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2010 April

Signficant Objects X Kate Bingaman-Burt X 20×200 — now available!

11×14; edition of 500: $50!

I teased this last week — and now it’s here! We’re really excited to announce the latest Significant Objects team-up, resulting in thoroughly affordable art, and another way to support v3 beneficiary Girls Write Now.

The prints you see on this page are available in limited editions from 20×200, Jen Bekman’s online project that sells a dazzling array of prints from an impressive roster of artists, all priced to meet a mission of making art available to all.

16×20; edition of 20: $200!

The artist is Kate Bingaman-Burt, whose delightful book Obsessive Consumption was just published, and whose combination of thoughtfulness about consumer behavior and mad drawing skills make her our perfect match.

All these prints are created using archival pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper with a matte finish.

8×10; edition of 200: $20!

Proceeds from the sale of these prints will benefit Girls Write Now, contributing to Significant Object’s grand total donation.

Girls Write Now provides guidance, support, and opportunities for New York City’s underserved or at-risk high school girls, enabling them to develop their creative, independent voices, explore careers in professional writing, and learn how to make healthy choices in school, career and life.

Read more

Pictures of Stuff, cont’d: Clutter? Joy?

Doug Bell. Click for more.

Via Junk Culture, yet again:

Artist Doug Bell makes sculptures that range from small table-top sized, manipulated found object pieces, to life size tableaus and wall sized installations. The installations can be made up of hundreds of objects….  His work is a reflection of his need to make order out of chaos and give meaning to the incoherent.

Part of a series.

Books, the idea: Carefully sliced objects

By Onlab. Click for more.

Via ffffound. Part of a series.

Linkpile

Where Were You? 2009: Now available — for free!

FEATURING: Life, Death, More of the Same.

As some of you know, Where Were You? is a side project of mine that dates back many years: I note “where I was” when I learned of various notable deaths, and record any related thoughts. For the last few years, I have collected these entries into annual zines. For 2009, instead of printing and mailing physical zines, I’m making a year of entries available as a sort of e-zine.

Also, instead of charging a buck or two, I’m making it available for free.

I have had great help and encouragement on this enterprise from Mr. Harold Check. In fact, I can safely say that without his efforts, technical and otherwise, there is no way I would have collected this year’s entries in any public form.

We’ve used two fine ebook services to present WWY2009. The Scribd version includes some illustrations. The Feedbooks  version does not.

You don’t have to have a special e-reader device to make use of these services and get to this material — in fact, it’s easy to print it out if you like.

Early adopters are welcome.

Here is how to get Where Were You? 2009 — whether you use an ebook reader or not:

1. If you use a Kindle or an iPad (or probably any ebook reader, so far as I know): Download from Feedbooks, or Scribd.

2. If you use a reader app on your iPhone (such as the Kindle app or Stanza, a good free reader app that you can obtain here): Download from Feedbooks or Scribd. I assume most readers on most smartphones work easily with Feedbooks or Scribd documents, but let me know if you have trouble.

3. If (like me!) you don’t use any of that stuff, and you are happy to read it in the form of a PDF on your computer, or as a regular printout, Scribd is probably for you. Check out the “full-screen” book view for the complete retro zine experience. (And if you download it as a PDF, it seems this site will reorder the pages for booklet printing, should you wish to go that way: http://bookletcreator.com/.)

Thoughtful people have enjoyed past editions of WWY.

Also of course if you have questions or comments or run into problems with the above, your feedback is more than welcome.

I hope you’ll check out the 2009 edition — and help spread the word.

Thanks. Read more

To Do In Savannah: “Soldier Portraits” At The Telfair Museum

Please pardon this brief aside. I’m really excited about E‘s latest show, at the Telfair Museum of Art here in Savannah. The opening reception is tomorrow night. I don’t know how many Murketing readers are actually in Savannah, but for those who are, here’s the info:

Ellen Susan / Soldier Portraits
Opening Reception: Thursday April 15, 6 pm.
Telfair’s Jepson Center
Savannah, GA

If you can’t make the opening, check out the actual show before closes July 25. Many of the images on view are ambrotypes (and tintypes) made with the wet-plate collodion process. This is a rather complicated and intense antique process that, while difficult, produces one-of-a-kind images that look particularly amazing in person.

For various reasons I’ve been thinking a lot lately about recognition and the art process, and I think it’s an important dimension of this project. The combination of this process and these subjects strikes me as a useful antidote to the way we’ve gotten used to seeing soldiers in the press: Whatever your stance might be about the war, “the troops” are often just fleeting, interchangeable images, more of an idea than actual people.

The Soldier Portraits project started when we first moved to Savannah a couple of years ago; locally based soldiers, who were all around at the grocery store or the mall, were at the time preparing to deploy to Iraq, some for the third time. Suddenly it was impossible not to recognize them as more than simply “the troops,” but rather as individuals. I think these images — made with long exposures, captured through a difficult process onto what are in effect unique objects — force the viewer to undergo a similar process.

Yes, I’m biased. But in this instance, I’m also right.

Not in Savannah? Well at least visit the project’s web site.

Pictures of stuff, cont’d: Color-grouped

Helga Steppan: “See Through is a series of twelve photographs. In which I audited all my personal belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of colour groupings.”

Helga Steppan / All My Stuff - White / Click for more.

Helga Steppan / All My Stuff - Black / Click for more

Helga Steppan / All My Stuff - Red / Click for more.

Part of an occasional series.

Books, the idea, cont’d: Bookends depicting readers — of what?

By Cubo3 via BoingBoing, click for more

BoingBoing published this. At first I was interested in bookends depicting someone reading. Then I wondered: What are they reading? The comments suggest others had the same thought. Is it a Kindle or an iPad? somebody wondered. Someone else countered, amusingly, that those devices require hands to use, and these figures lack hands or even arms. So perhaps it’s flat-laid book of poetry. Somebody else noted that some of the angles actually suggest a sort of spy-holding-a-gun pose. And finally: “Those are velcro-backed ebook readers. Stick right to your lap, no hands required. To turn the page, lean forward and tap with your nose.”

I suppose even if the figures are reading electronic devices, these items still require physical books for proper use. Unless we some day have so many devices they are shelved and displayed. Hm.

Pictures of Stuff, cont’d: Spotlight for stuff

By Chen Karlsson. Click for more.

Junk Culture: “Stockholm design studio Chen Karlsson created a lamp where treasured objects can be exhibited inside a transparent tank beneath the light source. Called Favourite Things, the design is meant to spotlight objects of importance to the owner.”

Thx: Gabriel. Seen also on Significant Objects. Part of an occasional series.

Linkpile

  • Twitter Has a Business Model: ‘Promoted Tweets’: “Will put ads on Twitter, first in search results and later in user feeds both on Twitter.com and the myriad third-party clients that access the service.” Starbucks, Virgin America, Bravo to participate. Once again: Information wants to be ad-supported.
  • ideal bookshelves: Design*Sponge notes upcoming show of “ideal bookshelves” works by Jane Mount (noted here) at The Curiosity Shoppe.
  • On Being Good at Seeming Smart: The “paraphernalia” of smartness: “Poise, confidence (but not defensiveness), giving a moderate amount of detail but not too much, providing some frame and jargon, etc. But also, unfortunately, I suspect: whiteness, maleness, a certain physical bearing, a certain dialect (one American type, one British type), certain patterns of prosody.” Via Mind Hacks.
  • Visual aesthetics in early computing: 1950-1980. Via Coudal.
  • Supertaskers: I’ve read/heard many times that people who think they’re great multi-taskers (especially young people) usually aren’t. But this study says a small slice of the population (less than three percent) really can do two things at once, effectively. Since it’s Time magazine they have to come up with a hype name: “supertaskers.” That aside, the article is interesting. Via Mind Hacks.
  • German Firm Wins Right to Make Beer Called ‘Fucking Hell’: Couple of the pix in the slide show are quite excellent.
  • The Vintage Price Stickers Pool: On Flickr. A new standard in obsessive documentation of all things visual and consumption related?? Thanks to Shawn W.
  • The iPad Luddites: Nicholas Carr: “Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”
  • These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

The Murketing-inspired (imaginary) cigarette brand!

Earlier, the new yet surprisingly comprehensive imaginary-branding-related blog Not A Real Thing made available a template inviting readers to invent their own imaginary cigarette brand. I mentioned it, and to my (happy) surprise, I see that Justin Kirkwood himself has offered up Murks. As he notes, the design is inspired by this site’s rather obsessive cataloging of the idea of the book. (Click either pic for more, and to see his design for a made-up brand of smokes from his spec-screenplay days, Blonde Horses. Nice stuff.)

And yes, that’s right — Murks are unfiltered. The type along the bottom reads: “The Taste Will Consume You.” Yes.

The hoarding cure

Vis-a-vis hoarding — discussed earlier here and to some extent here (and also in a post on aesthetics of joy) — Salon’s Heather Havrilesky describes the effect that watching hoarding shows has had on her. For example:

[W]hen I watch these hoarders, kvetching over this bag of yarn or that muffin tin, I think about the old black-and-white photographs you sometimes find at flea markets and estate sales, photos of a couple smiling on their couch, or of a gathering of women in a backyard, holding a miserable-looking baby, or of a girl sitting on a swing, a dog wandering through the grass nearby.

These are someone else’s memories that were packed away in boxes, in an attic or a basement, and when that person died, no one wanted them. No kids, no sisters, no spouse, no second cousins showed up and dragged these photographs away — they were left in a pile somewhere, and now here they are, being sorted through by total strangers. How much stuff will I force my kids to sort through? How much of it will immediately be identified as worthless? How much of my stuff might end up like this, drifting through the hands of strangers? When you think about your stuff that way, 90 percent of it suddenly begs to be boxed up and driven to Goodwill immediately.

I know what she’s saying, although when I follow this line of thought it usually ends with me wanting to obliterate all material traces of myself, rather than cart them to Goodwill so they can end up precisely the Stuff Ecosystem described here, to be mused over by strangers after I’m going.

But possibly that’s just me.

Pictures of stuff, cont’d: Throwaway wood art

Betty Parsons. Click for more.

A Betty Parsons piece made from “carpenters’ throwaways.” Via Junk Culture. Part of an occasional series.

Books, the idea, cont’d: Amusing Atlantic cartoon

Spotted in the April 2010 issue of The Atlantic (go buy a copy so they don’t make me cease-and-desist this image!). Part of a series.

Pictures of stuff, cont’d: Take-out lids, etc.

A few images from a Flickr set by sarcoptiform, courtesy of Shawn Wolfe. Part of a series.

Take Out Beverage Lids

Tea Tags Assortment

Tarnished Dimes