seaweed dries
in crumpled fistfuls
strewn across shorelines,

a scribbled calligraphy
filled with tongue-tied letters,
tangled ligatures.

i amass a small pile,
ply a dry patch of grass
with stilted lowercase,
slowly unsnarling
one letter at a time -

each gnarl snaps easily,
with the same brief pressure
as the tip of a pencil
or a camera's shutter,
gentle enough
to be accidental -

afterwards, forgetting the words
for the wind to find.

Strange that the more that is happening, the less I tend to write about what is happening. Here is a small update.

Earlier this year I took part in the MFA group exhibition Interrobang, at Anna Leonowens Gallery. I suggested the title and designed the invitation (right), and contributed a large inkjet print called index of first lines (32 months). The print consists of the first line of pixels from every photo taken with my previous digital camera (read more here).

I'm currently working on a blog version of index of first lines, as well as another blog project called queries. In the fall I'll be teaching a studio course called Blog Art: Artists' Blogs that will explore blogging as an art practice.

Also recently designed consumptuous.com for artist Shelley Miller.

index of first lines (32 months) at Anna Leonowens. On either side are artworks by Catherine Allen and Smriti Mehra. There are more photos of the show here.

Inspired by a bpNichol poem from An H In the Heart:

Another attempt to 'translate' digital photographic data into other systems, this time into a kind of paint-by-number. Each colour in the image is assigned a number, and a border is drawn around each area of colour. Since digital photos are made of small square pixels, this more or less creates a grid. The bigger boxes are where two or more adjacent pixels are the same colour (notice the patch of black in the lower-right corner). A key of colours and corresponding numbers is also generated. The example above has been resampled to fit on this website; the generated file is big enough to be printed out and hand-painted. I like that this demonstrates how a digital image is made up, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. If you had a big enough palette (this image uses 1171 different colours) and enough time, it could work perfectly as a paint-by-number. Again, this was generated using PHP scripting. I'm working with small images for now, as anything much bigger than this causes the script to time out.

The photo was taken in Dublin, and is one of the images included in index of first lines.

Added October 22, 2006: Jeremiah McNichols has written an interesting analysis of my paint by number and index of first lines projects on his excellent blog, Think In Pictures. They were also briefly mentioned on Information Aesthetics and Digital Aesthetics.

Certainly the identity of a photographic image no longer has to do with its support or its chemical composition, or with its authorship, place of origin, or pictorial appearance. It instead comprises, as Müller-Pohle suggests, a pliable sequence of digital data and electronic impulses.
· Geoffrey Batchen, Da[r]ta, from Each Wild Idea

As opposed to an analog film negative, a digital image is essentially a stream of data, and can be represented as a string of ones and zeroes. With a bit of ingenuity, a digital image can be 'translated' into other forms of digital data, such as text. I'm interested in adapting digital photographic data into information systems usually associated with language and literature, such as an index of first lines.

An index of first lines, occasionally found in anthologies of poetry, eschews authorship, title and chronology and lists poems alphabetically according to each first line of text. The idea is that a reader might not always recall the title or author of a poem, but is likely to remember how it begins. I've always found indices of first lines amusing as Dadaist exercises in found poetry - reading the lines sequentially often results in a charmingly garbled, wandering diatribe, full of false starts. An example, from The Oxford Shakespeare:

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Against my love shall be, as I am now
Against that time, if ever that time come
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth
Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there
As a decrepit father takes delight
As an unperfect actor on the stage
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st
As it fell upon a day
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted...

index of first lines contains the first row of pixels from every digital photo I took from May 9 to July 17, 2004, during a summer spent studying art history in the U.K. and France. The lines of pixels are stratified in chronological order, with the earliest photo at the top. The resulting image contains 2048 x 1047 pixels - 2048 pixels being the width of the photos my digital camera took (3.2 megapixels), times 1047 photos.

It would have been quite time-consuming to assemble this using digital image editing software such as Photoshop. Instead, I wrote a PHP script to automatically copy and compile the images (PHP is a programming language designed for producing dynamic web pages, and can also be used to generate and manipulate digital images in a systematic way). index of first lines is a product not only of a digital camera, but of computer code - the very act of its creation is an act of reproduction. Thus it is an example of "the work of art designed for reproducibility" described by Walter Benjamin. It is similar to film in this way, and also in that it is composed of a series of sequential images that are never perceived individually. Its horizontal lines can be likened to the lines that jitter across the screen when one fast-forwards a video.

While it's impossible for me to identify individual photos, looking at this image does bring back memories. Its hazy horizontal sweep evokes a landscape seen from the window of a moving train, a suitable metaphor for the fleeting, mesmerizing summer I remember. The 'busiest' areas (with the most contrasting lines) represent hectic days wandering London or Paris, when no two photos were alike. Thicker bands of colour indicate slower times, when I snapped many photos with similar scenery - the greenery of The Gibberd Garden, or a clear blue sky over Brighton Pier. A certain band of white a third of the way down - near the end of the first month - is a trace of the overcast sky on the afternoon I first visited Stonehenge. In this way, index of first lines is an accurate cross-section of my memory, or at least my photographic habits. I read it in the same way I occasionally reread the journals I kept during that summer's travels: not top-to-bottom, but discursively, letting my eyes and mind wander. Nevertheless, examining it is an act of reading.

Robert Frank once said, "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." He might have said, "the way they do when they want to pause and rewind a film." index of first lines is full of these small instant replays, from near-identical rows of pixels which indicate a photo taken twice, to my reading of it as a kind of rewound / fast-forwarded version of my summer. Like an index of poems, its usefulness as a reference device depends on my memory. Taken out of context, it has a certain Dadaist quality.

"The still photographic image has circulated [...] predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word," writes Martin Lister in his Introduction to the Photographic Image in Digital Culture, and "with the emergence of digital technology this convergence is exponentially increasing." Though it can be approximated on paper, index of first lines is not intended for a gallery wall. I'm interested in the possibilities of web-based art and writing, and especially in self-published, ongoing projects such as blogs. It's with the intention of designing my blog that I began to learn PHP in the first place, and it seems fitting to situate index of first lines there, as part of a longer ongoing journal of photographs and writing.

a seagull quill
dipped in tidepool

sips water easily,
doesn't drip, deposits
a clean, oblong line,
brief as breath,
on shoreline stone

saltwater letters vanish fast
in strong lateral sunlight -
traced this three times before it would linger
long enough to photograph,

not long after

The city, however, does not tell its past,
but contains it like the lines of a hand....
· Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

in freshly-poured concrete, fried-egg white
and politely cordoned off with orange tape,
someone has planted a handprint

between backlit plastic letters
that spell La Belle Province
sparrows refurbish a nest
with feathers, napkins, ketchup packets

on a somewhat crumpled twenty
someone has pencilled a thin moustache
on queen elizabeth's upper lip.

at Place Jacques Cartier
the fountain overflows with foam;
small children squeal
and clap, squishing fistfuls,
fashioning moustaches
and flimsy foam castles

a woman lifts a handful
and it drifts off, descending
to float across paving stones
boatlike, buoyant with light,
her handprint still in it

This is my contribution to a concrete poetry project organized by derek beaulieu. The idea was to work with only the materials supplied: a sheet of letraset dry-transfer lettering and a sheet of 8½ x 11" paper.

The piece is titled Ryoan-ji, and was inspired by the famous Japanese rock garden. The Ryoan-ji garden consists of fifteen stones arranged on a field of raked gravel, and is part of a Zen temple. There are many maps and photos of the garden available online.

The simplicity of the Ryoan-ji garden lent itself well to the limits of this project. The five english vowels represent the garden's five clusters of rocks, with capital letters for the largest stones. The orientation of the letters implies connections between the clusters, in the same way that the garden's gatherings of stones resonate with one another in a kind of understated harmony.

Vowels are the most essential letters of the English language, as it is almost impossible to write or pronounce words without them. A and I are also the only letters which are also words. I thought this worked well with the garden's wabi-sabi aesthetic, which evokes simplicity, tranquility, and transcendence. Attempting to pronounce the poem produces a mantra-like sound.

Earlier today, Google posted one of their popular commemorative logos to mark the birthday of artist Joan Miró. However, according to the Mercury News (use BugMeNot to sign in and read the article):

Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google's logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site.

The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, had asked Google to remove the image early this morning.

"There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights," said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society.

In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

Google's logo allegedly incorporates images from Miró's The Escape Ladder (1940), Nocturne (1940), and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (1941).

This is ridiculous. I'm no expert, but I doubt that clearly imitative work is considered a copyright violation. Ironically, I checked out the Artists Rights Society website, and one of the random artworks that popped up was Botticelli's Venus, by Andy Warhol:

I guess it's okay with the ARS if Warhol does it. I wonder if he asked permission?

Google's created plenty of artist-inspired logos in the past, including plays on da Vinci, van Gogh, Escher, Warhol, and Picasso. As the article mentions, there was also a Dali logo which was removed due to a similar request by the ARS; you can find it here. I think the Miró logo is one of the best they've done, and it's a shame to see it taken down because of banal legal bickering.

on the pale crumbling parchment
of last year's leaves

with a ballpoint pen,
patiently,
whetting its tip
on my tongue

ink reluctantly
catches in cracks,
breaks in places,
makes mistakes

on stone
like glaucous chalkboard,
slated by glaciers
just for this purpose

with a shard of green glass
found smashed at its base

each scratch
leaves a sharp white scar,
leaves tiny grains of glass
in my english

Inspired by the recent flurry of 'remixed' transit maps that have been submitted to Boing Boing, I assembled this anagram Montreal metro map (with suggestions from a few local Livejournallers). Click the map for a larger, more legible version. Also, here's the official map, for comparison.

The remixed maps meme started with London, then someone did Toronto, and it snowballed from there... as of today, Boing Boing has posted anagrammed maps from about 35 cities worldwide. Both the London and Toronto maps have since been censored by Transport for London and the TTC (hence the disclaimer on this one).

I had a lot of fun putting this together... would've liked to include more French, but despite recently taking classes I could only come up with Joli Tête, which isn't even grammatically correct (it should be Jolie Tête, I think). A couple of people suggested d'Un Ver and Ai Vu. It would have been great to get more, especially since some of the smaller station names didn't anagram very gracefully in English. Ah, well.

Added March 2, 2006: This map was published in the Letters section of The Mirror today. There are at least three other anagrammed Montreal metro maps (by Julien, Jay, and Dave). Also, some folks have come up with some french anagrams, though I've yet to see a full map.

It's been a while since I put pencil to sketchbook, but I have been experimenting with my graphics tablet lately. Tonight I attempted a self-portrait.

a montreal mitten map:

chatting with j. at o'reagan's,
folded preet's mitten into a map of newfoundland
(thumb the northern peninsula):
here is where i'm from.

later re-created my mitten map, and photographed it.
so, with apologies to the avalon and burin peninsulas: