SprawlCode hits the Big Apple!

Julie Buck reading SprawlCode - Times Square, Feb 2007. Photo by Kris Merola. See www.preachersbiscuitbooks.com

SprawlCode is released!

The SprawlCode is back from the bindery and ready for distribution. Please see www.preachersbiscuitbooks.com for information and ordering.

The Moving Photograph at SPE

Viewing an enlargement of a microchip as a work of art in the exhibition, Information art, MOMA, c. 1989; "Picture Weave" blanket (created with a jacquard loom) displayed at a jewelry store, 2006.
Our panel, The Moving Photograph in a Digital World, is scheduled for the SPE conference in Miami, March 2007. In company with Patti Ambrogi and David Tomas, I'll be exploring photography's struggle with time through images that
are neither fixed nor entirely in motion. My particular effort will be to unpack Norbert Wiener's notion of the "operative image" as the latest incarnation of the mechanical picture tradition that runs parallel to photography and leads to the fantastic whirling of the computer microchip. In seeing how images functionally "tick" (mechanically and cybernetically), we can proceed to seeing moving photographs as a cognitive process of informing the world. See: Moving Photograph proposal

SprawlCode, the book is coming

Finally, my artists' book is about to come out -- all 368 pages are printed and at the bindery (behind another massive job, I'm afraid). SprawlCode is a collection of processed image-texts that encounters sprawl as a condition of language. I'll be working with Tate and Kris of Preacher's Biscuit books about the release party soon. For now, the proof is online as a PDF at: SprawlCode-book

Selle Collection Big Mural Project

Andy Eskind, Dave Mount and I are working on a preliminary proposal to create for the city of San Francisco a very large mural consisting of up to one-million street vendor photographs in the Joseph Selle photographic archive. An accompanying website would offer enhanced information about the project and interactive access to the entire image-base -- myriads of recorded glimpses of people passing by. The building-scale mosaic and website would stand as a monumental public artwork and a tribute to the passing street life of a major american city.
The big question now is what to call the project. So far I've considered: The photographer of Modern Life; Modern Life through a street vendor's lens; Streetwalking with a lens; Streetwalking on a Ruined Map; Photogeography of the City; San francisco street life through a photovendor's lens; Post WWII street life in...; Bystander; Street Scan: Sanfrancisco. Please help! See:
Big Mural Proposal
Selle Animation
Selle Roll H

Image Process Literature anthology

A traveling cosmetic kit resembling a typewriter

Our efforts look promising to assemble the latest writing on new directions in visual literature in the anthology, Image Process Literature. Our aim in this anthology is to bring together the work of writers, theorists, visual artists and poets who question the very status of literature in a media soaked world -- literature as we see it being processed by visual culture. We have an impressive range of authors interested in contributing: Jan Baetens (Belgium); David Tomas (Montreal); Alisia Chase (Rochester); David Brittain (London); and others. See: ImageProcessLit Proposal

Photography as writing

I'm looking forward to the History of Photography course this Spring and looking deeper at the relationships between photography and literature. I'm reading Nancy Armstrong's Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999); even some experimental novels, Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000). The syllabus is underway at: vsw.org-histphoto

Picture Stories - a new series in process

This is a new series of prints that I'm provisionally calling, "Picture Stories." Reading them is somewhat like encountering in a car windshield an elaborate image in the shape of words. See: Picture Stories in process

Mapping the Magazines of Photography

I presented a tour of the 3rd Space at the recent conference of the Society of Photographic Education at the Photographic Resource center in Boston. It was actally a double tour of the show Found, Shared: The Magazine as PhotoWork curated by David Brittain and the VSW Research Center. My presentation gives background and contemplated the contingencies that operate in the "archive/trash" aesthetic of the Found, Shared exhibition. They point to three connecting factors: 1) the capriciousness of small things; 2) the play and instability of archival categories; and the uncertainty (chaos) of very large numbers. Working with David, I hope we can get the show to the North America soon. See: Found, Shared at CUBE gallery, Manchester; Ohio; Found

Digitization Project with ABsOnline is funded!

We recently received the good the news from NYSCA that we can begin our project to digitize the Independent Press archive. Designed in collaboration with Artists' Books Online (ABsOnline) and the Digital Library at the University of Virginia (UVa), the project intends to make artists' books accessible online in order to promote critical discussion and form an overview of production and collection patterns in the field. It will also beta test collection sharing and a distributed content model. Tate Shaw is coordinating the project, and we've already had a good planning and training session with Johanna Drucker and staff at UVa. See: Artists' Books Online

Repetition-High Noon

My work High Noon is a sequence of 4 imagetext prints laid out on a print rail or ledge. The ledge is about 8 ft. wide and 22 in. deep and is attached to the gallery wall at an approximately 45 degree angle. The ledge is painted deep grey to set off the black prints. The sequence imagines a gnomon that ties together verbal references to various geographical places in the USA. At high noon, they are caught in repeated acts of becoming. See: High Noon

Scholars Day proposal

The panel presents and discusses experimental forms of academic composition in the "Media Culture" course of the MFA Program in Visual Studies (at the Visual Studies Workshop). While exploring themes and elements of the media environment, the goal was to further our understanding of the role of the image in society by the direct application of our visual skills to the academic content of the course. In designing the final project, the course employed W. J. T. Mitchell's concept of the "imagetext" - a composite, synthetic work that gives images and audio-visual signs a primary role along with text. The course encouraged multiple forms of communication - short videos, web pages, cartoons, and artists' books – while insisting on standards of research, argumentation and rigor. While summarizing and reflecting on the results, the panel addresses open questions about visual rhetoric as a valid form of academic scholarship. See: Media Culture syllabus

Working with Visual Information

Draft of my Introduction -

# 2 - Found photographs from the Visual Studies Workshop

The visionary historian and photographic archivist Paul Vanderbilt is the patron saint for our investigation of the 3rd Effect using large scale picture collections. Vanderbilt envisioned the use of archives as an exploration rather than the routine selection of illustrations to accompany prescribed arguments. To encourage an open-ended, imaginative use of pictures, Vanderbilt worked out a long-term practice of forming combinations of images, usually in pairs, that were unrelated to each other by the usual archival categories of photographer, time period, geographic location, genre, and subject matter. Escaping the regulation of these control vocabularies, the pairings would reveal an unexpected line of interpretation and lead to larger associative patterns of imagery and ideas. He later used these picture combinations to make unique table-top "exhibitions" brought out as needed to have "conversations" with like-minded visual researchers.

The members of the "Working with Visual Information" class are pleased to participate in this wider conversation using the Internet. We hope our pairings enhance the use of picture collections as a speculative adventure and will contribute to the 3rd Effect. See: The 3rd Effect website

My first digital camera

This is my first digital camera from 1996.

I sold it in Kansas City in yard sale in 2001.

Starting this blog

I would like my blog to work as a diary -- a place where I can note ideas, small and large accomplisments. I hope I can register clearly some interesting things that I see everyday. Afterall, you see what you know...