Algorithms in the Air

Some of the artwork that comes from this trip has to do with the patterns that we, I, us humans, overlay on the wilderness. It seems to me that much as a traveler tries to manipulate the new environment to match his old environment, so do we try to find patterns where perhaps there are none.

Traffic Theory Part 1

Theory: An accurate description of a city can be extrapolated by observing how locals behave in the street.

In Portland, the pedestrian in the street is sacred. Bikes and pedestrians are pretty much honored and respected. I never see anyone in a rush. Everyone just lets each other go along. No hurry man, it's all good, your carbon footprint is lower than mine so just go along and take your time crossing the street.

This has caused me, and the drivers of Portland, a great deal of stress. I am from a city where drivers speed up if they see a pedestrian crossing the street. Here I am forever darting in and out of the street as I am used to doing in Chicago. In my mind, it's every man for himself, and the pedestrian is the lowest on the street hierarchy, not the top. Sometimes I'll just find myself jaywalking across the street with my zigzag anti-getting-hit-by-car plan all in place, and everyone just stops, and then I stop and we're all just frozen in the street and if they'd just stop respecting me we could all get along.

And here the peds respect the drivers too. I'll be walking with my friends, locals, and all of sudden I look around and they're not there. They've stopped minutes ago at the stop light even though there's no cars in the street.

I know, I know. I need to play by the rules...but it's definitely one of the hardest behaviors to change, and one that makes me stick out as a non-local, or just an asshole. Play by the rules, respect each other, and most importantly, deserve the respect others give you.

Back from Mt. Hood

I drove over 1000 miles last week in search of mountains, but really there is only one main mountain in Oregon. Of course, this is no ordinary mountain, but a volcano that will blow it's top one day. I drove up to the Timberline Lodge which is an amazing place by itself, but there in the middle of July it was packed with countless snowboarders, skiers, backcountry hikers, road bikers, and mountain bikers. The place was hoppin'.

Mt. Hood is a force unto it's own. It is the heart of the state, in my month old opinion. People live on it, ski on it, ride on it, seek it out, and just look at it. It is truly amazing to just sit and stare at it.

This image I took at the top of Lost Lake Butte, elevation: 4468 ft. Mt Hood tops off at 11,240 ft.

It is difficult to paint rocks

I'm starting small. Here are 3 rocks. The reddish ones on the ends are from the mountains and the middle one is from the coast. I painted them separately and put this composition together in Photoshop.

I get these little zen moments when painting things like rocks and sticks. I realize how complicated it is, and painting a rock becomes as complex an endeavor as painting a huge landscape. In the moment I am painting I am seeing clearly with no expectations or influences...it's all just colors and shapes.

Some new pics posted

I've been on the road a lot, collecting evidence for my theories on traveling and tourism. There's a lot of media to process. I've been making some watercolors and videos as well. I will get it all up soon. Until then here is a collection of images I been wanting to get online.

http://picasaweb.google.com/port707/ShotsILike

Wandering as Critique

A (semi) random sampling of an environment will provide a higher resolution and less aliasing when synthesized with nonrandom data, such as maps and GPS coordinates. As critic of the environment I will encounter the environment with all senses engaged but without a destination in mind, yet seeking to understand the whole of what I am encountering.

This is no different than looking at a painting or sculpture and letting your eyes, fingers, run over the piece, wandering lazily as the work guides you. Is it whole? Is it complete? Somehow we sense it and if we are critiquing it then we look for flaws in the argument the work presents.

As I wander off the path that most travel I see things that less see and I can understand more of the whole and make a better judgement.

Johnny Laptopseed

At this very moment I am sitting next to a river that is about 50 ft wide and moving along at maybe 5 mph. It is very soothing yet I feel like an idiot typing on my laptop. I mean, I want and need to be working on this. I could be at a hotel, but instead I am here where it is beautiful and quiet and totally outdoors in the sun. Also, I can see about 50 ft to my left a huge RV no doubt with color TV, stereo, full kitchen and who knows what else. Still, their use of technology doesn't justify mine; I feel like I should just be writing in my spiral notebook.

I know that this is simply a clash of cultures going on in my brain, and soon enough, there will be laptops and wi-fi a-plenty in the wilderness. Not a good thing or a bad thing, just a thing to contemplate. More interesting here is the abrasion, the conflict, and the resolution.

Who the fuck cares if I am typing on my laptop! You can go screw if you think that's weird. Or, is that just the city in me talking? Obviously I care enough to notice, but I'm not changing my behavior. Maybe as an outsider I can be a teacher? No, I don't want to be Johnny Laptopseed and spread the technology all over the land. I just want to be left alone, which I am, so why am I even typing this?

Ever have an inch worm on your laptop?

Yer basic touristy coastal photos

Here's my collection of various sunset and coastal images. I visited all the lighthouses and bridges and vista points I could find. These images represent 5 days on the coast, from Astoria to Gold Beach.

full set

Return to the ocean

I am on the coast, the Pacific coast, standing in the ocean and my brain is exploding because this is way different. The sun is setting it is a mix of Maxx and Turner and Thomas Kincaid. The colors can't be real. Pelicans hunt from the sky in flocks, the waves crash endlessly, there's a hull of a ship that crashed. I am taking pictures, shooting video. I look at the birds and I think of algorithms and databases. Yes, it's true. Math and physics, and the properties of light when the yellow sun light passed through the light blue of the cloud there's a bit of green then that if I painted it it would look fake.

Portland is both loose and tight.

It's loose because it is open minded, artistic, sort of rustic, and independent. It is tight in the way it is gridded out, clean, almost curated. The people have been so nice. But you have to ask. Everyone leaves you alone.

To me it is more similar to Chicago than to San Francisco. In its gridded out structure, in its manicured parks, in its independent yet blue collar attitude I find cultural parallels. Chicago has one thing to learn from Portland: embrace the bicycle.

Less distortion, more harmony, less work to resolve it all, so I feel peaceful here. Does the meaning come from the difference? Do I learn more when I confront what is more different, like in San Francisco?

Hittin the major spots

I lived here for 2 years about 10 years ago and I never visited these places. Here I am now as a tourist and so it is required. It makes me think, perhaps, that I should have gone before. And when I get back to Chicago I'll be visiting the touristy places I normally avoid.

But again...why? How do places become places for tourists to visit? Like the spots of wilderness we seek out, these places are concentrated spots of attention where we marvel at ourselves. And there I am, trying to take beautiful photos like a million people before me. The reality of the situation fades, and a composed reality sets in, as if, perhaps, just possibly I too suffer from a need to control the environment.

more pics here

Why do we seek the wild?

So I went kayaking in the ocean the other day...paid $45 for the pleasure and it was worth every penny. Got to meet Krista and Nate, two locals who work for Sea For Yourself tours. Krista is 23 and speaks like a marine biologist, though she holds no graduate degree. And why should she? As she told us, most of her knowledge comes from growing up in the area. Nate was maybe 15 or 16, and just as capable and friendly as can be.

I'm in a group of 6, a family from Kentucky, and my friend with whom I am traveling. We get a quick lesson, and head right out into the ocean. I'm wearing a wetsuit for the first time in my life and I feel like a superhero or a motorcycle racer or something. The ocean is calm and it really isn't that much different, risk-wise, than Lake Michigan or Duck Lake at midnight. As we go Krista gives us information about the ecosystems and the wild life. Because we are actually in the kayaks out on the water we can see bright orange starfish in the caves, brown and white pelicans, a sea otter sleeping floating on its back in the kelp beds, elephant seals, gulls, cormorants, hawks, and much more.

Of course this leads me off into tourism thoughts. Why do we seek the wild? Why do we visit places and seek out the animals and plants and environments, not even to touch, but to see smell and hear? It seems as though some have a checklist (saw that, did that, smelled that, good, let's go home.) I don't know what to expect so I don't have a checklist, but somehow I feel proud that I saw these animals in their habitat and not at a zoo or something. What is that pride about?

Miller vs Hearst. Miller wins.

I can't accurately describe how great the Henry Miller Memorial Library is. It would do well, I think, to compare it to the Hearst Castle. Both are tourist stops along highway 1 that travels the coast of California. Both are places that contain art. Both are sort of museums and monuments to a specific man. One I find to be natural, unassuming, open and free. The other I find to be ostentatious, not in harmony with its environment, and more to do with power over nature than harmony. But I need to think more about this. It's too easy to attack W. R. Hearst. Perhaps he should be celebrated for bringing so much European culture to the coast of California.

Henry Miller Memorial Library

Hearst Castle

Inevitable comparisons begin

I don't really want to compare. I'd like to see things as they are, but of course, that's impossible. If there's one thing I learned in grad school it's that it's all relative. I cannot help but see these environments in relation to my own current and past experiences. I will move forward with the caution that these thoughts are interpretations, not judgements, and come from one who is now slightly over-educated and indoctrinated in the academic ideologies. As if you couldn't tell that from this very paragraph.

For me SF is at much higher resolution, and not just in terms of the density of the population on so little land. It is more than that. It is an attitude that stems from a history of open-mindedness and nice weather (my opinion, remember) that has made places like Venice Beach and San Francisco such a mish mash of cultures. Probably being on the westest most side of the country accounts for it as well, as if folks who did not like places like Chicago just keep heading west until they run out of room.

Chicago is so segregated still, so gridded in its layout. So entrenched in the politics of commerce. Here the crazy streets and angles and architecture make for a lot more diversity and unexpected combinations, both culturally and engineeringly, if that's a word.

The sun is killing me

San Francisco is intense. Why? The freakin sunlight for one. Here the sunlight is what, more direct? brighter? clearer? I've heard the fog "cleans" the air and removes the dust particles. Whatever the case, to my eyes the sun beats down upon me and slowly drives me crazy. I am not a sunny person I guess. I mean, I like daylight like most other people, but this light seems to bore straight into my brain making me sluggish and tired. I already long for the brown hazy light of Chicago. This light here is clean, bright blue, sparkling against the pastel shades of stucco and Victorian wood siding. Chicago is brown and red and ochre. I can handle that much better.

The wilderness versus the city: Here the wilderness is embedded in the city, it is a part of the city. The parks here sprout up at the strangest places and envelop you. Once you are in you are removed from the city in a way that Chicago could never do. The parks are wild, paths go everywhere. You walk around a bend and you expect to come across some tribe of natives that has lived in the woods unnoticed until now.

The homeless, the tattoos, the bikes, the scale of architecture...all intense. I never see anyone with one tattoo. If they have any ink it is a serious endeavor, covering most of the visible skin acreage. The bikes are intense, many fixed gears and minimalist designs, then again there are a ton of cruisers and quite a few fold up bikes. But there are far more bikers here than Chicago. I suspect Portland to exceed it even more.

I did live here for 2 years, so it is not all that unexpected, just reinforced.

Next stop: Big Sur, highway 1, and the coast of California.

I learn by going where I have to go

This poem is killing me right now. It is called "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke. It turns my brain inside out. The first three lines alone stop me in my tracks.


I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.


It's the last line there that I relate to this trip. So many times my expectations and the reality experienced are so different. We rely on our personal myths to get by, and it is scary to confront them. And we always learn from going and seeing for ourself. That notion is probably in every self help book out there. What I am interested in is the distortions that occur when we lay one set of beliefs over another. This can be described as aliasing, some sort of cultural aliasing, and perhaps it is the artists and travelers who are performing the anti-aliasing.

read the whole poem here

Thoughts on sampling and tourism

Maybe it's all sampling and rubbing up against different samples. The meaning comes from the difference (Saussure anyone?) Isn't that what tourism is? When you visit a place, and you are from another place, then you measure one against the other. Not measure in the sense that one is going to be "better" but measure in the sense of compare what you know against what you don't know.

Steve Mumford paints watercolors in Iraq

www.artnet.com

I really like these watercolors. They are quick, yet precise, and seem to come from the world of photography instead of painting. I like that mix up. This is the kind of tourism/travel art I am thinking of, just without the overt political context.

Sketches

I've begun making images from this trip and I still have a month before I even get to where I'm going. It's no good though because I have to use other's images. This one I got from wikimedia.com

Traveling as Art, cont.

Here's a good example of what intrigues me. Regarding Jeanette Doyle's piece called "Star Line Tours" here's a little bit from ArtForum's website critics picks.

"...Combining the languages of video, photography, and painting with sound components, she creates elaborate installations that critically address identity—whether personal or national. In her latest solo show, “StarLine Tours,” all the pieces presented derive from footage she shot during a Los Angeles commercial sightseeing journey focusing on celebrities’ mansions. Two videos reveal the view from the window on the left side of the bus, providing glimpses of bushes, pedestrians, vehicles, and the occasional star’s home... Reflecting LA’s history and spirit, the usual description of tourist attractions is replaced by the faits-divers of the city’s personalities. ...Doyle highlights the consumption that marks current leisure activity, a metaphor for her ethnographic inquiry into the politics of contemporary society." (thank you M. Amado)

I guess this makes sense to me. And it's not too far off from how I'd like to present it. And look! it gets critic's pick! It must be important. Does it all come down to cultural sampling, or rubbing two cultures against each other? Haven't we moved beyond that?

I suppose I would be considered Romantic (Pre-Modern) to want to go to a place and experience that place in itself.

All the data you could want

This is my new favorite site. I tend to get lost looking at all the numbers. I can't really get any meaning from it, yet it seems so meaningful.

Here's what city-data.com says about Portland (just keep scrolling down): www.city-data.com/city/Portland-Oregon.html

Traveling as Art

I have been trying to wrap my head around what exactly I am trying to do. Am I confronting personal myths by going to the source to see for myself? Am I comparing home (Chicago) to elsewhere (Death Valley, Wyoming, Portland?) And how is this exactly art?

Most often, I think, artists GO somewhere and DO something. Like it is all very important. Take this guy for example: Dude washing a photo

Schedule so far

I get into PDX on 6/21. Immediately will rent a car and head out to the coast for a week. My goal is drive one big circle from Portland to Astoria to Brookings and back up, camping all the way.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Google map

PORT707

PORT707 is the name of my new piece. This new piece is also my summer vacation, and how I want to spend my time post-grad school.

I've always wanted to go to the Pacific Northwest in general, and Portland in specific. As usual, I'm inclined to make some sort of art work out of it all...