This my piece for a collection of works created under the title boxing clever. The project is organised by my friend and former colleague Carinna Parraman.

Naturally, the project is overdue, but I've been working on this for some time now and, at least for the moment, I'm pleased with it. It has elements from C18th and C19th engravings, my usual theme of redemption gone wrong and vague allusions to some 'world view' engravings made by Jesuits and plain ole crazy folk throughout the centuries.

Beta News has announced that PS CS2 will be released in May, after speculation elsewhere indicated that it would be here by now. The news came with a press release that will be released on monday of next week, prompting speculation (in my mind) as to whether or not Adobe is in fact working on a time machine to cope with software delays and that this was just a beta press release that found a piece of buggy code.

The new version will almost certainly everything the old thingy did plus a few new trinkets which will be underexploited in order to promote CS3 but simultaneously absolutely-necessary and unimaginable-without-it.

I will of course purchase this software.

www.netdisaster.com will destroy your website too, if you want! Or anybody else's for that matter...

At the moment this is a simply a series of images of flowers. You can find them here. I guess I'll figure the whys and wherefores later.

I've added extra images to the lives in representation series (here) and moved others here which were already present.

The body of work is starting to shape itself as a concern for a certain sort of high contrast 'concrete' light becomes one of the formal qualities, and a colour temperature has become a little more balance but still on the warm side. Mortality seems to become more of an element in it too, but I'm not sure about that yet.

The composition and attitude is, in part, me trying to reconcile myself with Walker Evan's more literary understanding of photography, but was also chosen to reflect that form of documentary where the photographic voice willfully constructs the scene with a historical scope in mind and, to quote the painter Victor Willing, it is created with "the thought... made in the mouth".

This may not seem that interesting but it is a radically different way of not only understanding how a photograph should be taken but also of how we perceive and understand ourselves and our world. Rather than the conscious eye delimiting and knowing what is happening at the moment of the photograph - a form of apollonian image making - the photograph and photographer and the world are brought together coercively to describe an the spirit of a place, in its time, with photographer's feet planted in its earth. The photographer is relying upon their relationship to their 'unknowing' selves and the world, and that the photograph will open a space describing a totality that will, in a form of poetic kenning, relate the metaphors of the situation. (*Doff's hat to aesop*).

The iPhoto Library Manager is a utility to create and manage multiple libraries in iPhoto. One of painful things about iphoto is that you only have one library and that is set by default. There are hacks for moving a iphoto library, you can simply move it using the finder from one location to another and when its booted up iphoto's confusion will prompt you tell it where the library is now. This solution is slightly less hacky and allows multiple users to access a single library, plus you can now have network mounted libraries with *nix permissions and so on. It really opens up the potential for using iPhoto in a workgroup or just managing multiple computers each with iPhoto.

DILO - day in the life of - is a flickr phenomenon where people post a photographic diary of certain days. Sadly, it often results in pretty banal photographs, thus proving the old adage - "hell is other people's lives 'cus they don't look any better than your does." A truly wonderful exception to this is bingo little's text description of her day, built out of seemingly monumental lead type, and making fun of the banality or the average working day.

Some bars have a strange mixed clientele which exist like some kind of proof that different micro-cultures of people can get along just fine (assuming they have a beer or two in them or somewhere quite near them). Other bars like to test the limits of this thesis, such as the bar I was in last night in new brunswick, home of rutgers university and bugger all else.

The demographic was a pretty traditional mix of 'townies' and students. The experiment began with something called bumfight, which is one of those shows where hand held video cameras are giving to lunatics who do sports involving boards/damage themselves/damage other people. This show belongs to the latter category, which is probably the most nefarious. It largely consists of people picking fights in the street, mostly ganging up on people, occasionally cat fights.

This was playing in the bar and the townies were lapping it up, whilst playing pool discussing what they would do if someone jumped them (only defensive of course, maintains the righteousness of the fight) and so on. They are of course doing this whilst drinking enthusiastically and the little alcohol demons are spreading just great thoughts about their invinsibility and how fuggin obnoxious students are. This of course may not be true, but historically it does go that way on occasions. Or it has done in the life of most guy's that i've known.

Fortunately nothing did happen, so the social maintained itself but as a recipe for a 'bumfight' it was perfect: instructional video; inspirational drinks; and, the principle of sufficient reason embodied in the student population.

On the plus side, I got to shoot a fair amount, 'cus it was kind of interesting. Unfortunately, I was drinking a fair amount and the shooting conditions were a little difficult and so I didn't get many shots worthwhile.

I mentioned art in the title. I was down in NB to see the Rutger's MFA show for 2005. It was not great. The materials were mostly sterile, there was little of anybody's life in the work - and I don't mean autobiography, I mean personal conviction and vitality. There was some by-the-book critical thinking, and ciritcal thinking is mostly what rutger's is known for instilling in its art students, but little of the politics that I often associate with it, when the times are primed for critical politics in art.

here's a list graphic and drawing competitions:
http://www.artksp.be/2005_graphics_drawing.htm
And here's a good photo call:
http://www.photoreview.org/compete.htm

on a similar note, here's a an excellant place to get slides made from digital files for a reasonable price!

Erstwhile local graffiti artist banksy becomes strangely local again as he direct deposits artworks into several of NYC's most prestigious museums.

This is a follow on from the work that he did last year at the tate britain where he left a painting until it was discovered when it fell loose from its glue and crashed to the floor.

Its got to be said, his paintings and works are really pretty good, and the new ones considerably better than the tate one.

Update: banky's made the headlines.

The Great British landscape...
The timeless serenity of the rolling hills, burnt out vauxhalls etc etc...

PS1's current show, Greater New York 2005, showcases 'up and coming' talent from the 5 boroughs and metro area (i.e. the parts of NJ its ok to like). These sort of shows act as visual directories of what is going on in those inaccessible garrets in the quiet corners of the night. The curators responded (favourably and unfavourably) to 2,000 applications for studio visits and selected based upon those.

From this a strange coherence to the show has formed, which at times seems like part of a natural curatorial policy - showing artists together who complement/respond to each other, and at parts slightly absurd - the overwhelming bias towards media such as paper cut-outs, and towards fairy-tale fantasy imagery. Both the paper cut-outs and the fantasy themes I have no problems with, they are both very arresting. Cut-outs have an incredible delicacy where the edge fetishistically describes both imagery and material in the same moment. The fantasy imagery often results in images of wonderful complexity, where the viewer is seduced drunk under the overwhelming detailing. Neither fetishism nor seduction are altogether entirely unpleasant experiences, but perhaps I'm getting old, for I came wanting something else, something more.

The show brought together the 5 boroughs best cut-out fantasists. It really did. And I came out of the show thinking that the curators are really nice. They've put together some really nice work. It also brought together a nice selection of Yale photographers (I'm assuming here). Its all a bit nice. Nobody said anything to offend me directly - although I'm sure there were lots of oblique nastiness, as a neat counterbalance to the ostensible niceness.

Of course with 160 artists, one is forced to generalise. It is simply too much to really pay attention to. Far too much. This is not the fault of the curators, they have an enormous space to fill, and they didn't ask me to look at all the work. There were some notable pieces of work in there, including the cut-out work of Yuken Teruya; Christian Jankowski's film (sorry about the lack of link); Daniel Arsham's gouache's; and Kent Henricksen's installed embroideries. There are many other's apart from these, but these were among the one's that stuck out to the extent that I wrote a little note about each of them.

It isn't a bad show, however, its wasn't a great show either. I've often considered shows that were just a rattlebag of artists with no real connections between them to be disconcerting and ill-thought out, but with this show the limits of curatorial instinct were showing to the detriment of the variety. Perhaps more explicit curating is what I want: "these are some of the current themes/means/ways that are present in NYC right now, and these artists, we feel, are the best to represent those." Maybe something like that would have kept me happier. Maybe.

here's a link which is a useful grouping of add-ons for del.icio.us. It includes things such as python scripts for taking firefox/mozilla bookmark files and uploading them onto delicious replete with tags. I think its great, but I'm a dull dull boy.

I promise I'll post something more interesting soon...

My friend Kyle Faust took me, and my unbruised, un battered arse snowboarding. It was great of him to do that - he worked at the ski resort as a photographer (and before his knee injury as a pro-snowboarder) so it was great to have him show me around and explain to me why I kept falling over so much.

Now I feel like I'm an expert in arse-mountain-impact-pain. Its a good subject, burgeoning field and so on. I'm not kidding when I say I fell over about 100 times. In truth, Kyle taught me well, and after a few hours of eating snow I felt like I knew something about the principles of the snowboarding. However, the practice of this fine and noble sport was another matter.

Our brains are great, they learn so well. So, my brain today learned from kyle that I should use the board to stop me whilst plummeting down a mountain. It extrapolated very quickly that it was in fact more expedicious to use my entire body. It took me a little while longer to really believe that I didn't need to fall down in order to stop, and that I could in fact use that plank that I was cruelly tied to. And its true, you know, its true...

There's part of our minds that can really enjoy maladaptive thinking. The mountain was not really crowded but there were plenty of people for me to bisect and my brain was terribly aware of that. A chunk of the day was spent learning that I didn't need to throw myself into the ground in order to avoid someone who could have been 20 yards away and often quite capable of moving themselves out of the way of an obvious novice. Another slice was spent fighting against my instincts to lean with my body rather then lean the board. I remember the moment when I realised that I was trying to use the wrong understanding in order to move myself on the plank-of-inertia and when I applied the 'counter-intuitive' teachings that I was given then all was well. And from that point onwards things improved markedly.

Just a list of residencies that's all... get to it!
http://www.resartis.org/

Here's a flash based gallery showing a novel application of the time-slice photography/film techniques that tim macmillan invented and reinvents in this new context.

The images are created by having the graffiti created with torches over a long exposure - 5-10 seconds, at a guess - in darkness, or near darkness and then using a second curtain flash to capture the graffitist frozen and clear. The effect is very beautiful and mesmerising but I wonder something more substantial could be built with it.

(thanks to aesop for the link)

Now that I'm a label fetishist officially, I can start to incorporate the principles of Getting Things Done with zeal.

BoingBoing recently posted an image and a few links showing doctored photographs, doctored for the well being of the subjects, perhaps: smokers became non-smokers as they all had the cigarettes removed from their images. Its interesting to watch the broader cultural machine re-write history, to see how laws are changed regarding advertising smoking which has ramifications onto posters for teenage walls and exhibitions for the edification of the middle class - effectively policing the subject like other regimes we'd rather distance ourselves from, but indirectly:

The library's president, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi Evin - a law banning tobacco advertising - but also so as not to frighten away potential sponsors from the exhibition, which opened yesterday.

(from the telegraph article linked above)

Update: Image of Johnson removed at owner's 'request'.

This website is a temple to my geekishness. Any way to extend and build upon activity that results in extra geekarma flowing from my being is enthusiastically embraced. I've found a veritable fount of geekarma pouring from my geekpores (can you smell it?) because of the scriptability of the wonderful FTP client Cyberduck.

Cyberduck behaves very well on its own and in company. It is an excellent example of how an application ought to integrate into general workflow and especially with the finder. You can drag and drop from the finder or to the finder. By having an open folder with the local version of the site using the finder, and cyberduck handling the remote, all is well.

I've been using cyberduck for some time now - probably about 6 months or so - but only just realised that it comes with applescripts that you can attach to folders (which will automatically upload to a specified folder on the remote site) as well as syncing scripts and others. I now have a script attached to my local version of the site which automatically publishes new HTML and JPEG files onto the server.

Not only that but I've got standard photoshop droplets and batch automate commands which resize master images into screen size and thumbnail versions and then save them in the respective folders. As these folders are the ones which have the folder actions attached to them, as soon as the photoshop action kicks in, it causes the cyberduck scripts to begin and upload the images.

Can you smell it yet?

One caveat: the scripts on the disk image for cyberduck are wrong. Go here to find the correct ones. (Select the script, then click the download link.)

I went to the estate sale of local new jersey composer Richard Lane. It was astonishing to see an entire life disregarded. His work was scattered around, original and copied manuscripts were laid out on the bed alongside books evincing his broad cultural education and interests.

I do not know a lot about the man yet, but his work was published by boosey and hawkes, who are a fairly prestigious music publisher, if I remember correctly.

There's a site describing his life here by an old friend. He doesn't seemed to have left any family - I really do not know - as the estate sale was conducted by a company, and because the general disregard for his life-work, and any family surely would have treated the remains of his life better.

The series is growing and becoming a little more focussed, or perhaps not as the subject is becoming broader. I've written to the faculty at MSU who looks after the Harry Partch instruments and he's ok'd me to photograph those. The series is becoming more about the spaces and the objects of a life dedicated to art and is mostly fuelled by my own musings upon the direction and shape of my life.

I've just been introduced to a new site: Artlex. Its a dictionary for artists giving the artistic terms for words rather than their conventional usage, and specialising in formal manufacturing terms and art movements from what I can gather. Its not an amazing tool for people who've come through the art education system but is very useful from a pedagogical perspective and for those still in the throws of it. It is also suffering from a design that was looking a little ropey in 1996.

For a more conceptually useful resource try john lechte's 50 key contemporary thinkers (sorry - only found it at amazon.co.uk), and his more recent key contemporary concepts, as well as the classic Keywords by the late Raymond Williams.

The elegant flickr exporter from fraser speirs at speirs.org has been updated to, amongst other things, work with iPhoto. (Or I assume so, when I upgraded from iPhoto 4.x to iPhoto 5.x the flickr uploader didn't work and nor did any of the export functions.) This natty little utility allows a direct export from the iPhoto catalogue to flickr, and most significantly, keeps all of the tags that you assigned from Apple's software. It is simple, does its job and buggers off again without a complaint, which is exactly how I like my applications to work.

My fellow flickrer aesop complained that the flickr exporter hijacked the standard export functions of iPhoto and so uses the flickr uploadr instead. (available here). Speir's site shows an image with all the functions still working, but alas on my version at least, this is not the case. I'll write to the man and see what happens.

iPhoto itself is a neat update. The RAW importer renders iPhoto useful to me as a cataloguing tool direct from the CF cards, which is a genuine change in work flow. However, it doesn't export to Photoshop in the RAW format but converts it into a 8-bit JPG and then sends it, which renders the RAW importer a little on the pointless side, as I've got to find the original file in the finder, then open that in Photoshop in order to enjoy the fetishistic image tweaking that titilates photographers so much. It is also a lot slower than PS on general handling. (I measured this in quantifiable metrics known as the 'should-I-boil-the-kettle-and-have-another-cuppa-whilst-waiting' factor.)

Oh well, perhaps there will be a iPhoto 5.5...

Quite reasonably I was recently asked whether I had a studio. Simply, I don't and outside of university I never have, but I also understand the pschological need for one.

I think Its important for the spaces in your life to represent the life that you lead. I'm sure thats why -at one level- we have rooms for sleeping and bathing and so on: to demarcate the psychological differences in what we do in our life and reflect the differences that we can make in creating our lifes. Of course there are practical, plumbing, heating, social considerations and so on but these could be overcome should there be a need for it at the level of our type of humanity. However, The divisions, walls, and functionality of spaces persists.

The spaces I occupy reflect parts of my mind and my activities. So, as a photographer, as an artist, the absence of a studio should be a concern. Because of the question and because of my persistant tinkering with this site over the last two months I made a mental bridge between the two. The more that I have thought about this more coherent the argument seems.

A studio is firstly somewhere to make work - ok so the site does not do this, but the laptop and desktop that I maintain and update the site upon does. Secondly, it is a place to reflect, and to spend time in. This is certainly true. It is a space for constructing and organising what my work is about and how it relates from one body of work to another. Again this is something that I was conscious in doing when I recreated the site - that it was an opportunity to reframe the work contained in it. Its also that persists and holds my work, and lastly somewhere for others to see my work, a place to hold studio visits.

The analogy is not perfect, but it is useful. This studio (with the laptop) moves with me wherever I go, and is always open for a view. Perhaps it is better to think of the site as an aspect of my digital studio, it is the public aspect for viewing my work and also the reflective space when my physical space won't permit it.

I ordered a quantity of life stuff from amazon.com, excellent purveyors of stuff. They split my order - for my convenience - and sent a small labeller refill separately in a vastly oversized box. So, I wrote to them about their packaging, along with this photo.

I've got to admit that I got a reply within minutes. And the first sentence was almost certainly composed by a human being in response to my query. But I deeply suspect I contracted generic-replyitis from the remainder (but at least it was a reply):

Thank you for writing to Amazon.com with your concerns about excessive packaging.

As you may know, our company has gone to great lengths to establish a brand name of quality and excellence. Please know that we are concerned about our impact on the environment and have taken steps to balance our needs as a business with our responsibility as a consumer in our environment.

Our packaging material is made from recycled material and our
promotional materials are printed on recycled paper. Furthermore, the materials we use for packaging are themselves recyclable. For more information, please visit the following section of our Help desk:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/578084/

Please know that it is always important for us to hear how customers
react to all aspects of our service. Customer feedback like yours helps us make important decisions about how our shipping procedures can be improved over the course of time.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com. We hope to see you again soon.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=btbxdxre1148868235
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=btbxdxre1148868235

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please use the appropriate link above if you need to contact us again about this matter.


Best regards,

Mike A.
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com

There's something quite beautiful about this series of images.

We all know why we don't email help@whereever.com: they don't write back. Its a simple transaction. You piss into a blackhole, the end. However, I've got something called faith in several internet companies. I have faith in google - I believe in google's mission, I believe in their desire to bring order, and reclaim knowledge out of the internet. I have faith. I believe in that. I believe that amazon will deliver my books in reasonable time. I believe that if I wrote to amazon's helpdesk that I would an automated reply very quickly and a generic reply sometime later. I believe that, I have faith in that being the case. I believe that microsoft will never produce a good piece of software by design. I have faith in their desire to make money. I believe that apple makes highly desirable objects, and that they are a more-or-less virtuous company and that they are very charming when they are at their worst. I still believe.

Flickr, I believe in too. I believed in flickr so much the other day that I wrote to their helpdesk. I wrote to to help@flickr.com or something equally anonymous. And I got a reply within a few hours, and, it may begger belief, but I also got a question in that response. In other words something asking for further communication. Which I did and which resulted in further communication and in me learning something that I did not know about google too, to whit:

you can preface a google search with the argument 'link:' for example, 'link:flickr.com/photos/andrewatkinson/3075041/' which will search for sites citing that flickr link.

In other words reverse bibliographies for the internet. Very cool. Well, useful, and possibly fun for those of us who have a website up and running...

Extisp.icio.us is a web-app which creates a visual layout of a user's del.icio.us tags. The links are active, and take the viewer to the list of that particular tag, and hovering on the title reveals the number of links. Mine at the moment is quite poor, I have less than a hundred tags, but I haven't bookmarked anything locally on a browser since I created (and started using) the account.

That said, there are lots of other people who are more familiar with this than me. (This person is very focused isn't he?)