Elsewhat

The New Yorker has a nice little profile on Robert Cumming, an absurdist photographer I had never heard about. His pieces are whimsical and silly, like the above piece entitled “Watermelon/Bread”.

As an artist, he was an inveterate tinkerer who, for a period, taught himself a new fabrication skill every year, which would later come in handy when making the props that he used in his photographs. He was stubbornly inquisitive, often following his ideas wherever they led him, even—or especially—if it was impractical or absurd.

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Via Rafa

During precontact days, birch bark biting was practiced mainly by women in tribes “wherever the birch tree grows,” Church says. That area is vast; it includes British Columbia, northwest Alaska, Washington state, the northern Great Plains, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Lakes and New England. Tribes that have practiced the art form include some Algonquin peoples of the Great Lakes parts of Canada and the United States, Ojibwe, Pottawatomi, Abenaki, Odawa, Chippewa and some groups of Cree.

To create an image — a dragonfly, a flower, a hummingbird — artists use their eyeteeth (the sharp teeth also known as canines) to pierce the delicate, onion-thin skin just enough to make indentations. They move the piece around in their mouth, creating symmetrical shapes. They can’t see the results of their work until they unfold the bark and hold it to the light.

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To oversimplify, written words, like these I’m writing, are humanity’s way of recording spoken words. Musical notation are how we record a song. But what if we want to record a dance or other movements? Enter Labanotation, a written language for recording human movements developed in the 1920’s.

In Labanotation, movements of different parts of the body are mapped to symbols:

The result is a language that, read from bottom to top, tracks a series of simultaneous motions into one synchronized flow of symbols:

Found via artist Eija Loponen-Stephenson.

The local art gallery near my house has a wonderful little exhibit this week with a variety of musical works by an artist named Nick Ryan, whose other work and biographical information I’ve failed to find.

The works consist of simple household object arranged in such a way as to play music when electricity is applied (which is accomplished by random timers). It’s simple, and playful, and can be completely explored in about 10 minutes.

On from January 24 to 28th or so at Produit Rien in Mile Ex.

The New York Times has a review of an exhibition of vintage environmental posters. The article has a nice gallery of some wonderfully designed and often poignant examples of graphic design with a message.

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Via Rafa

My favourite blog post of every year is the best songs of the year by friend of Elsewhat’s Sean Michaels. I always discover a whole trove of new songs and artists.

Read 2023’s List Here →

YouTube channel Digging the Greats has a very good breakdown of how Daft Punk’s farewell album was made. See also his recent breakdown of the creation of their previous album Discovery.

Snelson’s sculptures feel like they should almost not stand up, but work via an intriguing mix of tension and compression (Which Buckminster Fuller would later term ‘Tensegrity’).

Take, for example, this beautiful 60 foot piece, ‘The Needle Tower’, from 1968:

This stunning new sculpture at Storm King uses traditional African brick-laying techniques:

It uses a technique known as Nubian vaulting, developed thousands of years ago in the Upper Nile delta. Mudbricks can be laid at an angle rather than in the typical flat orientation, and the technique requires a fast-setting mortar.

The beautiful structure reminds me of an igloo, which obliges me to link to Doug Wilkinson’s unbelievable 1949 NFB film How to Build an Igloo.

Read More about Lookout →

Street art by unknown artist.