Last week, to follow on from the discussion of atemporality, I started sort of an essay/rant about the future being a fictional construct, the non-linear nature of “progress”, and how making and remixing intersect. I haven’t felt inspired to shape it into something actually readable, so instead, how about some music and photos?

Above is a song I wrote with the KORG DS-10 cartridge on my Nintendo DS (RSS reader folks, click through to see it).

I also made something I’m calling an atemporal dance mix (my mom says it’s good for cheering yourself up, too).

To finish, here’s Mudshark reprising his role as a furry creature from beyond.

A few minutes after taking the photos.

About an hour later.

The first photo, a day later. You can just barely see the remains of the image. This one is now taped inside a window, trying the suggestion that Fade to Black photos can be bleached out to reveal more of the image again.

The second photo, finished. This one I peeled open and let dry for about a day before taping it back together and scanning the image. The front image and the back foil don’t quite lay flat now, giving the image the appearance of depth. It’s a neat effect, and one I’d like to play with more. Maybe I could reassemble the photo with some sort of spacer keeping the layers apart?

I really love the colors of this film. It’s a bit more work to capture the result at any point in the development, and if you open the photo to stop the development process, that’s it, no going back. But I like that photography can still be this hands-on, messy thing, not completely measured and precise. It feels good to muck around and see what happens.

This is a sketch I made on my phone (using Brushes) at the pdx.rb meeting while Igal was talking about why he uses rcov. His code example involved kitties, so obviously kitties love rcov too.

This is a polaroid I took while walking around my neighborhood on … Thursday? I finished off the Artistic-TZ film pack I had in the SX-70, so next up is a pack of Fade to Black film, which does exactly what it sounds like, over a 24-hour period after the photo is taken. The scans I’ve seen online are pretty neat, so I’m excited to try it out for myself.

I also did a few things like go to the Open Source Bridge work session, and fix a couple of setup instructions in OpenConferenceWare that I found confusing. And I watched the Superbowl with friends, though honestly I’m a much bigger fan of Puppy Bowl. I think the mass appeal of watching puppies and kittens run around in circles must say something about human nature, or western civilization, or something like that. But I don’t know what.

We drove past this a couple of times before finally giving in to curiosity and stopping to check it out. A few sites I’ve found label it as Golf Ball House, but given the alien figures in the windows, it’s clearly a UFO.

Right on Highway 40 in the otherwise abandoned-looking town of Yucca, the house is surrounded by a number of metal saucers and other sculptures. And a mini-mart in a trailer, if you need to get something to drink or a package of beef jerky.

Plus a couple of aliens on a road trip. Though I think they’d be creamed by the trucks out there.

More pictures from this visit (and a previous one, in 2007) on Flickr.

August Vacation – 2009

A few photo highlights that didn’t make it into the comic:

I brought my camera so I could get a few pictures of big shiny red apples.

They all looked so delicious that I ended up with more photos than I expected.

This is making me hungry.

Tags: apples

I’ve started scanning in pictures taken with that first camera, and while most are as blurry as I remember, there are some fun things here too.

This is the front yard of the duplex we lived in from 1990-1994. Across the street is Sabin Elementary School, where I attended the second half of fifth grade after we moved back from Richland.

This was taken in Sitka, AK. I think the overpass in the foreground is probably part of Halibut Point Road, the highway that connects the west side of Baranoff Island. I spent 3-5 weeks a year in Sitka from about ’88 to ’92, visiting my father and stepmother.

My brother attempts a self-portrait, on the same trip to Alaska. If he had a camera during this time it was a little plastic 110.

Tenakee Springs, also in SE Alaska, about two years after the pictures above. It’s a tiny fishing village with about 100 residents. The only way to get there is by boat, and the ferry dock doesn’t allow cars on or off. People walk, or bike, or use mopeds. You can’t go very far without needing a boat again, anyhow.

The general store seen here handles rentals for a few vacation houses across the street. They’re comfortable, but nothing fancy. Around the building to the right is the ferry dock.

This is the bathhouse. The island doesn’t have a full sewage system or room for everyone to install a septic tank, but it does have natural hot springs, so people use the communal bathhouse to clean up. There are men’s and women’s hours posted, and to bathe you go in, undress in the outer room, get a pitcher of water and scrub off the dirt on the ring of benches outside the tub, then hop in for a soak after you’re clean.

I regret that I didn’t get a picture of the other part of the hygiene situation on the island: a pair of outhouses hanging over the ocean. At high tide, everything goes in the water, but at low tide it can be somewhat gross. While we were there, my brother scrawled a short poem about the wind tickling your ass on the inside wall of one of the outhouses. I recognized his handwriting a few hours later, told my stepmother, and she marched him down to the general store to apologize and get something to remove the marker. These days I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. It was a funny poem.

Now we move on another year or two to OMSI Tidepool Camp on the Oregon coast. This picture is from the second year I went to the camp.

There must have been something interesting in the pool. Rocks like this are extremely slippery, so you spend a lot of time trying not to fall over.

Group picture!

The Peter Iredale, one of the icons of the Oregon Coast, second only to Haystack Rock.

Tags: photos, photography, oregon, alaska, summer