Phenomena

As the semester trucks on, I really want to take advantage of the facilities available to at HKU. So, although I spent a good two or three weeks, everyday, doing the drawings for the little animation, it will be put on hold temporarily for the more site specific silk silkscreen and letter press.

For the past 2 months I've been advised in a silkscreen course with the other exchange students. It was my first time doing this type of printing, and I've really enjoyed it although the process can simultaneously benefit from and exasperate any obsessive-compulsive tendencies I may have... I've included an image of "Phantasmagoric Gold" an edition of 10 prints. For this print I used the drawing/watercolor that I did by the same title; I scanned it and printed four different levels of contrast as four layers. Preparing the screen is somewhat difficult, but our instructor Hendrick, is both kind and extremely patient.

This past Tuesday was my first instruction in the letter press; totally awesome. It's just the tedious type of thing I like to do. There are shelves and shelves of all the different styles and sizes of fonts. The letters are small pieces of lead that you fit into each line you want to print; a group of lines is called a text block. You have a little map of reference to the placement of the letters in the drawers but often they are all mixed up and creating a text block is like completing a personalized backwards puzzle. Manuel, the book arts and letter press teacher advising me for this is one of the more excited and animated people I've met here. This upcoming Tuesday, I'll begin to print on paper.

So, right now I'm working on a book to bring these two disciplines together. I will be focusing on cellular imagery in both the prints and the text. I am trying to experiment with the materials I print on. On the image I have included, the cells are printed on a vellum-like paper, and the lines are printed on a really great (and therefore expensive) rice paper. I'm interested in layering the images with the different thicknesses of paper.

I'm trying to experiment with this project. Letting things happen as they will while trying not planning obsessively. In the words of Samuel Beckett, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Some words I've recently been trying to live by. More thoughts on that later.

Holy Shit, The Fourth

Marc showed me this video today. Watch it and be amazed:

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html

Dream Night of 2/11/08 and Holy Shit Pt. 3

I dreamt of dancing; I often have dancing dreams like this, where I'm the only one doing the right steps and the other girls are messing them up and should I follow what they're doing because that's how you make the performance not look terrible if someone completely messes up? I was with old dancemates, and my old instructors. My hair was long in a ponytail that went down to my lower back.

I also dreamt of a plane crash; We were flying over a large canal and couldn't get any air and sank into the water. There was a fire as well. There were small children who I love as my own. I had my phone-cord purse with my cell phone, camera, Ipod and wallet in it, and I kept trying to take it with me when we evacuated even though they tell us not to. Finally I just left it because I was scared of what was going to happen to us.

And HOLY SHIT Part III.

I've been reading this book recently on blood cells, specifically red blood cells. The book is from the 70s but it's filled with these beautiful negative-looking images of these microscopic cells that keep us alive. Red blood cells are 6-8 micrometers in diameter. A micron is one millionth of a meter.

It's amazing how the processes and makeup of our bodies are all basically identical. For the most of us, our cells are all the same size and shape, moving in the same paths through our body almost effortlessly. The malleability and resiliency of our blood is quite amazing as well. There's so many things that could go wrong that don't because our bodies just work. For instance, there are some arteries in our bodies in which our red blood cells have to go through one at a time. It's so bizarre that all this is just going on inside of us right now. Think about that... And that ladies and gentlemen is a Holy Shit moment. Take a look at Red Blood Cells on wiki. And maybe I'll be able to post some quotes from the book I'm reading that blew my mind.