Category: Photography

A bit of a rain, err, storm

With temperatures in the 40s, and with humidity that can only be described as totally fucked up atlantic, it was with desperate joy that I received todays short storm. And it really was a storm – during 30 minutes it literally poured down, making cars go “sploosh” through deep puddles.

Now it’s warm as hell again, and twice as humid. It’s bloody unbearable. I’m actually dripping with sweat and my pants feel like I’ve pissed myself!

—————update—

Here’s a video of the rain from the increadible stifling heat of the office. This is some ten minutes into the storm; it’s worth remembering that just ten minutes prior the temperature was in the almost-forties and not a drop of water in sight (if you don’t count all the miserable sweat, of course).

Bumb-ily-bumop-bymop-bumpup – a busride

I visited my cusin in Cracow the other day, and we ended up sitting in pubs watching football; Occasionaly I danced like a god (like a god I tell’s you!). Nice city, nice cusin. One night when we took a bus home to the subs I just had to capture the busride – the bumpiest parts where those that promted me to take out the camera. Trust me, before I started filming it was [——–this——-] much more bump.

If I could only find a way to work here, I’d consider moving for a while.

Three shades of hair.

Because beauty belongs to the world, I tough I’d share some self portraits.

From the top:
1) Mateusz sits in a really warm pizza place and would look even more haunted where it not for the miracles of image editing.
2) In Poland you can still smoke almost everywhere (but not train stations, go figure). In fact, I’m smoking right now!
3) The heat (today it’s 36C in the shade) has driven me to extreme measures, and apart from walking around sort of butt naked, i comb my hair back to give what little brain I have left some relief. Image taken in slightly warped two-part mirror; my head really isn’t as big as all that.

An eventful weekend

Oh oh oh! There was this show that we had! And oh oh, then mom & bro (mobro!) came visiting from Stockholm, and oh, then there was this party and a loooot of beer and oh oh oh(!) I had to work the day after! Hilarious! Oh oh oh, smelly I was, in store I standing was! Oh, and then, then I had a lot of tea and we had sushi, and mom ate way too much wasabi and her tummy ached and today is Sunday and mom and bro (mobro!) just left on a train, and now I’m sitting here and I want more coffee!

At some point during the evening Mari took my camera, I think she’s to blame.

Well hung

Yes, well hung indeed. The gaps between the four prints is visable, but since they align quite well, it doesn’t bother much. What I ment to write is it doesn’t bother me much, but that goes without saying. The first fucker to ask me the symbolism of the cross-pattern the prints make will get a blank stare though.

I managed to surprise myself with how the finished work actually resembles the photoshopped dummy I made a couple of days ago.

Show opens Friday.

Work in progress…

I’m working along the lines of the title The Boy with Half a Pinky and this photoshop is one way to pull it off.

Here’s the idea, as it is:

* The boy with half a pinky is an image of a young man sitting and smoking and looking slightly miserable. It’s blurry, except for the hand that holds the cigarette & which doesn’t miss any digits. Looking at the other hand you can’t really tell, because of the angle.

* What would be the point of this?

* This might look like an excercise in stearing the viewer, but it’s such an obvious point to make. Look, if I tell you that an image is about one thing, you’re gonna interpret or at least look at the image in relationship to what I’ve told you. And if I lead you on by saying something that either is

1) not verifiable
or
2) not verifiable & an outright lie

You’re not going to get anything true out of looking at the image, and it might actually make your perception of the image, and thereby your grasp on reality, slightly more false than you’d like. Of course, we’re constantly reminded of that others lie to us, or are otherwise not in a position to communicate anything un-false to us (how few and far between are the experiences of understanding, anyway?) and maybe we’re aware of this well enough.

* Basically, the above line of reasoning could lead one to believe that I’m just taking a piss and want to annoy any viewer, while at the same time creating an argument based on the falsehood of images and making a Descartian demon out of myself; An imbecile sitting by the roadside giving false directions to passersby, chuckling under my breath.

Ugh. But maybe that’s good enough? Or maybe good isn’t the right word to use. Maybe it’s plausable enough? The good part might come in if someone gets anything from looking at this while it’s hanging in a gallery, eat a breadstick and between munches says “uhm, this was nice. I’d say it’s even good.” That’s where the good part comes in?

I can’t seem to stear clear of the obvious trap here – I tend to treat what I’m doing as riddles that I have to reverse-engineer in order to figure out the true meaning of. Darn it. Darn it to heck.

One way to make clear that this image doesn’t matter in the slightest is this:

The second image is a heavily rasterised version of the one on the left. You can’t really make out any details unless you back a few steps away. Both images are made up of smaller parts – they’re stapled to the wall, taped with duct tape on the back, i.e. not being cared for very much.

There’s something fun about putting so many hours into a work that you finally decide to staple the shit out of. This might actually come as close to release as I’ll get on this side of legalised prostitution.

* Just had a smoke break with Mark, and he asked me the unwelcomed question I don’t see what you’re getting at, especially with the rasterised image.

Damnation.

So, what we end up with are a bunch of negative descriptions; Things that i’d like to point out that are wrong, but without offering an exit or a way out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since I just need to offer a way in, but, well, anyway. Nevermind. I’ll just prep the image for printing (it’s gonna come out on four sheets) and go home and eat soup.

Soup is good for you,
Soup is good for me,
and when you eat soup together
the company is free.

All those megabytes add up to a whole pile of gigabytes

Even though I don’t consider myself to be a stuff-junkie, I’ve found myself in a situation where I more or less everyday walk around with a bunch of gear. The stuff itself isn’t all that interesting; An external harddrive, a USB2-stick, compact digital camera, iPod & cellphone.

It struck me that I’m a walking storage facility. Let’s calculate a bit

iPod: 40gb
HD: 80gb
USB2-stick: 2gb
Digicam: 500mb
Cellphone: 80mb (Memory Stick + built in memory)

Not accounting for the formatting, that’s 122.580GB of storage that I carry around with me more or less all the time. (Which is why sewing a really nifty backpack is quite high on my to-do list.)
Ok, so the harddrive is usually nine tenths full, as is the iPod. camera, stick & cell are say one third full.

There’s no point to this post, just that it’s all rather cool. If I could only offset my lazy monkey-brain memory with some on the hd, I’d be set!

And of course, I took a look at my desk and there’s roughly 300 cds & dvds (50% of each), a harddrive from a bricket iPod, one 4GB and one 40GB hd that I used in my bondage-iMac & a DSLR with 512mb. A lot of space.

If all the empty and unused space in the world saved data in a forest and there was no-one there to use it, would it make a wooshing sound or would only the trees shudder because someone sooner or later would try to print all that data?