avad

detail of 'Epic Tale of an Idea'. new mixedmedia artwork on view as part of the Self-Assembling MemoryPalace show at Christina Ray Gallery in Soho.

childhood memories

what is a favorite comforting smell for you? something that soothes you whenever you smell it? perhaps all the way from childhood or not.

for example, the steam of cooked white rice really soothes me. whether it's my own or just opening the box from the chinese food place and the steam wafts out. I breathe it in intentionally....reminds me of home I guess.

( comforting scents(collected from friends) )
please add yours!

I'm moving some of my older files/texts/writings onto LJ for mirror keeping, tagging.

........2005
"I bring up [http://mappa.mundi.net/cartography/Palace/ Memory Palaces] not to necessarily encourage a return to the ancient art in its same form.

The Art of Memory and the Method of Loci (back in the days) was really quite an immense visualization trick...and a feat I think that few people today would consciously use. What I'm very excited about is the probability that we're entering a new phase in the internet and a new form of memory retention (which traces back to this concept of memory palaces) will become second nature to the masses:( continued )

weird things happening attached to getting back in touch with Margie C from childhood.
responding to Facebook message...reminiscing about drawing exercises and my grandmother Mita's house...saying how I dream there often and wish i could return for a day to everything as it was...with everyone alive...and how I have been compiling memories on a special page on Cloudpad...and about to link...going through the notes again...about the floors of the house..and the playroom with door to the garden...and how mita used to try to teach me not to be afraid of spiders...and would tell me they were good luck and if we saw one (usually a jumping spider is what I remember), she would secretly drop a dime or similar so I would find it.and say ' See??? GOod luck!!"...and so right then on my laptop there appears a jumping spider...crawling up the side. um. in 'real life' mind you. wha?

so I get the glass and postcard to relocate it outside...all the while thinking of mita...and I put it out front and it just sits there looking up at me.(!) and I'm like, Mita? And it looks at me and brushes its face/mouth...??
I'm freaked a little..go inside to tell Brent who is napping. The day has turned grey and dreamlike.

I go back to finish writing and send the message to Margie asking if she has any photos/other memories with a link to the cloudpad, and I decide to work on the cloudpad memorypalace of Mita's house some more...remembering other things....like the tv show song i can hear in my head...something like Viva Alegre!LalalalaLalalalaLalalalaLa.....and so I try googling it and come up with it on youtube and myspace...it's called Villa Alegre.and I can listen to it and look at pics. I don't remember any visuals but the song is so clear. And I put a link to the photo I have of Mita and papa in the kitchen...and I think of the other photos that I will have to scan.

and then the strange squeaking mysterybird/animal thing we've been hearing every once in a while starts up...sounding again like it is just outside the window. Brent comes over trying to see if we can see it outside...but we can't and it doesn't sound so loud out the front door as we expected...so where then is it coming from?? the attic?? so we go to check the attic...cannot really see anything...but as we leave it I ask for the box of my journals...because I had wanted to find my pink notebook where I list my 10%s...and he gives me a box.
Back in the kitchen I start looking through this box and it is the 'wrong box', instead of the journals and notebook I find a little wooden box inside with old jewelry in it. my magic blue necklace and other bead necklaces... one of them that I remember wearing so often but can't remember where I got it....well, now I realize that the strange seed that is on it is a rudashka seed (!?) I never knew what it was. hmmmm (see recent journal entry w/package from india)
then a box of photographs...I go to put the photo that is lying precariously on top away (of 5x5inch pieces on a wall) and split the photos like a deck of cards...and what opens is the picture of me at Ortiz's piragua stand...back at Mita's house(!)... I take the box and sit down to look through a bunch of other photos that are in that set of that place and old photos of mita, papa and mom too.
...........
!!!!!!!!!
Brent agrees something strange seems to be going on.
Mita? are you here? trying to tell me something?
I am remembering the time that I daydreamed so clearly that I felt I went to Mita's house...and that this was there waiting in a parallel reality. still . and that when I 'returned', THIS was the reality that seems strange and unbelievable...because I was still a little girl in my mind...
I love you Mita.
xoxo

La Esquina, 1000 West 25th St, www.urbancultureprject.org
Feb 1- March 22, 2008, Hours Thurs & Saturdays 12-5


Artists: Corrie Baldauf, Darlene Charneco, Brian Collier, Matt Dehaemers Andrea Flamini, Jorge Garcia, Adriane Herman, Mike Hill, Wopo Holup, Timothy Hutchings, Anne Lindberg, Justin Newhall, Garry Noland, Anne Pearce, Dana Sperry, VxPxC, James Woodfill, and Matt Wycoff.
Curator: Kate Hackman

exerpts from the pdf essays accompanying the exhibition:
"In 2008, we are in the midst of a mapping revolution. Thanks to the personal computer, the Internet, space satellites for data collection, and an expansive array of related technological tools, the scope of information available for mapping has exploded; we simply choose how we would like to select, filter, manipulate, magnify. Tracked by GPS, our physical locations and motions may be mapped in real time (never to be lost again), while at the same time we navigate through a vast virtual network, locating and relocating ourselves perpetually. Using Google Earth to view one's own neighborhood or childhood home; routinely linking Mapquest directions to e-mailed party invites, building networks of Myspace friends: we have become habitual mapmakers as well as blips on a vast array of other people's maps.

...With thick, slick, clear resin surfaces coating colorful, glittery, minutely detailed aerial maps of imaginary interlocking architectures and lawns, Darlene Charneco's sculptural paintings have a terrific physical presence. Yet her appealingly homespun approach is in fact significantly inspired by aspects of cyberspace, particularly its potential for empowering "social, interactive and collaboratively built spaces." Like aerial views, which provide an instant glimpse of patterns and connections not so easily discerned from the ground, so do virtual worlds collectively constructed through games like SimCity and Second Life reveal, more rapidly than in "real life" a vivid picture of societal tendencies and desires." Rather than overly discouraged by what these virtual worlds currently suggest, Charneco is "inspired by the thought that with the continued progress and eventual integration of mapping tools such as geographic information systems with computer gaming technologies, we just may be able to evolve the needed feedback to recover from what seems to be a dangerous myopia." Her work communicates this hopeful sense of a humanitarian re-mapping.

Charneco's Sitemap generates specifically from the concept of a memory palace: "a mentally constructed architecture or location which has been used since ancient times as a mnemonic device for the recollection of intentionally embedded information," she explains; and from that of a sitemap: "typically used in web-based information architecture to enable a more thorough exploration of a website's content by search engines." Seeing potential for merging the two types of structures, her Sitemap, with its interlocking parts, meandering passageways, and mushroom-like nodes projecting from various chambers functions as a sort of imagined prototypical structure for storing information to be later accessed/recalled..." and armature for a theoretically infinite number of different exercises."..

Photos from the show
Complete essays for parts 1 and 2 available in pdf form (16pages!), email me if you want em!:)

well put in the flickr blog:

Many hands make light work

"Have you ever tagged someone else’s photo? I know I have. A describing word, or perhaps even two joined together; a ‘lasso’ to group photos together from an event; identification of a subject in the photo; a colour; a season…

All that work that we’ve put in has contributed to making something greater than the sum of its parts: an organic information system, derived of descriptive words and phrases made entirely from individual contributions. You can see what’s going on in the world by watching hot tags fly by on our main tags page. You can even see what’s going on now in some of the bigger cities in the world on our new Places pages. All thanks to the determined effort of you, you nerdy taggers, you.

There are about 20 million unique tags on Flickr today. 20 million! They are the bread and butter of what makes our search work so beautifully. Simply by association, tags create emergent collections of words that reinforce meaning. You can see this in our clusters around words like tiger, sea, jump, or even turkey.

What if we could lend this wonderful power to some of the huge reference collections around the world? What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?

Well… you can. ..read more

grandmothers perfume 11/26/2002
what is the scent of Nostalgia? Of memory tinged with longing and wonder?
these days I think it is my grandmother's perfume. A scent I can no longer imagine....though I can picture the bottle perfectly,(which I liked to hold as a child) can nearly feel the coolness of the glass, rub the facets of the shape. I can see the color of the perfume, feel the weight distribution change as the liquid sloshed back and forth in its container in my warm little girl hand. In my mind I can feel the slight resistance of the cap to turning, then its click of unsticking and agreeable undoing.In my mind I see the perfectly designed threaded unscrewing of metal and glass.. and then it is open, the scent particles floating out like unseen fairies to tickle my nose and beckon me closer...for one good real sniff.

But I cannot smell it. A few neurons in my brain whisper conspiratorally with eachother, offering the vaguest shadow memory teases of sweet and musk....but others boo them down from doubtful corners of my mind.."Nah, that's not IT, not it really..there's more to it."

And there I am lost in a daydream trying to smell my grandmother's perfume. Up on mental tiptoe, straining for that which is on the top, top shelf today...and coming up short.

Since I live in this strange age of the future I consult the internet, my own court wizard. Internet, I say, find me my grandmother's perfume. press search.

A stream of link-paths emerge and I browse their brief descriptions. I click and shoot down the rabbithole. Suddenly I am within some modern discount perfume shop staring at an item with the name of my grandmother's perfume. But it is a 'modernized' plastic topped spray cologne bottle so hideous to my eyes that I'm sure I would not be able to smell memory there. How could those mystical fairies live in such a bottle? I don't think so. I check a few more paths...and all lead to such 'updated' bottles.

Internet, I cry, this is not IT!!! Bring me my grandmother's perfume!

My wizard knows what to do. In silence he takes my hand and brings me to a room. The name on the door is one I am familiar with, a room I have avoided because it seemed such a time and energy drainer, preying on the consumerist addictions of the masses. I shudder. But I understand.

This is the Lost and Found. A very magical place. A very dangerous place. Enter at your own risk. Here you will find your grandmother's perfume.

I walk into ebay.

I type in my grandmother's perfume. press search.

In an instant I am staring at the exact bottle from my memory. It is a strange moment. A magical moment. A dangerous moment.

With this new power in my hands I browse my memory for other objects that have vaporized in time. And I search for them. And I find them. I want them back. I want it all back! I can recreate my grandmother's bathroom in its entirety! I can recreate my childhood bedroom! I can line my shelves with all my childhood toys! I can summon all objects lost back to me!! I can recreate the past, build tributes, altars, museum like buildings! I can touch and feel and smell what before I could only try to remember!! My grandmother's coin purse. The stuffed mechanical toy poodle in the photo my dad took so long ago!

And then I stop.

There is something not right about this. I feel suspended, hovering, weightless. The hands on all clocks have become cartoonlike. Clock? I want to see my grandmother's cuckoo clock, not the modern cheap plastic 'functional' one I picked up at Wal-Mart.

But wait. WAIT. there are whispers.

What is this longing? What is wrong? Why does this feel so WRONG?

I try to tune into the whispers like a radio.