when recording in snow...

some tips for recording in snow:

1. be careful if your contact mics are warm... if you place them on ice, they will stick to it, like your tongue on the inside of the refrigerator.

2. your baseball cap can work pretty good as an impromptu protective cover for your recorder if it starts snowing.

3. sometimes even in snow and cold, a dog will run up to your mics and try to lick them, perhaps thinking they are food or play toys...

to make a snow film...

i have made several films using a kind of relative scale drawing process. the first was done by tracing all of the notes in a piece of music onto clear film stock. the second was from my trip to norway, and involved tracing a map, words in a book, and a player piano roll. when i got to wyoming last week, i wanted to find a way to do something related to the landscape, but trying to find a way to have it have a relationship to scale.

for the first film/drawing, i covered the entire sliding glass door of my bedroom with clear 16mm film stock, and then tried to draw the view onto the large plane of strips. this one was a bit of a disaster as i ended up getting sharpie marks all over the window and had to spend the better portion of the next day cleaning it off.

yesterday, as it began to snow, i decided to try to map the dropping flakes, so i covered the small window in my studio with clear film stock, and did several 5 minute drawings, trying to map the falling white dots in different colors, within the window plane.

what you see above is the resulting drawing, before it was taken apart and edited into one long strip. i have no idea what these will look like when projected, but quite excited by the potential...

when there are demons in the airwaves...

dear loyal readers, i have arrived in banner wyoming for the residency, and to say that the internet connection is 'wonky' would be an understatement. those of you who read the blog daily will quickly realize the situation for the next four weeks will be a sporadic one at best. in better news, my studio faces a beautiful snow covered mountain and i awoke this morning at 5 am to snow sparkling in the moonlight and a rabbit slowly hopping past... the landscape so quiet i could hear his little paws on the surface of the snow...

migration...

from otto piene's 1970 book, more sky:

migration: migrating artworks or groups of artworks can float or swim like fish, fly like cranes, or fade like the setting sun. migrating man carries portable electronic charms and receives universally spread tele-information. migrant apparitions could be planted into the sky like wandering clouds of snow.

i'm leaving this morning on a 3 day drive to banner wyoming for a residency, where i will spend the next four weeks with 5 other artists on a 1000 very cold acres, with my own tiny studio. yes, i will be bringing my portable electronic charms, and will be able to receive universally spread tele-information (on my computer but fortunately not on my phone!). i plan on also wandering like a cloud of snow (as there will indeed be many of them).

there's a good chance airforms will be heavy on the text and light on the vintage photographs while i'm gone, as i won't be receiving things in the mail, and there don't seem to be any flea markets near where i'm staying... nevertheless between the very large box of books that i'm bringing and the amount of landscape i'll be ingesting, i will certainly find at least a few nuggets to share.

mother bell...

a few more images from the photo scrapbook i found sunday...