Bubble - metaphor

The bubble is used in two metaphorical ways, one positive, one negative. A bubble can be protective, like the shell that insulated Bubble Boy from his toxic surroundings. The bubble is sometimes associated with spirituality, personal energy. And the quality of complete, seemless, cohesive and elastic surface is attractive when associated with things like learning and memory.

The negative association is also common, however. Bubbles are vapourous, illusory, short-lived and burst, leaving nothing behind. Thus, we speak of economic bubbles, real estate bubbles, the dot com bubble. In some cases, the positive, protective association combines with the negative one, as in the Bush Bubble, which both protects the President while making him vulnerable because he is too insulated from opinions that matter but simply cannot reach through the bubble around him.

Other people's thinking about bubbles:

Steven Soderbergh's Bubble (2005) - "an absolutely riveting little tragedy in High Def in an Ohio doll factory, starring non-professional actors."

Sir John Everett Millais painted this painting, called "Bubbles" in 1886.

The Cyberpunk Project manifesto of 2003 ponders the bubble as a metaphor.

In corporate-speak: "Through the use of a metaphor, the research suggests that a confidentiality agreement has many similarities with the properties and characteristics of a bubble. This bubble trope is used to enhance conceptual understanding of confidentiality constraints in an organizational-change context."

And of course, there's the movie, Bubble Boy, 2001.

permanent link

The bubble - type, trope, trip

Tomas Saraceno's interactive thingamajigs.



above: Superstudio's City of the Hemispheres

Archigram's moving units, Seaside Bubbles (still looking for this one online)

Yona Friedman's spatial cities

permanent link

Babel - other references

Babel #2 by David B. published by Fantagraphics.

Joey thinks Michael Kupperman and I might something in common. V. flattering. That would be me in the uniform I guess:)

permanent link

Babel - theme: translation practices

Although few people took up the Babel story in any literal way in their work (kind of surprising given it is about the beginning of language as we know it), a few of us worked on the periphery of it and more than a few people worked in or on translations. Simon Glass created a new translation of the Babel story, heavily annotated. I toyed with the idea of creating a tower out of magazines, maquette shown here. As we were leaving Marna Bunnell was still at work on an edition of flocked silkscreen prints that had something to do with the Rapunzel fable, an interesting connection. Others used multiple languages or versions of texts: Janice Gurney was using different translations of a paragraph from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. These translations, Simon's and my own play with the Babel story can be seen on website I built with the help of David Kretz in the CEE media lab, SwingSpace. Laurel MacMillan translated a gothic novel, now out of print, from French to English. Joey Dubuc had various people from different countries who were there on campus creating lists of words in their mother tongue using only certain characters. I'm not sure about all the different things people were doing. I'll have to ask.

permanent link

Babel - theme: babble

This one is more complicated, for what, these days, is not babble. Who doesn't use text in their work? Still, if the idea is the complication of language, some take that more literally than others. Manon De Pauw, Joey Dubuc, Simon Glass, Ken Singer. Then there are the punctuators: Janice Gurney, Michael Maranda, arguably Barbara Todd... Those who make works that "speak" or "tell stories": Catherine Hamel, Denise Hawrysio, Emilie O'Brien, Marna Bunnell. And finally those who use language more directly, to tell stories: J.R. Carpenter, Ashok Mathur; or talk about art: Michelle Jacques, Jessica Wyman, Laurel MacMillan. This needs further explication. Above, an object that tells a very twisted (you had to be there) sort of story.

permanent link

Babel - theme: rabble

The word rabble suggests an identification with, or criticism of popular culture or "the masses" (the rabble). It also suggests a theme of social justice: which Wikipedia says is about giving individuals or groups their due within society as a whole.

Laurie Ljubojevic's work, shown here, where she uses newspapers, found posters, or money as the substrate for her dots, comments on popular culture, the media, commodities, money, etc. Billy Mavreas' work where he rips and mixes found materials works that way, as do Nate Larson's paranormal parodies. Joey Dubuc's child-like narratives are full of both hi and low art/pop culture references, as is Joni Murphy's poetry, John Richey's animations, Melisandre Schofield's imaginary school of personas, and Adrianna Riquer Turner's "pinatas." My own His Master's Voice dog and gramophone cartoons fall loosely into this category also.

btw Rabble.ca is a Canadian social justice-oriented news website. Those folks incidentally run a community bulletin board called babble.

permanent link

Babel - the theme

Well, the residency is done. Time for some reflection.

I never really took the theme of this residency that seriously. I mean, every artist involved works with text, but beyond that, the question what exactly we were there for never came up. Which was fine. I learned alot, made new friends and created a lot of new work.

There were some "Babel-like" commonalities. Billy Mavreas introduced us to the term "asemic writing", which was found in most people's work at some point and in other's more so: Sylvia Ptak's thread-pulls, Ernie Kroeger's beetle drawings, Adrianna Riquer Turner's wall mark tracings, perhaps even Ken Singer's new "landscapes," and Rachelle Viader Knowles text fragments, which appear also in this month's YYZine.

So Babel, the confusion of languages was one possible thread.
Babble was perhaps another, different thread.
Rabble yet another.
More about these later.

permanent link