One of the people at the MoveOn vigil for Cindy Sheehan in Mountain View held a placard advertising the site. She said that the sweaters are easy to knit and an experienced knitter could turn out a couple in an evening.

Update: Cynthia picked up requested type of yarn and has started knitting sweaters.

A friend found Autostitch, a UBC Computer Science Department project for ‘stitching’ together photos into panoramas, and threw some photos from the Apollo Moon landing missions into it.

Some of the results, like the Sea of Tranquility seen from the window of Eagle (above) are amazing. We put the results up as a Flickr photoset.

Bathsheba Grossman etches that 3-D map into a cube of crystal using a laser.

A friend received one of these for a Christmas present. It’s a wonderfully geeky piece of sculpture. I want one.

He creates short-lived pieces, and few permanent works, out in the field, using the materials (leaves, driftwood, ice, pigments made from plant and minerals) at hand.

Some observations about why I think he’s good at it:

1. He embraces Wabi Sabi.

2. He’s not afraid of screwups.

   In one scene in the film, he’s building an elaborate, chaotic latticework out brambles and thorns. He talks about how he likes to build out to the edge of stability. The structure buckles and he tries to keep it together. It fails. Brambles fall, and he facepalms.

   Earlier, we see him building a pine cone shaped monolith out of pieces of slate-like rock on a beach in Novia Scotia. He’s racing to get it done before the tide comes in. By the time he’s done, he will had made five tries to build it.

3. He can find order in what appears to be the chaotic.

   His leaf pieces delight me. He will sort through fallen leaves on the forest floor, and cover a small puddle with a blanket of leaves in a color gradient, shading from purple, back to yellow.

   In another construction, he organized a line of stones along the bottom of a shallow, fast moving stream. He sought out stones contrasting with the uniform grey and created a subtle line of color running below and perpendicular to the current.

The graffiti artist Banksy has managed to smuggle in his latest work, a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, into the Natural History Museum where it was exhibited on a wall for several hours.

…

The rat was stuffed and clad in wraparound sunglasses, scaled down to fit the top of its head, a rucksack on its back, and with a microphone in one paw.

He used radar altimeter data from the Mars Orbiters and fed it into the Terragen program.

My favorite is the print of what appears to be an official procession:

The various personages along the march are called out with notes.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to be dialog, their names, or catty comments on what they’re wearing.

The pages don’t set an encoding, so unless you’re on a Japanese-localized system, the text will be garbled.

They’re interested in creative work that happens between boundaries (genre and mainstream fiction, commercial and ‘fine’ arts).

Heinz Insu Fenkl wrote an essay for the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s site trying for a theory of the Interstitial. Now the physics analogies made me wince, but a key point is that novels that are interstitial, Fenkl mentions Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, have the peculiar property of classifying the writer, in the market, contingent on who reads them. In the case of Kirsty Gunn, she had a critically acclaimed ‘mainstream’ first novel, but her second novel was a fantasy. The critics who like the first novel didn’t like fantasy and the marketing for the second novel imploded.

Given that, it’s not surprising that writers such as Atwood go to great lengths to deny a particular work of theirs is anything but mainstream, for fear of getting classified as a genre writer and forclosing their access to the mainstream in subsequent work.

When I walked up to the piece, I recognized it — it was a web page, not only a web page, but someone’s weblog entry, as it would had been done if people wrote weblogs 90 years ago.

Okay, it’s not exactly weblog prose, since it doesn’t follow a strict chronological order, but most of the structure’s there.

In which two graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy Ivy educations.

They blast modernist architecture in the same cheerful, catty manner in which Trinny and Susannah destroy their subjects’ wardrobes.

They have it in for post modernism as well, but I get the feeling they think that it’s a game only for the Right. Jeeze, Terry Eagleton was picking off pomos while GayToryCatholic.com was still in Public School

Yet, they give a damn about art, and being crafty, so they go into my reading list. But I’m waiting for more postings on evolutionary biology.