when rainbows become bowrain...

my exhibition at pomona college, when words become forms, will close on december 19. because of the scale of bowrain - a large installation work, this might be your only chance to experience it for a long while... the sound, sculpture, and hand drawn films that make up the piece, were all birthed from a tiny notational sketch by buckminster fuller. fuller's drawing was used as a score towards most of the compositional decisions within the piece. all of the footage is in "real time", and the images of just the films are the actual projection footage...

for more info click here

for those of you who think an embedded video means i'm going to start performing with a laptop, never fear, it took me a number of frustrating hours to export the video without it looking like a broken old scoreboard... needless to say, videos will most likely NOT occur here on a regular basis.

nonetheless, i'm hoping the video will enable the far away folks to see/hear a bit of what i did on my summer "vacation", and for those of you who are local, perhaps it will inspire you to take the drive out to pomona... and if you do, don't miss the incredible bas jan ader show nearby.

when alternative culture came to school...

1967-1968 was a good time to be a student at the university of illinois, particularly because of their tremendous series of lectures under the rubric of "the university in motion".

here are some images of a recently acquired lot of cardboard posters used to advertise the talks. there is no designer mentioned, but they seem to have been designed by one person. they run the gamut of iconic humans in various endeavors of action and thought, including the premier of john cage's seminal work - musicircus, and a talk by bucky fuller.

the events, many of them part of a symposium in november of 1967 included such academic rock stars as: saul bellow, leo lionni, harold rosenberg, merce cunningham dance company and john cage, gunther schuller, charles wuorinen, buckminster fuller, stan vanderbeek, and others. topics ranged from avant garde music to the vietnam war.

cage's musicircus featured " lajaren hiller, herbert brun, kenneth gaburo, david tudor, gordon mumma, toshi ichiyanagi, and a ton of other people, including "others present in spirit". in the recent past, musicircus was recreated at the tate, as well as the mca chicago, using 300 - 500 musicians.

architecture on the go...

well in the midst of architecture month i'm off to austin for an exhibition and to finally visit marfa. it seems a good time to post a recently acquired snapshot of one of the greatest examples of architecture on wheels... buckminster fuller's dymaxion car.

the first of only three prototypes was built in 1933, and in 1934 the last one was built for conductor leopold stokowski (one more merging of sound and architecture...).

this image is of number two (based on the two tone paint job). the thing that is so extraordinary about the snapshot is that most of the photos i've seen of the car show it in all its lonely glory. here, you get way more of a sense of just how strange this car must've looked sitting casually next to regular cars of the era.

p.s. i'll be back in a week.

from bucky to biosphere... and back again...

here's a souvenir from the buckminster fuller designed giant geodesic globe that encased the us pavilion at expo 67. the metal badge (which i also found sunday) is slightly convex, forming a very low dome, so the form and image are either unintentional reflections of each other, or an unbelievably beautiful design.

you can read much about what the pavilion contained during the expohere.

remarkably, after the expo ended, the dome was deemed important enough to be left standing. it survived intact until the mid 70's, when a fire melted the plastic panels. the steel structure remained intact; and the hollow skeleton sat unused for years until the early 90's. in 1995, a museum opened in the interior space dedicated to environmental issues relating to water, and was dubbed the "biosphere" museum. i believe this was fuller's largest geodesic, and considering it was designed for a world's fair, it's kind of amazing that it still exists on site.

i googled the word biosphere to find some history, and got to a site that said it was a term coined by vladimir vernadsky. it seems verdansky did write a book called "biosphere" in 1926, but the term was supposedly first used by edward seuss in 1885. the interesting thing is that vernadsky seems to be responsible for another term... the noosphere (what a word!) - "the sphere of human thought".

according to verdansky via wikipedia, the noosphere is "the third in a succession of phases of development of the earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere."

in the "see also" section at the bottom of verdansky's wikipedia page there's a link to "buckminster fuller". a click reveals that the fuller page doesn't mention either sphere - bio or noo, but it's nice to know that everything still comes back to bucky in one way or another...

mora pahara

in 2000, while i was trying to find a way to move my paintings into new territory i happend upon this old train brochure published by the indian state railways. the cover, of course, was enough to make me need to own it, as the painting on the front is completely amazing; but the inside didn't seem all that interesting until i discovered the map on the last page.

this image made up of the lines that connect all of the sites on the route map, reminded me of some of buckminster fuller's structures. i began to think about maps not just as drawings but also as objects in space; and in terms of image building, the lines suggested a potential of other forms by simply connecting the dots in different ways - essentially creating new images through new routes to the same destinations.

this idea of building new images by connecting the same points in space differently, became the beginnings of an incredibly rich step forward. i did a series of 10 paintings based on the map and then the brochure got lost in the disaster that is my studio. a last week i was looking for something else and i happened upon it again... a few days later and i'm working on a sculpture, finally using those ideas suggested by fuller, creating not just an image, but an object in space...

i am constantly amazed at the richness one can find in such seemingly inconsequential objects...