Creativity

Braised Tangerine Tintype Beef Tongue

Art, Giggles

Prologue

In which we explore the process of exploration, and we take things and make other things from them for the purpose of being joyful in the process of exploration, and mix things up in a way that creates little mental explosions of aliveness, for no other purpose than to celebrate the uncircumscribeable, with a nod to Eraserhead and Quinn Martin. Oh, and also, pictures and tacos come out in the end.

Act I

Ingredients:

-One 8 pound beef tongue
-Chard
-One cake plate
-One 8×10 camera
-One 8×10 black enameled aluminum plate
-One studio with some lights
-Chemistry: collodion, silver nitrate, developer and fixer
-Two onion
-Two heads of garlic
-Three chipotle chilies
-Half a teaspoon oregano
-Eight bay leaves
-Five tangerines
-Salt and pepper to taste

tonguestudioshoot

Act II

-Take the beef tongue, the camera and the chemistry into the studio, and lay out the beef tongue onto the cake plate. Decorate the base with some chard leaves and carefully place your lights around the arrangement to highlight the features of the tongue.
-Take some pictures of it and adjust as needed.
-While you’re at it and in the studio, take more pictures of other stuff you happened to bring along.
-After a long day shooting, bring the tongue home, place it in the fridge and forget about it.
-Leave in fridge for four or five days until your wife starts asking what the hell you’re intending to do with that disgusting thing.
-Decide maybe you should make some decisions regarding what the next step is for the tongue.
-Look at a bunch of recipes online, decide to not follow any of them and wing it instead.

Act III

-Put the tongue in a large pot and cover with six quarts of water. Add one of the onion, one of the heads of garlic, and two of the chilies, all chopped. Add the bay leaves, salt and pepper and boil for 4 hours.
-Let the tongue cool and peel off the skin. Cut it in half and slice off a piece a decide it’s kind of weird and probably not quite cooked enough. Pretend you’re cool and that all the strange gristly fatty bits don’t freak you out at all.
-Decide it can be better…

This blog post is starting to be a little text heavy and we know that can be a problem with today’s typical 4 minute attention span reader. Here’s something completely random and unrelated that moves, for the purpose of keeping overactive brains engaged. It’s even interactive, so when you click in it, it does interactive multimedia!

Act IV

-Cut up the tongue in about 10 chunks and saute the pieces in olive oil in a dutch oven. Add salt, oregano, one chopped onion, peeled garlic cloves from the second head, and finely chopped chili.
-Juice tangerine, remove seeds, and add the juice and the peel to the mix.
-Cover the dutch oven and place in oven at 325 for 4 hours, checking it occasionally to make sure it’s not getting too dry.
-Once it’s done, cut it into 1/2 inch slices and sprinkle with chopped white onion and cilantro, and squeeze lime juice on it.
-Serve it to your family and watch them give it the old college try, claim that they really like it but say they’re not really hungry.
-Eat a lot of it yourself because it’s pretty freakin’ good, actually.
-Eat tacos de lengua at lunch for the next 5 days.
-Have your family eventually admit to you they thought it was weird and disgusting, and please never make it again.
-Blog about it later because if you don’t blog about, how can you know for sure it actually happened?
final_dish

Epilog

In which one has better figure out what the hell to do with the cow’s feet that were purchased with the tongue, because they’s really starting to smell. I hear tendon soup is a thing… Thanks to Tintypebooth for the help with the tintypes.

tongueandfeet

Building an Ultra Large Format Camera, Part 1

Art, Atoms

The basic elements of a camera

One of the cool things about a camera is that at its core, it’s very simple. All you need is a lens that focuses light and a surface that this light gets focused on. The process of bending light with lenses to focus on a surface was first explored during the Renaissance with the camera obscura. It wasn’t until the 19th century that people figured out how to keep a record of how much light hit a particular area of that surface. Anyway, to make a camera, all you really need is a lens and a surface for the light to hit, and to create an image from a camera, you either need to trace the image you see projected on the surface or you need some kind of coating on the surface that reacts to light.

lens_ring

Is that a large lens in your pocket?

After giving me a taste of 4×5 tintypes, my buddy at Tintypebooth showed me some large old lenses from photographic systems used in spy planes that he had bought on ebay. These things are serious! They are very heavy and the glass is super thick; there is just something massive about them, and when you hold one and feel its weight, you can’t help but be awed by their image making potential and you get possessed by an urge to unlock that potential. He pitched the idea of building a ultra large format camera with one of them, a little “Kodak Aero-Ektar 24” 610mm” number, weighing in at just over 10 lbs and sporting a few scratches I like to think were caused by the strafing of some of the Luftwaffe’s last Messerschmitts.

Let’s decode those numbers, shall we? The 24” is the size of the image plane and 610mm (also 24”) is the focal length.Based on my previous post about lenses, it means that at its shortest, this camera will be a little over two feet long. At four feet of distance between the lens and the plane, the image on the focal plane will be the same size as the subject in focus four feet from the lens, and six feet will create an image bigger than reality. The film holder will need to accommodate plates that will be 24 inches on one side. I may need a bigger car…

camera_build

I need a plan

Patience is a virtue I’ve always been in somewhat limited supply of. We have this killer lens… What’s the fastest and cheapest way we can get a picture out of it? Sure, we can design a fancy camera with a lot of bells and whistles but it would take a long time and cost a pretty penny. For now, I just need a bare bones proof of concept prototype. I’ll focus on the basic pieces and see if I can build it myself. I’ll build the back out of oak and do all the struts and supports using aluminum channels. The animated image above is a Maya model I built to scale that shows how all the pieces need to fit together. It doesn’t look too difficult, does it? One thing not shown in the animation is that the back that will hold the plate will be interchangeable with another back that will have the ground glass necessary to focus. The process will be as follows: first you will use the ground glass back to focus, slide it out, and then slide in the film back to load your camera.

film_back

Baby got back

Kim Kardashian’s got nothing on this bad boy! I built this 24″x20″ film back over the past couple weeks. I’m not a great builder and my Home Depot tools are a bit wobbly so I wouldn’t call it fine craftsmanship but it will hopefully do the trick. Oh, and did I forget to mention it’s not exactly square? Yeah… Let’s just say it’s square enough. It’s made from 1″x2″ and 1/4″x2″ red oak lumber which I routed to get the insets. It will make a great example when we eventually hire a finish carpenter for the next fancy version of the camera. Here are some pictures of the various pieces it’s made of (you can also see that I like to wear my slippers when I take pictures of my handy work).

More to come…

Here are the steps that come next and will be documented in a hopefully not too distant future.

  • I already bought the aluminum extrusions that are necessary to build the film back support, the lens plate holder, and the rails. I will need to learn how to properly drill in aluminum and figure out how to connect all the pieces. (anyone in Venice with a drill press?)
  • I will built the lens plate, mount the lens on the plate, and mount the plate on the rails.
  • Last will be creating the bellows. Not too sure how that will work but what the hell! We’ve got a few ideas. I’m sure we’ll figure something out.

See? It’s basically like it’s done already…

Tintype Photography, Part 2

Art, Thoughts

Just like marks in the vinyl grooves of an LP record are the direct physical imprint of a measured pressure wave that one traveled through space, the presence of silver on a tintype plate is the mark left by all the photons that hit it. We shepherd a series of physical processes and transform matter to create a unique, tangible artifact that will stand as an independent physical record of our existence at that particular moment in time. In an era of increasing digital ubiquity, relentless inquisitors want to reflect not only on what has been gained but also on what has been lost.

Matter matters

There is something profoundly human in the drive to make a physical imprint on our environment. We are driven to manipulate the physical world around us and make it hold something of us. We integrate ourselves into the universe by making our experience a part of that matter. The rock is hard, it’s millions of years old, and it was carved by someone at some point. When we carve that rock, we transcend the constraints of the the laws of physics that rule our lives and we have finally become part of the big story. We can die but we still existed…
We ask the universe to be the guardian of our humanity, and by universe, I mean “atoms and particles and time that form what we perceive around us, that we’re not even sure what it is, where it starts or end, that we’re made of but somehow feeling separate from…” sense. We ask it to provide a surface for us and the process of transcribing this incorporeal mental construct into a physical manifestation bridges the gap between our experience and the physical world. Then, when someone else witnesses this mark we made, it creates a continuum which we need in order to function in the great mystery.

Bytes bite

An electronic record doesn’t support us in the way that a physical one does. By definition, it is not continuous. It systematically quantizes anything we feed it, regardless of its significance, and encodes it into endless streams of seemingly random on/off states from which we can perceive neither structure nor meaning. In order to consume a digitized version of something, we rely on a decoding process to reassemble the raw data in a way that creates the likeness of the original. Alternatively, we also rely on computing power and statistical algorithms to generate a signal that is altogehter artificial but that produces something we recognize as familiar. In either case, the stuff that holds the meaning is transient and immaterial; it reminds us of something but it is not that thing itself. As digital tools become more powerful, the illusion of similitude will become increasingly convincing but ultimately, it will never have the life of something physical. It may have a life of its own but it’s in an alien world of pure logic and without senses that we peer into through shiny devices and smooth interfaces; they lure us in with the illusory promise of infinite creative control but ultimately filter out all that is intangible in the world we actually inhabit. The machines aren’t able to transcode what they can’t quantify, the mysterious, the unexplained, the sacred. They digitize and represent the surface with methodical precision but they don’t capture the essence.

Especially if the power goes out…

Herding photons

Going back to the original question: why do I enjoy making tintypes? I love the fact that each exposure results in a single tangible artifact that frees you from the crazy-making tyranny of unlimited undos. You prepare the shot as best you can, you commit your actions to the plate, and you see the results of it. Then you move on… It takes purpose, vision, courage, and conviction, because you can’t “fix it in post”. It’s a truly magic process, too, specially when you dunk the developed image in the fixer and watch the positive result appear through a milky cloud. I call it the Harry Potter moment because it looks like a VFX element from those movies, except real. Also, the way we have been working, it’s a very social activity. It takes about twenty minutes from start to finish and people tend to gather around the booth chatting and observing the process, usually with smiles on their faces. We take our time, we experiment…

Creating a Spotify appliance from an old smartphone

Atoms, Electrons

A problem:

If you have a teenager, you will no doubt be familiar with the dilemma of letting them listen to music at night while keeping them somewhat sheltered from the irresistible pull of the bright rectangle of light that seem to so efficiently hijack their attention. In my day, it was simple: the tape deck played music and that’s all it did. These days, with smart phones, it feels like it’s all or nothing. The tape deck comes with a movie theater, a video game arcade, and a place to hang out with friends, and they’re all open and available 24 hours a day. So, like any concerned parent, we take the phone away at night but since now days, it’s the place they get their music, it means they can’t listen to music anymore which is kind of sad.

Something annoying:

You know what I hate? The fact that our consumer culture dictates that when something is broken, we throw it away and buy something new rather than fixing it. I had a smartphone and after two years, the internal phone speaker broke, which meant I had to have it on speaker or plugged into an earpiece to hear people talking to me. I actually attempted to fix the problem: I ordered the part on ebay and spend 30 minutes opening the phone but I failed. Mind you, the smartphone was still a computer with over 1000 times the speed and memory of my first computer, a nice bright and sharp touch screen, wifi, etc… Other than the speaker problem, it worked perfectly. In the end, though, since I couldn’t fix the problem, I reluctantly gave in and bought a new phone. Grrrrr!

Ready for the trash? Not so fast!

So, I made this:

It’s actually really simple. I tried to restrict the functionality of the phone and create an object designed with the single purpose of enjoying spotify without the potential distraction of the rest of the internet getting in the way. First off, with the zip card out, your smartphone becomes a small tablet.

I removed all the video games and Netflix and Youtubes and Hulus and Snapchats and Facebooks and Vines and Instagrams and circles and Pinterests and Ellos and MySpace. I kept only Spotify and installed a program called Autostart which automatically launches an app after the phone boots and prevents a user from quitting the app.

I then built a frame into which I could mount the phone and poured a trademark Hollier polished cement base. I used autostart to automatically launch Spotify to whenever the phone turns on and thus transformed a crappy old orphaned phone into a custom one-of-a-kind Spotify appliance. Being mounted in a frame and set into a solid base transforms it into something you set and walk away like a radio rather than something you interact and fiddle with like a phone.

Tintype photography, part 1

Art

You absolutely need to know about tintype photography! Tintype photography, also sometimes referred to as wet plate or collodion process, is an image making technique developed in the early 1850’s and was widely used through the second half of that century because of its ease of use, its sharpness, and the immediacy of the results. Technically, the wet plate process can be used to shoot negatives on glass which can be used later to create prints or to shoot tintypes which yield a single positive on a dark opaque support.
Jason, a friend from my old job, is a complete film and old camera junky and, with the help of the internet, had been putting together a kit that would allow him to experiment with the process. He introduced me to it and I was instantly hooked. Since then, we’ve been geeking out together and I’ve been helping out where I can on Tintypebooth with the goal of creating a mobile tintype kit. We’ve shot 4×5 portraits at the Venice art walk and Tarfest, and Jason sets up for portraits every Saturday at Bar Nine, a groovy coffee lover’s destination in Culver City.

The process

It’s actually surprisingly simple. The whole process takes about 15 minutes and consists of the following seven steps. Don’t be intimidated by the mention of the various chemicals and other fancy sounding science lab-ey processes; I personally wouldn’t know silver bromide from halide crystals if they wore name tags. You can buy all the stuff you need on the internet.

  • Coating: a black enameled aluminum plate is coated with collodion, a viscous solution containing salts.
  • Sensitizing: as soon as the collodion starts to gel, the plate is taken into a portable darkroom, dunked into a silver nitrate solution which turns the salts into light sensitive silver halides, and loaded into a film holder ready to be exposed
  • Exposing: this is the “taking the picture” part. The ISO of the plate is somewhere around .5 so fast lenses and a bright flash are used to avoid motion artifacts.
  • Developing: the exposed plate is taken back into the darkroom. An iron solution is poured on it until the the exposed silver halides turn into silver metal, at which point the developing process is stopped by rinsing off the solution with water.
  • Fixing: at this point the plate is still fully covered with silver, some developed some not. The fixer dissolves away the undeveloped silver. The silver remains on the areas of the plate that got the most light and the areas that got less light reveal the dark enamel support.
  • Washing: once the undeveloped silver is fully washed away, the plate is rinsed to get rid of any remaining fixer.
  • Varnishing: once the plate is dry, it is still very delicate and the coating can easily be damaged. A coat of varnish is used to preserve the plate.

    • Although looking at these images on a computer screen really doesn’t do any justice to the feel of handling the actual object itself, I’m including the scans of a couple portraits I did a while back to give a sense of the look.

    What’s the appeal of doing tintype?

    Stay tuned for part 2 of this fascinating series in which I use very long words to explain why I think tintypes are a very relevant medium to experience in our hyper digital world.

    All pictures on this page by Sary Madsen at Tintypebooth

    Submerged, a Lightscape Installation

    Art, Electrons

    I have a real soft spot for projects that blend virtual environments with real architectural spaces. In fact, before I even found a place in the VFX and animation industry, I had already had the opportunity to get involved in various stage design and themed entertainment projects that required this kind of creative inquiry. I’ve also always been excited by the use of image re-projections techniques in my VFX and animation work because I find they can sometimes offer an elegant and effective solution to problems which would otherwise be difficult or expensive to tackle through more traditional approaches.

    A few months ago, when a painter friend approached me for help designing a lightscape installation for the opening of her exhibit, I jumped at the opportunity.  Corinne Chaix‘s exhibit is called “Submerged” and is at the PYO gallery downtown. Her work features underwater scenes, and she wanted to explore the idea of complementing their mood and reinforcing their theme by turning the gallery space itself into an underwater environment.

    We visited the gallery and brainstormed on the most aesthetically interesting ways to set up the projection. I also surveyed the space which later allowed me to build an accurate digital version of the environment.

    The next step was to create a digital version of the projector in this virtual environment which allowed us to visualize the way imagery projected out into the space.

    Meanwhile Corinne compiled a set of stock footage clips that resonated with her and passed them on to me. I created a composite movie that blended various elements from these clips and formatted the resulting image to fit the contours of the gallery space.
    The first clip conveyed a dark foreboding underwater feeling while the second captured the delicate crystal beauty of the water’s surface.

    I combined the two, moving the water surface to the top of the frame in an echo of many of her paintings.
    The last step was to take this composite, project it onto the walls and remap it to line up with the contours and orientation of the walls.
    I used the open source VisualSFM package to extract the geometry from the photos, Maya for the 3D and Nuke for compositing.

    Cement, Succulents, and The Bliss of Stacking Stuff That’s Heavy

    Art, Atoms
    [vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]I can relate to the fundamental urge that stirred people to build Stonehenge. Also, I read somewhere that tiling has spiritual meaning in Islamic art because it allows the artist and the viewer to peer into infinity from a simple set of shapes and rules. As for me, these days, I am into designing stackable cement succulent pots. Putting things together, creating form, transforming space, exploring patterns and discovering shapes… The kind of play this website advocates is a sacred activity. No doubt in my mind…

    Anyway, check out my latest project:[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

    The Concept

    It all starts with a unit.

    1x1_0

    And then, there were two.

    1x2_00

    Any builder worth his salt will need stacking pieces.

    And so now, we start composing shapes.

    example_1

    Going up.

    example_2

    Playing with possibilities.

    example_2[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

    The Application

    Since they have holes, you can put stuff in them.

    You can make many combinations with just a few pieces.

    Playtime!!!
    1x1_grass[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

    The Buy Some

    Why should I be the only one able to have fun around here? I know you can wait to get your paws on a few of these bad boys.

    Well, lucky for you, a couple of local stores have agreed to spread the joy of succulent care and cool home made cement pots to our eager community and are making them available for purchase.

    In Los Feliz:
    http://www.pottedstore.com

    On Abbott Kinney:
    http://www.thejuicyleaf.com/

    On the web at Etsy:
    https://www.etsy.com/shop/RelentlessPlay

    Act now! Supplies are limited! Since they’re a pain in the ass to make and I’ll be working super long weeks all summer at my other job, I won’t be cranking out many of these. It actually gives you the opportunity to be the only one on your block with one. Think of how envious your friends and neighbors will be when they find out there are no more left to buy!!![/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

    The Making Of

    I built the main pot shapes out of 1×3 oak lumber cut and glued together to make the shape.

    blockpot_howto_01

    Next, I built a box around the master shape

    and made a mold out of rubber.

    Here is the original shape and the mold.

    blockpot_howto_04
    All that is left to do is put the empty mold back into the box it was poured in, put some cement in and wait a couple of days…

    blockpot_howto_05

    There it is. It’s that simple…

    Or is it? In fact, I learned quite a few things through the many mistakes I made along the way. First, the mold I document here actually has a major flaw in that it creates a visible seam along the main face of the pot. I ended up having to take a new approach and pour a new mold that had its seam located just around the bottom edge of the pot. Figuring out how to build the box and the process to take to get the two rubber pieces to come out the way they did involved a lot of visualizing 3 dimensional positive and negative shapes. Also, I made the box out of melamine which was yet another mistake because it has sucked up moisture and gotten warped. I think I will make a mother mold out of plaster for these at some point. Also, it can be pretty hard to get the cast out of the mold, specially the big rubber squares that end up shaping the holes. I need to find a way to make it easier, and while I’m at it, to make it so I can pour 10 pots at once rather than just one.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

    Epilog

    Here it is, at home.
    1x1_grass[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

    Hacking, Creativity, Process

    Art, Electrons, Giggles, Thoughts

    PlaneSander

    I had a great time today! I took apart my belt sander. It’s a basic Black and Decker model I got at Home Depot which I have been abusing for the past two years to sand and polish the cement pots I make. In the end, considering the time it took me and the fact that it only costs $50, the sensible thing would probably have been to go out and buy a new one. The thing is I am curious; I wanted to see how the pieces necessary for the tool to function all fit together into one design, I wanted to see how big the motor is, what kind of gears and pulleys it uses, and if there are any cool pieces I can use for something else or are just cool to look at. In the end, I took all its pieces apart, cleaned up all the cement and wood dust that were clogged up in there and, lo and behold, when I put it back together, it worked!

    Hacking is a vital activity that subverts the opaque technological structures that exert increasing control over our lives. Extensive data collection empowers large corporate entities to profile how we fit into marketing models and allows them to decide what we should or shouldn’t have access to in order to maximize profits. Accompanying this are the prevailing consumerist attitudes which dictate that the broken item should be thrown away and a new one bought. This wasteful assumption is enabled by the orgy of cheap goods globalization provides us with.  It sucks!

    Opening up that belt sander represents my refusal to accept this status quo.  Though I don’t particularly like the word “hacker” because it conjures up the image of a social recluse with questionable personal  hygiene, impressive technical abilities, and a broken moral compass, what I associate hacking with are the creative endeavors borne from the spirit of questioning, exploring, and rearranging the prevailing attitudes and objects of our world. It attempts to figure out how something works, and whether the designers of that “thing” put it together in a way that attempts to control my behavior, and it further seeks to put that thing back together differently. The reasons for doing so can be varied: artistic, political and utilitarian, but usually a bit of all of the above.

    Ultimately, I think what really compels me to open up a broken belt sander just to see what’s inside it is that it makes me happy. It allows me to experience a child like sense of discovery and excitement at understanding how something works and the happiness of integrating it into my own creative process. When I get lost in this process of disassembling and reassembling, breaking and building, cool things usually come out and it puts me in harmony with the world. It restores my sense of my own humanity. That’s why the name of this blog is relentlessplay; it’s meant to convey the urgency of keeping the spirit of play alive and well.