Sep 27th, 2008 by Paul Hertz
Ignotus the Mage attended the recent Chain Reaction media festival sponsored by The Upgrade! International in Skopje, Macedonia. Paul Hertz tagged along to do the Mage’s drudge work and to represent Chicago OpenNode. We’ll have more about this later,meanwhile, here are some links to photos:
Jul 25th, 2008 by Ignotus
What is who?
How is where?
Why is when?
Jul 24th, 2008 by Paul Hertz
Brazilian photographer Eliane Velozo has a show, “White Dream” going up in Lubbock, Texas, very soon, at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts. I wrote a short essay for the catalog, some of which is quoted on the LHUCA website. You can read the essay, A Shadow Dreams of Light, here.
The genesis of White Dream is an integral part of the exhibition, bound up in the artist’s dreams, memories, and knowledge of history. All these fuse together in ways that are very clear to relate, and yet mysterious in their working.
Jul 20th, 2008 by Darrell Luce
Despite the long title, this is a reasonably simple dressing to prepare. The complication comes from needing a preserved lemon and a roasted onion. I made my first batch of preserved lemons with this recipe, and roasted an onion on the grill with a lot of other vegetables (eggplants, zucchinis, red and green peppers) that went into a salad. I used the dressing on the salad, after chilling it overnight.
Clean the pulp from the preserved lemon. Slice half the lemon into thin slivers and then chop these into four or five pieces and reserve for later. Cut the roasted onion in half, and treat it similarly, but make the pieces a little coarser, and reserve it.
Put the oil, lemon, vinegar, salt, brown sugar, half the preserved lemon and half the roasted onion in the a blender. Blend on high until ingredients are emulsified. Add Dijon mustard and reserved ingredients. Blend on low for a few seconds, just enough to chop the ingredients a little but leave texture. Correct the salt if you want, I don’t use much. I really like how the mild, sweet flavors of the roasted onion and the soft chunks of onion complement the intense flavor and slight crunch of the preserved lemon. The onion and mustard together make this a creamy dressing, but with far fewer calories than recipes that use cream, cheese, or eggs. It goes well with all kinds of things–try it over rice, or on a vegiburger, or just plain on a ricecake. Use it to win friends and influence people.
Jul 17th, 2008 by Paul Hertz
The “Second Bremen Symposium on Early Digitial Art: Machinic Art, Art History, and Data Base,” where I gave a presentation on “Imaging by Numbers” last weekend, was held in the print room of the Kunsthalle Bremen and in the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Sammlung, a private collection housed just across the street. The Hollweg Collection has a wonderful section of Tobey drawings and prints.
Kunsthalle Bremen is also home to what is perhaps the most important collection of early computer art, Dr. Herbert W. Franke’s collection. Director Wulf Herzogenrath had a selection of works from the collection laid out on the tables in the print room, which also has on display some marvelous (may one say “mind-blowing” with out breaching the gravity of art historical discourse?) prints by Dürer and Altdorfer. The three copper engravings, “Knight, Death and the Devil,” “Saint Jerome in his Study” and “Melancholia” seemed to my unpracticed eye to be absolute gems.
The Altdorfers are interesting both for representing landscape practically without habitation–as Altdorfer is know for doing–and for the sinuosity of the line, clearly present in his paintings, that leaps out in the graphic works in much the same way lines do in Van Gogh’s drawings, descriptive and expressive at once. One feels as though these two painters, so very different otherwise, are both taking observed nature seriously as a point of departure. The entry of emotion into the line or color seems wholly bound to the act of looking, not a capricious insertion of the artist’s state of mind. And both, though clearly aware of the surface effects of decorative texturing, again rely on the act of looking to guide the line, rather than on an a priori knowledge of pattern.
Which leads me to Tintoretto’s work in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco… I was fortunate to be in Firenze, Milano, and Venezia this last spring, tagging along with my wife who had a medical conference in Firenze as an excuse for going. Like the late work of Tiziano, on display in a special exhibition at the Accademia, the paintings in the Scuola Grande present a startling break from strict representation and modeling in favor of an art of optical suggestion, deliberately sparse information whose full import is completed by the viewer. Masters of knowing what to leave out, these are still very modern painters. Though I don’t know of anyone now who would create such a vast machine as the Scuola Grande.
May 31st, 2007 by Darrell Luce
Wash and trim the snow peas. Trim and slice the mushrooms into thin slices (a little thicker than the snow peas). You may substitute shitake, straw or similar mushrooms for the Criminis. Peel the garlic cloves and slice them longitudinally into slivers.
Heat about 2 T of olive oil until it shimmers, then toss in the garlic and give it a quick stir. Continue stirring until the garlic just begins to turn golden, then quickly stir in the mushrooms. Reduce the heat a little, and sauté the mushrooms until they begin to reabsorb some of their liquid. Add the wine and stir it in with a wooden spoon, being sure to capture the flavors clinging to the bottom of the pan. Add salt to taste, and cook until the wine is reduced and absorbed into the mushrooms. Reserve the mushrooms.
Add another T or two of olive oil to the pan, heat it to shimmering. At this point you may toss in some dried chiles. They can help to bring out the ginger and give a nutty flavor to the oil–remove them when you think it wise. In any case, toss in the snow peas and stir fry them on high heat, uncovered. When the snow peas have begun to color, reduce the heat and cover for 30 seconds, shaking the pan occasionally, then uncover and stir for 30 seconds. Repeat until the snow peas are tender but crisp. Add a pinch of Five Spice powder and stir. Stir in the mushrooms. Grate on a generous portion of fresh ginger. Stir in toasted sesame oil to taste, and additional salt or soy sauce if you wish.
Serve with steamed rice or fresh Italian bread, a good wine and better friends.
I can’t begin to tell you how this dish takes me back. Serve it beside grilled salmon flavored with a lime-chipotle-maple marinade (a recipe the world is not yet ready for, as it splices Canada to Mexico) and I could bust out crying.
May 25th, 2007 by Alma de la Serra
This view of Baltimore is at once so void and so specific in its identity that I cannot approach it as a place at all, but only as a haunted memory. I have long been an observer of sidewalk cracks and an incessant classifier of their quirks and topology. Over time they’ve almost become individuals. There are certain patterns I greet as old friends, familiar to a girl who used to walk along with her eyes on the ground. I remember how the arc of a long crack that split through three pavement sections on one street in Valencia, broken perhaps by a truck hauled up on the curb, could evoke all my passages over that same street, their shifting emotions overlaid in a multiple exposure that was no longer memory but its specter. Different moments collapse into one through the act of recognition. The present, “notable for its absence,” as my Tio Pescador would say, shimmers before us like a mirage, bending light from distant oases.
When we greet someone we know after a long absence and tell them, “You haven’t changed a bit,” perhaps what we really mean is that everything has changed except the moment of recognition, that reconfigures time. The moment is the same, and it is empty, resonant in its absence. I met an old friend in Baltimore, and behold, even the cracks in the sidewalk have something to say about that.
May 22nd, 2007 by Paul Hertz
Finished setting up the stylesheet, editing header and footer, etc., to adjust the look of this blog to something reasonably close to the ignotus.com site. Some tricky CSS issues were helped along by the following sites:
And of course the W3C reference, with its gallumphing hover markup.
May 20th, 2007 by Paul Hertz
Ignotus sails off into the wild brew yonder.
