virtual orders

I'm thinking about the collections we keep that are immaterial/digital:
-songs
-lists
-facebook friends
-poems
-secrets
-email
-SPAM
-voicemail
-lists
-memory


Most interfaces essentially exist to order and display collections of information. Finder, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us, rss, etc. are the digital decendants of wunderkammer. In some ways, they retain the form and limitation of their ancestry (boxes containing items arranged according to the user's fancy.) Virtual space doesn't really correspond to physical reality, but we're accustomed to the metaphor. Though it now seems obvious, the graphical user interface (files and folders on the desktop) was a revolutionary development for Apple. I wonder if our interfaces will become less tied to the physical as we settle into virtual space. Or maybe there is something about the box and its contents that relates innately to the human brain.



"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."
-Foucault, The Order of Things

o death

The National Museum of Mexican Art is my new favorite museum. I'm especially excited about the ofrendas a los muertos: stage-like altars to the dead.

I bought a sugar skull with my name on it. At home, I added it to my mantelpiece collection of decorative-objects-with-vaguely-emotional-significance. Also in this collection:

-praying hands
-large eyed kitten
-virgin mary
-antique portuguese teacup & saucer
-gnarled root

In my first post, I wrote about collecting to fulfill an emotion need. People collect for an variety of reasons, but I think my main motivation is a desire to see my identity and experience reflected in the objects around me. My stuff is my self in a way. I've never been the kind of person to buy things that are generic and practical. I need style and whimsy to feel like an individual.

Additionally, I suspect that all collecting involves a denial of death. By linking my identity to objects, I become immortal. I might die, but my stuff never will. When my grandmother was dying, she bought sewing patterns. Judging from the boxes we found in her room, she was planning to make hundreds of dresses someday.

Of course, everything is a spectrum:

New Collections

-fake birds from Maxwell St. Market.
-bell jar from Village Discount Outlet
-vacuform packages shaped like mice
-velvet fabric samples from Craigslist
-crocheted tubes
-673 images of fake flowers from the internet

nature morte

I visited the Chicago Botanic Gardens with my aunt & uncle and took digital pinhole photos of some of the flowers.




Nothing spectacular, but I'm thinking about how (earnest) flowers are a taboo in art these days. Does anyone like Georgia O'Keeffe anymore? I certainly don't, but I get interested whenever subject matter is widely marginalized.


"The emergence of the aesthetic of artifice was directly related to the disappearance of a whole realm of signification: that of a natural world infused with mystical attributes . . . Nature lost the metaphoric vitality associated with creation, becoming a dead emblem of its former meaning . . . As a model of ideological purity (or even better the lack of all ideology) [Nature] was redeemed wholesale in the 19th century, but as ornament it was decried as kitsch. This literal association of artifice with death is the counterpart of the assumption that Nature, because of its life giving qualities, is also authentic and transcendental, while artifice (and all of culture for that matter) must be counterfeit and superfluous since it intervenes with the raw materials of nature, investing them with extrinsic meaning. [This thinking] ignores that human perception is by definition artificial, requiring the translation of nature into culture- the symbolic conversion of things into representations."
From The Artificial Kingdom by Celeste Olaquiaga

my pink things

I recently discovered the work of Jeongmee Yoon, a Korean artist who photographs children with their hoards of gendered belongings.



I keep files of images I like on my computer organized in a folder called AWESOME. Subfolders include:
-art in general
-diagram
-fashion
-fibers
-graphic/text
-HAHA
-kitsch
-nature
-photography
-puppets

I'm constantly wanting to reorganize these images thematically. In honor of Jeongmee Yoon, here are my pink things.

royal trash

"Kitsch is not an active commodity naively infused with the desire of a wish image, but rather a failed commodity that continually speaks of all it has ceased to be. Kitsch is a time capsule with a two way ticket to the land of dreams, the collective or individual realm of myth."


(Tasty snacks.)

"Queen Victoria would not allow any of her innumerable possessions to be thrown away or even altered. If something fell in to total disrepair, she would have it replicated to perfection. When even this was not enough, she had all her belongings photographed from several angles and the photos place in huge albums that the elderly queen browsed at leisure."


Both quotations from The Artificial Kingdom
by Celeste Olaquiaga

on harems

I'm currently reading the catalogue of the Uncanny exhibition curated by Mike Kelley. Most of the objects and images in the exhibition are humanoid unions of the erotic and the grotesque. According to Freud, the Uncanny is defined by an eruption of repressed emotions and impulses. Dolls, mannequins, prosthetics, and automata are uncanny because they are both familiar and other. Being inanimate and figurative, they awaken a knowledge of mortality and sexuality we normally suppress.


I was interested to find that Kelley had also included a number of his personal collections in the exhibition. He calls these collections "Harems," a term used to describe a fetishist's accumulation of like objects. He writes, "The uncontrollable impulse to collect and order is itself uncanny." I don't get an uncanny sensation looking at these works, but I can see how Kelley might. It is disturbing to find oneself repeating the same unconscious behaviors.


"Collecting has been described as a form of 'doubling.' Through the amassing of identical or similar objects, the collector attempts to cheat death . . . the collector's inability to stop collecting, to stop pursuing similar or related objects, is a further manifestation of unrecognized and hidden motifs"
From Christoph Grunberg "Life in a Dead Circus: The Spectacle of the Real"