Look, See

Red Gradients

Red Gradients, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (21 seconds, looped), 380 x 400 pixels

Red River

Red River, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (approx. 28 seconds, looped), 505 x 490 pixels

Anniversary

It's round about this time in March 2000 that I started weblogging, six years ago.

I started by running a copy of Manila- one of, if not the first weblogging applications- on my own desktop NT box in my office. That weblog was called XYZ, and is no longer on line. I have most of the files stashed on this very computer on which I type, and have posted a couple below.

In the first few months I learned how to use the software- weblogging back then was much less user-friendly than now- and developed the habit, my personal policy, of posting something, anything, everyday. The policy has made me what I am today: slightly neurotic about posting everyday, but at least I didn't fall by the wayside, like a million and one others.

In July 2001 I wrote an article for Berkeley Computing and Communications titled Weblogging: Another Kind of Website. I wrote:

One day in mid-March 2000 Raymond Yee of the Interactive University[1] thought it would be a good idea to buy and experiment with Manila, a web server application capable of supporting literally thousands of weblog websites. A bargain-priced education license was purchased, and Catherine Yoes downloaded and installed it on a rather ordinary NT server. Within weeks the IU experienced a revolutionary change in thinking about what a website is, how they're hosted, what they're used for, how they're built, and who owns them. A year and a half later all of the IU's websites are being produced using weblog technology, our team communications and sharing has been vitally enhanced, a number of our team members are regularly writing on the web, as are many of our University/K-12 projects and the K-12 teachers we work with.

Read the rest of it...

XYZ went offline in Jan 2001- too much of a hassle running upgrades, keeping my machine, the server, nice and secure, so I established another weblog called A Place to Write, Nothing Fancy, hosted on another Berkeley machine by the group with which I worked at the time, the Interactive University, a K-12 outreach and technology program. About a year and a half later I realized it wasn't all about the writing; I had started making dorky little images with HTML, and after months of that renamed the weblog A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy. That weblog lasted until February 21, 2004, its three year anniversary. It is still online. The preference for "nothing fancy" followed me here.

This weblog, Look, See, was established in October 2003. I posted here and at APTWNF simultaneously during October-February 2004, and finally just here since February 22, 2004. That's a lot of posts. I have posted nearly everyday for six years. My record is not as good as my friend and colleague Lloyd Nebres's; his is perfect. Mostly I missed when I was out of town without access, but that has decreased- not the out of town part; access has improved tremendously. I remember during January 2001 I had a kind of crisis- what am I doing?- and stopped posting for three weeks or so. I'm not sure how long I've been posting HTML images, maybe five years, except for taking last August off (I still posted, however) when I thought I'd figure out where this going and then just resumed in September not having figured anything out. Why am I talking about this? I must be thinking about many of the same questions that have popped up periodically over the years about this dang habit: why, what for, for whom, how to, how long, what next?

January 14, 2001: swimming, massage, mushroom burger

swimming, massage, mushroom burger

January 12, 2001: flying dream

I dreamt that I was flying, and that it was happening in pre-modern times.

Red Heart

Red Heart, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (32 seconds, looping), 385 x 350 pixels

Red Frames

Red Frames, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs, 350 x 410 pixels

Red Boxes

Red Boxes, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs, 480 x330 pixels

Sally McKay's "Sheep Cliff"

Stills from Sally McKay's Sheep Cliff; see the animated GIF or, better yet, the Quicktime version with terrific audio.

Sally writes, "The location is a tiny place in Wales called Rhossili. The piece of land jutting out is called The Worm. If I ever win the lottery I want to spend an entire year there, and take a picture of the weather every day."

I wrote, "it's something like a whole creation and armageddon story, eons in twenty seconds. The soundtrack in the video is great." Maybe "armageddon" isn't quite the right word; I meant the end of the world, but Sally's is cyclical, beginning and end and beginning and so on.

Red Fade

Red Fade, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs, 425 x 600

Jerry Saltz on Charline Von Heyl

Jerry Saltz writes about Charline Von Heyl (reprinted from the Village Voice at Artnet. The following are excerpts.

HARDCORE by Jerry Saltz

Charline von Heyl: Dunce, 2005 acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas 82 x 78 inches/208.3 x 198.1 cm

Charline Von Heyl, Feb. 18-Mar. 18, 2006 at Friedrich Petzel, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

Given that for every five solo shows of a living artist in a New York gallery only one is by a woman, and that only a small percentage of these are by women painters, and an even smaller proportion of those are by women who paint in what could be called an abstract manner, for a woman to be painting in a nonrepresentational, vaguely gestural mode right now is, consciously or not, a political act. If that woman is over 35 it could be called revolutionary. Some would say it's suicidal...

And right now there's Charline von Heyl, 45, who is German, which may not be coincidental considering that innovative painters seem to tumble out of Deutschland like clowns from a Volkswagen. Von Heyl has lived in New York for more than 10 years and is currently having her fifth and best solo exhibition since 1996...

Von Heyl is unafraid of making big, serious, stupid paintings. Her work, which is neither abstract nor representational (terms that are all but obsolete by now), is discovered in process, not mapped out beforehand. It is visually engorged but still sketchy, intensely open-ended. Sometimes this openness dissipates into unfinishedness or academicism, or her color turns turbid and arbitrary. This may explain why her starkly graphic black-and-white drawings and paintings which involve limited palettes are better. ..

Von Heyl is not a good artist because she's a female who paints but because of how she paints. Throughout her work there's an emotional remove. Mondrian wrote about painting "pure reality," Kandinsky, "inner reality." Von Heyl's work isn't mystical; she's smart but thankfully doesn't approach abstraction as a conceptual project (the downfall of so many painters these days, e.g., Fiona Rae.) She's closer to Cézanne who said, "I have very strong sensations." Von Heyl paints her sensations, guarded and otherwise, in serendipitous, thoughtful torrents, subjecting her work to constant editing. She's painting something in a feverish, hardcore way while using her entire body as a reference.

Red Panels

Red Panels, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs, 400 x 480 pixels