Use It or Lose It

It just occurred to me what a cool space the oval office is.
different seats for different moods
it really lends itself to all kinds of communication:
the chat with a casual veneer
(don’t be fooled–it’s always loaded)
the multi-party negotiation
the policy charrette
pronouncements from the desk
the check-in with a confidant
kids playing on the sofa
the stern confrontation
quiet reading alone.
It works for everything you wouldn’t use a meeting room for.
each piece of furniture is key
and there is bilateral symmetry:
the office equivalent of an oval table

I recently purchased Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings (not to be confused with Sala’s One Thousand Paintings), which generates paintings on your screen by layering a set of images and slowly fading between them. The software is designed to emulate a 1970s slideshow installation that Eno built; many of the images are from the original slides. Most of them are abstract scratches, geometric patterns, color blocks and swirls, but some paintings have very clear imagery: rocket drawings, schematics, halftoned faces etc. Each time you run the program, it starts in a different place, so you’re always at the dawn of a new day of paintings. But patterns do repeat: the number of slides is limited, so there is definitely a style among the imagery—this is not pure randomness.

But I have to say that since I bought this program a month or so ago, I’ve only run it a handful of times. I ran it for friends once. Karl and I stared at it for a few minutes once. When you get it going, it really is captivating and beautiful, but because it’s a self-contained program, you really have to want to see it. The activation energy is high, especially because there’s nothing you can do in 77 Million Paintings but sit and stare (and listen—the soundtrack is also generated). The only thing you can manipulate is the speed of the transitions before the show starts. So it’s unlike a video game or a word processor or any other application on my computer. It has no real functionality; it’s all form. And that’s frustrating for me, because I never go looking for pure, self-contained form in my Applications folder. Every other program I have is about me somehow manipulating content of my choosing, and here comes Eno with this rogue Application to which nothing can be Applied. It’s a misfit.

A screen saver seems like the ideal venue for pure, self-contained form, doesn’t it? I’m really surprised that Eno didn’t take it in that direction, or at least provide the option. He must have considered it, but I couldn’t find an explanation in the packaging as to why it wasn’t a screen saver. In his diary, Eno went on and on about screen savers—he loved them!—so I’m baffled.

I can only guess why it it’s not a screen saver. When active, screen savers are not usually the center of attention. They’re a background element, something one might see across the room, or something one might not see at all because one is down the block having a sandwich. Eno may feel that his work should really have people’s undivided attention when it’s running, and that it would be an insult for it to exist only as background. That is, maybe he wanted the software to be as true as possible to its original museum context. Unfortunately, people do not use computers as they use museums, so I think the intent falls flat.

I just found this article from Dec 2004 Wired, about a less-is-less traffic engineer who “hates traffic signs”:
Highlights:
“A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.”
Of course, I think immediately of minicabs in London barreling down one-lane, two-way streets with cars parked on both sides.
“In West Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several major streets, removing traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the roadbed, and bringing people and cars into much closer contact. The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times.”
His test of a safe intersection? Walk backwards through the middle of it at rush hour.
From the article:

How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road – not signs and signals – dictates traffic flow.
2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is.
3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas.
4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space.
5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs.
6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color.

Half of the art is in the frame, right? That’s what a frame store will tell you, anyway. So will Brian Eno and most ad agencies. But I’m unwilling to spend $50 for a nice wooden frame with glass and a custom-cut, museum quality archival matt board to house an 8×10″ photograph I paid two bucks for. It doesn’t seem to fit the medium and it’s way too expensive. But I’m equally unwiling to buy one of these and add doubt to my already dubious credibility as a photographer. So I went out looking for alternatives—something cheap that looks good. If I could sell a framed 8×10″ print for less than the outrageous $150+ that local photographers demand and probably never collect, I’d have some “art for the masses,” right?

So here’s my approach. For an 8×10 photo, I went down to the frame store and bought a 12×14″ piece of Plexiglas, a can of white spraypaint that bonds to plastic, and a can of spray adhesive. Plexiglas comes with a backing stuck to both sides. I peeled the backing from one side, masking taped around the edges and spraypainted the showing side. Then I removed the tape and backing from the flip side, revealing a plate that has the sheen and color of the outside of an iBook. Then I centered and mounted the photograph there with the spray adhesive.

That’s the short story. It took a bit of work to get the tape on and off, to line the photo up, to adhere it straight onto the plastic without a dry mount press and without glue getting everywhere. I also had to sand down the sides of the Plexiglas to even out the rough edges left by the glass cutter. But I did manage, and I think with a little work (and a real dry mount press, a bigger cutting board, and some studio space to house it all) I could start making these frames pretty quickly.

They’re cheap and they look great. My total cost for the 8×10″ is a little over $15 for everything. I think people would be happy to pay $40+ for these prints (not Steve Keene cheap, but still cheap), and I get to cover at least the printing and framing expenses right away (the cam0era would take years to pay off at this rate, though).

Here’s a photo of the photos I’ve framed so far: a 16×20″ on the left and an 8×10″ on the right. I have placed a pen in the upper right so you can get a sense of the scale.

I’m still experimenting with different aspect ratios. I kind of like the “HDTV look” on the left, but maybe with a bit more margin on top and bottom. Meanwhile, the biggest challenge is the hanger on the back: I still haven’t figured out how to hang these things. Hot glue doesn’t stick, epoxy doesn’t stick, and I can’t see how I could drill a hole in the Plexiglas without screwing up the photo. I’ll let you know how it goes…