learned to use oils, with direct color from the tube & precise mixing on a large mirrored palette, simply using water to thin rather than laquer, they basically worked the same.

They don’t make an exactly comparable image, and there are lots of specific ways of working with either that don’t transfer, but my experience with paint to that point could all be nicely transitioned to a much smaller scale of work on paper. With the dynamics of mixing and opacity being roughly the same, almost everything else was different— shrunken and more delicate. I’m not sure why paintings made with water media tend to be smaller but I imagine that it’s mostly because of how quickly the paint dries, but it could also have to do with the sizes that watercolor paper is cut to. Brushes are scaled to fit smaller work and are much smaller than those for oil and acrylic, have very fine, supple bristles, which feel like they would do well to soak up and hold water. The differences between the two are mostly what have kept me using gouache more than a decade after painting in oils for the last time.

Without knowing exactly how to handle the paints at first, I would make a simple pencil sketch and then painstakingly mix local colors very slowly. In oil I had a rhythm for how my early washes & underpainting would dry and change in workability, but I found gouache dries almost immediately, unless it gets diluted to the point of being more like watercolor. So when I first tried using it, I didn’t try to build the painting up in much of a way, and instead just worked in mostly direct patches, like a paint by numbers.

Even though the size of these two paintings is much smaller than anything I made in oil they seemed to take more time. It felt like I was mixing a color for every tiny stroke. That wasn’t really the case, but it was how it seemed after a few hours of painting 2” square.

That’s why these paintings are left unfinished. There’s a scale factor to the time and physical size of the paintings that almost guarantees this format of skeletal drawing to give some indication of the space and then almost a swatch sample of the perfectly mixed observed colors on a small section of the image. If I had known what I was doing with the gouache I could have probably just as easily mixed enough to lay down color fields and make a proper painting, but this language of empty space and inferred texture is something I appreciated in its own right.

A year or two later, I found this way of working reemerge in montage. Here, where a the unpainted areas are a sort of ground, the collaged elements merge with the paint in an interesting figure with some dimension. This kind of image feels to me like it has one foot in the sketchbook and the other in a wire frame rendering.

This kind of speculative imagery encompasses both sketchbook fantasy and virtual reality. It still uses a sample set of colors to render out forms with surprising clarity. The image is nearly complete and almost insists on having some negative space as if to deny the stature of the kind of advertising illustration that it mimics.

 

Another year or so later, in 2013, I made a pair of mosaic paintings that worked like a multi-directional space-comic. Depending on which direction you read, the space of the painting can be explored on a few paths. Because of when I stopped working on the paintings, the further extents are represented more and more sparsely. There’s a quality of how a memory might look mapped out from the point of most vivid recall, out into more and more tangential and sparse elements.

amish 9-patch

Over the winter I spent my idle hours learning the basics of quilting. I made a design for an Amish 9-patch, which can be as simple as a 3x3 grid of squares, but I played with the proportions a bit. When stitched, the small corner and side pieces join to make an inferred grid the same size as the center square. Despite the simple repetitive actions involved in quilting, it takes a lot of time to complete rows! It really is an antiquarian way of passing the time. I only got about half way done with one side of the quilt by the time the thaw came. Next year!

a year of unrealized designs

quail coop

April 2020

When I built my raised garden beds two summers ago, I had also recently given up on a tandem project of raising quail. I designed a coop sized for 6-8 hens if I remember correctly. The doors (painted green) are meant to hinge open, the lower ones are for collecting eggs from along the sloped floor. The style of the cabin of the coop was made to complement the house it would adjoin, while it was also meant to partner up with the garden beds.

 

yarn caddy

December 2020

When I made my sewing table I also designed a set of crates for each of my sewing machines. They each fit in a tray sized to their beds, and then each had a corresponding case with handles which connected using latch hardware. The case size varied according to the size of the tray, so that all the crates were the same overall dimensions.

One of my sewing machines does a kind of embroidery stitch, and uses a particular type of yarnlike thread. I have 25 rolls of this ‘tex 15’, and they roughly form a color space when arrayed with some care. I tried a couple variations on how I could display the colors and also keep to the standard overall size of my other crates.

 

wacom desk

January 2021

I have a wacom tablet from about ten years ago that sits on an adjustable stand, meant to tilt like a drafting table. It also turns on a radius at the center of the screen to almost any angle. The problem with the stand though is that when placed on the desk I found the screen was always a bit higher than I felt comfortable drawing on. Being from 2012, the screen itself is four or five inches thick at the center. It was always above where I felt the desk ‘should’ be (and was), no matter what angle i set it at.

I worked for a couple weeks attempting to make a desk that could swallow the tablet and make the two surfaces basically flush. The desk itself began with a design in James Hennessey’s book of DIY furniture “Nomadic Furniture”, designed to use just two 4’x8’ sheets of plywood in an interlocking, fastener-free joinery system. From there the design evolved a bit, first to slope at a set angle, then an adjustable one, and finally to allow the tablet the ability to rotate on a lazy susan, with a screw tightened brake.

 

cat sheds

March 2021

During the covid lockdowns I spent a lot of time living among and observing our new kittens. They’re the first I’ve ever really gotten to know, with attitudes and personalities that seemed to be there from the start.

Tony, the more aggressive cat would usually be the instigator, stalking Maria and pouncing and chasing her. Maria is more of a comfort-cat and is not as high energy, she always seemed like she was putting up with Tony’s excitement and humoring him until he became too vicious. We wondered if their names were deliberate, because Tony was usually bent on pursuing Maria.

I’m not sure what first caused me to think of designing play structures for the cats. It wasn’t in keeping with my project from college for dogs, but more along the lines of interesting and strange furniture.

The line of thinking here is a little weird. We had a couple carpet-clad towers and tubes for the cats to play on and they seemed to me like a strange kind of brutalist form. Carpet-brutalist. There was equally something scratching at the back of my mind that I had read somewhere in design theory, someone from the streamline era like maybe Raymond Loewy had said that the basic form of cars is derived from the sphinx, a strange prone homunculous of a forward oriented face and 4 wheel appendages. This got me thinking about my cats as little vehicles, in relation to their furniture scale play structures, which in my covid shut-in fervor seemed like little buildings. And thinking of little buildings pertaining to vehicles as their users, I thought of the roadside architecture of the 50s and 60s.

So at approximately the intersection of these two thoughts came the idea of “cat sheds”, as in decorated sheds for cat traffic. The first is based largely on the Chips restaurant in Hawthorne California, designed by Harry Harrison in 1957, and the other is an adaptation of a bus stop in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, designed by an anonymous state architect in the 1970s. They each feel proportionate to the different characters of the cats that I’ve come to know too, one a riff on the prowling inherent to “cruising the strip” and the other a humble monument to the braced and waiting.

harvest moon

The Harvest Moon by George Mason via

As the autumn equinox draws closer I’ve been busy making the most of my very small harvest this summer. I learned a lot in my second year’s planting but still have found myself with a smaller yield than I imagined. Some of the discrepancy is just my idealism slowly coming into alignment with reality. There’s only so much that can grow in the planters and pots that I’ve been using, and now that I’ve tried out a few different layouts I have a better sense of the limits of the space I’ve built. The herbs and leafy plants did really well, but my cucumber and pepper plants have struggled. The fruits are still full-size, fresh and very tasty, and I almost worship them for their singularity! Wanting to make the most of them has led me to return to another perennial obsession: preserving.

My first single-cucumber pickles used used the common quick pickle method of vinegar brining. The mixture is about 1:1 apple cider vinegar to water with a mixture of 1:1 of sugar and salt, as well as some dill and mustard seed. After bringing to a brief boil the mixture is added to the contents of the jar. I used dill flowers and a pepper from the garden with the cucumber, which is a very firm-fleshed pickling variety. The benefit of this method is that the effects are almost immediate, they’re ready to eat the next day and will keep for at least a month. If theyre canned properly and pasteurized, they’ll last 18 months on the shelf before their taste starts to change. I made mine a little too garlicky and ultimately I don’t prefer the vinegar sharpness of these acidified preserves on their own but they’re good in certain places, like with smoked fish or pork or on a sandwich.

My tomato plant has actually come out quite prolific! It was labeled as a “sandwich” variety and definitely hasn’t disappointed in that category. I’ve made quite a few caprese sandwiches on open crumb bread, usually with a few giant basil leaves from the garden as well. They stand out even in less tomato-centric meals too, like roast beef sandwiches and burgers. When I pick a less-than-perfect fruit sometimes I’ll pulp it on a cheese grater and make pa amb tomàquet, a Catalan spread with olive oil on garlic rubbed toast. Among my relatives who also garden, fresh tomatoes have always been a proud topic— and I can now say that I understand!

My garden is situated on our patio, surrounded on all sides by flowers, which I’m sure has helped the fruiting plants to be as productive as they’ve managed to be. For most of the day the buzzing coming off the flower beds is actually pretty loud. Sometimes when I’m passing by I’ll stop and bend down to look closer at the work that the bumbles and honeys are doing so enthusiastically. They seem blissfully unaware of the happy spectacle they make. When its quiet at night sometimes I imagine them back in their hives. Besides my garden they’re responsible for pollinating the pear trees scattered through the nearby forest, resulting in their many fruit-crowded boughs. These are also a favorite gathering place of a different wildlife cohort— squirrels who either enjoy the fruit as food or more likely the fermented drops at their base. Whether this is for their slight alcohol content or else just an appreciation of the fine changes in taste and texture that fermentation confers is unclear. One wonders about the palette of a pear appreciating squirrel…

For my part, my taste has recently found its destiny in fermented vegetables. I’ve always really enjoyed pickles, since a bizarrely early age, but to my knowledge those weren’t fermented pickles. This is sometimes expressed in the naming nuance of pickled-x versus y-pickles. Typically a pickled-something is canned raw in an acidified brine, usually involving vinegar. Fermentation most commonly uses a culture of Lactobacillus bacteria to create lactic acid over the course of feeding on the vegetables themselves, which then preserves them in an altered state. The added delight in fermentation is the flux the vegetables undergo as the culture digests them, usually imbuing an interesting depth to their flavor. Vinegar itself can even be made by fermentation, and live culture vinegars can be used as a kind of middle ground between the two ways of making a ‘pickle’.

I tried to ferment some full-sour pickles at the end of last summer but all of my jars except one got mold before I could eat them. When the vegetables float or otherwise break the surface of the brine, or if you open the jar to release gas from the bacteria, the risk of actual rot rises. I was careful then and even boiled each jar before filling it, but it didn’t seem to matter ultimately. I took a little time to find some reference books on fermenting this time and discovered two simple solutions that possess an alchemical kind of flair. Using a glass or ceramic weight to keep the vegetables submerged, and installing airlocks in the lids of the jars limits the mold risk considerably. An airlock releases you from needing to open the jars to “burp” them. Expanding pressure can simply vent through the water trap in the airlock, and practically nothing can travel back into the container.

For my first time using the new gear I wanted to try out a bunch of vegetables to see how the lacto culture took to them. These are all “wild” ferments, so the bacteria comes from the vegetables themselves. Some vegetables like cucumbers have stronger natural cultures than others. I started with the recipe for full sour pickles from last year, using cucumbers and jalapenos from the garden, which clouded up after only a couple hours. Because I cut my cukes into spears the ferment went really quickly, maybe even too quickly! They started going soft before the brine was very sour, but they still have a pretty interesting semi-sour taste. The next batch will be using whole cucumbers so that they’ll stay firm for two or more weeks while a properly acidic lacto builds up in the brine. I’ve also come across a tip to use certain leaves and even teabags to introduce tannins to the brine, which also apparently help keep things crisp.

The next jar was filled with cherry tomatoes and basil from the garden as well as some garlic, and only fermented for a few days before being capped and refrigerated. The tomatoes taste almost like they’ve been sautéed with the other ingredients, they’re a little more soft, sweet and salty. The pulp is a little vinegary but then has a buttery aftertaste, almost like a confit!

Next I made a simple giardiniera, with cauliflower florets, jalapenos, chillies, celery, carrots and garlic, which will be ready after a week and is already making a nice smell through the airlock. When I tasted a little piece of califlower to check it’s progress I was surprised at how blended all the flavors had already become after only a few days. I filled the biggest jar with firm green tomatoes, chillies and garlic. Sour green tomatoes are probably my favorite fermented food of all! They clouded up after only a day but they’ll probably need to ferment for more than two weeks for the culture to get to the center of the slices.

I really want to have a garden that I can grow all of these ingredients in someday. I’ve always dreamt of being able to grow my own food entirely but I think I would be happy to settle for being self sufficient in just pickled things.

2018 harvest moon ecliptic via

The autumnal equinox happens to fall on the last day of the full moon this month, the harvest moon. The name is among an otherwise kind of problematic set of names for the full moons of the year erroneously attributed to Indigenous People by early American settlers. These have taken up their own place in pseudo history as a part of American folklore, but the harvest moon dates back several hundred years earlier, to Europe. Its origins trace to the way the full moon coincided with dusk and illuminated an extra hour of work in the fields at the time of harvest, for several days near the equinox each fall. The reason it rises at the same time for a few nights in a row in the northern hemisphere is because the moon’s orbital motion at the start of autumn forms a very shallow angle to the eastern horizon.